Volume I
Frameworks
Economic systems, in theory and in practice.
Available
Frameworks takes up the systems by which societies organize production and exchange: markets, plans, commons, and the mixtures that govern nearly everyone alive. Each chapter states what a system claims about itself, then follows what it does in practice.
Every chapter answers a single question, and each concept is treated here once; the other volumes point back rather than restate.
Contents
- Is the economy zero-sum?
- What actually separates capitalism, socialism, and communism?
- How have the rival systems performed in practice?
- Why did the planned economies fall behind, and was it inevitable?
- Why do monopolies persist in markets that are supposed to be competitive?
- Why does the middleman often capture more value than the maker?
- Why do healthcare and education keep getting more expensive while electronics get cheaper?
- Why do subsidies outlive the industries they were built to protect?
- Worker cooperatives survive as well as conventional firms, so why are there so few?
- Which economic futures are actually plausible?