Online Courses
- China and Communism (Harvard University)
- Mao to Now: On Chinese Marxism (University of Newcastle)
In the video slider the trailer of those two courses.
Books
All you can know about a book without actually reading it: the Moral Markets bookshelf
Articles & Blogs
Hand-picked for you from around the web + original articles published just on the Moral Markets site
Socialism: Foundations and Key Concepts
“What is the political, philosophic, and economic system known as socialism? […] In seeking to make the case for socialism—and to understand impediments to a world governed by people’s needs rather than corporate profits—thinkers in the socialist tradition have grappled with topics as varied as colonialism, gender, race, art, sex, psychology, economics, medicine, ecology, and countless other issues. As such, this Reading List makes no claim of being exhaustive; rather, it seeks to achieve two modest goals: to acquaint readers with a handful of key socialist preoccupations, and to demonstrate how the core concepts of socialist thought have been articulated at different historical moments and taken up by women and people of color.”
Capitalists and Socialists of the World, Unite!
“Although it can be politically expedient to draw a thick line between capitalist decentralization and socialist central planning, the truth is that these two systems have converged on many occasions. Moreover, each was conceived for the same purpose, and elements of both could be realized in today’s digital economy.”
Friedman’s Principle, 50 Years Later
“In the mid-1980s, Milton Friedman’s view that the only social responsibility of business is to increase its profits became dominant in business and academia. Since the Great Financial Crisis, his views have increasingly been challenged. To mark the 50-year anniversary of Friedman’s influential NYT piece, we are launching a series of articles on the shareholder-stakeholder debate.”
Is a Capitalist-Socialist Economy Inevitable?
“What will the economy of the future look like? To answer that we must first consider the current trajectory and the ways in which modern capitalism operates, who it benefits, and if it is sustainable. In this video, historians, economists, and authors discuss income and wealth inequality, how the American economy grew into the machine that it is today, the pillars of capitalism and how the concept has changed over time, and ways in which the status quo can, and maybe even should, change.”
Is a Job Guarantee the Answer?
“It’s no wonder that people like the idea of a job guarantee, with the government as the employer of last resort, promising a job to anyone who wants one. It would avoid the catastrophic and well-documented social, economic, political and cultural costs of long-term unemployment on families, health, life expectancy and communities. And economists love that it’s an ‘automatic fiscal stabiliser’: it increases government spending when the economy is weak by funding the guaranteed jobs, and reduces it as the economy recovers. So, if the benefits of a job guarantee are so big, what’s the problem?”
Bailouts Pose an Economic, and Moral, Threat
“Suddenly in these times of the COVID-19 crisis, everything is ‘free’: stimulus checks, benefits, paycheck loans, and medical care. The government can spend with reckless abandon. Trillions of dollars of debt are rubber-stamped with little fanfare. […] The result of a government-rescue culture is not the flowering of capitalism but very much the opposite. As Ruchir Sharma writes in the Wall Street Journal, ‘the irony is that the rising culture of government dependence is, in fact, a form of socialism – for the rich and powerful‘.”
