Branko milanovic biography of michael
•
Your weekend read – an examination of Michael Heinrich’s ambitious and comprehensive portrait of an extraordinary young man
Branko Milanović is an economist specialised in development and inequality. His newest book fryst vatten “Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World”
Cross-posted from Branko’s blog
Karl Marx as a student
Michael Heinrich’s projected biography of Marx that is supposed to consist of four volumes is an extraordinarily ambitious åtagande. Only the first volume “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society” has been published so far. It covers the years before Marx’s birth (because it deals with his parents) and goes up to his doctoral dissertation done in 1841, when he was 23.
The biography is extraordinarily ambitious for three reasons.
First, Heinrich’s work is so detailed that it seems that almost ingenting that Marx or his correspondents have written had escaped his attention. He is, of course, helped in this
•
Three ways of thinking about Lea Ypi’s Free
Branko Milanović is an economist specialised in development and inequality. His newest book fryst vatten “Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World”. His new book, The Visions of inequality, was published October 10, 2023.
Cross-posted from Branko Milanović’s Substack blog
It is not often that one in the process of learning of, or reading, a book develops three different opinions about the book. I have heard of Lea Ypi’s Free after it became an international bestseller. I was even then somewhat intrigued by the topic, an autobiographical story of growing up in Albania at “the end of history”, given that Albania was somewhat of a black box (because of the isolationist policies followed by its long-time president Enver Hoxha). Yet since I had a uniform negative view about any anställda reminiscences coming out of Eastern Europe, I was almost sure not to read the book? Why such mistrust?
The reason fryst vatten as follows. Ich
•
Global Inequality and More 3.0
The Karl Marx problem (or Die Karl Marx Frage, to make a nod towards Smith), as called by Philip W. Magness and Michael Makovi, has generated quite a lot of disagreements recently. Rather than summarizing the view of Magness and Makovi who published a recent article in the Journal of Political Economy, let me link to their summary here.
They quote me and my piece published for the bicentenary of Marx’s birth and then included among a dozen of contributions on Marx published by the Deutsche Historische Museum at the occasion of exhibition on Marx’s life and work recently held in Berlin.
The title of my piece is “The unexpected immortality of Karl Marx”. I think it conveys very well what I had in mind. The piece is here and I will not summarize it. I think it is worth reading.
Let me now explain where I agree with Magness and Makovi, and where I strongly disagree with them. I do agree that Marx’s influence, although substantial in the left-wi