
Capitalism and Its Critics
A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI
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Narrated by:
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Nathaniel Priestley
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By:
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John Cassidy
About this listen
A Financial Times Most Anticipated Book of 2025
A sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics.
At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, and inequality are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company and Industrial Revolution to the digital revolution. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics. From the English Luddites who rebelled against early factory automation to communists in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, the absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It visits with familiar names―Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi―but also focuses on many less familiar figures, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Ghandian economics; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of the Cold War; and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founding father of degrowth.
Blending rich biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics is true big history that illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2024 John Cassidy (P)2024 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Cassidy’s masterful synthesis of history and biography serves to demonstrate that capitalism is in a permanent state of change not just because of its fundamental nature, but because of how it’s continuously being subjected to pushback. The result is a unique and invigorating view of capitalism’s history."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A sweeping economic history of the to-some-sacrosanct doctrine of capitalism and those arrayed against it over the years . . . dense with information, free of jargon, and a powerful argument against an increasingly unsustainable economic system."—Kirkus (starred review)
"Capitalism and its Critics is everything that we’ve come to expect from John Cassidy. He weaves an engaging and trenchant discussion of key critics of capitalism over its more than 200 years into a history of capitalism itself. The battle is not only about economic ideas, but about the VERY nature of our society. Especially now, when some see the failures of capitalism as more than a little responsible for the Trumpian oligarchy, while others see its successes as ushering in a new era of AI-led prosperity, this is an illuminating and essential read.”—Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society
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Throughout history, there have been many more dark ages than the one that occurred between the fall of the Roman Empire and the dawn of the Renaissance. Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors went from hunter-gatherers to farmers and, along the way, lost almost all memory of what existed before. Now we stand at another monumental crossroads, as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future. How do we make this shift without losing the culture we hold dear—and without falling behind other nations that successfully master the transition?
By: Jane Jacobs
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Inflation
- A Guide for Users and Losers
- By: Nicolò Fraccaroli, Mark Blyth
- Narrated by: Rebecca H. Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Inflation is back, and its impact can be felt everywhere, from the grocery store to the mortgage market to the results of elections around the world. Yet the conventional wisdom about inflation is stuck in the past. Since the 1970s, there has only really been one playbook for fighting inflation: raise interest rates, thereby creating unemployment and a recession, which will lower prices. But this simple story hides a multitude of beliefs about why prices go up and how policymakers can wrestle them back down, beliefs that are often wrong, damaging, and have little empirical basis.
By: Nicolò Fraccaroli, and others
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The Birth of Classical Europe
- A History from Troy to Augustine
- By: Simon Price, Peter Thonemann
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world. At every level, from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a “classical Europe,” using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures. As this consistently fresh and surprising new audio book makes clear, however, this was no less true for the inhabitants of those classical civilizations themselves, whose myths, history, and buildings were an elaborate engagement with an already old and revered past - one filled with great leaders and writers....
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Excellent overview of the Classical World
- By David I. Williams on 01-12-14
By: Simon Price, and others
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Analogia
- The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control
- By: George Dyson
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In Analogia, technology historian George Dyson presents a startling look back at the analog age and life before the digital revolution - and an unsettling vision of what comes next.
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just go with it
- By Amazon Customer on 11-20-20
By: George Dyson
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The AI Con
- How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
- By: Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna
- Narrated by: Jade Wheeler
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.”
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A must read, even if you're an AI optimist
- By Malcolm Gomez on 05-15-25
By: Emily M. Bender, and others
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Empty Vessel
- The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge
- By: Ian Kumekawa
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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What do a barracks for British troops in the Falklands War, a floating jail off the Bronx, and temporary housing for VW factory workers in Germany have in common? The Balder Scapa: a single barge that served all three roles. Though the name would eventually change to Finnboda 12. And then to Safe Esperia. And later on, to the Bibby Resolution. And after that . . . in short, a vessel with so many names, and so many fates, that to keep it in our sights—as the protagonist of this fascinating economic parable—Ian Kumekawa has no choice but to call it, simply, the Vessel.
By: Ian Kumekawa
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Geopolitics and Democracy
- The Western Liberal Order from Foundation to Fracture
- By: Peter Trubowitz, Brian Burgoon
- Narrated by: Elliot Fitzpatrick
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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A large, widening gap has opened between Western democracies' international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support them. On issues ranging from immigration and international trade to national security, new political parties on the left and the right are rejecting the core foreign policy principles that Western governments have championed for over half a century. In Geopolitics and Democracy, Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon provide a powerful new explanation for the rise of anti-globalism in the West.
By: Peter Trubowitz, and others
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The Book of Greek and Roman Folktales, Legends, and Myths
- By: William Hansen
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Captured centaurs and satyrs, incompetent seers, people who suddenly change sex, a woman who remembers too much, a man who cannot laugh—these are just some of the colorful characters who feature in the unforgettable stories that ancient Greeks and Romans told in their daily lives. Together they created an incredibly rich body of popular oral stories that include, but range well beyond, mythology—from heroic legends, fairy tales, and fables to ghost stories, urban legends, and jokes. This unique anthology presents the largest collection of these tales ever assembled.
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So many stories and anecdotes!
- By Amanda on 07-24-24
By: William Hansen
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GDP
- A Brief but Affectionate History
- By: Diane Coyle
- Narrated by: Diane Coyle
- Length: 4 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Why did the size of the US economy increase by three percent on one day in mid-2013 - or Ghana's balloon by 60 percent overnight in 2010? Why did the UK financial industry show its fastest expansion ever at the end of 2008 - just as the world’s financial system went into meltdown? And why was Greece’s chief statistician charged with treason in 2013 for apparently doing nothing more than trying to accurately report the size of his country’s economy? The answers to all these questions lie in the way we define and measure national economies around the world: Gross Domestic Product.
By: Diane Coyle
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Empire of AI
- Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
- By: Karen Hao
- Narrated by: Karen Hao
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
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Well-researched. Timely. Informative. Karen is brilliant and kind!
- By Kahlil Andrews on 05-25-25
By: Karen Hao
Accessible and accurate overview
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Criticism: Missing anarchists. No estimate of murders by Chicago School.
Halfway: A heroic survey of ingenious critics of the alien force non-freemarket Capitalism—which will probably kill us with SI.
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I asked AI to describe society with out property - of course, because the literature is bereft of examples, it would amount to speculation - not a competency of AI
Comprehensive history
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