437. Do Socialists Dream of Electric Institutions, Part 1 (ft. Aaron Benanav)

MOTHER He must be dreaming Well, if he is dreaming, then he must be asleep Then if he is asleep, then I will wake him up At the height of their fame and glory, they turned on one another, each struggling in vain for ultimate supremacy. In the passion and death of their struggle, the very art that had raised them to such Olympian heights was lost. Their techniques vanished. This Machine Kills So we can get into, you know, scratch the surface of this just absolutely magisterial two-part essay that he's got in New Left Review on Beyond Capitalism. You know, really getting deep into alternative ideas, alternative institutions, alternative groundwork for what a system beyond capitalism, a post-capitalist system, if you will, might look like. Like, you know, I think there's always the, you know, leftists always rely on, you know, parts of Marx where he's like, I'm not writing the recipes for the cooks of the future. You know, it's a little bit of a way to avoid a hard question of like, well, what's your solution then? What's your society look like? And we are very fortunate that we have people like Aaron and, you know, great minds who are thinking deeply about the like, you know what? actually, maybe I will make a blueprint for the future. And it sounds good. It sounds good. So, Aaron, thank you for coming back on TMK. Yeah, it's really great to be back. I love the show. Well, we love your work here. And it feels like a real event when you've got a new essay series. Because it also feels like you think in terms of books. And so it's like, you just kind of go away for a little while. And then you come back and you're like, boom, Here's some of the deepest thinking you've ever read in your life. I've been right. You didn't know, but I was in the dojo. I was writing my next masterpiece, and you didn't even know it was going to drop on you. That's how I want everyone to think of me, just like in the dojo, you know, really like studying the moves, coming back while you were, you know, whatever it is you were doing. You were studying the blade. Yeah, studying the blade. That's exactly right. I was studying the blade. like a bit. And it is true. I mean, you've got this great perch at New Left Review where they let you just like basically write a book in essay form. So you can then kind of work out your ideas in these journal essay forms and then take that, turn it into a book for, you know, broader public consumption. And it's great to kind of, it's almost like reading the, you know, it's a little bit of Grundrisse kind of stuff. It's reading the notes for the book that comes after. But this new one here, you're really focusing on this question of not only how do we move beyond capitalism in an abstract sense, but really how do we move beyond the kind of the structural imperatives, but also structural constraints of capitalism, namely, you know, really understanding capitalism as a system geared towards single parameter optimization, right? How do you optimize for capital accumulation? How do you optimize for profit maximization? And through that then becomes optimizing for efficiency, so reducing cost and, you know, maximizing returns. It's really this, it takes the logic of optimization to its extreme, but it really only does it in, I think, also the easiest way to optimize, which is when you only have one single parameter that you're optimizing for. Whereas your critique is, maybe we'll start there before we get into everything else, what it means to move beyond that and have a society that actually values lots of values rather than optimizing for one value. But how did you kind of come to this as the basis for your critique of a capitalist system and the groundwork for moving beyond it? Yeah, it's really, it was a difficult problem for me because I was interested in describing the kind of core logic of capitalism. And I should just say from the get-go that it's quite a hard project. And I think, you know, people look to Marx and maybe some other really foundational thinkers to think about what is the essence of capitalism. You do get into a bit of a tangle because once you identify a core logic, people will say, well, you know, that's not everything we see, right? Not everything in capitalism is about efficiency. There are all these other forces at play. You know, if you look at big corporations today, they're not just interested in being efficient. They've got all these monopolistic tendencies, right? All these things that companies do that don't quite line up with that. And I think it's important to say from the beginning that when we look at actual realities on the ground, it's going to be messy, right? It's going to be complex in all these ways. But I do think it's possible. And I think it's very interesting that both kind of defenders of capitalism, like neoclassical economists and Marxists agree that the big thing that capitalism does, the big thing that profit-making does, is it drives this really intense focus on maximizing efficiency. And it's really true, I think, a limit of how Marxists talk about that is we tend to focus a lot on the cost-cutting side of efficiency, whereas I think there's some advantage in at least some neoclassical texts, And maybe some 20th century Marxists tried to copy this idea to talk not just about reducing costs, but also increasing revenues, basically inventing new products, not just process innovations that reduce costs, but product innovations that expand revenues. But that can all be thought of in this real efficiency frame. If you're a neoclassical economist, you think capitalism, it maximizes efficiency. It's so great because all efficiency maximization is like a benefit to society. It's just making society better, you know, making us able to do things with fewer resources or to have all this new stuff, all these new gizmos we didn't have before or something like that. Marxists and other critics tend to think of efficiency much more broadly and to think about a lot of the negative forms of that. So maybe capitalists are like businesses are making a lot of money by super exploiting their workers, like finding ways to like hold workers at arm's distance and pay them less money. companies are always finding ways to like offload costs onto society so you know iphones um and facebook like social media you know they create all this revenue uh through advertising but they massively suck away people's attentions and they cause like teen suicides right so that like offloads all these costs onto society um and the third one is obviously just like massive exploitation of natural resources without paying for those. So you have all these ways that, you know, there are a way, but I think it's important to hold both of those in mind at the same time, that capitalism is both increasing efficiency in the sense of actually increasing productivity. It's a lot slower than it used to be. And that's maybe a way we could, you know, find our way into this, what's going wrong with capitalism. But it's also all these destructive forms of efficiency too. I really like also laying out efficiency as a way to think or a way to articulate that the profit is something like not really a direct, it's a proxy and that efficiency is the core criteria here. I mean, I think it also feels like a fun reversal of the way in which capitalists insist, well, yeah like we focus on profit but all these other benefits are proxies of profit right you know the it's it's you know the the usual like miss uh mangling of that adam's line where you know like as if by an invisible hand everyone ends up satisfying you know in pursuit of their own self-interest they end up satisfying things that are good for the larger uh collective i i when when when you were developing this or working through this, I mean, did you come across capitalist literature defenses that would insist or that might anticipate this and say, hey, look, like we are a multi-criterial, you know, system, you know, we focus on profit, but we also focus on diversity. You know, we focus on, you know, workplace safety. We focus on all these other standards or did they more or less not indulge in that or you know not really try to make the argument that it's it's profit and or efficiency and others yeah it's it's fascinating because i think that for a long time economists didn't even really have to think about that it was just so obvious like this is an efficiency like if you think about it the global concept of efficiency maxing is GDP growth. That's the idea. So the goal of our society is to get as much income as possible. That's GDP. And the way we do it is by efficiency maxing. That's the micro level, and the macro is GDP growth. So I think they would claim that this is the sole focus for good reason. This is what people really care about. I think more recently, and maybe also throughout history when there have been moments where people criticize that and they say, hey, aren't there other things we need the economy to do? And that's fundamentally pointing towards my way of thinking about what it would mean to get beyond capitalism, to think about a world where we could pursue many different goals. When you pose that to economists or defenders of capitalism, they would say, in order to meet any of those goals, we need more resources, We need more efficiencies that say, hey, look, you know, it's only by focusing in every moment on efficiency gains that we will generate the resources we need to be more sustainable, to have better quality work, you know, to be able to care more, to have a bigger welfare state and so on. So there's this kind of magical thinking, I think, component to how they would respond to that question. They would say efficiency is like the basis of everything else you want to do. The problem is that when the whole system is built around efficiency maxing like that or GDP maxing, then, you know, you never like there's never a moment where you cash that out. Right. Like everyone thinks, oh, as capitalism gets more efficient and as incomes grow, we're all going to be artists and we're all going to be. you know, having all of this like extensive welfare state with all these benefits that, you know, at some point the system must cash out its gains. Like there's even that famous essay by Keynes, Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren, which says, look, in 90 years, we're going to cash out all these gains. But when you think about what it really means for there to be a systemic logic, it's pretty clear that we never cash it out, even facing the climate crisis. There's no moment where they say like, oh, well, you know, we've gone pretty far with this. Why don't we cash it out now and just like reduce or like level out and, you know, make everything a lot more sustainable instead of more efficient. And it's when you face those kinds of questions that you really see that it's a systemic logic of the system built into this idea of putting profit first that it's very hard for the system to break from. As long as the companies are focused on profit, they won't change their goal. Now, that said, something that didn't make it as much into these essays that I think is really important is I do think corporations are kind of multi-criterial actors. And I think that a lot of what makes corporations multi-criterial actors has made for a somewhat softer capitalism in some ways than we had in earlier, you know, like in the 19th century. And I think the reason for that is that corporations achieve such large economies of scale and they're able to just best their competitors. You know, like these companies often have like three to five companies with 50 or even 70 percent market share in many industries. Those oligopolistic companies, they don't have to worry so much about making profit in the short run. Their focus is maintaining their dominance in the long run. And part of what they do as a result of that, and this was like a big thing for Schumpeter, is that they do a lot of research and development. They invent all these new products and processes that allow them to maintain their dominance over the long run. But they also do a lot of other stuff. They try to influence culture, to shape culture in all these different ways. They pay lobbyists and they shape and have a huge influence over the political system. And precisely for that reason, I think corporations become multi-criterial actors. But instead of pursuing all these goals for the purpose of improving human flourishing, they're pursuing them for the goal of their own long-term dominance. In some cases, though, that does mean giving employees benefits. They can do all these kind of positive things in certain limited ways as long as they serve the end of those companies' long-run dominance. So I think it's also very important that, you know, insofar as we have some, you know, very powerful actors acting this way, it takes the form of a kind of domination over society, not a vehicle for society to express these goals and choose, you know, how to blend them together. Yeah, because I often think about this in terms of like purposes and priorities. Right. And this is one of my this is one of the critiques I regularly pull out now when I'm like giving public talks or whatever around technology is, you know, because people can point to, you know, any technology. Right. And like find some kind of silver lining in a gray cloud and be like, well, you know, but like what about this convenience or this like new capability that AI brings or that my smartphone. What about this? This like, you know, benefit that I get from this thing. Right. But I think very often what we're doing there is we're finding benefits that are byproducts of the system, not the goal of the system. Right. And so like the you know, the byproduct of a of a of an app might be that it makes your life a little bit more convenient. But that's not the goal of the app. The goal of the app is to extract your data and sell it on an open market for personalized targeting. Right. Like so that's what the that's the primary parameters built into the system are those things. The other things are maybe you need to make it a little bit convenient to get people to use it, right? Or maybe it's just an accident that that feature was actually beneficial for users as well as for the company. And we see so many of these kind of silver lining moments where it's like the tragedy of technology today and the political economy of technology is that we are largely normalizing just being satisfied with accidental benefits and byproducts rather than like the primary purpose of the thing being to make society better, to make our lives better. And so we kind of have this bigotry of low expectations around our technologies rather than actually holding these things to higher expectations to say, well, no, the primary purpose of the system should be to increase human flourishing or social well-being. that should not be a byproduct. That should not be something, a feature baked into the system as a way to smooth over what the actual purpose is, which is to maximize extraction or profit making or market domination. And I think there's a lot of the same kind of things that you're talking about here with real existing capitalism today, right? The things we're talking about, ESG or DEI or workplace benefits, these kinds of things. All of those things are byproducts that feed into the primary purpose, the priority of the system, which is to increase the efficiency of profit maximization, to increase capital accumulation. I really like this idea of a A single parameter or single criteria optimization doesn't necessarily mean there's no other criteria in the system. It instead means that all other criteria are subordinated to that single criteria. That's what I try to say in the book, because I think, yeah, I think that if I could, I would put even more emphasis on that. You know, that it's this idea that it's an efficiency first logic. Right. It doesn't mean efficiency only. It just means that there's a primacy. And it's really important when we talk about it, too. It's like economic efficiency. It's getting the most revenue at the least cost and then figuring out how to do that, you know, get that profit for the smallest unit of investment, you know. So it's like we could imagine a world where efficiency becomes a goal for its own sake, and it might have all these other things it achieves for us. It wouldn't be such a narrow concept of efficiency that guides the system. I think the advantage of it, which you were kind of getting at before, of having just this single goal, which is really fascinating to me, is that as long as you have only this one driving goal of the system, capitalism achieves incredible complexity in terms of this huge division of labor, all these different forms of engineering that it mobilizes, and other forms of labor that it kind of coordinates through just this singular goal of making a profit. And the thing about making a profit is that, you know, if that's the only thing you care about, there's always going to be a strategy that gets you the most profit at the least investment cost. And it's kind of a technical question to identify what that thing is. You see this, I became very interested also in like all the literature on optimization of the self in Silicon Valley because they try to apply these ideas also to individual lives. and you know like if you look at brian johnson like the the life maxing guy you know like it's really important that he chooses the single goal of like living as long as possible and now he's like doing mushrooms and stuff because he's like oh maybe being happy will extend my life you know but even like that is subordinated to the goal of life maxing and you just see this in all these different systems There a kind of impulse to find a singular goal that will be like you organizing criterion for whatever it is you're doing. Because as long as you have one goal, you will always have a best choice. You know what I mean? You'll always have one way that will maximize this particular goal the most. And maybe it's a segue I talk about in other things. But the idea here is that when you try to optimize for many goals at the same time, even just two, what you'll find is that the strategy that best improves your outcome on one goal will not be the same as a strategy that best improves it for the other. So for the economy, for example, if we had economic efficiency and sustainability as two goals, it'd be pretty obvious that the solutions that are best from the perspective of economic efficiency will not be the ones that are best from the perspective of sustainability. and suddenly instead of just technically thinking, okay, what's the best way to get as much profit as we can, you'd be thinking, oh, I mean, within a capitalist economy, you're thinking, oh, how do I balance these different goals? And it raises these really important ethical and political questions of like, what do we do if we're optimizing for multiple goals at the same time and there's no singular best solution? There's just a set of solutions that do different things for us. And there are even people in the kind of life extension world who are very critical of Brian for his singular focus on living forever. And they're like, no, good life. You have to balance living long against all these other goals and so on. Yeah. Anyway, maybe a little too much about that creepy life extension culture. I do think that's fascinating. I'm fascinated by – the Silicon Valley transhumanists are very fascinated me. I'm fascinated by how they represent in them. I mean, now thinking about it through this single focus and multi-criterial lens is interesting. I've always been interested in them because they represent like a reactionary inversion of the initial crop of transhumanists that we got around the eve of the transhumanists. humanist i mean i'm around the eve of the russian revolution who are these you know the cosmos who are just like we should figure out some kooky way to bring everyone who's ever lived back to life and what would that look like maybe we should have you know museums or cultural sites where you bring every artifact that any that ever had to do with someone's life into the place and maybe resurrection is more like a mediated process where it's like you're talking to you know and And it's like, that's, you know, I don't want to, we should not bring back everyone who ever lived back to life. But the- Didn't they have that problem? Like they had this kind of like, you could talk to any historical figure and you could talk to like Hitler, Himmler and stuff. I'm really sorry for what I did to the Jews. Well, which is funny now, because now you've got Glenn Beck bringing back an AI George Washington on his show and asking him, 21st century George, what do you think about modern America? You've got people that are kind of trying to do that now with AI, right? I'm bringing back these historical figures and showing them TikToks and being like, what do you think about this? I feel like people do that sometimes with Marx. They're like, oh, what would Marx think if we could bring him into the 21st century? And you're like, dude would just be so bewildered. What the fuck is going on? Yeah, I do love, I think my favorite articulation is that tweet where it's like, where they're explaining everything to him and he's like, and they're like, hey, so what do you think? How do we get out of this hellhole? And he's pointing at the moon and he said, you went to that? what you were getting at though is like there's a there is this interesting kind of inversion where it becomes it is you know rather than like let's bring everyone who died back to life it's like let me never never die right right i mean silicon valley is in a lot of ways just a uh a real caricature of like capitalism, you know, writ large, right? And because Silicon Valley does take this kind of like, you know, optimization logic to its extreme. And there's an interesting kind of thing here as well, where, you know, we're talking about efficiency, and we're talking about optimization. And they're not quite the same thing. But they're kind of two sides of the same coin. And I think that they both represent different ways of approaching the same question of mathematical rationality, which is, you know, economists think in terms of efficiency, data scientists think in terms of optimization. And I wonder, Aaron, if you could actually explain a little bit, tease out some of the differences there between efficiency and optimization. And yeah, they're not quite the same thing, but I do think one is they're coming up together in parallel. I think Silicon Valley really takes this idea of optimization and runs with it. The neoliberals maybe took the idea of efficiency and really run with it. obviously they're like said two sides of the same coin but i think the differences there do kind of give us a like tease out some of how the capitalist logic is unfolding oh that's a that's a really big question so but i think i think that there's a simple answer and then there's like we can go into the deep end you know but i think the simple answer is that whenever you optimize you always have to optimize for something. And so the question is, what is your goal? You could say that when economists talk about why markets are so great, they would say that with markets, you can optimize for efficient allocation. And when you look into what they mean by that, it's something so different from how we think about it in the economy more broadly. They're talking about Pareto efficiency, they're saying, oh, we can get to a world where everyone is made as well off as they can be without taking anything away from other people. So there's this famous rebuttal of economists' theoretical notion of efficiency, where they say a world where one person is everything and everyone else has nothing could be just as efficient from their perspective as a world where everyone is equal. So I think that would be a great example of where the meaning of what we're optimizing for. It's like really about what the goal is of what we're optimizing. In the Silicon Valley world and in the tech world, I think they're often optimizing for things like speed, you know, like minimizing energy use. They're trying to do that piece by piece because, you know, those kind of engineering and technical modes of optimization are fitting into larger economic logics of how the companies they're working for are making money. But I think optimization as such is not necessarily a bad thing. And I'm writing these technical papers about multi-objective or multi-criterial optimization where you're saying, hey, what if we optimize for multiple things at the same time? A big part of what I'm trying to say is, look, if we get rid of this profit basis for the economy, we can have an economy where we can we can do all these things you want to do like we could you know we could we could make a world where we work less we can make a world where the work we have is better and more meaningful and more dignified for people we can make a world where we are as sustainable you know where we're very sustainable and we no longer are burning fossil fuels we can make a world where we really care for each other we can make a world with a lot of community we can make a world where people have a lot of autonomy in terms of their life choices. We can even make a world with a lot of beauty. We can make an economy that produces all these effects. Now, in a way, I would say that actually, let's just take those things as an example. We would want to optimize the economy for all of those things. And what that would mean is we want to find some option that is better than any other option in terms of its ability to make the world beautiful, enjoyable, satisfying, filled with free time, community, and so on. Like, we don't want to choose an option that gives us all those things worse than some other option that's available to us. In that sense, we want to optimize. We want, you know, if there's a way to have this really great economy where people are caring for each other, and then with no cost to any of our goals, we can make it even better in terms of how it cares for people. We should do that. That's a kind of optimization, you know. But the thing about multi-objective optimization and why I think it's such a fascinating basis for thinking about what comes after capitalism is that when you optimize for multiple things at the same time, you end up having to make choices and trade-offs, you know. Like, ultimately, if we want a world with a lot of free time, at some point there's going to be a conflict between having more free time and making sure we care for everyone in the way that they need to be cared for. And so if we're trying to pursue all these different goals at once, we need institutions that help us figure out how to balance our different goals against one another, to compose a society out of all the different goals that we have. And I think something that people have said for a long time about capitalism is that it's really about depoliticizing the economy. You know, it's really about finding a way to sort of say, hey, look, keep your politics over there. You want to make regulations. You want to shape the space in which the economy unfolds. That's OK. But once we have that, the rules of the game in place, let people just optimize the heck out of this one goal of making money. You know, and what I'm proposing is that once we have multiple goals and once the economy is designed to pursue those goals at the same time, You're going to need institutions that help us balance these goals against one another, and those will inevitably be political institutions. And so what I'm proposing is like a really a politicization of the economy that, you know, maybe we would think it'd be better not to have that. We would be better off not having conflict. But there's no way to avoid it if we want to have an economy that suffuses what and how we produce with all of these different social and ecological goals. yeah no i really i really i really i like that and agree that i i i and i really like the the framing that runs through that this is this is about politicizing you know the economy i feel like i was reading just the other day uh this column from ezra klein say uh i think in the new york times pay attention how you pay attention and the thrust of it was trying to say you know Look, political tools or policy tools that politicize parts of the economy, namely progressive antitrust, are insufficient because we don't value competition as an outcome for socially harmful ends. we need to figure out a way to articulate a sort of platform temperance movement where we have moralizing about consumption that leads its that lends itself to regulation of the platforms. Right. Then the idea being that if we start getting into political or if we start trying to politicize the structure of the economy and of itself, we're going to run into problems. You know, and, you know, and of course, the implicit thing being we'll run into problems because oligarchs and donors that we rely on so on and so forth are going to not support this. A plan that we can push in the big tent of moderates, business friendly individuals, billionaires, so on and so forth, is some sort of argument that basically says these things are bad for your soul. But leaves out why they might be bad for your soul. And I think I really loved also – I was revisiting it because I was thinking about also contrast with the multi-criterial economy because it's sort of like it's been interesting seeing the moves that some of the abundance liberals have been trying to make where it's trying to acknowledge that the fundamental political economy of the country is fucked and that there's a deep amount of capitalist dysfunction. but refusing to engage with any of the lines of inquiry that you might have. You know, that you, for example, hit off in section one, right? You know, why are we having secular stagnation? You know, why do we have ecological degradation? Why do we have these demographic crises? Why are we having deindustrialization? And instead insisting that if we articulate a nice enough spiritual, deep political uh messaging then people across class lines will collaborate and rein in uh capitalism which is just fanciful but the thing i want i i'm really interested i i would also love to talk on because we're i know we're talking a little bit about the plan i really also enjoyed the i think the section that goes right before we're kind of trying to lay out what went wrong with the Soviet Union and using the single criteria versus the multi-criteria framework to analyze it. And I know you also get into this in later sections too, we're trying to look at, you know, here are some moves that might, that happened maybe in Hungary and Yugoslavia that, you know, you'll soften things a bit or could have been interesting paths to go down. But I'd love maybe we can talk about, okay, you know, we had an alternative to a very specific capitalist way of doing the single criterion system. Some of the areas in which it worked that they might have taken notes from the socialist multi-criteria articulation that you talked about in earlier section, but also where it failed, either because there's just a lot more work that needs to be done, because there are question marks, or because they're just like maybe some systemic logic that we might not have been able to escape at the time. Yeah, I think it's, you know, tackling the question of past alternatives to capitalism is totally essential. And I think that, you know, those efforts failed. and I think it's really it's kind of fascinating to me about my generation, you know, our generation and like how after the end of the Soviet Union we became socialists, you know we wanted to get out of capitalism and we were like, obviously what we want has nothing to do with that, you know we don't want that kind of thing but I think there's very few of us that actually went and studied it and tried to think, okay, what actually went wrong there why why didn't that work you know people you have a lot of people who say well they had the wrong goal you know they weren't trying to set up a democratic socialism that's what we're interested in and then they use that to kind of dismiss what happened the soviet union say well there's no lessons there because they were trying to do something totally different than what we want to do and of course i'm not i'm not disagreeing with that i want to do something different too but i think i think that when we turn away from the tragedy of socialism in the past I don't want to sound like some kind of grade school teacher like if you don't study the past you're going to repeat it I don't think we could repeat that I don't think you could repeat peasant collectivization wars and rapid industrial none of that's going to happen at least in the West I don't know if deindustrialization keeps going apace we might have a re-peasantization of the proletariat. And then we can really, you know, just create those same initial starting conditions and try again. Try again, yeah, the circle of turns. But yeah, I think it's just like, it's really worth studying that stuff. And I think that, you know, the main thing is like, I think maybe more than what I said in the essay, it is true that in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, they did want to build a world with many goals. but they realized that you know in order to build that world just like capo say it's like they had to do this efficiency maxing thing like they focused on just expansion industrial expansion which is you know essentially they were trying to pursue the efficiency goal without profit as the driver but they were trying to pursue it directly and something interesting when you like go back and read the socialist calculation debate which was this debate between people like Friedrich Hayek and, you know, Ludwig von Mises on the kind of neoliberal side, the pro-capitalism side, taking on thinkers like Otto Neurad and Oskar Lange, who represented like the socialist side. I think that a big claim that Mises and Hayek wanted to make was that socialism would be fundamentally stagnant, not viable, impossible, it would fall apart. And when we read that stuff in the 90s, it's like, oh, yeah, this is definitely true. This was a stagnant, screwed up society. It couldn't find its way forward. It couldn't really adapt to the information, communication, technology world. But in reality, in the 1930s and 40s under Stalin, not a great time, you know, not a time, nothing in the politics or the way they ran society that we want to approve of or repeat. It was a real, obviously, huge, terrible tragedy. But by discovering five-year plans, they actually did get the economy to grow super quickly by pursuing efficiency directly rather than through the proxy of profit. And I think it's really interesting when you look at venture capital and you look at models of blitzscaling. They're basically doing what the Soviet Union discovered, which is like blitzscaling is not a profit-based way of thinking about the growth of companies, right? The idea is that they find some other proxy. Like if you're Netflix, it's like, you know, how many subscribers you have. If it's open AI, it's how many users you have. If it's Uber, it's how many rides you're getting. And you continue to get funding as long as you're showing expansion in some fundamental terms of what you're doing. And the Soviet Union like pioneered that for an economy as a whole. And they were able to deliver like really, really rapid growth rates. I think in the 30s and 40s, it was obviously like the fastest growing economy. in the world. But even into the 50s, it was like a very rapidly growing economy, sort of in contradiction to what Hayek and Mises said. But the thing is that when they focused on growth and delivering output, they were actually really inefficient in resource terms, like the way they use labor, the way they use energy, and so on. And I think over time, the economy really ran into problems when they ran out of peasants to like stuff into factories into new factories they had a lot of problems with efficiency and it's also true in a really unfortunate way that when they tried to get rid of markets they created a lot of problems and so a lot of the kind of like discussion and debate in the later parts of the 20th century about what went wrong in the Soviet Union focused on markets for a good reason which is that purely by planning They did a really bad job of planning. They couldn't get things to producers that those producers actually needed to do their jobs. And so, so much of what happened happened via these informal markets. They were, you know, there's black markets, there's stories about black markets, but I think it's better to think of these as informal markets because they were tolerated and they were absolutely necessary to the functioning of these societies. And the reason for that, you know, I'm probably already saying way too much about this, but I think it's important to know is that when you have this kind of purely administrative allocation of resources, there's two really big problems that emerge. One which is really fascinating violates a lot of basic economic assumptions is called the vintage problem It the fact that every company does things slightly you guys have a podcast like probably the way you do a podcast it like slightly different from how other people do it And that means you need certain resources. You know, I don't know, maybe a podcast isn't a great example, but it's really important like factories that they're all built slightly differently at different times. They have different resource needs. And so when the bureaucrats would send out like a standardized package, it often meant that people weren't getting what they actually needed in the workplaces that they actually worked in. So that was a big problem. The other problem, which is related to that, is called incompleteness, which is like you might get 90 percent of what you need to produce, but then you're missing crucial 10 percent. And now you have all these resources that other producers can't use, and you don't have what you need in order to produce what you're supposed to produce. And what it leads to is just lying. Everyone lies. Everyone's trying to get access to the things they need by claiming they need more than what they actually need or claiming they need things that other people need in order to have something to barter. And so the whole system becomes a giant mess because everyone's trying to get access to the actual things they need by hoarding stuff they think other people need. And in Hungary and some other Eastern Bloc countries in Yugoslavia, they found that when they normalized or made the informal markets formal, they just solved a lot of those problems. You know, like market, like allowing direct producers to actually contract with one another and get what they need. Solved a lot of the really basic problems of shoddy products, stuff not arriving on time and all that. And I think it's really hard for, you know, socialists because, OK, well, if markets help solve a lot of these day to day problems in the economy, like what is what are we fighting for? You know, like it's saying that markets are important tantamount to saying we should have a profit driven economy. Is that ultimately what we're saying? There were a lot of, you know, Marxists and socialists in the 80s and 90s who did reach that conclusion. And when people talk about market socialism, they mean not just a world where the economy has markets, but more fundamentally a world where profit guides everything. And I'm trying through talking about the multi-criterial economy to recognize, yes, we do need markets. We're not going to be able to overcome that limit that was discovered in a really difficult way through the 20th century socialist experiments. But we don't want a world where those markets are integrated with profit making, with capitalists, capital accumulation, and so on. So we need to think really differently about what an economy is for in order to figure out this larger set of structures that we're going to build to replace the capitalist system. We could talk a little bit about the dual currency system. One, because that was really fascinating. And two, because since that comes up in your… your part two. We only have an hour with Aaron. We're going to do a second part with Aaron in the near future so we can get a lot more into it. Because right now, I think we're spending a lot of time kind of laying out a lot of, mainly focusing on what's in your first part of the Beyond Capitalism part one, which is the kind of groundwork for a multi-criterial economy. So really this history, the kind of the theory here, the analysis, the critique, and then kind of laying out this vision of what a multi-criterial economy means, why it's desirable, right? And then in part two of your essays, that's called the institutions for a multi-criteal economy. And that's where you really start getting into the nitty gritty like blueprints where you're like, this is how this economy would or could actually be organized at like an institutional level. and it's incredibly detailed. And what Ed was gesturing towards is, you know, a lot of it is really kind of based around this like dual currency system of points and credits. But maybe we'll leave that right now as a teaser to be like, folks, tune in. And, you know, in just a couple of weeks, we will have the second part with Aaron where we can like really, you know, stretch our legs and get deeper into those things. because I don't want to be like, all right, let's lay all this out and then be like, eh, that's all the time we have. It's hard. It's a big project. And I think it's, you know, there's some books are like, ah, that could have been an essay. I feel like these essays are like, oh, that could have been like six volumes. You know, it's really dense. So it's hard to get through it all. So do you want me to talk about the Soviet dual currency stuff or do you want to leave that off for now? We'll leave that. We can leave that. There'll be a teaser for listeners. Tune in. We'll get into that more. Let's keep drilling in on the groundwork of a multi-criterial economy. Keeping up with this alternative, the history here is really important because it's also telling us what to keep, what to do differently, and why things didn't work. The critique you lay out here of why the Soviet Union didn't work, you're wading into the socialist calculation debate, it really clarified so much for me as well. I'm familiar with this history. I read these debates, but nowhere near as deeply or, this is a compliment, obsessively as you do, Aaron. But one of my sins was always- you're meditating you're doing your kata's my sense was always that elevator pitch for why the Soviet Union didn't work out, they tried to beat capitalism at their own game we're going to do capitalism but we're going to do it better than the capitalists can do and I think that's right but your essay really provides more detail well, what do you mean by beating capitalism at their own game? That was something I never really had a good explanation for. It's kind of a little gestural, right? But you really get into it. Well, what that meant is they tried to do the efficiency first optimization, but instead of using markets to do that, they wanted to use planned coordination to do that. But it was still ultimately same end, just different means. And that was the problem, is they didn't change the purpose of the system, they just tried to change the system to achieve that same purpose in a different way. And then similarly, we see and then so what that leads to then is I think a socialist calculation debate that's organized around, well, how can we beat markets at their own game? How can we take Hayek's critique, the use of knowledge in society and say, well, sure, Hayek, you're right. Currently, markets are the most powerful information processor and communication technology that society has. But what if we had a more powerful information communication technology of supercomputers, right? And so that's where you get like Cybersyn and these kinds of ideas of being like, ah, we figured out how to beat markets by doing it with it rather than having like a Politburo of Mintats doing these calculations. We'll have a supercomputer with AI doing the calculations. Could you get into a little bit more there around like why that also was always kind of doomed to fail, right? Like we can point to the experiment, the experiment of Cyberson and have a bunch of reasons why, you know, like Eden Medina's book is really great on this. Evgeny Morozov's podcast series is really great on this around like what happened. And, you know, because of the coup, socialists always have the perfect get out of jail free card, which is, well, it would have worked if the CIA hadn't backed Pinochet. And Pinochet literally went and like stabbed a knife into Cyberson and said, you shall not beat the market. So it gives us this perfect get out of jail free card of being like, that's why it didn't work. But I think your essay really lays out it was always doomed to fail as long as they were driven by this single criteria efficiency logic. Yeah. And I think it's I think it's two things which are important to say. I think on the one hand, the kind of algorithmic socialism stuff. And here it's important to distinguish between the kind of People's Republic of Walmart, like Cox, Scott and Cottrell, like computer socialism and the Cybersyn cybernetic wing. I think that they they would see themselves as like different ways of thinking about the same problem. But I would say about a lot of computer stuff, it's also just really important that they're, like in a lot of these socialist models, there's this idea that we can tell you how to make a car. We can tell you how to make a computer program. There's some defined recipe for every good or service produced in the economy. And it's really important, if you're going to do the computer stuff, to know the right way to make each thing. and the problem with that as i mentioned before this vintage problem is that actually every workplace does the thing differently you know every workplace does the thing slightly differently and that complexity that you can't you know the way a lot of those models work is that they have to generalize from everyone doing something to like one line of code that says how to do it but if you go to toyota you know how they make each of their cars is different not let alone how they make them in each factory. It also matters where things are located, right? Can change how and what is produced and so on. So the actual amount of information complexity is so high. And it's one of these, what do you call it? It's the type of problem where like, the number of calculations you need to do like explodes. There like isn't enough, you know, computing power in the universe to really cover all the data you would need. It's why work to rule is such an effective worker strike tactic because you cannot actually, like, you know, algorithms are just rules, right? Like, you cannot actually lay out a work process as a strict rule-based system because as soon as workers only follow the rules to the letter of the law, the whole system starts falling apart. Yeah. And so I think that that is another way into this whole class of technical issues with that type of planning. But I think that the deeper issue for me and what you were already getting at is that those systems are really based on optimizing the system to be resource efficient, to max the amount of stuff we can produce with the resources we have. It's all this similar kind of income maxing or efficiency maxing project that's behind a lot of the computer socialisms. And when you actually think about trying to get to a world, as I said before, where we have many different goals, not just one goal, you will find that there are these conflicts and trade-offs between the goals that we have that require us to think about the economy as a political object, that we have all these choices we have to make. And I think that another way to think about that really simply is just to realize that a lot of our life happens through the economy. It's not just that a lot of our lives happen through it, but a lot of arguments about what we should be doing and what we are doing and what the future should look like happen through and are mediated through all this economic activity. And the idea that we could petrify that and turn it into a bunch of data that's going to be like processed in some data center in New Mexico and then handed back to us, oh, this is the most efficient way to do everything. It annihilates this kind of like dimension of the economy, which is lived life and kind of figuring out dynamically what we're going to do with other people. You know, it annihilates that real lived and actual dimension of economic life. And I think that that is not the future. You know, there's a reason why people are drawn to that who are engineers, I think. But like, you know, it, yeah, it, it, there, the bigger problem is just that, which the multidimensional stuff is trying to capture another way is that, yeah, you have to, you have to actually see the economy as a kind of living and evolving set of arguments that are unfolding in the course of actual lives. It's not going to be something that we can just – and that we have to actually talk about. That's the key point, too. We have to actually talk about it and figure out together what we want to do. You can't have just a bunch of cybernetic controllers or computer algorithms that are going to figure it all out for us. It has to be deliberative, right? Exactly. I mean, that's also one of the key things. I feel like I've been reading a bunch of democratic theory also in part for this response to Klein's – column where i think he's you know he and others offer their liberalism in a really kind of shallow way which is that it should you know our extent our democracy and our liberalism should really sum up to everyone should be allowed to do what they want so long as everyone is happy and no one is hurt and you know i was rereading just some of john dewey just kind of talking about you know you know like on a basic level wouldn't you be interested in having society that produces people who are free to associate with each other equally and then through those associations discover whatever else it is that we have not because we have not plumbed any real depths of possibilities for humans in the sort of society that we prioritize and I really so I really like the idea of it being deliberately deliberative in addition to it being politicized right because if these are values and we're not going to rely on algorithmic optimization to rank them, and if we're also going to lean into uncertainty, if we're going to lean into concentrations of maybe some places have more insider knowledge than others might introduce, then you would also want, like you're saying, you want the economy, which is this institution most of us pass most of our lives through in one way or another, to be shaped by us in a real way and not the incredibly shallow and superficial way that we're told, which is either consumption or trying our hat in the arena, right, to do some sort of profit-seeking ourselves or to build something, to plug some sort of hole that might monetize, so that we can monetize some sort of trade-off, right, because we see, okay, something wasn't prioritized by the marketplace, we'll monetize that, right? And I really like this. and reading it, I really liked how much more forceful and how much harder it is to get away from the end implication and explicit assertion that it has to be democratic. And if we're doing this as democratic, then we need to be planning. There are a lot more institutions we need to plan and take seriously, right? Instead of just offloading it to technological instrumentation, which I think is the impulse increasingly now in liberal, progressive, and sometimes leftist circles right that we have these impressive machines increasingly so and there are these some then they're doing stuff that is technically impressive and wonderful and maybe could come in and intervene in old debates um maybe i think kind of like what you're saying at the top maybe what we should do is offload a lot of the work so that we can be artists you know if i could say something about that i think it's um i think that when we have a term like democratic socialism and we're all democratic socialists you know no one wants to be an anti-democratic social right there's this real question of what the democracy there actually means yes what does it mean and like it's important that you know when you look at the name of the ussr or like you know north korea they already have democratic in their name right right you know they're all democratic like and you know and i think that a lot of what democracy means to a lot of people who do economics, popular economics, by democracy they mean doing things for the people. You know what I mean? Like a democratic economy is one focused on meeting people's needs. But that version of democracy doesn't actually include any procedural component where people are the ones deciding what those needs are. It's just saying that it's going to deliver stuff for people's needs. And I think that it's actually hard for Marxists and people on the left because so much of the tradition is anti-political. Like the idea is what is politics? Politics in our society is class politics, right? Class politics is domination of capitalists over workers. And if we can get rid of that, if we can abolish class society, we get rid of class politics. You don't have politics anymore. Like in all these different visions of what comes after socialism, after capitalism, the basic idea is that it's a society without politics. That means it's a technical society. And I think if you look at our tradition and you look at the kind of politics people are able to find, I think the two main versions of that, one is this Republican tradition that's being revived now. There's all these people interested in left-wing and socialist and red republicanism. And I think it's really deeply inadequate because basically what they're saying is like, politics means non-domination. It means securing this space where we're not dominated by anyone else. Well, if we have that space where we're not dominated, then what happens in that space? It seems like it's essentially, in the way that Marx has talked about it, there was this idea of administration at workman's wages. The idea was that there was going to be all this technical determination of what and how to produce. And then you need a bunch of administrators to either tally up the numbers or check that the bureaucrats are not like you know making the economy work in a way that benefits them at the expense of others or even in councilism you have all these technical ideas it's like the whole idea is to be transparent to make sure no group is exploiting any other group in society and that's it that's their whole conception of politics and i think it's like it's a very um it's a very uh impoverished notion of politics really to me what politics fundamentally means is choice across meaningful alternative futures. There's different places we can go, and we need to pick which directions we're going to go in. That's a meaningful choice. There are meaningful alternatives that we could pick. We need to have a green transition. There's no single technically best way to do the green transition because it involves so many different things. Are we going to eat meat? What kinds of energy are we going to have? Do we need energy? Do we want versions where we have energy all the time? Or is it okay to have some intermittence? You could just start going on and on about all the different things, these questions about the kind of world we want to live in. And you'll find that there's different green transitions that correspond to different possible ways of building a world after fossil fuels. And there something about I think the left has a rather impoverished notion of politics that can capture this idea that there going to be really meaningful choices about what kinds of technologies we pursue even what kinds of research we pursue and how we then construct a world out of all these different pieces and values that feel important to us that's real politics you know and i think if you read you know i mean there's a lot of problems with it but if you read these figures like john stewart mill john dewey they were both liberal socialists you know they really believed in a future um i mean they thought that i mean people say this sometimes like they thought that the liberal project could only be achieved in a socialist society because only in a socialist society could actually guarantee people um the basic decency and standard of living that mean that they wouldn't have to focus on survival and could actually think about the kind of world they want to inhabit. But also, I think both of them, in different ways, thought about the idea that once we get rid of capitalism, we could finally figure out what kind of world we want to build. We wouldn't be structured and constrained by profit-making. We could actually have a liberal, unfolding political conversation about what the world should look like. And I think that those ideas are ideas that we need to draw on because we want not only democracy in the sense of the economy for the people, but also in some fundamental way by the people, right? And that is, I think, you know, for me, why we need democracy, what it means to be democratic socialist is to say, okay, we're going to get to a world where instead of just focusing on, you know, improving in income and GDP and efficiency maxing, you know, like you hear people like Obama, you know, they're saying like, oh, we need more education. We need more childcare. Why? Well, because it's going to increase efficiency. It's going to make for a more productive workforce. We want to get to where we can defend all these different goals for their own sake as goals in their own right. But that very idea of having all these different goals is going to mean that we're going to face these choices, real concrete choices about alternative futures we can get to. And democratic socialism means not only being able to surface those possibilities. Because in our world today, we can't even surface those alternative futures, right? So there's that act of surfacing, but then there's also the choice of what kind of world do we want to go toward? And by extension, what kind of people are we? What fundamentally matters to us, you know, in the choice of the future that we have? So that's my pitch for a truly democratic socialism that goes beyond, I think, some of the limits of how people, you know, I think our traditions, unfortunately, impoverished conception of politics. Yes. Crucial to that. And we'll start wrapping up now because I know you got to get running there. But I think that really gives us a real ramp up into getting even deeper into, I think, what you kind of end the first essay with and becomes the real heart of the second essay, which are these questions of investment. That was something that really made my eyes open when I read that first essay was how much time you really spend talking about what's a theory of investment here? What's the function of investment? And real quick, I'll just quote from you where you say, why then did no other Marxist develop a theory of investment as a political process? The answer lies in how planning was understood. In the socialist tradition, planning was usually seen not as an arena for the articulation of disagreements, but as a way to put an end to them, both economically and politically. The theory of the plan promised rational order in place of capitalist anarchy, social harmony in place of class struggle. And I love this. This is exactly what you were just talking about here. This depoliticization, this lack of procedural democracy, real deliberation over things. And deliberation means disagreement until you find a path forward. You know, that might be a consensus or maybe that's, hey, we've got two viable paths. Let's invest in both of them, see how they turn out. But really taking seriously this question of investment, I mean, it's something we talk a lot about on TMK with focusing on technology, right? Because the investment function of our society right now is largely captured by venture capital, right? It is a form of central planning for innovation and technology, but it's one that is held in the private markets and geared towards capitalist logics and specifically Silicon Valley logics around scaling, five-year cycles on returns for investment, market domination, these kinds of things. And so we have these forms of investment and planning, but they are depoliticized. They are not subject to political oversight or arenas for political disagreements, contestation, on the way towards deliberation and consensus. And so I really love how you take this idea of investment very seriously as also the thing that gives a society life. Right. It is it goes against this idea of a kind of a stagnation, a, you know, optimization is an inherently conservative position. Right. Because it means, you know, holding steady the kind of starting conditions of a system. and then just seeing how much you can push that system to an endpoint. It's inherently conservative in a lot of ways. And the kind of theory of investment you're laying out here is one that really embraces a diverse form of progress and experimentation based not just on blitzscaling or profit-making, but lots of other things. That theory of investment is so central to then you talking about in the next part of this essay and what we'll get to in our next episode with you around this is really thinking about institutions, which I love as well. This goes back to how deeply you think about these things, Aaron, is that like so many people do not think institutionally about these questions and you really are in a deep way. Yeah. And I and I, you know, yeah, we'll see like what you guys think of that institutional model. I do want to say about the investment stuff, because I think it's really to me, it was really fascinating working on this project that when you go back and read the socialist calculation debate, like what the neoliberals were saying about the limits of the socialists, there was something they really they really focused on that I think they were right about. where they said, you know, these Marxists, they have a really impoverished understanding of what capitalists do. There's just this idea, there's this real focus on accumulation, which is the end result of investment, right? Investment is the process, accumulation is the consequence. And by focusing on accumulation, they are always thinking, oh, like, what capitalists do is they just expand stuff, right? Like, we currently make this much, then we're going to make 10 times that and 10 times that and 10 times that and so on. And they said, you know, what's really missing from this is a sense of the entrepreneurial function of investment, which is, you know, whatever. There's a way we talk about it today in neoliberalism, right? It's like identifying holes in the market or whatever and trying to make money off of filling them. But I think that there's kind of this idea that it's a creative act, you know, that there's something creative And there's a world shaping function of investment because it's an attempt to say, you know, we think this is the next move that's going to that's going to create a new world. You know, it's not a mere expansion. It's often like change, redirection. It has this character of a kind of argument, a conversation about what comes next. Now, obviously, the neoliberal version of that is extremely limited. But I found it fascinating how, you know, I think precisely for the reasons that you were quoting in the essay, there's some way that socialists and Marxists, they didn't want to think too carefully about investment. Because if they did, it would have become clear that we would need to replace this creative function. We would need to democratize this creative function. We need to think about, you know, how are we going to decide what together, how are we going to decide together what kinds of futures we want to go towards? And so, yeah, I think I think that's why in the essay I turn a bit to John Maynard Keynes and the most radical of the Keynesians to try to think about investment in new ways. obviously very critical of the Keynesians for having, you know, really piss poor class analysis and being totally technocratic in terms of their impulses. But I think like this theory of dynamism, right? Like the theory of how do we have a different kind of dynamism, different kinds of goals of dynamism. And for me, condensing all that down into this idea that investment is really about these choices across alternative futures. We've all these different goals. We could make the economy more sustainable. We could use our resources to repair historic injustices and rebuild underserved neighborhoods. We could focus on this growing mental health crisis among the youth. We could try to figure out how to make all this horrible work better for people. We could think about just how to make cities more beautiful or more accessible or build these 15-minute city. We could do all these different things. But as we decide what to do next, you know, which of these goals should we put first? There's going to be a real political debate that people are going to care about a lot about what we do. And there's also going to be choices about the kinds of futures we could inhabit that add up all those possibilities into real worlds that serve us in very different ways. So I think, yeah, you could call it the political theory of investment. That could be the core logic and that idea maybe to come back to what we started with. What does it mean to have a core logic of investment? It's not even a logic anymore because it's not so fixed in its character. but what would it mean to have a politicization of investment that means that finally as a society and as a civilization and as a as a as a species we can actually pursue all these different goals that matters to us and suffuse the production system that we have to really like in every little piece of it make it serve all these goals that actually promote a uh flourishing humanity and relationship with other species as well. We can get to that world. And I think, I don't know, I guess I'm just a dreamer or whatever, but we can talk about it, we can explain it to people in a way that actually makes people think, like, hey, why do we live in this shithole? We could live in a really, really great world, and there's nothing about the problems we face that we can't solve. Absolutely. we change society. I love this. I'm just a dreamer. And then if readers haven't already read part two of your Beyond Capitalism, you'll see that Aaron is a dreamer, the most concrete, solid dreamer you've ever met in your life. I really go hard on the idealist in my latest book. I kind of set them up as the foil, the way not to think about technology and capitalism. And you just kind of exist in your mind palace and it's all, you know, the world is shaped by, you know, manifesting dreams and visions and hopes and desires, right? But that is not what you're doing, right? Like, I think what makes your work so powerful, but also gives so many handholds to grab onto is that there is this fundamental dreamy optimism in the work, but it doesn't end there, right? Like, it would be a lot easier to kind of like, write a manifesto that's very kind of vague and, you know, has like good slogans, but not a whole lot there. Or it'd be so much easier to write like, you know, a sci-fi story that outlines like, and, you know, question mark, question mark, we then got to the, you know, the future and everything is great, right? But like the way that you dream is by dreaming about institutions, which again is a compliment. Because I think I dream of institutions like when I'm sleeping in bed. It's actually horrible. Stop! Do socialists dream of electronic institutions. Yeah, exactly. And there is the episode title right there. Oh, man. And so I can't wait till we chat in the next episode on this where we get more into those institutions. Really, that political theory of investment actually see how does this roll out? How does this actually look like? How does it give us the opportunity to explore new futures? It's not about stagnation. It's not about doing the same thing, but just harder, faster, you know, bigger, which is what optimization is on this single criteria path, but is instead thinking what like new golden pathways unexplored can we open up? Can we crack? I know you got to get going. This all just makes me think that I just wrote a review essay for a new book called The Irrational Decision by Benjamin Reck, who's a computer science professor at UC Berkeley and has written a lot of extremely influential work on optimization and machine learning, but has this new book where he really, it's a historical book where he really says, what's the origins of this, of mathematical rationality and how have these methods of mathematical optimization, game theory, statistical prediction, and randomized control trials are the kind of four methodological pillars, he argues, of mathematical rationality. And he's really saying, what are the origins of this way of thinking of these methods? And how have they gone so awry? How have they become these kinds of like this hegemonic rationality in society? And it's very interesting to read from someone who's a incredibly influential data scientist, who has written a lot about optimization methods and theory and machine learning and has, you know, but and then is now kind of saying what's gone wrong with these things. And one of the arguments he has is, on one hand, there's this lack of respect for the boundaries and limitations of these methods, of this rationality that, and we'll get into this in the next episode, but it's not anti-optimization. It's instead saying we're using it and we're using the tools in ways they're not meant to be used or that they can't be used in places where they shouldn't be used. And one of his arguments as well is it really goes against this idea of the kind of like, you know, the capitalist innovation and breakneck speed of technological progress where he says, I'll quote from Rex book. He says, the computer age has taken World War II technology and made it smaller, more embedded, more accessible, and much, much faster. In one word, optimized. And really what he's arguing is that pretty much the groundwork and the theories for all of what we consider innovation today was laid in the 40s. People 70 years ago imagined what would be happening. In fact, people 70 years ago thought we would be achieving what we're achieving now 50 years ago. So we're kind of behind schedule in that way. But one of the things that he argues is that against this idea that optimization leads to innovation, but only within a very narrow confines of what innovation can mean. It only leads you down the one path that you are optimizing for. And you can see the endpoints of that pathway because all optimization is is saying, can we do what we're already doing, but do it faster, do it smaller, do it bigger, whatever it might be. But you're still ultimately doing the same thing. And I think it's an interesting book that's not out yet. I've reviewed a galley of it. But it's one that I was thinking about a lot when reading your essays and in our conversation today because it really goes, it's a very complimentary analysis of yours where it's like, you know, it also is the downside of optimization. Yes, capitalism gives us this explosion of innovation and dynamism and growth, but it's also innovation, dynamism and growth for the same thing over and over and over again. There's nothing different. That sounds super interesting. I'm really excited to check that out. But now you're recommending a book that will not be released for like four months. I know. I know. I'm so sorry. I'll take another review of it. But anyways, that was just on the tip of my mind. I think a really great way to say those are the kinds of things we're going to get into in our next episode. So I don't want to keep you all evening here, Aaron. But lots for us to chat about in part two. The essays are Beyond Capitalism. Part one and part two are already out with New Left Review. So, folks, if you have not read them yet, go and read it. It's, you know, they're big, but they're worth your time. You know, and we will get a lot more into the part two around institutions next time. But, Aaron, is there anything else you want to direct people's attention to or plug before we get out of here? No, I think that sounds great. And if you have trouble finding the essays, feel free to reach out to me and I can send you free copies. Yeah, well, I will say they are on your website as PDFs. So just go to Aaron's website and you can download them directly there. But it's Aaron Benenov slash papers. Because you can't find that part of the website from the website. You have to know to go to that. AaronBennadam.com slash papers and then you'll find the essays. We'll put a link in the episode description so people know. Alright Aaron, thanks so much. Can't wait until we chat again and get more into the institutions. And folks, you can find us at patreon.com slash thismachinekills for additional premium episodes. And until next time, later. Adios. I've done anybody quite a bit, man. Outro Music Thank you.