The ruling class will never give up fossil fuel, because it's key to their power over workers. By Troy Vettese.

Eat the rich.

Today I want to explore the conflict between capitalism and open society, market values and social values. I am going to approach the subject indirectly, by first introducing a phenomenon that has attracted my attention only recently, but has assumed such importance in my thinking that I could almost call it the fourth pillar of my conceptual framework. That phenomenon is the principal-agent problem.

Economists are increasingly turning their attention to the problem of monopoly. This doesn’t mean literal monopoly, like when one utility company provides all the power in a city. It refers to market concentration in general -- when an industry goes from having 20 players to having only 10, or when the four biggest companies in an industry start taking a bigger and bigger share of sales. This sort of creeping oligopoly acts much like a literal monopoly -- it raises prices, limits market size and tends to make the economy less efficient.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless.

Democracy inherently assumes that people know what is best for them, and that they are educated enough, and knowledgeable enough to elect their leaders. But most election results shows again and again that when you let ordinary people elect their leaders, they will screw it up, more often than not.

Weekends are a lie created by capitalism. We made up the weekend the same way we made up the week. The earth actually does rotate around the sun once a year, taking about 365.25 days. The sun truly rises and sets over twenty-four hours. But the week is man-made, arbitrary, a substance not found in nature. That seven-day cycle in which we mark our meetings, mind birthdays, and overstuff our iCals—buffered on both ends by those promise-filled 48 hours of freedom—only holds us in place because we invented it.

The EpiPen was invented in the 1970s by a biomedical engineer, Sheldon Kaplan, who was searching for a way to treat allergic reactions quickly. What he came up with was the EpiPen we know today: a pen-like device that delivers a premeasured dose of the hormone epinephrine in emergency situations. The device is ubiquitous in our country, carried by those with asthma or life-threatening allergies.

A deep-rooted crisis in education, and a long cultural and political decline, is what got us here. There's hope!

Before you say no, take a moment to really ask yourself whether it’s the system that’s best suited to build our future society. By Jason Hickel, Martin Kirk.

It’s time to dethrone capitalism’s single-minded directive and replace it with a more balanced logic, laying the foundations for a better, more equitable world.

The story of oil is the story of those who helped shape the modern world, and how the oil-igarchy they created is on the verge of monopolizing life itself.

The growing popularity of fried chicken and pizza in parts of Africa underscores how fast food is changing habits and expanding waistlines.

The state of capitalism is in desperate need of reform and modernisation, according to some of the UK’s top business leaders, who claim that the system has been hurt by management greed, corporate tax dodging and investor short-termism. Speaking on a panel for the Financial Times, former minister Baroness Shriti Vadera, who is now chairwoman of Santander UK, said that “the underlying promise of western capitalist economies — that a rising tide lifts all boats — has been broken”. She said that a “better model” is needed.

BBC Radio 4

The work of saving the planet is not technical, it’s political. By Benjamin Y. Fong.

Is there someone, sitting in a comfortable chair somewhere, flipping a coin from time to time, deciding what happens in the world? By Puzhong Yao.

Nowadays, there are a lot of articles being written about the collapse of retail in the USA. Some people blame Amazon and online shopping, but that is only a trivial part of the problem. $1,355,610,000,000 of consumer spending is missing from the demand side of USA spending, and that should be kept in mind whenever you read an article about retail going through hell. The big boom in retail in the mid-20th century was thanks a strong middle class. Conversely, the collapse of income of the middle quintiles of income must lead to a contraction of retail. Consider these charts:

A crash course in social democracy.

America’s favorite board game is reflecting the economy we live in.