People sometimes ask me, “What is the most important concept in political economy?” The answer is easy, but subtle …
Power: A Primer for Perplexed Economists
Let's Assume an Unfettered Marketplace of Ideas! Or Actually, Let's Not.
A Real Political Economy of Technology - The Ideas Letter
Two technological futures are competing for political and material priority: generative AI and the green transition. Benanav argues that while AI is marketed as a world-reordering breakthrough, its productivity gains…
Three views on economic power
We investigate the concept of economic power in the three main paradigms of economic thinking in the 20th century: neoclassical, marxist and institutionalist. We propose a reconstruction, based on a new taxonomy, of the various forms of power conceptualized by each of them. In particular, we claim that the neoclassical paradigm contains a consistent although often implicit theory of power. We then show that many controversies between these paradigms were debates on power and that some shifts in mainstream economics in the 1970s and 1980s are a reaction to the criticisms leveled against the neoclassical conceptualization of power.
Evolutionary Political Economy: Content and Methods
In this paper we present the major theoretical and methodological pillars of evolutionary political economy. We proceed in four steps. Aesthetics: In chapter 1 the immediate appeal of evolutionary ...
Preface | The World After Capital
Since publishing the previous version of The World After Capital, I have met with people across the political spectrum to discuss the ideas from the book. When I present these in person, I emphasize that the ideas are neither left nor right but forward (credit to Scott Santens who first used this phrase about Universal Basic Income). My writing, however, at times has alienated readers who identify as being more on the right. In this new edition, I am therefore making an extra effort to emphasize how both my diagnosis of where we are at and my suggestions for how to move forward do not map onto the existing political divides. Instead this is a new way of understanding our challenges and opportunities that can be the basis for movements and parties that are not trapped in Industrial Age ideology.
Pluralistic: Process knowledge (08 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable – and most controversial – aspect of global trade policy:
Muskism, capitalism according to Elon Musk
Cognitive Capitalism - Public Seminar
There are broadly three ways of thinking historically about capitalism. One draws on Marx’s value theory and pretty much treats...Read More
Built on Shared Knowledge: What the World Wants from AI Wealth
AI labs and policymakers are focusing on AI dividends to address economic insecurity. We asked 1,041 people across 64 countries what they actually want from AI wealth.
1% for the People
Capitalism is the undisputed powerplant of global prosperity. Since Adam Smith first described the “invisible hand” that allows economies to be efficiently self-organizing and self-renewing, every attempt to supplant it with a competing system has failed spectacularly.
Building Political Superintelligence
Amidst fears of dystopia, a blueprint for how we use AI to reinvent the way we govern ourselves
Private-sector Trumpism
Monopoly, facial recognition and property rights all add up to a private system of government.
What does it mean for AI to be democratic?
Some pushback on a specific fuzzy idea with some ominous implications
AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum
This paper treats AI as diagnostic for the deeper changes taking place in the existing order of things. It uses AI's alignment with both the political economy and with the dualisms that underpin it, including race, gender and anthropocentrism, to highlight the nihilistic character of the current restructuring. AI's scaling and accelerationism are taken as examples of the wider tactics being invoked by hegemonic power to maintain control under changing conditions. From this perspective, the massive build-out of data centres isn't simply a seizure of energy resources but a manifestation of an aggressive and misogynist technopolitics. The paper argues that a liberal push for digital sovereignty doesn't interrupt these dynamics but plays into the hands of emerging technofascism. It proposes instead the prefigurative tactic of 'decomputing', which draws on degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to technology. It explores decomputing as a means to mitigate both material and relational harms and as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good. The paper concludes that AI is the contradiction that reveals many others, not least the gap between claims to legitimacy and the actuality of destructive violence, and proposes an alternative technopolitics of reciprocity that prioritises care and sustainability.
the viability of many right-wing intellectuals and intellectual spaces is enormously dependent on the largesse of reactionary billionaires and foreign governments, who help them circumvent a marketplace of ideas where they would otherwise post extraordinarily poor sales
Don Moynihan
Its fair to ask if Orban's successful cultivation of the Western right wing intellectuals reflected that their networks were already dependent on patronage. Rod Dreher was funded by a weird billionaire, and when he stopped paying his salary, Orban did. Dreher already looking for a new gig.
