From The Wealth of Nations to The Divide, I’ve spent months with my nose in a book looking for answers to income and wealth inequality. Meanwhile, down on a trip to Lima in Peru, simply walking around answered one key question that keeps going unanswered by the writers, “Where does inequality lead us to?“ When that question comes up in my circle of friends, the conversation...
In October of 1929, the public stock market crashed. Black Tuesday. Bad day on Wall Street. At least for the 16% of rich Americans who had investments in those public companies. As often happens after a financial crisis, the federal government decided to step in to protect a re-occurrence. The result of that, was the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the...
We are told that employees (labor) works for management, that management works for the board, and that boards works for shareholders, with shareholder value being the ultimate goal of business. We’re told a lot of things that are simply not true. That story is common, but not universal. It’s not required by law. It’s just tradition. Another pattern is the employee-owned...
It’s good to be out of debt… even when that means finishing David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I had started on this book before diving into the rabbit hole of The Wealth of Nations, Communist Manifesto, Capitalist Manifesto, Divine Right of Capital, Et al, revisiting Debt’s 400 pages on occasion to clean my mental palate between other books. Debt is another...
Two economics books, both anthologies, both edited by Mariana Mazzucato, both too brief to make their arguments convincing, and neither providing much about income and wealth inequality. As an impact investor, I had high hopes for Mission-Oriented Finance for Innovation, but like a lot of English it seems the term “mission-oriented” has multiple meanings. This book can be summarized...
After finishing The Divine Right of Capital, I searched my house high and low for my copy of Owning our Future, Marjorie Kelly’s other book on Capitalism, which I remembered was good enough to merit ordering a second copy after the search came up empty. Whereas The Divine Right of Capital is 95% problem, Owning our Future is a travelogue of solutions. Kelly takes us with her traveling to...
A much better manifesto of Capitalism is Marjorie Kelly’s The Divine Right of Capital (amazon.com). In it, Kelly explains in greater detail the divide between capital and labor, some of its origins, and dives deep into the assumptions latent within the current system which she hopes to see uncovered and overturned. Kelly repeatedly returns to the metaphor of feudalism, with the noble Board...
Speaking of manifestos… in 1958, 110 years after Marx, Louis Kelso wrote The Capitalist Manifesto as an alternative solution to the rift between capital and labor. This is one of those books with a handful of interesting ideas, wrapped in 265 pages of repetitive rhetoric, closer in style to a long academic paper than a New York Times nonfiction bestseller. None the less those few ideas...
Jumping forward to 1848, 72 years from The Wealth of Nations, Great Britain, Western Europe, and the United States experienced an economic revolution in the Industrial Revolution. Steam power, coal, gaslight, railroads, etc. With that change came the industrialization of work, with far more powerful capitalists and unpowerful laborers. From that change came Karl Marx’s Manifesto of the...
Continuing my dive into Capitalism, I headed to the beginning, to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, better known simply as Adam Smith’s masterpiece The Wealth of Nations. This is one of those books you hear about so often you think already know, but which you really only know of until you crack it open and dig into the details. And wow, are there ever details...
