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Another week and another Angry Planet about the horrifying systems that rule our lives.Is there a depressive theme running through the work right now? Possibly. I promise we’ll soon replace it with rage.
This week on the show we have Sven Beckert to talk about his new book Capitalism: A Global History. Beckert is a professor of history at Harvard and his tome is an attempt to capture the entire history of an economic system in one book. It’s a doorstop, but it’s also readable and clear-eyed. Some come with me on a journey that runs through the plantations of South Carolina to the tech markets of Shenzhen.
* Cotton as an entry point to the history of capitalism
* The economic big bang
* Industrial Revolution as mutation
* “It’s still being born.”
* Human data is oil to be fracked
* The Quaker Oats metaphor
* “The market is God.”
* Ascribing morality to economics
* When Gary Hart ushered in Neoliberalism
* “Capitalism is a series of regime changes.”
* Moments of great change offer opportunities
