American Capitalism is Sinking Under Its Own Weight—and AI.
What Comes Next?

Can we imagine another system? Yanis Varoufakis says it best: Every ruling class wants us to believe that “this world sucks, but it is the best of all possible worlds. If for a moment we lose our will to imagine an alternative present, an alternative set of circumstances, then we become slaves to whoever happens to be in power.”

Imagining an Alternative Present — People with Vision are the Heroes We Need Now

America needs new leaders who work for us, who engage in planning, who openly seek and discuss ideas and models for an economic system where the benefits of AI productivity accrue to everyone, not just the ultra-wealthy. AI is a technology built with public investment and data. Its benefits belong to all of us.

The ideas represented here aren’t meant to solve everything but to open some long-overdue discussions, broaden the horizons of our politicians. There are economists (very few in the US) who are willing to say what the people at the top don’t want to hear: trickle-down economics (also called “neoliberalism”) is a failed theory, and we can definitely do better than the system we have now.

Why aren’t we talking about Universal Employment Opportunities as well as Universal Basic Income?

• Not only Universal Basic Income, but new and wide-ranging job opportunities. Andrew Yang is the rare political figure who isn’t afraid to talk in specific and bold terms about the future of work. His interview with Human Unicorn podcast host Nihal Mehta.

• Ecological economists argue for a public jobs guarantee, so anyone who wants to could be trained to do socially useful jobs, like building affordable homes, instead of everyone working on whatever is most profitable for companies to pursue, whether it benefits society or not. Jason Hickel (more links from this video, A World Without Capitalism, below).

This fascinating and visionary video, A World Without Capitalism, has so many important discussions, several are highlighted below with links that go to different timestamps:

• A more functional model to support our well-being would be to think of the economy as two broad sectors, with the sector of socially necessary things as the core economy. The rest can be mediated by post-capitalist markets. Jason Hickel.

• GDP is the wrong measure for well-being, because it includes everything produced, whether it contributes to our well being or not. Jason Hickel, in a discussion with Yanis Varoufakis and filmmaker Raoul Martinez.

• GDP is so bad as a measure of well-being, just look at the well-being of a society that had a GDP of zero: Yanis Varoufakis.

Back in 2016, Yanis Varoufakis imagined a different model for work, capital, and income. TED Talk 2016, timestamped to the imagining-forward topic.

What specifically is it about capitalism that invariably creates huge inequality, and how can it be addressed?

Karl Marx is wildly mischaracterized by Americans who have been conditioned to believe that he embodied everything that was bad about the Soviet Union. In fact Marx was a deep thinker who examined difficult questions. When he was writing and publishing in the mid-1800s, there were no communist or revolutionary governments in the world. There were despotic states, which Marx despised, as historian Francis B. Randall wrote. One of the things Marx wondered about was why, in history, unequal societies replaced more equal ones? His insight was that it had to do with systems of production. To get equality and democracy, we have to change the system of production so all the surplus isn’t directed to the hands of a few people. Professor Richard Wolff explains in an Economic Update from March 24, 2025: How Marx’s Class Analysis Could Solve Inequality Now.

We need a new economics. Five rules for leaving trickle-down economics/neoliberalism behind.