In Scene on Radio Season 7, Capitalism, host and producer John Biewen and co-host Ellen McGirt—longtime business and economics reporter and editor-in-chief of Design Observer Magazine—outline the history of capitalism, from its emergence in Europe 500 years ago up to the present. They explore alternatives, from reforms of capitalism as we know it to more radical transformations.
If you’re curious about how we got to this moment, and what do to next, this podcast is required listening. Find it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Season 7 Trailer: Capitalism
Welcome to Season 7: Capitalism. The world’s dominant economic system is on trial as it hasn’t been for at least half a century. This season tells the story of capitalism — how people with power built and shaped it over time. We’ll also explore what to do now that many people see capitalism as the problem, not the solution.
Episode 1: Market Failure
Introduction to our seventh season: Capitalism. The world’s dominant economic system is on trial as it hasn’t been for at least half a century. Millions, young people especially, now see capitalism as the problem, not the solution. Others fear throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Episode 2: BC: Before Capitalism
To fully grasp capitalism, it helps to understand the system it replaced – and the most meaningful differences between feudalism and capitalism. We visit the British Isles of the Middle Ages.
Episode 3: Ships, Swords, and Fences
From the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama to colonial conquest and the Atlantic Slave Trade, to the privatization of land in western Europe: humanity’s turn toward the capitalist world we live in now.
Episode 4: Invisible Hand Guy?
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 often held up as the patron saint of unfettered capitalism.)
Episode 5: A New Thing in Human History
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 nation, the United States, overtake its parent as the leader of the capitalist order? And what does it all mean in the lives of ordinary people?
Episode 6: Thirty Glorious Years
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 thing.
Episode 7: Gilded Age 2.0
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.
Episode 8: The People’s Pushback
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.
Episode 9: At the Tipping Point
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 ridiculed. The story of Donella Meadows and The Limits to Growth.
Episode 10: The Extracted
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, or does it continue today?
Episode 11: Better Capitalism?
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.
Episode 12: Reimagined Economies
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.
Episode 13: CAPITALISM Bonus, Live at Motorco
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, Season 7 co-hosts John Biewen and Ellen McGirt are joined by journalism professor, podcaster, and two-time Scene on Radio co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika. They discuss how to move toward a more democratic economy and society – with the live audience, and with Camryn Smith and Courtney Smith of Durham’s Communities in Partnership.