Wolff does a lot of hand-waving, gentle credential reminders etc. I’ve heard him on a couple podcasts recently.
China grew 6-9% a year because it started as a peasant society and steadily hoovered up trillions in FDI. $173B in 2021.
The idea that workers get a vote on how a business should run because they put their kids in a different school is totally unserious. His workplace democracy kick has no persuasive power at all and he’s silent on how this would actually work at scale (hint: it would crumble into factions as unions insert themselves into decision-making and rapidly destroy firms by protecting mediocre people, product and processes).
He still loves this binary: capitalism bad and has failed, Marx was right, something else is coming.
What if Capitalism is perfectible iterative, evolving? Its marriage with democracy our best bet for stability and prosperity? (Viz: capitalist democracies trend to slowing population growth and improving environmental records; totalitarian and authoritarian small-penis-complex egotists don’t give a shit what and who they despoil).
What if our prior isn’t that capitalism “has failed”
—as if it’s a vinyl record that was cut in the 20th century that’s fallen out of style and can’t be edited—but that the price mechanism and the market is as much an evolutionary innovation for the species as aphid farming is for ants? That with the destabilizing effects of technology and social media, we need iterative improvements to policy-making, governance, and the very incentive structure of media? It seems to me that we have a values crisis. It is not time to return to the ecological and human disaster of socialism.
We need to consider valuing deep thought, learning, dialogue, failure, humility, conservation, and so on. Think about how we might evolve our society to whatever consensus we arrive at on what matters in a world in which our lizard brains are increasingly manipulated. Certainly our children aren’t taught how to be critical, independent thinkers; my sense is that a kindergartener today is walking into an device-centric adolescence characterized by feeds that hijack their brains and porn.
And we might not have time to perfect capitalism if we spend our time navel-gazing while China preps for a regional or world war in the next ten years. The world’s prosperity still revolves around the whims of vain male tyrants, which is truly sad and demoralizing.
Old Marxist warhorses like Wolff may have some empirical insights to share but they don’t do us any favours by pretending to have a scholar’s yearning for truth when the truth is they haven’t materially changed their base assumptions since grad school.
Wolff does a lot of hand-waving, gentle credential reminders etc. I’ve heard him on a couple podcasts recently.
China grew 6-9% a year because it started as a peasant society and steadily hoovered up trillions in FDI. $173B in 2021.
The idea that workers get a vote on how a business should run because they put their kids in a different school is totally unserious. His workplace democracy kick has no persuasive power at all and he’s silent on how this would actually work at scale (hint: it would crumble into factions as unions insert themselves into decision-making and rapidly destroy firms by protecting mediocre people, product and processes).
He still loves this binary: capitalism bad and has failed, Marx was right, something else is coming.
What if Capitalism is perfectible iterative, evolving? Its marriage with democracy our best bet for stability and prosperity? (Viz: capitalist democracies trend to slowing population growth and improving environmental records; totalitarian and authoritarian small-penis-complex egotists don’t give a shit what and who they despoil).
What if our prior isn’t that capitalism “has failed”
—as if it’s a vinyl record that was cut in the 20th century that’s fallen out of style and can’t be edited—but that the price mechanism and the market is as much an evolutionary innovation for the species as aphid farming is for ants? That with the destabilizing effects of technology and social media, we need iterative improvements to policy-making, governance, and the very incentive structure of media? It seems to me that we have a values crisis. It is not time to return to the ecological and human disaster of socialism.
We need to consider valuing deep thought, learning, dialogue, failure, humility, conservation, and so on. Think about how we might evolve our society to whatever consensus we arrive at on what matters in a world in which our lizard brains are increasingly manipulated. Certainly our children aren’t taught how to be critical, independent thinkers; my sense is that a kindergartener today is walking into an device-centric adolescence characterized by feeds that hijack their brains and porn.
And we might not have time to perfect capitalism if we spend our time navel-gazing while China preps for a regional or world war in the next ten years. The world’s prosperity still revolves around the whims of vain male tyrants, which is truly sad and demoralizing.
Old Marxist warhorses like Wolff may have some empirical insights to share but they don’t do us any favours by pretending to have a scholar’s yearning for truth when the truth is they haven’t materially changed their base assumptions since grad school.