Should We Tinker with Capitalism or Replace It With Something Else? — Podcast May 27, 2013


Erik Olin Wright: The Failure of Imagination Among Our Political and Economic Elites. Democratic Perspective’s Mike Cosentino and Steve Williamson discuss University of Wisconsin Sociology Professor Erik Olin Wright’s 2010 book Envisioning Real Utopias.

Capitalism, which has been so successful in creating wealth, has also been notoriously bad at distributing it equitably. The concentrated wealth it produces has also had a distorting effect on democratic government, so much so in the wake of our recent financial crisis that there has lately been a revival of doubt whether capitalism and democracy can ever successfully coexist. Can capitalism be reformed, as liberals hope, or must it be replaced with something else entirely? Professor Wright, who calls himself an analytical socialist, has spent decades studying the problem, and has come up with some intriguing answers.

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