A wave of new books argue that capitalism isn’t doomed
With the world in mortal crisis throughout the 1930s, the leading capitalist intellectuals of the day met in a series of fraught conferences. Horrified by the advances of totalitarianism, economists like John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi and Ludwig von Mises clashed, tried to understand what had gone wrong and sought a version of capitalism that people would accept.
Today’s intellectual ferment among capitalists is uncomfortably similar. It’s no longer left to socialists or progressives to criticize free markets. Capitalists themselves are convinced they are facing the gravest crisis since the 1930s.
The Harvard historian Sven Beckert just published an immensely ambitious 1,300-page tome simply titled Capitalism.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/541160/capitalism-by-sven-beckert/
His book is the latest in a stream of interventions that all start from the assumption that capitalism needs to be fixed, from The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, by the Financial Times’ influential commentator Martin Wolf,
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2023/02/martin-wolf-crisis-of-democratic.html
to What Went Wrong With Capitalism, by Ruchir Sharma, an investment banker who currently chairs Rockefeller International.
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/06/ruchir-sharma-what-went-wrong-with.html
The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, by the Financial Times’ influential commentator Martin Wolf, to What Went Wrong With Capitalism, by Ruchir Sharma, an investment banker who currently chairs Rockefeller International.
Winston Churchill once described democracy as “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
By the same token, free markets are a terrible way to allocate capital, but better than any other system yet attempted. Capitalism can adapt. That is its inherent advantage. It has periodic crises but takes on new shapes.
It morphed into something new after the Great Depression of the 1930s and the crisis of stagflation in the 1970s.
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2023/03/its-complicated-no-its-stagflation.html
Similarly, the GFC ended the neoliberalism pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The risk is increasing of a repeat of the 1930s, when capitalism reinvented itself only after social collapse, totalitarian atrocities and world war. Viktor Shvets’ Twilight Before the Storm analyzes that calamitous period, and finds that it is growing harder to avoid a repeat.
https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9781633378254
Anatole Kaletsky’s Capitalism 4.0 boils capitalism down to three versions to date
https://web.gavekal.com/books/capitalism-40-the-birth-of-a-new-economy-in-the-aftermath-of-crisis/
As the Western world’s economic growth slowed, political polarization and extremism rose. rising housing prices made older people wealthier and put the American Dream of home ownership out of reach for many.
Globalization. Chinese exports drove down prices in the West and allowed major economies to grow without inflation.
Financialization. Financial engineers turned commodities, stocks and bonds from emerging economies, loans to low-quality companies and — crucially — mortgages into instruments that could be traded. In 2008 that led to disasters like the implosion of the US housing market
All of this drove up moral hazard — the tendency to take more and greater risks when there is protection from the consequences if things go wrong.
The global financial crisis brought to the fore the arguments of Hyman Minsky.
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-mere-mention-of-minsky-moment-is.html
Trump has put forward a clear alternative narrative — nationalist or mercantilist capitalism, a zero-sum game played out among countries to control resources, with a highly interventionist state. It’s not a new idea; it’s been practiced successfully by China for decades.
A repeat of the disaster that ended the 1930s is not inevitable. But just as then, capitalists and intellectuals can’t thrash out how to adapt their favored economic model in a way that voters will accept.
John Authers Bloomberg December 12, 2025
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