Category: Season 7

With our Capitalism season and the election behind us, now what? Can we find hope and a way forward? In a live show taped December 5, 2024, at Motorco Music Hall in Durham, North Carolina,…

In our season finale, we visit with people on two continents who are turning core structures of capitalism on their heads – or, at least, sideways.   By John Biewen, with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews…

In the first of two episodes looking at responses to capitalism’s failings, we look at reforms aimed at making the current economic system more humane, fair, effective, and sustainable. By John Biewen with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews…

A visit to West Africa and Western Europe to look at the cocoa trade. Did the colonial side of early capitalism – Western countries getting rich at the expense of poorer nations – ever change,…

In 1972, a team of young scientists at MIT published a study exploring what would happen to human civilization if people kept pursuing endless economic growth on a finite planet. They weren’t just disbelieved, they were…

Over several decades, a growing number of people in the United States and elsewhere – especially younger people – have turned against capitalism. The reasons are not hard to find. Reported by Lewis Raven Wallace…

After 40 years of neoliberalism, most Americans of every political stripe agree that the economy is “rigged” in favor of corporations and the wealthy. But we may not know the half of it. By John…

How the balance of power shifted, for a time, in the decades after World War II, and led to a better kind of capitalism – if you think prosperity being broadly shared is a good…

An age of invention and mass production, propelled by a new mechanism – the corporate research lab – leads to a surge in material wealth like the world has never seen. How does a new…

Economic change happens in a cultural context. We trace the tectonic shifts in the Western mind that made capitalism thinkable — in part through a look at two Enlightenment thinkers: Baruch Spinoza and Adam Smith. (The real Smith, not the one…