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PostCapitalism

A Guide to Our Future

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PostCapitalism

By: Paul Mason
Narrated by: Paul Mason
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About this listen

Penguin presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of PostCapitalism, written and read by Paul Mason.

From Paul Mason, the award-winning Channel 4 presenter, PostCapitalism is a guide to our era of seismic economic change and how we can build a more equal society.

Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change - economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust - and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a change so big, so profound, that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system by which entire societies function, has reached its limits and is changing into something wholly new.

At the heart of this change is information technology: a revolution that, as Mason shows, has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership; in fact, he contends, it is already doing so.

This audiobook has been updated as of March 2017.

©2016 Paul Mason (P)2016 Penguin Audio Economics International Macroeconomics Politics & Government Capitalism Socialism Taxation Imperialism Economic disparity US Economy China Tariff Technology Economic Inequality
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I LOVED the intro and was initially excited by the premise but it got bogged down in economic, historical detail, a lot of which I struggled to find relevant, or comprehensible as a lay person. But persisted. Mason's vision reduces humans to being largely an economics/work driven species. The words community and family didn't make it into the index. And it seems we're still bogged down in systems of power and control rather autonomy, and how is it post csptialism is still rooted in eternal growth?

In Mason's future a lot of things will be free and goods abundant due to the information age creating worth while devaluing it. Everything will be more automated giving us free time, but he fails to understand or explore the energy limitations making his basic premise a nice fairytale . We cannot replicate our system based on our current and expanding energy use much longer or replace it with the misnomer of renewables (a green washing capitalist concept to monetise our environmental concerns). Mason reduces environmental overshoot to just climate change and, like most, relies on a now debunked ability to magically convert to renewables when we have a drastic shortage of minerals to do so.
It was. of course, written 10 years ago. He does open up the field for utopian dreaming but his vision is business as usual and will lead to dystopian outcomes just like the current paradigm.

if we are to survive we need to stop looking at the environment as an externality and resource supply and find ways where both planet and people can flourish. it's possible. The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives.

Reimagining capitalism

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A highly orginal and important contribution to the literature on our future, how bleak the situation is, and the possibilities of charting a more promising course. The author is a realist idealist. A most fascinating, enjoyable and important read!

Must read for anyone making sense of our future!

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Any additional comments?

COMPLAINT: there should be a PDF for all the graphs referred to by the author

Needs PDF material

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