A leading liberal economist’s latest book.
The wrong assumption, and not hardly questioned by the reviewer, is that socialism and communism existed in modern times.
“Capitalism, Alone demonstrates the limits of studying capitalism’s empirical effects without a theory of how the system actually works—or especially, how it doesn’t.”
Surely, without (referring to) theory–the Marxist tenets and analysis–then our description of the socio-economic system that existed in the Soviet Union, would be the mainstream one: socialist/communist.
A fundamental pillar of capitalism is the rate of profit, not just profit-making. This also has not been even hinted at. How any form of capitalism that is dominated by private capital invests and therefore achieves growth is determined by the rate of return.
“Where the globalization literature of the 2000s was exultant with promise, Milanovic’s book frankly admits the limitations of actually existing capitalism and resigns itself to making the best of things. Milanovic anticipates criticisms from those who find his portrait of capitalism uninspiring: “Isn’t this state of affairs a plea for change in the socioeconomic system?” Or to put it more sharply, is this really the best we can do? Doesn’t this chronicle of the rapid increase of inequality and iniquity, of self-justifying elites and self-dealing bureaucrats, nativism and corruption, cry out for something better? And yet his answer to such questions is an old one: There is no alternative—or a bit more precisely, capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others.”
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