How Capitalism Survives

"In 2008, on the precipice of the global financial crisis, the British journalist Philip Delves Broughton published a book recounting his experience studying at Harvard Business School. The subtitle of his book, issued in the United States under the title What They Teach You at Harvard Business School, christened the venerable institution "the cauldron of capitalism." Broughton's memoir painted a devastating portrait of the American business elite: at once complacent and overworked, self-satisfied and spiritually diseased,"

"These days, however, doubt is bubbling up from the cauldron of capitalism. Global economic inequality, the rise of the right in both hemispheres, and the specter of climate change will be on the business-school syllabus whether one likes it or not. In 2023, toward the end of the Biden administration, a Harvard Business School blog published a post titled "Capitalism Faces Systemic Challenges That Require Systemic Solutions," summarizing the research of Andy Hoffman, who insisted that "we're watching this model die under its own weight.""

"The answer to that question, it would seem, depends on who you think counts as an anticapitalist. It is the great virtue of John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics that it shows this category to be far more capacious-and even chimerical-than one might at first assume. A New Yorker staff writer and a veteran economic journalist, Cassidy ranges over some 250 years of history unfolding on every inhabited continent to demonstrate that capitalism has been criticized from just about every vantage"

Harvard Business School has been characterized as a cauldron of capitalism, with the American business elite portrayed as complacent, overworked, self-satisfied, spiritually diseased, and insulated from contrary evidence. Contemporary doubts are rising at elite business schools as global economic inequality, the rise of the right, and climate change force systemic issues onto curricula. Faculty and institutional posts have framed capitalism as facing systemic challenges requiring systemic solutions and warned that the model may be failing. Criticism of capitalism spans roughly 250 years and every inhabited continent, encompassing a wide and sometimes contradictory spectrum of perspectives.

Read at The Nation