Cupcakes and Cashmere

By  Hāsnain Riza With increasingly ubiquitous iPhones, Internet, Central Air Conditioning, Flat-screen TVs, and Indoor plumbing, few in the developed world would want to go back to life 100, 30, or even 10 years ago. Indeed, around the world, the last two centuries have brought vast improvements in material living standards; billions of people have been lifted from poverty, and life expectancy across income levels has broadly risen. Most of that progress came from capitalist economies. Yet those economies are not without their problems. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the gap between the rich and poor has become intolerably large as business owners and highly educated workers in urban areas have become richer while workers’ wages in rural areas have stagnated. In most rich countries, more trade has brought a bigger, better variety of goods, but it has also displaced many jobs. With social instability in the form of mass protests, Brexit, the rise of populis...

by  Hāsnain Riza It’s one of history’s great ironies that the most influential writer of the 20th century lived his entire life in the 19th. But if there was anyone who could appreciate a good historical contradiction, it was Karl Marx. His ideas defined the political and economic landscape of the previous century. The day affords the opportunity to ask to what extent, if any, those ideas are relevant today, in 2021. Marxism has always been polarizing, but perhaps the political anomie of 2021 leaves the debate over its relevance less ideologically encumbered than previous milestones. Soviet-style communism has settled into the ash heap of history, and yet, for many, capitalism’s victory has been less than decisive, particularly following the economic crash of 2007, an event that has driven a small but growing number of citizens in advanced industrial nations to question the very foundations of our economic system. “Marx was the first great critic of capitalism,” says Ri...