10-05-2025
Is capitalism doomed? (I wouldn't bet on it)
'Are economists human?' the economist Lord Crowther once asked in — where else? — The Economist, before mournfully adding that most people did not think so. In Capitalism and its Critics, the British-born John Cassidy takes the opposite view, although not all of his subjects, in fairness to them, would have identified themselves as economists.
Across 28 chapters, Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker, aims to tell the history of capitalism through the eyes and lives of the system's critics. To normal people, economic theory is soul-crushing at the best of times. But Cassidy makes it all digestible by weaving together, in each chapter, the biography of each of his subjects with their key critique of capitalism, thus humanising otherwise dry debates
