Taming Predatory Capitalism

Abstract

In 1899 Thorstein Veblen described predation as a phase in the evolution of culture, ‘attained only when the predatory attitude has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude … when the fight has become the dominant note in the current theory of life’. After an entire century’s struggle to escape from this phase, we’ve suffered a relapse. The predators are everywhere unleashed; the institutions built to contain them, from the UN to the AFL-CIO to the SEC, are everywhere under siege. Predation has become again the defining feature of economic life; our first problem is to grasp this reality in full.