Bart Hawkins Kreps

Purchasing others’ time, whether by the hour, the day, or the week, can be an important tactic for extracting wealth – especially when asserting control over that time allows for speed-ups in the production of exchange value. But Alyssa Battistoni emphasizes that much wealth depends on natural processes that are difficult if not impossible to speed up. In many such cases capitalism forgoes direct control of labour and finds other ways to extract value.

Capitalists, at least those at the pinnacles of their industries, may have a distinct aversion to being subject to market rule, as Doctorow writes. But as Battistoni writes, they show no such ambivalence about class rule, which gives them non-democratic control over where and how investments are either made or not made.

Why is it so difficult to find a job or to buy products that align with our values? Why is it difficult to even know whether our personal choices might have effects in the right direction?

Political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century employed a curious phrase to denote the source of wealth at the base of the economy: the “free gifts of nature.” Alyssa Battistoni, a political science professor at Barnard College, believes that careful attention to the meanings of this phrase illuminates many aspects of the world we inhabit today.

Electrification is an important and necessary step for a sustainable, healthy future, but growth-driven Business As Usual—even Electrified—is killing us.

Guerra has done a great job of describing the recipe for overbuilding. But the recipe for converting an overbuilt network into a safe, sustainable transportation system is still being worked out in countries and cities around the world.