The Opium of the Intellectuals (2005)
&quot;Even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist&quot; - Keynes.<p>That&#x27;s the trouble with looking backward to Marx or Smith for guidance.  Both predate the Industrial Revolution reaching full speed.  The basic problem of their era was making enough stuff, just as it had been for millenia. Today&#x27;s basic problem is that we don&#x27;t need that many people to make all the stuff.  Neither Marx nor Smith addressed that problem. Keynes said it might be a problem for generations after his. Well, we&#x27;re there.<p>We&#x27;ve also conquered scale. One of the assumptions of capitalism is that lots of people working for their own self-interest would outperform a central planning system.  It looked that way in the days of the USSR. Big companies had trouble getting out of their own way. General Motors, once the biggest company, had to operate as a bunch of independent companies under one corporate umbrella just to make the thing manageable.<p>That&#x27;s no longer true. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Apple, FedEx, UPS, AT&amp;T, and WalMart are all very centralized. It doesn&#x27;t seem to hurt their performance. They don&#x27;t compete on price - they define markets and platforms, and dictate terms.  They&#x27;re able to change rapidly compared to monopolies of the past - each of those companies is quite different than a decade ago.  Computers and networks have made this possible - deployment at scale works far better than it did even twenty years ago. Even for companies with physical products.<p>Economics for the 21st century needs to start dealing with these issues, not rehashing the 19th century.