NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital rounds out the section on limits of capitalism. We already saw the issue of missing prices, the problem of power laws and today talks about how the self-conservation of capitalism through the political system keeps attention trapped in the job loop.Self-ConservationToward the end of the Agrarian Age, when land was scarce, the political elites came from land ownership. Their influence really wasn’t substantially diminished until after World War II...

NOTE: Last week’s excerpt from World After Capital described how prices cannot exist for many of our most important attention allocation decisions. Today I describe how production functions with network effects result in power law distributions that have bad social and economic implications.Power LawsEconomics is not normative when it comes to the distribution of income and wealth. Many different outcomes are possible and what is realized depends a lot on the underlying production functions. ...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital starts to explain why capitalism cannot solve the problem of allocating attention which is scarce at the individual and collective levels.Limits Of CapitalismCapitalism has been extraordinarily successful. So much so that even communist countries like China, that had long sought a different path, have embraced it. But capitalism cannot solve the scarcity of attention without significant changes in regulation and self-regulation. That’s due to thr...