One thing I’ve been mulling over for at least the past decade is the state of utopian Capitalism that the USA has been in since the fall of the Soviet Union. Contrary to what most people seem to believe, there are not just one or two ways of organizing the human economy, but many. For most of the 20th century, we heard really only about two dominant systems: Capitalism and Communism. Capitalism and Communism held each other in sway over the decades in the areas of the world dominated by the Capitalist West and the Communist Block.

With the fall of Communism, we got a massive swing towards a utopian Capitalism in a lot of the Capitalist West. In the nineties, it was common to believe that we had “broken the business cycle” and there would be no more busts, only booms. Well, that was obviously false, and the dot-com economy collapsed, along with companies like Enron. But of course, Capitalism wasn’t flawed, there were other issues, so we did it again, this time with real estate and insanely complex and opaque financial instruments. And this time, it looks like we are in for a severe recession, or perhaps even a depression.

Even the previously infallible Alan Greenspan had to change his beliefs, he found a flaw his model. [1][2][3][4][5][6]. A while back, I read this interesting analysis of how the current system is getting things wrong like the pricing of large corporations, one of the very things the Capitalist system is supposed to excel at.

It seems pretty obvious that capitalism combined with democracy is a pretty good system for dealing with commodities and efficient production. But it would be silly to say its perfect, and to stop trying to improve upon it. Capitalism has a lot of waste and often ends up creating large, destructive hierarchies. Ever work at a large corporation? It can be mind-numbingly boring and stiffling. Just like Capitalism replaced previous systems like Feudalism, it is becoming quite obvious that digital media is starting to stir up the organization of a new system.