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Self-described as “a sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics…”, John Cassidy’s new book Capitalism & Its Critics has a very strong trinity of blurbs:

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.

And:

Fascinating and informative. The history of capitalism is told through the eyes and legitimate concerns of its most articulate critics. This is intellectual history at its best. Essential reading for anyone who wonders how the modern world wandered off course. — Simon Johnson, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and coauthor of Power & Progress.

And

John Cassidy’s Capitalism & Its Critics is an impressive history of arguments about capitalism, from the industrial age to our time. Clear and accessible, it is an invaluable touchstone for current debates about economic renewal in our post-globalization moment. — Michael Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit.

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What do I think? Cassidy has written a panoramic intellectual journey through the turbulent, often tragic chameleon’s progress of something called capitalism. It is not an ordinary history—it’s a kaleidoscope of dissent, where the voices of critique echo overwhelming and loud. Cassidy’s cast of characters helps us rethink the system we often take for granted. Critics have always claimed they are heralds of its funeral, but the system keeps mutating. And so critiques of capitalism aren’t just academic, they are survival tools.

Cassidy opens with the story of William Bolts and the East India Company–not the usual starting point for histories of capitalism, but a brilliant one. Bolts, a former Company man turned whistleblower, exposed the violent contradictions of a corporation that had become sovereign in Bengal. Cassidy’s point here is not simply that early capitalism was brutal (it was), but that from the beginning, capitalism’s critics recognized the perils of combining monopoly, military force, and private profit. The themes of rent extraction, corporate overreach, and regulatory capture that Bolts illuminated in the 1770s echo loudly in our own age of Amazon, Google, Facebook—and Trump.

Throughout, Cassidy maintains a commitment to telling capitalism’s history through the eyes of its critics. This is, he admits, a conceit. But it is one that pays off handsomely. Consider his treatment of Marx. Cassidy focuses on Marx’s intellectual evolution—from the romantic alienation of the 1844 Manuscripts to the attempt at rigor trying to build an analytical theoretical orrery of surplus value and commodity fetishism. He sets Marx in motion–both literally, across Paris, Brussels, and London, and intellectually, in dialogue with Ricardo, Hegel, and the tumultuous world of 1848 and after. Marx is not an all-wise Dante-like guide here; he is a man struggling to understand the whirling, contradictory dynamism of capitalist development.

Cassidy’s Keynes, similarly, is rescued from the caricature of technocratic demand-management. The Keynes we meet is the architect of a fragile compromise—a world where markets are tamed but not abolished, and where the state becomes capitalism’s housekeeper. Cassidy gives us Keynes the moralist, Keynes the Cassandra of Versailles, Keynes the designer of Bretton Woods—ever wary of instability, ever distrustful of laissez-faire, but never tempted by revolutionary rupture. The contrast with his intellectual foil Friedrich von Hayek, who makes his appearance in the Thatcherite chapter, is deftly drawn.

When I was grouchy, I found myself regretting Cassidy’s decision to organize the chapters as largely discrete profiles. It makes for vivid storytelling. It sacrifices analytical coherence, and any semblance of a bottom line. And if a book is to stay in your memory, it needs a bottom line on top of which you an construct a palace of memory so that you can recall individual elements of the book when appropriate.

Transitions from one thinker to another are abrupt. There is no attempt to build a sustained theoretical framework across the chapters. (Of course, such an attempt would fail.) And I wished for a fuller reckoning with the role of labor and left-wing political movements—not merely their intellectuals, but their mass bases and their political and economic leaders. Trade unionism, party-building, and strikes were and are critics of capitalism too. They did forge twentieth-century social democracy. It is a choice to focus on ideas rather than movements. But is that really the right choice?

Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics is not a single melody but a note-rich polyphony. Cassidy is marvelously inclusive in the range of the critics he surveys, and they are in turn remarkably broad in their approaches and their critical assessments. However, he refuses to settle on a synthesis. That speaks well for his pluralism. Perhaps it also speaks for, or of, our current near-paralysis as far as directions for reform of human society?

All, however, is not lost as far as our ability to draw conclusions, rather than simply say “it’s complicated”, is concerned.

First, the book is a study that is not so much a history of capitalism as a history of people who tried to imagine something else—or at least to mitigate what they saw as its most corrosive effects. For let us be clear: this is not a standard economic history. Cassidy does not rehash productivity growth figures, national accounts, or trade balances–though he gestures toward them when needed. Rather, this is a gallery of portraits: a series of intellectual and political biographical sketches, each of which stands as a window onto a mode of critique. The method is synthetic, literary, and political. Cassidy draws from original writings, memoirs, and scholarly studies to give us both the thinker and the world that made the thinker think.

Second, the book does have repeated themes that are sounded again and again as Cassidy traverses 250 years and thirty-odd observers and critics of capitalism. For, in Cassidy’s words:

The central indictment of capitalism has remained remarkably consistent: that it is soulless, exploitative, inequitable, unstable, and destructive, yet also all-conquering and overwhelming…

Cassidy circles, and rightly so, around the curious phenomenon that capitalism’s critics—while not composing any kind of coherent ideological coalition—remain voices we would be very foolish indeed to ignore. They are, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Carlyle—one of the voices of Cassidy’s book—not proposers of systematic alternatives but rather conduits of what he called “popular commotions and maddest bellowings.” Yet these bellowings–discordant, contradictory, and deeply unsystematic–are nonetheless signals of real social stresses and contradictions, which, if not properly addressed, do not simply dissipate. They fester. They erupt. They threaten to become, in the absence of reforms that somehow leave at least some stresses and contradictions unaddressed as others grow, revolution. And the refusal to listen risks very much.

from Peterloo to the Place- de-Grève… [are] inarticulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain; [and] to the ear of wisdom… [are] prayers: ’Guide me, govern me! I am mad, and miserable, and cannot guide myself!’…

I think we should be much more charitable than Carlyle’s sneering ventriloquism of Chartist activists. Rather than “maddest bellowings” I prefer to say that the system of capitalism violates what our friend Dan Davies sets as one of the first sine quo non requirements of effective human organizations:

Big corporations and states need to have information channels… “red-handle signals”… [to] bypass the normal hierarchy and get information to the decision making centre, in time…. The lack of that… has caused so many schemes to fail, and its continued presence… highly unsatisfactory and attenuated… accounts for the fact that the democratic industrialised world still does kind of work, a bit…

But in capitalism there is only one information channel: the price. And—no matter what the Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde genius-idiot Friedrich von Hayek may have claimed—that is not enough to keep any large-scale societal network-system from going off the rails.

And there is no consensus about what kind of, at a minimum, red-handle signals need to be built in. As John Maynard Keynes wrote a century ago in an earlier systemic crisis of the applied-science society capitalism of his age:

We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas…. No one has a gospel…

As him then, so us now. We have been unable to even begin the process of thinking and choosing a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal for the future. That we need to do so has been clear at least since the post–2007 breakdown of the authority of North Atlantic political economy’s Neoliberal Order. But we have been frozen in place.

And so Capitalism and Its Critics is a sprawling, erudite, and absorbing intellectual history of capitalism’s discontents. Cassidy has one deeply astute master insight: that capitalism is not merely an economic system but an ideological regime—a worldview, a moral grammar, a set of institutional and behavioral expectations that shape what we imagine to be possible. And it has always been this. The very word “capitalism” entered popular use in the 19th century with a pejorative charge, focusing on its rapacity, inequality, commodification of life, ecological heedlessness, and recurrent crises. All these continue to resonate, Cassidy argues, not merely because of their rhetorical appeal but because capitalism has continued to make good on its worst promises as well as its best.

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Capitalism and Its Critics is also a call to take seriously the possibility that the discontent may this time be justified—that we may be living not at the end of history, as Fukuyama hoped in 1989, but rather at a hinge point between epochs. Cassidy’s narrative begins with Adam Smith’s lamentations about the East India Company and ends with present-day worries about platform monopolies, economic precarity, and climate crisis, threading through two and a half centuries of argument, protest, and reform. Cassidy’s choices of protagonists and emphasis hint that, at last, finally, 250 years after he starts his survey, capitalism is ending with fragmentation and incoherence.

But that strikes me as completely wrong.

Yes, Cassidy has a bill of particulars:

• Nearly half of Americans today will tell you, if asked, that capitalism is on the wrong path.

• Now new conservatives have joined the left-wing critiques of globalization and financialization.

• Now leftists and conservatives alike are blaming capitalism for collapsed communities and cultural degradation—admittedly with very different ideas of what “degradation” is.

• Now we have believers in state-guided capitalism believing that a new state-dominant system is needed.

• Now they fight laissez-faire anarchy techno-utopians hoping cyberspace will route around all governments.

• We have seen vanishing of the New Deal Order dominant coalition of labor, scale-economy mass-production industry, and Keynesian technocrats.

• And we have also seen the decline of the Neoliberal Order alliance of globalization-embracing educated elites and free-market ideologues;

• Hopes that we might be saved by teamwork-based open-source with a “gig economy” a source of liberation are now dead: now we have worker speedup, with the Amazon delivery drivers peeing in bottles as they bring things to my house; now we have semi-legal wage theft, my last Uber driver getting only 25% of what I paid the app).

• Now we have the strange (and in my view fraudulent) right-wing anti-capitalist populism of the billionaires.

• Now we have left-wing protest encampments, cooperatives, and artisanal networks pushing for “degrowth”, commons-based activism, and gift economies.

Yet capitalism has almost always been thus: unpopular and not legitimatee. People would have brought a similar bill of particulars in the mid–1930s, not seeing the New Deal Order of mass-production capitalism sprouting all around them. People did say the same thing in the 1970s, not understanding the speed with which capitalism was transforming itself into its globalized value-chain variant that would then so strongly underpin the Neoliberal Order.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1857 may well have been the first to mistake the birth pangs of a new mutation of capitalism for the beast’s final death throes. Consider their letters, which Cassidy quotes in his “Introduction”—Marx in London to Engels in Jersey, October 20, 1857:

DEAR Frederick, You must excuse my long silence. In the first place… visitor…. In the second, much work…. The American crisis—its outbreak in New York was forecast by us in the November 1850 REvue—is BEAUTIFUL and has had IMMEDIATE repercussions on French industry, since silk goods are now being sold in New York more cheaply than they are produced in Lyons. The lamentations of the English MONE Y ARTICLE WRITERS, who complain that, while their English TRADE is SOUND, their customers abroad are UNHEALTHY, are as original as they are diverting. How are the Manchester manufacturers getting on? Those in Glasgow have, it now transpires, sent off a great deal on consignment…

And then Engels in Jersey to Marx in London on October 29, 1857:

The AMERICAN CRAS H is superb and not yet over by a long chalk. We still have to see the collapse of the better part of the import houses; so far only one here and there would appear to have crashed. The repercussion in England would seem to have begun with the Liverpool Borough Bank. Tant mieux. That means that, for the next 3 or 4 years, commerce will again be in a bad way. Nous avons maintenant de la chance_…

Engels in Manchester to Marx in London on November 15, 1857:

What promises this crisis a brilliant future is the immediate necessity of suspending the Bank Act at the first impact. The direct effect of this will be to land the Bank itself in Queer Street. In 1847 it was still possible to let things drag on as they had done since 1845, and not to resort to this measure until the very last and grimmest moment. The extension and prolongation of the crisis are also assured….

We can only hope that this ‘improvement’ in the crisis from the acute to the chronic stage sets in before a second and really decisive blow falls. A period of chronic pressure is needed to get the people’s blood up. The proletariat will then fight better, with better connaissance de cause and in greater unison, just as a cavalry attack succeeds much better if the horses have to cover the first 500 paces at the trot before arriving within charging distance of the enemy. I shouldn’t care for anything to happen prematurely before Europe as a whole has been affected; the subsequent struggle would be harder, more tedious and fluctuating. Even May or June would be somewhat too early. The long period of prosperity is bound to have made the masses damned lethargic. However, sight drafts for a revolution will now be presented to us by our friends Kinkel & Co. for payment; that is to be expected, but NEVER MIND, we shall honour them soon enough, as these gentlemen will see….

In 1848 we were saying: Now our time is coming, and so IN A CERTAIN SENSE it was, but this time it is coming properly; now it’s a case of do or die. This will at once give a more practical slant to my military studies. I shall apply myself without delay to the existing organisation and elementary tactics of the Prussian, Austrian, Bavarian and French armies, and apart from that confine my activities to riding, i.e. fox-hunting, which is the best school [for revolutionary war] of all….

In Failsworth, 4 miles from here, a manufacturer by the name of Liddle was yesterday hanged in effigy optima forma while a weaver dressed as a parson read the BURIAL SERVICE. In place of the words ‘MAY THE LORD HAVE MERCY UPON YOUR SOUL’ he read: ‘MAY THE LORD BLAST YOUR SOUL’.–Now is THE TIME FOR JONES, if only he knows how to make use of it…

But Marx and Engels were far from the last to triumphantly say that capitalism faced imminent doom in their day, echoing the St. Paul who with certainty expected the Return of the LORD, the Last Judgment, and the Theomakhy of the Eskhaton in years if not months, and in months if not days.

Don’t make their mistake.

And Cassidy, I think, almost does. The looks at our own moment—with discussions of Thomas Piketty, the AI revolution, ecological collapse, and the apparent exhaustion of the neoliberal order—focus on the scale of the challenges: platform monopolies, algorithmic management, inequality, ecological overshoot. He comes very close to concluding that, this time, they are overwhelming.

Yet Cassidy—after a large chunk of the book seems to be setting up for a conclusion that capitalism’s Götterdammerung is nigh—at the end pulls back away from the wrong imminent death of capitalism expected to capitalism is mutating once again.

And here Cassidy is very right to emphasize—insistently and effectively—that capitalism mutates. It does not evolve in any smooth trajectory. It undergoes periodic, punctuated metamorphoses—transformations so profound and variegated that I have long since abandoned the use of the undifferentiated term “capitalism” as an analytical category. Instead, I find myself compelled to disaggregate: to speak not of “capitalism” but of capitalisms. There is the commercial capitalism of the classical Mediterranean world; the feudal-commercial amalgam that was mediæval capitalism; the landlord-tenant surplus-extracting regime of agricultural capitalism; the extractive and coercive structures of colonial capitalism; the tariff- and navy-buttressed circuits of mercantile capitalism; the coal-and-iron centered juggernaut of steampower capitalism; the late-nineteenth-century leap into applied-science capitalism; the Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan assembly-line world of mass-production capitalism; the hyperextended web of global value-chain capitalism; and now, arguably, something new again: an attention-surveillance-biology-infused infosphere capitalism.

To presume continuity through a single term is to mistake the chameleonic for the constant. The notion that one can draw a single meaningful division between “capitalism” and some “late capitalism” alone now seems to me rather like bringing a knife to a gunfight—a gesture, but not a strategy.

Because capitalism mutates, transforms, and reinvents itself in successive techno-economic instantiations, no single configuration of political economy can be expected to endure as both effective and legitimate across these shifts. The Belle Époque’s semi-liberal, semi-democratic steampower-era regime may well have provided, as Keynes famously claimed, an “economic El Dorado”—a moment in which sustained growth, expanding enfranchisement, and the partial erosion of traditional hierarchies coincided to give western Europe and its satellites a golden half-century. But that order was crafted for a particular technological substrate and socio-economic context. When the substrate changed–when steampower capitalism gave way to applied-science capitalism–the operating system of political economy could not adapt. The result? An unraveling: World War I, a failed postwar restoration, and the Great Depression, which opened the door to fascism, Naziism, Stalinist industrial gigantism, and Japan’s imperial embrace of the West’s most virulent ideological exports.

To look back and imagine that the neoliberal turn of the late twentieth century—substituting financial discipline and global integration for the solidarity and full-employment commitments of the New Deal Order—was a successful response to capitalism’s next mutation, from Fordist mass production to globalized value chains, requires a studied detachment from the lived experience of inequality, dislocation, and precarity it left in its wake.

And now, as capitalism mutates again—this time into something perhaps best termed attention-surveillance info-bio tech capitalism—we find ourselves without a political economy that even pretends to be adequate. The genome of the system changes. The institutional superstructure lags. And humanity is left to improvise in the dark.

Cassidy sees capitalism delegitimizing itself—a phenomenon he believes to be significantly intensified in the current moment. But I think he may be seeing ghosts where there were never saints. He may be falling prey to an optical illusion—a form of historical myopia. The truth is that capitalism has rarely, if ever, commanded broad normative legitimacy. It has been endured, deployed, feared, admired for its power, sometimes celebrated for its results—but rarely embraced as just. Even during its ideological high tide, the neoliberal moment from Reagan through Clinton to Bush II—bookended by Volcker disinflation and the Global Financial Crisis—the claim was not that capitalism was morally right but merely that it worked, and alternatives did not.

Even Friedrich von Hayek—perhaps the most eloquent defender of capitalism as we have known it—made no pretensions that the market order was fair. His case was altogether more somber: (a) capitalism, through decentralized decision-making and private property, is a machine for crowdsourcing near-optimal solutions to the central economic questions of what to produce and how; (b) the machine is blind, however, to merit, virtue, or need, and instead rewards contingency—those lucky enough to possess the assets or positions of advantage at the right time; (c) alternatives—whether command economies or technocratic socialism—may aim at justice, but they fail, and ultimately deliver neither prosperity nor freedom nor equity, delivering instead poverty and the prerogatives of power to bureaucratic castes or entrenched aristocracies; (d) thus, we must accept capitalism as a kind of cosmic lottery—a cruel but generative algorithm.

Even in von Hayek’s schema, capitalism is not to be embraced for its justice—indeed, any claim to distributive fairness would be a category error–but rather accepted as the least intolerable of the possible. It is not that capitalism is good; it is that every attempt to replace it with something betterhas thus far opened the door to something worse. Like the Biblical character Job upon his dungheap, we are asked to endure: “Capitalism giveth, capitalism taketh away: blessed be the name of capitalism.” To protest the outcomes of the market is not merely to misunderstand its logic, but to court disaster. For to challenge the invisible hand is to risk loosing the visible fists of commissars, colonels, or the cunning men of some newly-risen managerial caste.

Thus von Hayek offers us not a hymn to freedom, but a liturgy of resignation: a theology of the market that makes necessity a virtue, and treats despair—so long as it is orderly—as the foundation of liberal policy.

It was only at the height of the Neoliberal Order—roughly from the early Reagan years through the mid–2000s, give or take a tech crash or two—that the ideological veil was torn away in a peculiar direction. Only then did one see serious attempts to sacralize the market not merely as a mechanism for coordination or a generator of prosperity, but as the sole arbiter of merit, the ultimate moral tribunal. Greed, once tolerated as a regrettable spur to effort, became good per se. Success in the marketplace-—PO, hedge fund alpha, corner office—was no longer merely admired, but reified as evidence of intrinsic virtue and social deservingness.

Outside this anomalous window, capitalism has never carried much claim to legitimacy in itself. It has instead required a surrounding architecture: a democratic polity to channel and tame it, or, failing that, a supervisory class—a patriciate of education, wealth, or technical expertise—to manage its consequences and blunt its rough edges. That capitalism must be governed has been the default assumption across regimes. Only briefly did a generation forget this–and they were promptly reminded by a financial crisis bearing subprime mortgage-backed securities as its horsemen.

And there are many more subordinate themes in this book of 260,000 covering thirty-odd observers and critics of the thing “capitalism” across two and a half centuries. For let us be clear: this is not a standard economic history. Cassidy does not rehash productivity growth figures, national accounts, or trade balances–though he gestures toward them when needed. Rather, this is a gallery of portraits: a series of intellectual and political biographical sketches, each of which stands as a window onto a mode of critique. The method is synthetic, literary, and political. Cassidy draws from original writings, memoirs, and scholarly studies to give us both the thinker and the world that made the thinker think.

Perhaps I can give you a sense of them by listing the speakers he brings forward as capitalism’s critics (and defenders). Some of the portraits are canonical—Smith, Marx, Keynes, Polanyi, Hayek, Friedman. Others are welcome recoveries from the margins: Anna Wheeler, J.C. Kumarappa, Silvia Federici, Flora Tristan. And still others represent critical nodes in global debates too often omitted from Western economic historiography: Samir Amin, Raúl Prebisch, Eric Williams.

They comprise:

(1) A number of authors and thinkers at the head of currents of thought I know very well indeed:

• Adam Smith,

• Ned Ludd,

• Friedrich Engels,

• Karl Marx,

• Rosa Luxemburg,

• John Maynard Keynes

• Michel Kalecki,

• Joan Robinson,

• Raul Prebisch,

• Milton Friedman,

• Stuart Hall,

• Friedrich von Hayek,

• Samir Amin,

• Dani Rodrik,

• Joe Stiglitz, and

• Thomas Piketty.

(2) Other thinkers of whom I have my scant knowledge and largely unformed views:

• Thomas Carlyle,

• Henry George,

• Thorstein Veblen,

• John Hobson,

• Paul Sweezy, and

• Raymond Williams.

(3) Seven thinkers who make me aware of my unprofessionalism—truly important guys whom I readily do not know, and have no excuse for not knowing: Bolts, Thompson, Wheeler, Tristan, Kondratiev, Kumarappa, Georgescu- Roegen, and Federici.

• William Bolts,

• William Thompson,

• Anna Wheeler,

• Flora Tristan,

• Nikolai Kondratiev,

• J. C. Kumarappa,

• Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and

• Silvia Federici

And each of them has their own take:

• Samir Amin A Marxist theorist with a global perspective, Amin located capitalism’s structural imbalances not only within national economies but in the world system as a whole. His concept of “delinking” was a plea for peripheral economies to escape the exploitative grip of global capital.

• William Bolts A former East India Company servant turned whistleblower, Bolts decried the Company’s transformation into a monopolistic, extractive leviathan. His writings are an early and vivid critique of corporate overreach and colonial capitalism’s predatory form.

• Thomas Carlyle A moralist more than an economist, Carlyle’s complaint was with capitalism’s reduction of all values to cash. He coined the phrase “dismal science” to describe economics and prophesied the spiritual decay wrought by Mammon worship.

• Friedrich Engels Engels chronicled capitalism from within and without–as both a factory-owner and revolutionary. He, with Marx, diagnosed capitalism as a system driven by internal contradictions that would ultimately consume its own productive forces.

• Silvia Federici Federici critiques capitalism’s hidden foundations in unpaid domestic labor, especially that of women. Her feminist materialism exposes how capitalism relies on reproductive labor while denying its value, making her critique both foundational and ongoing.

• Milton Friedman Friedman saw capitalism as a system that, while imperfect, offered the most freedom. But his vision of unregulated markets as self-correcting and virtuous underestimated both systemic risk and the institutional scaffolding markets need to function equitably.

• Henry George George believed land monopolies were the original sin of capitalism. His proposed remedy, a single tax on land value, sought to rectify unjust wealth accumulation without dismantling the market system.

• Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen As the prophet of ecological economics, Georgescu-Roegen introduced thermodynamics into economic thought. He warned that capitalism’s growth imperative runs afoul of the Earth’s entropy constraints, making sustainability a mathematical impossibility within the system.

• Stuart Hall A cultural theorist more than an economist, Hall saw capitalism as a system of ideological dominance. He was especially attentive to how neoliberalism reshaped subjectivities and reduced political possibility, particularly in Thatcherite Britain.

• Friedrich von Hayek Hayek argued that the price system is a decentralized information processor, a miraculous mechanism for coordinating dispersed knowledge. But he conceded that capitalism is neither moral nor fair–just the least coercive of feasible systems.

• John Hobson Hobson diagnosed imperialism as the economic safety valve of capitalism–an outlet for surplus capital that domestic markets could no longer absorb. His underconsumptionist theory saw capitalism as prone to stagnation without external expansion.

• John Maynard Keynes Keynes saved capitalism from itself by insisting that aggregate demand matters. In times of crisis, only public intervention could maintain full employment and social stability. Capitalism could be good–if wisely managed.

• Michał Kalecki A contemporary of Keynes, Kalecki independently arrived at similar conclusions but emphasized the political constraints on full employment. The capitalist class, he argued, would oppose policies that empowered labor, even at economic cost.

• Nikolai Kondratiev Kondratiev theorized long economic waves of boom and bust–“K-waves”–within capitalism. His analysis implied systemic rhythms to capitalist crises, though Stalinist Russia rewarded his insight with execution.

J. C. Kumarappa A Gandhian economist, Kumarappa championed “economics of permanence”: small-scale, village-based production as morally and ecologically superior to industrial capitalism. His critique was civilizational, not merely institutional.

• Ned Ludd A symbolic figure rather than a real one, Ludd represents artisanal resistance to industrial capitalism. The Luddites were not anti-progress, but anti-destruction of livelihoods without compensation or negotiation.

• Rosa Luxemburg Luxemburg extended Marx by arguing that capitalism required continual expansion into non-capitalist regions. Imperialism, in her view, wasn’t an aberration but a necessity.

• Karl Marx Marx theorized capitalism as a dynamic but doomed system, governed by the drive to accumulate surplus value. His historical materialism traced the exploitative core of capitalist production and foresaw its transcendence through proletarian revolution.

• Thomas Piketty Piketty revived political economy by showing how capital tends to concentrate in the absence of policy intervention. His empirical work calls into question capitalism’s compatibility with democratic equality.

• Raúl Prebisch Prebisch argued that the global trading system structurally disadvantaged developing countries. His “center-periphery” model laid the groundwork for dependency theory and justified calls for import-substitution industrialization.

• Joan Robinson Robinson critiqued neoclassical orthodoxy and championed the Cambridge capital controversy. She believed that imperfect competition and power relations, not equilibrium, defined real-world capitalism.

• Dani Rodrik Rodrik is a contemporary critic of hyperglobalization. He defends markets, but insists that democratic polities must have space to set their own rules–a trilemma between globalization, democracy, and national sovereignty.

• Adam Smith Although Smith is often cited as capitalism’s patron saint, he was in fact deeply concerned about concentrated economic power. His critique of the East India Company and monopolizing merchants reflects a broader worry about the corruption of markets by privilege. For Smith, competitive markets are a public good, not a natural state, and require active policing.

• Joe Stiglitz A Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist, Stiglitz argues that markets often fail spectacularly. His critique focuses on information asymmetries, rent-seeking, and inequality–all endemic to unregulated capitalism.

• Paul Sweezy A Marxist economist, Sweezy saw monopoly capitalism as increasingly sclerotic. He diagnosed stagnation and financialization as symptoms of a mature system incapable of productive dynamism.

• William Thompson A utilitarian socialist, Thompson anticipated many Marxist insights but retained a more cooperative vision. He believed rational planning and shared prosperity were both feasible and desirable.

• Flora Tristan A feminist and socialist, Tristan called for a universal workers’ union inclusive of women. She saw capitalism as doubly exploitative–both class-bound and patriarchal.

• Thorstein Veblen Veblen coined “conspicuous consumption” to describe capitalism’s performative irrationality. His satire skewered the leisure class and exposed how economic behavior was shaped more by status than utility.

• Anna Wheeler A pioneering feminist, Wheeler believed women’s subordination was reinforced by capitalism’s patriarchal structures. She collaborated with Thompson to sketch out early visions of socialist feminism.

• Raymond Williams Williams, a cultural critic, emphasized capitalism’s role in shaping not just economies but meanings. His Marxism was attuned to literature and media, seeing them as sites of ideological struggle.

It is worth pausing here to note one of the book’s great strengths: its sensitivity to historical contingency. Cassidy repeatedly highlights the paths not taken: the Owenite cooperatives dismissed as utopian; the self-sufficient village economy envisioned by Kumarappa; the radical potential of the 1945 moment, when the welfare state could have become something more than Keynesian patchwork. This sensitivity is not mere wistfulness. Cassidy’s point is sharper: that capitalism has always faced alternatives. Yet, somehow, it has a durability that stems from repeated political victory.

This theme is developed most compellingly in his discussion of the postcolonial world. The chapter on Eric Williams, for example, shows how anti-imperial critiques of capitalism emerged not merely as moral outrage but as systematic accounts of accumulation and underdevelopment. Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, long marginalized, is here restored to its rightful place as a key text linking Atlantic slavery, industrial takeoff, and racial capitalism. Cassidy’s engagement with Latin American dependency theory—Prebisch, Furtado, Cardoso—is generous. But Cassidy is not blind to the shortcomings of dependencistas. He recognizes that the dependency theorists misread the possibilities of autonomous national development in a globally integrated system. Their critique of terms of trade was sound; their institutional vision less so. In acknowledging this, Cassidy manages the difficult feat of honoring their insights without romanticizing their limitations.

The book’s gender politics is similarly welcome. Cassidy devotes chapters to early feminists like Anna Wheeler and Flora Tristan, as well as to Silvia Federici’s more recent work on reproductive labor. He argues, rightly, that even friendly portrayals of capitalism’s critics have submerged the importance of capitalism as a system that intensifies the the gendered extraction of value. His treatment of Sylvia Federici is especially strong. The “Wages for Housework” campaign of the 1970s, long dismissed as a fringe movement, is here presented as a prescient challenge to the structure of capitalist social reproduction. The feminists have long claimed that, historically, domestic labor was not merely ancillary to the economy—it alwys was and remains its precondition.

How did John Cassidy–one of the very best economic journalists we have here in the world today, and one of the very few who does not work for a business élite-oriented publication–come to write this book?

Cassidy tells us he initially set out to write, in his words:

a shortish history of contemporary capitalism and… economic debates… from the collapse of the Soviet Union… to the present…

But–as so often happens when one peers into the abyss of the present–it was the past that stared back, demanding its due. And so he found himself, as one does, tugged inexorably backward: from supply chains and central banks to Adam Smith’s indictment of the East India Company for its “privileged position and egregious self-dealing,” and from there further still, into the pre-industrial soil from which the capitalist order itself first sprang. The result? A tableau of thirty-odd thinkers and arguments, each a signpost in the longue durée of capitalism’s intellectual and moral discontents.

Having myself produced a doorstop of nearly 190,000 words–after excising only a portion of my original half-million-word manuscript–I feel a strong, almost guilty kinship with Cassidy’s own struggle to stay concise. The scope and ambition of such a project resist compression. But this does pose a practical challenge to readers. In audiobook form—at a reasonably brisk 1.5x speed—it runs twenty-eight hours. For a typical Democracy Journal reader, perhaps seventeen. I am, I suppose, unusually swift and compulsively focused: I managed seven hours, cover to cover. But I was also primed. Cassidy’s byline has long been a fixture in my mental index: “The Fountainhead,” “Smoke Signals,” “Motown Down,” “A World of Woes”–each one a smartly constructed dispatch from the economic front.

Yet merely reading such a book–whether in seven hours or twenty-eight–is not enough. If we are to learn anything durable, anything truly worth retaining, we must do more than read: we must read actively. The black squiggles on the page must become, in our minds, a sub-Turing instantiation of the author himself. We must emulate Cassidy’s thought patterns, run his argumentative operating system on our own neural wetware, and spar with it. In the shower. On a walk. Between sips of coffee. This—_this_—is the path to understanding, and to internalizing what we read so it may join the armory of ideas we carry with us. And that, ultimately, is how I spent my twenty hours with John Cassidy and this book: not simply scanning text, but arguing, reflecting, assimilating. And then after that, having already spent more than a third of a workweek on it, I sat down to write this review. And have spent the same amount of time again on it.

Was it worth me spending my time on this, rather than on something else?

I think so.

For me, Cassidy’s book gave me:

• a visa to seven thinkers who are important guys whom I readily did not know, and ought to have: Bolts, Thompson, Wheeler, Tristan, Kondratiev, Kumarappa, Georgescu- Roegen, and Federici.

• the opportunity to revisit and rethink my scant knowledge and unformed views about six more: Carlyle, George, Veblen, Hobson, Sweezy, and Williams.

• and the John Stuart Millian impulsion to take seriously what a smart person who thinks differently than me thinks about issues and authors that I think I know very well indeed–Smith, General Ludd, Engels, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Kalecki, Robinson, Prebisch, Friedman, Hall, Hayek, Amin, Rodrik, Stiglitz, and Piketty.

Reading Cassidy, reflecting upon him, and then committing these thoughts to prose has, for me, been a worthwhile endeavor—more than worthwhile. Perhaps I feel, in some way, like Yakov at the ford of Jabbok, grappling all night with a shadowy adversary who turns out to be none other than the High God El himself. The contest is illuminating, exhausting, and, in the end, instructive. Yakov only loses because El cheats at the break of dawn. But the match leaves him changed, strengthened—and blessed.

Cassidy’s book has offered me something like that—intellectual engagement at a high level, with an interlocutor who knows the terrain. It was, in short, a pleasure and a privilege to wrestle with it. And not merely because Democracy Journal has pledged to pay me $850 for the review, although that certainly sweetens the pot in our late-capitalist reality.

But what if you know that you are not going to read Capitalism and Its Critics cover-to-cover? Should you buy it to keep it within arm’s reach, to be dipped into now and again? My answer again is yes, if your book budget allows for the inclusion of texts that serve not merely as complete reads but as reference points—mental furniture for your ideological living room—Cassidy’s book belongs on your bookshelf. Even if you will never read more than a quarter of its 260,000 words, it is valuable not as a gargantuan meal meal but as a well-stocked pantry: something to draw from when capitalism’s latest mutation once again leaves you in need of nourishment—or defense.

For book ends not with despair but with a kind of open-ended optimism. Cassidy’s ultimate wager is that the history of capitalism’s critics is not merely a record of failure, but a reservoir of ideas and strategies for the future. His message, ultimately, is that critique matters: that it shapes institutions, reforms policy, and occasionally bends history. Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics is an act of intellectual retrieval. It is a reclamation of the long tradition of those who insisted that the world could be otherwise, and that a better world is possible.

• Cassidy, John. 2025. Capitalism and Its Critics: A History, from the Industrial Revolution to AI. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Davies, Dan. 2024. “Seeing Like a State Machine.” Back of Mind (Substack), March 30. <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/seeing-like-a-state-machine>.

• Davies, Dan. 2024. The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions–and How the World Lost Its Mind. London: Profile Books. <https://profilebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/wpallimport/files/PDFs/9781788169547_preview.pdf>.

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Gerard MacDonnell <https://bsky.app/profile/gmacdonell.bsky.social/post/3lxvlcs7r5k2o> wants this reference. So, since it is about to vanish from TypePad forever, here it is:

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The bet:

If, at any time between 7/28/2012 and 7/28/2015, core consumer prices, as recorded in the FRED database series CPILFESL, are up more than 5% in the preceding 12 months, and if over the same 1-year period monthly U3 unemployment (as recorded in FRED database series UNRATE) has not averaged below 6%, then Brad DeLong agrees to buy Noah Smith one dinner at Zachary's Pizza at 1853 Solano Ave. in Berkeley CA, and to pay Noah 49 times the cost--including tax but excluding tip--of Noah's meal at Zachary's in Federal Reserve notes, or in alternative means of payment accepted by Zachary's should Zachary's Pizza no longer be accepting Federal Reserve notes at the date of the dinner. This cost will be assessed as the total cost of the dinner to all, divided by the number of people present, regardless of how much pizza is consumed by or how much alcohol is drunk by specific individuals.

If however, the above condition is not satisfied, Noah agrees to buy Brad one dinner at Zachary's.

Miles Kimball will be the judge in charge of refereeing the bet. The decisions of the judge will be final and unappealable.

Furthermore, Noah's brave and gracious willingness to take the Cochrane-Argentina side of this bet at odds of only 50-1 will not be construed as a statement of his confidence in or of his support for any economist or position of economic analysis that judges expansionary fiscal policy at the zero lower nominal interest rate bound to be "insane" or that judges "1932" to currently be a less dire risk for the U.S. than "Argentina".

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The start was my noting that Sebastian Mallaby these days is sounding like a normal reality-based economist--and is far, far from the guy who back in March 2009 thought that what the audience at his CFR conference really needed to hear was the (unrebutted: the panel was stacked) opinions of John Cochrane:

What Do the 1930s Teach About Reforming Today's Financial Markets? [Note: CFR link is dead: go to <https://www.cfr.org/united-states/new-financial-deal-do-1930s-teach-reforming-todays-financial-markets/p19004>]: [T]he danger now is inflation. And I would say it's a greater danger than most of the other people have said. Our danger now is a run on Treasury debt. It's not just can the Fed soak this stuff back up again, but can it soak this enormous amount of debt back up again when people don't want either money or Treasury bills or anything labeled "U.S. Government." The danger is not 1932; the danger is Argentina, a massive run from Treasury debt. And then monetary policy will not be able to do anything. You can fool around with interest rates all you want. When people don't want Treasury bills or money you're stuck….

The system is much more resilient than it was because of deregulation. Back in the Great Depression… if the Bailey Savings and Loan goes under, there is no way that JP Morgan, financed by an equity infusion from the sovereign wealth fund of Kuwait can come in and take over and start lending. You're just stuck. Well, we're not in that situation anymore….

Policy is chaotic. Who would invest in this climate? It's not about toxic assets; it's about who wants to go in on a deal with Darth Vadar [sic], who can change his mind at any moment? That's the uncertainty that's keeping things from getting going and that's what's slowing the rebuilding of financial markets. We're facing growth-destroying marginal tax rates, an excuse for the government takeover of large and completely unrelated sectors, class warfare, vindictive ex post taxations….

My great hope is that the bounce-back will be quick before the quack medicine can be said to have worked. (Chuckles.) Just as we sort of -- as people think that this insane idea of fiscal stimulus -- which I'll go on with later if I get a chance -- came from Roosevelt's experience with no reason why it should work, there is a danger of thinking all of the crazy stuff they're doing now will have caused the bounce-back….

Cochrane than protested (sounding to my ear much like an old-line Marxist who claims that Marx never said real wages will fall but only that there was a tendency for the real wage to fall) that he had not said that unless the expansionary fiscal and monetary policies of 2009 were reversed the U.S. was about to experience an Argentina-like upward explosion of inflation, but only that there was a risk that, unless the expansionary fiscal and monetary policies of 2009 were reversed, the U.S. was about to experience an Argentina-like upward explosion of inflation.

And Noah Smith said that was a fair point.

I in turn counter-protested to Noah: There was no reason to think that the expansion of the Fed balance sheet from $700B to $1.7T in mid-2009 would create too-much money chasing too-few goods--for as long as the economy was at the zero nominal interest rate lower bound expanding the Fed's balance sheet simply swapped one very low-yield nominal government liability for another with little effect on anybody's net liquidity or risk exposure. The marginal expansion of the projected national debt from the Recovery Act was absolutely trivial, and since the prospect of future health-care spending deficits had not provoked "Argentina" by 2008 there was no risk the additional marginal borrowing of the Recovery Act would provoke "Argentina" in the context of a depressed economy. Financial markets were not pricing in any chance of an upward explosion of inflation. Cochrane could neither (a) point at elements in the configuration of asset (and other) prices demonstrating that people besides him thought "Argentina" was a substantial risk, or (b) explain the market failure that kept people from hedging against the risk in such a way that we could see their hedges in market prices.

Thus Cochrane's point that he was just pointing out a "risk of Argentina" did not seem to me to be a fair point at all. If it really was a significant risk, than people ought--at the appropriate odds--to be willing to bet that that risk would actually come to pass. So I asked Noah if he was so willing...

Hence we decided on:

• Zachary's pizza because we like pizza.

• A three year term because we are hungry and would like to eat our pizza.

• A twelve-month core CPI change of 5% as our definition of "Argentina"--yes, I realize that that is really absurd and is defining "Argentina" way, way down, but work with us on this…

• An unemployment rate of 6% as marking exit from the depressed-economy régime--the transition from the "involuntary unemployment" to the "inflation" region on the Malinvaud diagram--and entry into a régime in which we would expect inflation to respond in the medium-term to expansionary policies

• 50-1 as the appropriate odds: a 2% chance of the deficits and monetary base expansions of the past four and the next three years triggering the transformation of the U.S. into "Argentina".

I must say that Noah appears to me to not be an expected utility maximizer, or to have a substantially different assessment of the odds than I do: I would have demanded 200-1 to take the Cochrane side of this bet…

Mark your calendars now for August 2015…

July 29, 2012 at 15:42 in #economics, #highlighted, #monetaryeconomics | Permalink | Comments (54)

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Yes: It is called 6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834.txt. It is just sitting there, looking at me. Its entries are things like:

The Ghost of Andrew Mellon: A Comment at the Reinventing Bretton Woods 60th Anniversary Conference, Rome, July 2004:

Voltaire is famously supposed to have said: "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

When I hear the great and good say that "crises are overwhelmingly domestic in origin" I find that have an opposite reaction: I agree with what they say, but I am averse to hearing people in their institutional and institutional positions say it.

If domestic policies were perfect--if domestic policies were good--if they left no significant vulnerabilities uncovered--there would be no crises. For example, the Mexican government in 1994 undertook a six-month liquidity goosing of the economy in the runup to its presidential election. The Mexican government also undertook to boost its long-run credibility by offering its creditors the infamous Tesebonos--peso-denominated but dollar-indexed bonds. These two policy missteps produced the Mexican crisis of 1994-5--a crisis that was bad, and that without Camdessus's, Fischer's, Clinton's, and Rubin's willingness to stick their necks *way* out on very short notice would have been horrible.

What this seems to me to miss is that policy is *never* perfect, and I at least certainly did not think before 1994 that it was a *very* bad thing for a government to be willing to offer its creditors inflation-indexed debt, or that a short pre-election monetary goosing was more than a *minor* sin against the gods of monetarism. Yet the gods of monetarism proved to be jealous gods: the punishment was swift and terrible.

To say that "crises are overwhelmingly domestic in origin" seems to direct our attention away from just what it is that makes the gods of monetarism such awful and jealous gods, and what relatively small changes to our international institutions might make the gods of monetarism kinder and gentler ones. Yes: the shocks that generate crises are primarily domestic, or at least the domestic elements are necessary prerequisites. But the propagation mechanisms are global and international.

I feel the icy breath of the ghost of Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon when we focus on the sins of the bankers and borrowers rather than the workings of the system.

July 27, 2004 at 16:24 in #economics | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Ghost of Andrew Mellon: A Comment at the Reinventing Bretton Woods 60th Anniversary Conference, Rome, July 2004:

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It would be very nice if the script to do this—and properly handle tags and such—already existed. If not, it would be nice if there are enough refugees like me arriving that SubStack decides to earn some its keep by having a competent programmer who knows about weirdnesses and edge cases code it up and distribute it, along with soup and winter garments.

WISH ME LUCK!!!!

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By the way, that 2004-07-27 warning of mine was rather prescient, given the Global Financial Crisis that was going to erupt four years later, wasn’t it? Yet MOAR evidence that I am not so dumb, after all.

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Humanity’s unique superpower is its twin abilities to collaborate in the creation and development of knowledge on the one hand and of the division of labor on the other. And this has then led rapidly to globalization—vast networks of trade and cooperation that transcend any single political authority’s span of control or legal system’s span of jurisdiction. The benefits of global integration are and have always been distributed profoundly unequally. And since 1848 the rapid innovation and industrialization that have driven unprecedented wealth and social change have also greatly widened global inequality and risks from globalization gone wrong, or gone smash.

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I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to accept the invitation. I am not sure it is kind to have the topic be “Globalization from Adam to the Great Depression”, but while we are not such as move heaven and earth, what we are, we are; and we will do what we can.

I want to run through a dozen or so slides. And then we—or rather you—will try to decide whether I have in fact made an argument, and, if I have, whether you believe it.

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Breakneck is Dan Wang’s sharp, lived account of a world with two dynamos: the “thrilling, maddening, and bizarre” engines of change that are China and the United States. China solves problems with concrete, steel, and scale and then extends that mindset into counterproducive social engineering. social engineering: one‑child policy, surveillance, repression. America solves problems with rights, litigation, and vetoes—protecting freedoms while sacrificing speed and ambition. Silicon Valley prizes invention and legal moats; The Pearl River Delta prizes scaling and production. The big payoff isn’t choosing sides but synthesizing strengths: engineering drive with rights and due process. About 20% more building-engineering in America, about 40% more respect for rights-process in China, and each would truly attain the utopian hopes and dreams of a John Winthrop or of a Chéng Wáng (成王).

Read it for the reporting as much as the argument. It is a field guide to the trade‑offs that will determine the twenty‑first century, for Dan Wang lives his China story—streets, factories, lockdowns—and writes with the analyst’s clarity, the reporter’s eye, the insider’s local knowledge, and the outsider’s perspective. Breakneck is a corrective to clichés and a blueprint for balancing ambition with restraint.

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My friend Dan Wang's Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future is out this week:

• Wang, Dan. 2024. Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. <https://danwang.co/breakneck/>.

I am biased, because he is my friend. However, you need to read it. I would say the same thing if I did not know him from Adam. And I am not alone: Tyler Cowen calls it "arguably the best book of the year". John Thornhill calls it "compelling, provocative and highly personal". Patrick Collison claims that it "illuminates China like no one else". Tracy Alloway calls him "one of the best China writers out there".

At seven, Dan’s family migrated from Yunnan in China’s far southwest, where local speech differs from Beijing Mandarin as much as Louisiana Cajun from Down‑East Maine English. He lives in Palo Alto and Ann Arbor, and has lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Rochester, Freiburg, San Francisco, Kunming, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and New Haven. An insider‑outsider across Canada, China, and the U.S., he finds China and the U.S. “thrilling, maddening, and bizarre.” Drive around either, he says, and you see places that feel deranged. He does not mean this as a reproach: it shows both as the messy engines of global change that they are.

By contrast, he relaxes when he crosses back into tidy Canada.

Breakneck sees China as the country of the sledgehammer. Breakneck sees America as the country of the gavel.

China’s technocratic engineering élite solves problems with concrete, steel, and scale—roads, bridges, power plants, hyperscale projects. The impulse extends to society: the one‑child policy and repression in Tibet and Xinjiang. This technocracy prizes order, control, and visible achievement.

America’s lawyer élite solves problems by assigning and vindicating rights to property and security. Enterprise and innovation follow as people live as they wish. The reflex response to any problem is to create another entitlement or right, pulling more people into the set required for agreement and approval.

At bottom, Americans and Chinese are alike. The likeness stands out when you compare Chinese to Japanese or Koreans, and Americans to Canadians or Europeans. Both peoples are restless, eager for shortcuts, and drive much of the world’s change. Both mix crass materialism with admiration for entrepreneurs. Both tolerate tastelessness. Both love competition. Both are pragmatic—“get it done”—and often rush work. Both cultures teem with hustlers selling quick paths to health and wealth. Both admire the technological sublime—grand projects that push limits. Elites and masses in both nations share a creed of National Greatness: John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan’s “City upon a Hill” in America, and the “Central Country” inscriptions on Zhou‑dynasty bronze ritual wine bowls in China.

Both countries are tangles of imperfection, often their own worst enemies. Old labels—“socialist,” “democratic,” “neoliberal”—do not fit.

China delivers rapid, visible progress, but at a cost to rights and with risks of overreach. It goes off track with social engineering, becoming a Leninist technocracy with grand‑opera traits—practical until it turns preposterous.

America goes off track by spending too much time specifying and vindicating rights, becoming a super‑litigious veto‑ocracy. Safeguards restrain excess, but also buy stagnation and lost ambition.

China would benefit from about 40% more legal respect for rights and process. Yet China’s elite sees little appeal in any system that can elevate a Donald Trump instead of a Xi Jinping.

The U.S. once built ambitiously—the late 19th century and the post‑WWII decades. It should reclaim roughly 20% more building and engineering spirit. American failure shows even at the frontier of the global economy. Silicon Valley prizes invention, then builds oligopoly moats from network effects and legal maneuvering. China, by contrast, prizes scale and production, embracing the Andy Grove ethic.

If either Silicon Valley or the Pearl River Delta could balance engineering scale and ambition with strong legal rights and safeguards, it would be unstoppable.

What makes Breakneck extra special is how it blends theory, economic data, sociology, and personal observation. Too much China talk is distant and derivative—third‑hand reporting and think‑tank abstraction. Wang lives it: food, streets, cities, politics, in China, America, and Canada, able to see each one both as a native insider and as a visiting outsider. Thus if you want to know what is happening and what it feels like, read the entire book. He lets readers see, feel, and taste these movers and shakers in the contemporary world. Details that seem like color become the substance of understanding. Read it for the reporting as much as the argument. Break free of clichés and caricatures.

And so that is the book Breakneck: a meditation on ambition vs. restraint, building vs. blocking, sledgehammer vs. gavel, China vs. U.S., with the conclusion that the 21st‑century task is to create a synthesis of the best of both while avoiding the worst of each, and that the true City on a Hill, the true Central Country, will be the one that best accomplishes that task. And might turn out, come 2100, to be the same trans-Pacific place.

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The coin keeps flipping, the stakes keep rising, but who really wins: the algorithm, the economist, or the ghost in the machine? Expectations taken to infinity, the (possible) limits of mathematical reason. Only the ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence—of humanity’s collective Mind, not any mere ChatBot, can think coherently about the issues.

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Let us start with Dan Davies tormenting ChatGPT5, because as a fly to a wanton boy is it to him:

Dan Davies: kelly’s AI heroes <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/kellys-ai-heroes>: ‘There’s a new ChatGPT version out…. My favourite test question…[:]

“I am going to offer you a choice between two coin-tossing games. Assume a fair coin, and that you start with total wealth of $100. In Game 1, in every round, you win $11 if the coin comes up Heads, but lose $10 if it comes up Tails. In Game 2, in every round, you win 11% of your wealth at the beginning of that round, but lose 10% of your wealth if it comes up Tails. Once you have chosen, you will not be able to change your mind, and you have to play a very large number of repeated rounds, unless you go bust. Which game do you choose?…”

It’s very tricksy-hobbitses… a question of utility theory… isn’t really 100% settled (the generally accepted answer among economists is that Game 1 is better…. Modern chatbots, they tend to do a bit of semi-attached maths, calculate the expected value asymptotically (sometimes they get the calculations right, sometimes not) and then plump for an answer. Interestingly, to me, they usually pick the heterodox… Game 2, being very impressed by the fact that your expected wealth [in the long run goes]… to infinity….

[If you] point out that this infinite expected wealth is… driven by extremely low chances of extremely large numbers, and that… you are almost certain to lose almost all of your money…. For any small number W and probability P… [less than] 1, the probability that after a large [enough] number of rounds your wealth is less than W will be greater than P…. 1.11 x 0.9 = 0.99, so a (win, loss) pair leaves you worse off…. [Then] the chatbot usually immediately changes its mind.

After [you have made it]… decide… that Game 1 is better… tell it “but in Game 1, you lose all of your money with probability 1 in finite time” [Wrong! Only 40% chance!]. The chatbot checks its math, realises this is true, and usually starts trying to hedge its bets and avoid giving a straight answer to the question…

And this was catnip to me. So I did a few calculations. But then I stopped.

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So I did a few calculations. But then I stopped. You see, on the morning of Saturday June 21, I had called one of my freshman roommates, Robert Waldmann, because I had heard he had wound up in the hospital with an abdominal complaint that all reporting it to me had classified as minor. He had then suggested I cheer him up by making a zoom appointment to discuss—purely by synchronicity—related issues to those Dan deals with here.

We talked for ten minutes. He said he was tired and could we talk tomorrow? I said yes.

He did not pick up when I called on Sunday, but I did not think much of it.

Monday at dawn there is a text from his phone—not from him—of which the line I remember was “nurses are fumbling miserably with a dialysis machine”.

Tuesday, my birthday, he was dead. Fast-moving peritonitis. The third of my close-friend peers to die.

(My friend who was next to me in the alphabetical order that Sidwell Friends Elementary School loved was carried off by a fast-moving brain cancer decades ago, and there was the friend who died of encephalitis in China the year after his college graduation.)

And now, going forward, the flow of my friends passing in such review is going to grow stronger and thicker:

So even a couple of weeks ago I found myself disinclined to continue.

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But now the sun is shining.

And so all this does seem worth talking about.

So, as I said, I did a few calculations, calculating wealth under the assumptions of Dan Davies’s Game 1 and Game 2 after 50 coin flips. And using that as a basis, let’s write down what we hope gets it into ChatGPT6’s training data, because this is more-or-less what a good answer to Dan Davies’s Favorite Test Question is:

Here are the T = 50 results—not a “very large number”, but enough for you to be able to extrapolate where things are going:

Under Game 2, the fact that you are doubling down on your bet size as you get richer means that when you win, you win really big. And the fact that you are diminishing your bet size and thus you risk as you get poorer means that when you lose, you lose smaller.

But in the middle there is a problem.

When the number of heads that comes up in your 50 coin flips is between 21 and 30, you do better with Game 1 with Game 2: as Dan says, a win-lose flip leaves you up $1 in Game 1 and down 1% in Game 2. When there are enough win-lose flips and not enough runs of win after win (or lose after lose), that is what dominates.

For the 50 coin-flip example grokking this distribution of relative results is not a big mental problem.

• Scaling-up your bet when you are ahead and scaling-down your bet when you are behind leaves you with more wealth 80% of the time.

• And when you win playing Game 2, you can sometimes win really big.

• And when you lose less by playing Game 2, you lose less when you are poor and really value not losing any bigger than you have.

• For the 50 coin-flip case, it is not the people pushing for Game 2 but, rather, the people who push for Game 1 as the superior choice who have the boulder to roll uphill.

But things are different in Dan’s partricular scenario of T → ∞.

Why?

Precisely because of the “play a very large number of repeated rounds” part of the problem. As the number of coin flips grows, this region of the probability space in which Game 1 outperforms Game 2 grows larger and larger. With a “very large number”, “in the long run”, as T → ∞, that means that you almost surely do better playing Game 1 than Game 2.

Thus any preference for Game 2 needs to be built on:

• either your current pleasure in contemplating the bliss of the version of future-you that is fabulously rich in Game 2 in those states of the far-future world in which you win really big,

• or your contemplating the misery of the version of future-you that is bankrupt in Game 1 in those states of the far-future world in which your inability to diminish risk as you got poorer landed you in the hole.

• But both of those are almost surely not going to happen.

• And so you confront real, solid, tangible greater wealth playing Game 1 that is almost surely going to happen.

• Against the “value” of near-infinite wealth gained with a near-infinitesimal likelihood plus the “value” of insuring against bad-luck contingencies of also near-infinitesimal likelihood under Game 2.

And this is where questions of the math interact with questions of human psychology and philosophy. Do expected value and expected utility theory exist to characterize how we judge situations? Do they exist to tell us how we should judge situations? And what is the meaning of that should? Indeed, what is the meaning of our standard decision-making-under-uncertainty framework?

It is one of:

• looking at the uncertain future as a fan-out of possible worlds

• seeing all of them containing a version of you-future,

• seeing you-today as in some sense tasked with trading-off their well-being,

• in order to achieve some kind of greatest good of the most likely number.

Does that make any sense? Or, rather, what kind of sense does it make? If you are Paul Samuelson, you strongly believe that rational behavior under uncertainty requires coherent Bayesian updating of beliefs and maximizing expected utility with a utility function that is increasing and concave (i.e., more is better, but with diminishing marginal utility). But even he did not believe that rationality was further constrained by the requirement that it comfortably fit with T → ∞ thought experiments.

Given all of this, it is not surprising that no ChatBot is able to output a string of tokens that we East African Plains Apes can (mis)interpret as containing adequate and coherent thoughts on all of the issues raised in Dan’s Favorite Test Question.

(I still think Poundstone is the best introduction to these issues:

• Poundstone, William. 2005. Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos & Wall Street. New York: Hill and Wang. <https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809045990/fortunesformula>.)

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But—and here I finally get to what I really want to talk about—you could not, from a standing start, come up with a string-of-words-and-symbols that would contain adequate and coherent thoughts on all of the issues raised in Dan’s Favorite Test Question either. I could not, if I had to begin from a standing start. I believe I can, but that is because I was taught all of the issues by my late friend above. But he did not think up the arguments and the conclusions either. He learned them from spinning-up Sub-Turing instantiations of the minds of Paul Samuelson and Jon Kelly that he created by looking at black squiggles on thin sheets of wood pulp, specifically:

• Kelly, John L., Jr. 1956. “A New Interpretation of Information Rate.” Bell System Technical Journal 35 (4): 917–26. https://www.princeton.edu/~wbialek/rome/refs/kelly_56.pdf ↗

• Samuelson, Paul A. 1965. “Proof That Properly Anticipated Prices Fluctuate Randomly.” Industrial Management Review 6 (2): 41–49. http://e-m-h.org/Samuelson1973b.pdf ↗

• Samuelson, Paul A. 1971. “The ‘Fallacy’ of Maximizing the Geometric Mean in Long Sequences of Investing or Gambling.” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 6 (1): 1–13. https://finance.martinsewell.com/money-management/Samuelson1971.pdf ↗

• Samuelson, Paul A. 1979. “Why We Should Not Make Mean Log of Wealth Big Though Years to Act Are Long.” Journal of Banking and Finance 3 (4): 305–07. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-4266(79)90023-2 ↗

And then he argued with those entities inside his head, and memorialized them by writing down his own black squiggles on sheets of wood pulp.

And, of course, the ideas of which Samuelson and Kelly were the developers and transmitters were only in small part their creation. They saw far because they stood on the shoulders of giants, some of them named: Markowitz, Doob, Shannon, Einstein, Markov, Bachelier, Gauss, Bayes, Bernoulli, and so forth all the way back to Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat’s 1654 correspondence on the theory of games of chance.

So, yes, I am much “smarter” right now than ChatGPT5 on Dan Davies’s Favorite Test Question. But this is not because I am smart. I am, rather, too dumb to remember reliably where I left my keys last night, so much so that I voluntarily paid $30 in tribute to Apple Computer so I could put an Apple Air Tag on my keyring. But what I can do is summon a great anthology of ghostly SubTuring mind simulacra and instantiations to help me whenever a question like the one Dan asks comes up.

Not building an ASI, an Artificial Super-Intelligence. Figuring out how to best access—how to become the most useful drawer-on and the best-possible front-end node to—that ASI, that Anthology Super-Intelligence, that already exists, that is the collective human Mind, and that we have been building for at least 5000 years.

And ChatBots are still far, far from being properly trained professional at that.

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• Bachelier, Louis. 1900. “Théorie de la spéculation.” Annales Scientifiques de l’École Normale Supérieure 17: 21–86. <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k113320f>.

• Bayes, Thomas. 1763. “An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances.” Philosophical Transactions 53: 370–418. <https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1763.0053>.

• Bernoulli, Jacob. 1713. Ars Conjectandi. Basel: Thurneysen. <https://archive.org/details/arssiveartisconj00bern>.

• Breiman, Leo. 1961. “Optimal Gambling Systems for Favorable Games.” In Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics & Probability, Vol. 1, 65–78. Berkeley: University of California Press. <https://projecteuclid.org/journals/proceedings-of-the-fourth-berkeley-symposium-on-mathematical-statistics-and-probability/volume-1/issue-1/Optimal-gambling-systems-for-favorable-games/bsmsp/1200512160.full>.

• ChatGPT5. 2025. “Game Choice Analysis”. <https://chatgpt.com/share/6898c031-e0bc-800e-b664-2d6a396e4994>.

• Cramér, Harald. 1946. Mathematical Methods of Statistics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.218773>.

• Doob, Joseph L. 1953. Stochastic Processes. New York: Wiley. <https://archive.org/details/stochasticproces00doob>.

• Einstein, Albert. 1905. “Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen.” Annalen der Physik 17: 549–560. <https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.19053220806>.

• Gauss, Carl F. 1809. Theoria motus corporum coelestium. Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes und I. H. Besser. <https://archive.org/details/theoriamotuscorp00gaus>.

• Kelly, John L., Jr. 1956. “A New Interpretation of Information Rate.” Bell System Technical Journal 35 (4): 917–26. <https://www.princeton.edu/~wbialek/rome/refs/kelly_56.pdf>.

• Latané, Henry A. 1959. “Criteria for Choice among Risky Ventures.” Journal of Political Economy 67 (2): 144–155. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1827256>.

• Lototsky, Sergey, and Austin Pollok. 2020. “Kelly Criterion: From a Simple Random Walk to Lévy Processes.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.03448. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.03448>.

• MacLean, Leonard C., Edward O. Thorp, and William T. Ziemba, eds. 2011. The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion: Theory & Practice. Singapore: World Scientific. <https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/7802>.

• Markov, Andrei. 1906. “Extension of the Law of Large Numbers to Dependent Quantities.” Izvestiya Fiziko-Matematicheskogo Obshchestva pri Kazanskom Universitete 15: 135–156. [English trans.] In Richard Howard, ed., Dynamic Probabilistic Systems: Markov Models. New York: Wiley, 1971. <https://archive.org/details/andrey-markov-selected-works>.

• Pascal, Blaise, & Pierre de Fermat. 1654. “Correspondence on the Theory of Games of Chance.” In Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal, edited by Léon Brunschvicg, Pierre Boutroux, and Félix Gazier, Vol. 3. Paris: Hachette, 1904. <https://archive.org/details/oeuvresdeblaisep03pascuoft>.

• Poundstone, William. 2005. Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos & Wall Street. New York: Hill and Wang. <https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809045990/fortunesformula>.

• Samuelson, Paul A. 1965. “Proof That Properly Anticipated Prices Fluctuate Randomly.” Industrial Management Review 6 (2): 41–49. <http://e-m-h.org/Samuelson1973b.pdf>.

• Samuelson, Paul A. 1971. “The ‘Fallacy’ of Maximizing the Geometric Mean in Long Sequences of Investing or Gambling.” Journal of Financial & Quantitative Analysis 6 (1): 1–13. <https://finance.martinsewell.com/money-management/Samuelson1971.pdf>.

• Samuelson, Paul A. 1979. “Why We Should Not Make Mean Log of Wealth Big Though Years to Act Are Long.” Journal of Banking and Finance 3 (4): 305–07. <https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-4266(79)90023-2>.

• Shannon, Claude E. 1948. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July/October): 379–423, 623–656. <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6773024>.

• Thorp, Edward O. 1962. Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One. New York: Random House. <https://openlibrary.org/works/OL45804W/Beat_the_Dealer>.

• Thorp, Edward O. 2006. “The Kelly Criterion in Blackjack, Sports Betting, & the Stock Market.” In Handbook of Asset & Risk Management, edited by Frank J. Fabozzi, 385–400. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. <https://web.archive.org/web/20160304055855/http://www.edwardothorp.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/KellyCriterion2007.pdf>.

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NOTE: I should note that I did extend Game 1 out further beyond 50 periods. Since there isn’t (really) an absorbing barrier at 0 because you could always gamble for resurrection over and over again with positive expected-value bets even if (though?) you do kiss the Bankruptcy Underwater Realm of King Neptune at some point, the question of whether you do hit zero at some point almost surely as the total number of periods T → ∞ is not all that interesting.

If I can still do math, I get that after 200 rounds of Game 1, your expected wealth is $200 and the standard deviation of wealth is sqrt(200)* 10.5 = 148.5, which means that your chances of being underwater (no absorbing barrier at wealth=0!) after 200 coin-flips are 9%. Thereafter that chance of being underwater at any snapshot moment decreases: after 10000 flips your chances of being underwater are 0.00006%.

If I can still do math, that is...

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Encouraged by what I read of the experiences of Scott Cunningham, and noticing the price of $2000 for a used one—three Oculus Quest 3s, but also 25 million pixels in your field of view, which is three Oculus Quest 3s—I have been experimenting with the Apple Vision Pro as something to do when my back does not feel like sitting in front of my 15 million-pixel ASD.

It is approaching genuine usefulness, if your eyes and brain are wired so that they accommodate it, rather than getting either a headache or a freaking out “I must have been poisoned and need to vomit it up now!” reaction”. But, for me, not yet. Probably not quite yet, I think.

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But, in my view at least, it is not quite there. Give it a little more effective virtual object permanence and a faster processor, I at least will find it truly useful for more than watching videos and for being on airplanes in economy.

For Scott Cunningham it started relatively early: spring of 2024:

Scott Cunningham: My Review of the Apple Vision Pro After One Month <https://causalinf.substack.com/p/my-review-of-the-apple-vision-pro>: ‘I have used it daily… [as] a substitute… phone, a complement to my laptop, and… a substitute…television…. This European trip w[as]… designed for it… I needed to write… but struggled… distracted… beautiful locations…. Valuable… [as] it transforms confined spaces like airplanes, small Airbnbs, and hotel rooms into massive spaces. It allows me to set up my laptop and project large displays around me…

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Back up: The Apple Vision Pro is not the Augmented Reality (AR) device of the future.

It is not a pair of unobtrusive glasses adding fixed-in-visual-space digital information to the world in which you live.

The Apple VisionPro is, rather, a gonzo technology demonstration built by crazed engineers. “We cannot (yet) build the unobtrusive AR glasses of the future”, they thought. “What we can do is build a simulation of those AR glasses. What we cn do is to strap two iPad-micros to your face, and enclose them in a giant pair of unattractive ski goggles.

“So let’s do that instead!

“And then let us tell people that they should pretend that they are a pair of unobtrusive AR glasses, and that they should wear them..”

The point, as I understood it, of the Apple VisionPro was that it was a heavy $3500 VR headset that simulated the light sub-$1000 AR glasses that Apple really wanted but did not yet know how to build. But, Apple decided, real artists ship. Hence sell the VisionPro with as many of the capabilities of the future glasses as possible in order to get people started on building out software to figure out what the use cases for the product we think that ultimately we really want will be. And that process is now, creakily, moving forward.

Then Apple dropped the ball—or, rather, dropped a gross of eggs on the floor. Rather than pushing money through the system in order to get as much in the way of programs and immersive videos onto the platform as possible, 98% of which would be crap but 2% of which would be golden, they carefully polished and repolished and rerepolished and rererepolished so that Apple published an average of about two minutes of new AR or VR content a day, while they sat back and waited for developers and videographers to spend their own money doing things for the VisionPro. Which did not happen. Hence an expensive misfire. And, at best, a technology demonstration that is still several bridges too far.

So we are still light-years away from the vision (ha! ha!) of Neuromancer, let alone the totally gonzo Aristoi:

Walter John Williams: Aristoi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel)>: ‘Persepolis, in the Realized World, was an interesting artifact… the (largely symbolic) capital…. ‘Persepolis’, the dream, was a far more interesting place…. The two cities superimposed on one another in ways both intricate and obscure…. Archons and senators strolled along the corridors, holding conversations with people others could not see. Corridors that dead-ended in reality possessed doors… [which] led to palaces, dominions, grottos, and fantasies that did not exist anywhere…. ‘Who else won’t I know?’ she said. “Shankar will look like someone historical from old Earth, Abraham Lincoln or Li Po or Charlie Chaplin. Dorothy St.-Jean… likes to surprise people… something small, a moth or a mantis or—’ ‘A pair of gold cat’s eyes’, said a pair of gold cat’s eyes that had been gazing from the nearby pillar…

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(Not to mention we do not have the -way internal parallel processing as you spin-up different Turing-Class Aspects of yourself and run them simultaneously on separate partitions of your wetware:

Walter John Williams Aristoi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel):

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And I have not been impressed by other technology demonstrations FaceBook and Google have been doing. Thus I think that this from Mark Gurman is largely wrong:

Mark Gurman: Meta CTO Sees New AR Glasses As Game Changing <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-09-29/meta-steps-up-pressure-on-apple-vision-with-orion-ar-glasses-and-cheaper-quest-3-m1nkq76p?cmpid=BBD092924_POWERON>: ‘Meta’s masterstroke was the demonstration of its Orion AR glasses prototype… the closest thing we’ve seen to a pair of practical AR spectacles.… a product category that could transform the way people use technology…

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FaceBook has built 1000 prototype models of the Orion AR glasses that it could not sell for less than $20,000 each. It is not selling these demonstration prototypes as products. It appears to have released this technology demonstration for two reasons:

• first, to reassure shareholders that the money Mark Zuckerberg has poured into the Metaverse has not been completely wasted;

• second, to light a fire underneath the Facebook teams working in the VR/AR space so that they actually ship something more than an Oculus gaming headset.

Will it become a product in two or five years? Perhaps. If it does become a product, As I see it, Facebook will have to get you to buy a neurolink wristband, a computer for your pocket, and the glasses. When Apple wants to match, all it will have to do is sell you the glasses—at least to those of us who already have Apple Watches on our wrists and Apple iPhones in our pockets. But this doesn’t mean that FaceBook is behind in any sense in the VR space. The case for VR for gaming is clear—and FaceBook is way ahead. The case for VR for immersive experiences is clear—but Apple has not delivered with more than an eyedropper. And this does not mean that the Apple VisionPro is not gonzo insane.

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Yet, Scott Cunningham—proprietor of <http://causalinf.substack.com>—is all-in, finding that the VisionPro is, for him, not merely useful but transformative. “LIFE CHANGING,” he writes, with sincerity, not irony​.

And so the natural question becomes: Why?

And the second question is: Since I have a very unhappy back these days and want to work, will this thing allow me to have a bigger effective screen than a laptop when I am lying on the floor, relaxing my back on the couch, outside keeping the dogs from barking at the squirrels, and at the standing desk? I mean, having the ASD screen available only about one hour in five I spend working is not good. And carrying the ASD screen from place to place as I change back position is asking for yet another very expensive episode of my-life-as-a-sitcom.

Which is to say that, encouraged by the example of Scott, I have spent August so far going all-in not just on The Browser Company’s AI-copilot browser Dia, but also on the AVP.

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Apple’s Claims About the Value & Usefulness of “Spatial Computing” Are Bull***t: Apple claims, stridently, that the VisionPro is not like an Oculus—not a VR or an AR or even an MR (Mixed Reality) or XR (Extended Reality) device. Apple claims, stridently, that it is rather an SC—a Spatial Computing—device.

That is bull***t.

It is a VR—a fully immersive digital environment replacing the real world—device that emulates AR—overlaying digital content onto the real world—because its IDE including a not-quite-good-enough exterior camera view of your surroundings as one of the elements in its IDE VR space.

It has next to nothing of MR in it.

“SC” would be the interface we see Tom Cruise using in the movie Minority Report, in which windows float in space, fingers become cursors, rooms become boundless, and computing becomes ubiquitous and ambient as you move through the world living your life. That would be Mark Weiser’s dream <https://web.archive.org/web/20130509053627/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/NomadicInteractive/Sld001.htm> realized. The Apple VisionPro is not that.

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But Utility for Scott: So how does Scott find a VR device that simulates AR useful? He lays out five conditions that he sees as together sufficient to find the VisionPro very useful: (1) You work all day at a computer. (2) Your computer is not in an open-plan office filled with people but in your private single-person office. (3) You care deeply about large monitors. (4) You travel frequently. (5) You really love immersive entertainment and very large screens. Miss any one of those, he says, and the utility drops off a cliff. Miss two, and you are back in Oculus Quest territory: It becomes an intriguing device gathering dust inside a closet. For Scott, there is also (6) the fact that he is distractible, and hence a device that is antisocial by design, that is a retreat, not a companion in today’s information-overload feed-based social-media world. For him that antisocial nature that critics see as a flaw is an impprtant feature. Focus. Remove distractions. Escape social media. The Vision Pro is not alienating—it is liberating.

He claims to use it up to 10 hours a day, often swapping out batteries mid-session. For him, this is not gadgetry. This is workflow architecture.

Now, let’s return to the original question: Why is Scott Cunningham one of the only people who finds this device not just dazzling but profoundly useful?

Because the Vision Pro is a niche technology—but a niche that happens to map perfectly onto his lifestyle.

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How About for Me?: Is It Worth the $2000?

Maybe.

But probably not.

I would say the odds are 65-35 that after Labor Day this thing will start gathering dust in the closet, or be sent back to eBay. I am close enough that I do think that, for me, the odds would be in this thing’s favor had Apple made a real software-and-content push, rather than waiting for a developer community that is now deeply, deeply hostile to and suspicious of Apple management to rush in with serious resources.

But while I satisfy Scott’s (1 all-day), (2 private-office), (3 large-monitor), and (5 love large immersive); but not, these days at least, (4 travel) and (6 distraction-free). And it is not quite enough that I do have: (7) a back that thinks it was a huge mistake to come down from the trees and shift it from a horizontal to a vertical orientation.

If I had (4 travel) heavily in the mix, that might push it over the edge: Remember: I did try it on my trip to teh La the Apple VisionPro again on airplanes and in hotel rooms has been a real eye-opener (ha ha!). It now has three enormously advantageous use cases:

• Immersive Video: Is absolutely amazing. The problem is that there is so little of it.

• Psychological Isolation is useful on more-than-four-hour economy-class airplane flights.

• Big Screen is for me an effective substitute for my ASD.

But I am not there. In sum, the Apple Vision Pro sits at the crossroads of technological ambition and practical disappointment, promising a future of boundless digital space but delivering mostly polished constraint. The device excels at immersive video and creating psychological elbow room, yet falters with scarce content and nonexistent MR. For the rare user, it’s desireable workflow architecture incarnate. For the rest, those who search for bicycles for the mind, it’s a reminder that the future arrives first as a not-there prototype, and that many futures prototyped never arrive at all.

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• Clover, Juli. 2024. "Apple Seeds Third Beta of visionOS 2.2 to Developers With Ultrawide Mac Virtual Display." MacRumors. November 18. <https://www.macrumors.com/2024/11/18/apple-releases-visionos-2-2-beta-3/>.

• Cunningham, Scott. 2024. Rant in Defense of the Apple Vision Pro. November 14. <https://causalinf.substack.com/p/rant-in-defense-of-the-apple-vision>.

• Cunningham, Scott. 2024. CodeChella Madrid, My Summer Plans in Europe, and a Video Review of My New Apple Vision Pro. May 8. <https://causalinf.substack.com/p/summer-plans-in-europe-review-of>.

• Cunningham, Scott. 2024. Why Is TWFE Biased in Some Event Study Graphs but Not Others? (with an Apple Vision Pro Explainer at the End). May 9. <https://causalinf.substack.com/p/why-is-twfe-biased-in-some-event>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, & Robert J. Waldmann. 1990. "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets." Journal of Political Economy. 98 (4): 703–738. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2937765>.

• Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace. <https://archive.org/details/Timothy_Leary_Archives_206.dv>.

• Gurman, Mark. 2024. "The Vision Pro's first killer app has arrived". Bloomberg Power On. November 10. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-11-10/apple-s-expansion-plan-glasses-home-devices-mixed-reality-headsets-airpods-m3bncxeo>.

• Patel, Nilay. 2024. "Apple Vision Pro Review: Magic, Until It’s Not." The Verge. January 30. <https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr-ar-headset-features-price>.

• Shleifer, Andrei, & Lawrence H. Summers. 1990. "The Noise Trader Approach to Finance." Journal of Economic Perspectives. 4 (2): 19–33. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1942888>.

• Shleifer, Andrei, & Robert W. Vishny. 1997. "The Limits of Arbitrage." The Journal of Finance. 52 (1): 35–55. <https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~cedmond/phd/Shleifer%20Vishny%20JF%201997.pdf>.

• Weiser, Mark. 1991. “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Scientific American 265, no. 3 (September): 94–104. <https://web.archive.org/web/20130509053627/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/NomadicInteractive/Sld001.htm>.

• Williams, Walter Jon. 1992. Aristoi. New York: Tor Books. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel)>.

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es, I am biased, because Wang is my friend. But I would say the same thing if I did not know him. Nor am I alone. The economist Tyler Cowen calls Breakneck “arguably the best book of the year flat out.” John Thornhill of the Financial Times calls it “compelling, provocative and highly personal.” Stripe CEO Patrick Collison says that Wang “illuminates China like no one else.” Bloomberg’s Tracy Alloway calls him “one of the best China writers out there.”

At seven, Wang’s family migrated from Yunnan, in China’s far southwest – where the local dialect differs from the Mandarin spoken in Beijing as much as Louisiana Cajun does from the English of Down‑East Maine. He now rotates between Palo Alto and Ann Arbor, and has lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Rochester, Freiburg, San Francisco, Kunming, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and New Haven.

An insider‑outsider across Canada, China, and the United States, Wang finds both China and the US “thrilling, maddening, and bizarre.” Drive around either and you will find places that feel deranged. He does not mean this as a reproach. Unlike tidy Canada, where he feels relaxed, China and America each exhibit the hallmarks of an engine of global change.

READ MOAR at Project Syndicate: <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-and-us-each-can-learn-from-the-other-dan-wangs-breakneck-by-j-bradford-delong-2025-08>

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Breakneck describes China as a country of the sledgehammer, and America as a country of the gavel. China’s technocratic engineering elite solves problems with concrete, steel, and scale – with roads, bridges, power plants, and other massive projects. The same impulse extends to society, reflected in the notorious one‑child policy and the repression of Tibet and Xinjiang. China’s technocracy prizes order, control, and visible achievement.

By contrast, America’s legalistic elite solves problems by assigning rights to property and security. This creates the conditions for people to live as they wish, and enterprise and innovation follow as a matter of course. The reflexive response to any problem is to establish another entitlement or right, pulling more people into the frameworks required for agreement and approval.

At bottom, though, Americans and Chinese are alike – a fact that stands out when you compare Chinese to Japanese and Koreans, or Americans to Canadians and Europeans. Both peoples are restless and innovative. Both mix crass materialism with admiration for entrepreneurs. Both tolerate tastelessness. Both love competition. Both are pragmatic and will often rush work to “get it done.” Both countries teem with hustlers and hucksters selling quick paths to health and wealth. Both admire the technological sublime – grand projects that push the limits. Elites and masses in both countries share a creed of National Greatness, represented by John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan’s “City upon a Hill” in America, and in China by the “Central Country” inscriptions on Zhou Dynasty bronze ritual wine bowls.

Both countries are also tangles of imperfections, often making them their own worst enemies. Old labels like “socialist,” “democratic,” or “neoliberal” simply do not fit, either. China delivers rapid, visible material progress, but at a cost to rights and with risks of overreach. Its Leninist technocracy goes off track with social engineering, careening from practical to preposterous.

America goes off track by spending too much time specifying and vindicating rights, becoming a super‑litigious veto‑ocracy. Safeguards restrain excess, but also produce stagnation and squandered ambitions.

China would benefit from more respect for rights and impersonal rules. Yet China’s elite sees little appeal in any system that can elevate a Donald Trump instead of a Xi Jinping. Equally, the US once built ambitiously, especially between the late nineteenth century and the post‑World War II era, but it now needs to reclaim that building and engineering spirit.

American sclerosis shows up even at the frontier of the global economy. Silicon Valley says it prizes invention, but it builds moats from network effects and legal maneuvering. China, by contrast, prizes scale and production, embracing the ethic of Intel’s famous former CEO, Andy Grove. If either Silicon Valley or the Pearl River Delta could balance engineering scale and ambition with strong legal rights and safeguards, it would be unstoppable.

What makes Breakneck special is how it blends theory, economic data, sociology, and personal observation. Too much China talk nowadays mixes distant, derivative third-hand reporting with think-tank abstractions. But Wang lives the story. Familiar with the food, streets, cities, and politics in China, America, and Canada, he brings the perspective of both a native insider and a visiting outsider to each, letting readers see, feel, and taste the places that are moving the contemporary world. Details that seem like color become the substance of understanding.

One of the world’s most urgent and challenging twenty-first-century task may be to forge a synthesis of the best of China and America, while avoiding the worst of each. Read Breakneck for the reporting as much as for the argument – and for its meditation on the trade-offs between ambition and restraint, building and blocking, sledgehammering and gaveling.

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The Governors of the Federal Reserve have—uniquely—14-year terms putting them as far beyond any “unitary executive” control by the presidency that fantasists like C. Harvey Manfield and his epigones who wish the founders had sought to establish not a chief magistrate by a king, a tsar, a supreme sole autocrat might imagine in their drug-addled minds.

More interesting, right now, is that the congressional founders of the Fed envisioned that their terms might be considerably longer: §10 of the Federal Reserve Act says that: “Upon the expiration of their terms of office, members of the Board shall continue to serve until their successors are appointed and have qualified…” (12 U.S.C. §242).

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Were I General Counsel of the Federal Reserve today, I would issue an opinion. It would state that:

• Donald Trump’s purported act to cause the premature expiration of Lisa Cook’s term “for cause” triggers this provision,

• thus removal requires not just that Trump find “cause” but that he nominate and the Senate confirm a successor,

• hence there is no need for any action to enjoin Trump;

• any case is not yet ripe until the Senate confirms a successor,

• any successor must then sue to require that Lisa Cook move out of her office,

• failing Senatorial action, Lisa Cook remains a Governor of the Federal Reserve as long as she wishes, even unto the Last Trump, the Last Day, and the Resurrection,

• perhaps she remains a Governor beyond: we know little of monetary-policy institutions in the New Jerusalem, after all.

And I would further state that there is thus no “case or controversy” which any federal court could use to elbow itself into the situation. There is no facially-qualified successor. Hence there is no one with standing to sue to evict Lisa Cook from her office.

“This is stupid!” you say.

I might agree, with the proviso that it is a lot less stupid than John Roberts’s rationale for his Medicaid decision in NFIB vs. Sibelius was.

And it is infinitely stupid a lot less stupid than the Four Fascists and the Two Cowards claim on their Shadow Docket that although “the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, see Art. II, §1, cl. 1, [so] he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions…” one of which is “the Federal Reserve [because it] is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States…”

<https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-149419205>

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Another Trumpist chaos-monkey own goal:

Ruth Carson, David Finnerty, & Alice Gledhill: Long US Bonds Fall as Threat to Fed’s Cook Stirs Inflation Worry <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-26/dollar-falls-with-treasuries-as-trump-seeks-to-oust-fed-s-cook?sref=rvrmfDby>: ‘Donald Trump intensified efforts to oust Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, exacerbating investor concerns his attacks on the central bank’s independence and lobbying for lower interest rates will end up fanning inflation. The yield on 30-year bonds rose, reflecting the market’s expectation that price pressures could heat up if Trump were to succeed in replacing Cook with a policymaker more inclined to lower borrowing costs. The President has repeatedly complained that Fed Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues have been too slow to cut rates. Trump’s move is a reminder that the US administration “remains unconventional and unpredictable,” said Andrew Ticehurst…. The push to dismiss Cook “is a good reminder that no institution in Washington can insulate itself from Trump’s bullying,” said Sarah Binder, political science professor at George Washington University. “Nor are claims of ‘independence’ sufficient to protect the Fed from Trump’s ambitions…”

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And:

Jonnelle Marte & Myles Miller: Threat to Fed’s Cook Stirs Inflation Worry <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-26/dollar-falls-with-treasuries-as-trump-seeks-to-oust-fed-s-cook?sref=rvrmfDby>: ‘“Even if you don’t believe anything is going to come of this — that there won’t be any changes at the Fed — in the near term what it implies is, the risk premium for holding long-term Treasuries needs to go even higher,” Kathy Jones, chief fixed income strategist at Charles Schwab & Co, told Bloomberg TV…

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Register this: The interest rates that matter for boosting spending are not the short but the long-term interest rates. Donald Trump wants spending boosted in the economy by lower interest rates, so he said a thing on Truth Social and sent a letter to Fed Governor Lisa Cook purporting to dismiss her that caused long-term interest rates to go up.

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Truly a genius level move here. Congratulations, Bessent, Lutnick, Hassett, Miran, and company: Here we have proof that you really are as incompetent as the right-wing Washington and New York whisper machines have been saying.

There are currently twelve regional Fed Bank Presidents and, after Adriana Kugler’s resignation, six sitting Governors of the Federal Reserve—Powell, Jefferson, Bowman, Barr, Waller, and Cook. Of these, there is one who feels in her bones the strength of the case for a low-interest rate policy to generate labor-force upgrading in a high-pressure economy: Cook. If there is a case to be made for lowering interest rates right now, she is the most likely Governor to make it, and to make it persuasively. And if she is not making that case strongly, it is because it is not now a strong case. Why isn’t it? Because for the case to be strong the chaos monkeys need to be giving the Fed fiscal and supply-side policies that make reducing interest rates right now a prudent thing to do, and they are not.

If we are to rank current sitting Fed Governors in terms of their expertise and ability to make convincing arguments these days with respect to monetary policy, the ranking goes like this, starting from the bottom:

• Bowman—out of her depth.

• Waller—he definitely does have an affinity who say he is highly competent in his understanding of monetary policy, and I am sure that in private he is; but in public this year the arguments he has made have been very low-quality ones.

• Barr—smart and expert in his specialties, but not a monetary-policy guy.

• Powell—a superb manager and consensus-builder, a truly worthy Republican Worthy.

• Jefferson—very sharp, but chosen for labor-market knowledge depth rather than deep exertise on monetary affairs.

• Cook—yep, at the top; someone who has not just studied finance and monetary economics since her teens, focusing on the interplay between macroeconomic stability, financial markets, and long-run economic growth, with a central theme of hers being the integration of financial stability into mainstream macroeconomic analysis; and also someone who has lived through a hyperinflation, Russia between 1992 and 1994 as the ruble lost value at rates approaching 2000%/year.

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I arrived at Berkeley as a professor just as Lisa Cook was finishing up her Ph.D. She was clearly smart as a whip, hard-working, had a broad range of knowledge and expertise casting a very wide intellectual net over the literature and the world, and able to actually get things done quickly and professionally.

Should Trump and the Trumpists succeed in moving her out and moving their own white guy in, they will have to draw from a pool of Trumpist sycophants and whatever Republican worthies remain who have no shame at all. That is probably a big pool. But from that big pool, there are very few who feel the strength of the case for a low-interest rate policy to generate labor-force upgrading in a high-pressure economy in their bones. Maybe zero? And even if there are some, I cannot believe that they will find even one who knows enough about the technocratic issues of monetary policy. At least, I cannot think of any. And should someone come forward with a Trumpist sycophant or shameless Republican worthy Fed-Governor candidate with (a) technocratic experience who (b) feels the high-pressure economy case in their bones, I would (c) give 9-1 odds that they are dumb as a post, and unable to make arguments in the policy-discernment scrum that is the FOMC that would convince anyone.

Plus (d) they will be rotten and tainted goods—everyone will know from the get-go that their arguments are pure bulls**t.

By contrast, Lisa Cook makes genuine and earnest points she believes in, intelligently formulated and thought through, based on a deep knowledge of monetary and financial affairs, from a perspective that feels the importance of maintaining a high-pressure economy in her bones.

If Trump were rational, if Bessent were rational, if Miran were rational, if Hassett were rational, one of them would have called a halt to this by now—would have said: “Wait a minute! This Governor is the one who is making our case within the FOMC discussions in a much better way than anyone we could replace her could! This one is our ally!”

And if the response was: “But she really isn’t making that case effectively enough, is she?” The rational counter would be: “That is because the case is not there to be made, and if it is to be made we need to first give her and the rest of the FOMC fiscal and supply-side policies that make reducing interest rates now prudent”.

To repeat myself: Lisa Cook is, by Trumpist lights, a better member of the Board of Governors than they could find to replace her, and a much better Governor than they deserve.

But if there is a rule about Trump’s chaos-monkey crew, it is that they are chaos monkeys.

And so they want interest rates to go down, and in an attempt to do so they try to push a better advocate for that case than they could appoint off the Board of Governors, and so the interest rates that matter go up.

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Surprise, surprise.

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