Concrete Possible World’s core topic is the economics of a feasible and desirable socialism; my hope is to enlarge and contribute to a debate over models, mechanisms, and visions for the kinds of futures we humans would like our children or great-great grandchildren to inhabit.
a brief pitch for caring about this subject
Suppose you think at least one of these hypotheses is likely:
capitalism - defined however you like - isn’t the best economic system we could have
capitalism won’t be the final economic system
Then it behooves us to look at other possible systems of economic organization - those which have been tried, those which have been proposed, and those which have not yet even been conceived. We'd want to see which could feasibly sustain as much prosperity and freedom as possible.
In general, however, advocates of capitalism have felt pretty secure about the goodness and/or inevitability of that system, while socialists have been largely skeptical of, in Marx's withering phrase, "making recipes for the cookshops of the future." The result has been many sincere and interesting proposals that are worth investigating, but not much of a cumulatively building tradition. (Though there are some people I admire who are attempting to put these in dialogue, for instance Jan Groos or the Next System Project.)
intended audience
My intended audience includes
people already in this space (obviously),
fellow leftists who want a sketch of “what socialism would look like”
non-socialists (such as the Progress Studies crowd) interested in economic thought experiments, possibilities for the future, or even just “what’s the least bad alternative if popular opinion turns against capitalism”
intellectually curious people of basically any stripe
though whether I succeed at this is up to you.
take my text, please
To the extent possible under law, I’ve waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Concrete Possible World. This means that you can:
quote me without letting anyone know it was me, in case my brand becomes toxic
rework my arguments and writing to be actually good, and then use those paragraphs in your own writing
sell all these posts as an epub on Amazon for a dollar, with or without crediting me
or pretty much whatever else. Realistically, of course, you could do all that anyway - so this is just a rectification of names. But anyway I encourage you to do so; yes, even the Amazon thing.
