Bhaskar Sunkara Thinks the Market Has a Place Under Socialism

In September, Gallup released a poll that showed that 43% percent of Americans viewed socialism positively, the highest approval since Gallup began the poll back in 2010. Since Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoral election, the left has made a number of gains across national politics. Still, the majority of Americans view socialism negatively, according to Gallup. As a longtime DSA member and veteran of leftist media, Bhaskar Sunkara is one of socialism's leading advocates, and he's spent much of his career charting what a socialist economy in America might look like. Unlike some other leftists, he believes the market has a place. In fact, he thinks markets and entrepreneurs are an objective good in society. He proposes a vision of so-called "market socialism" in his recent co-authored book The Blueprint, and he lays out this system for us in today's episode. We talk about how many features of capitalism — from small businesses to monetary policy — might be remade under socialist principles. Read more: Ocasio-Cortez Boosts El-Sayed and 2028 Talk With $1 Million Check https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-16/aoc-boosts-abdul-el-sayed-and-2028-talk-with-1-million-check?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article An Economist Makes the Case for Mamdani-Style Populism https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-16/an-economist-makes-the-case-for-mamdani-style-populism?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News http://bloomberg.com/ subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast Subscribe to the Odd Lots Newsletter http://bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots https://discord.gg/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Joe Weisenthal?

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• 1:39Speaker 01

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• 1:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Lysenthal.

• 2:00Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, I have a question for you. Do you ever get angry tweets from people? I mean, I know you get angry. We all do get angry tweets from people. Do you ever get angry tweets from people who say that Zoran is our fault?

• 2:15Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:16Joe Weisenthal?

  I do too.

• 2:17Tracy Alloway?

  Yes, so for those who don't know, Zoran Mumdani came on before he became mayor of New York when he was campaigning.

• 2:24Joe Weisenthal?

  He was at like 5% in the polls.

• 2:25Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, and then within a week or two of his Odd Lots appearance, he started gaining some real momentum.

• 2:32Joe Weisenthal?

  I regularly get these tweets, usually from people who are very, do not like the fellow, who are like, oh yeah, you platformed Zoran and now he's our mayor, et cetera. But that's not really the point. The point is that obviously in New York and across the country and various primaries and in the public's imagination, socialism is on the rise. And you know, there's a big fight about the future of the Democratic Party, about you know, like the degree to which DSA or socialism in general will be the direction of the party going forward. But I don't know what that means, but you know, no one knows what that means exactly.

• 3:08Tracy Alloway?

  So DSA, definitely a hot buzzword at the moment. And you see lots of people talking about various flavors of socialism, I would say. Or actually, I should say, what tends to happen is DSA gets thrown around quite a lot.

• 3:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Tracy Alloway?

  And then you discover, once you start digging into it, that actually there are different flavors within the party. And those don't necessarily get discussed as much as they should.

• 3:32Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I was in Greece during the 2012 election. And one of the things is that every, in the main square in the center of Athens, every party that's running gets a tent where they hand out flyers and also like sometimes like beer or water bottles, et cetera. And then there was the main parties and then there are these small parties.

• 3:49Tracy Alloway?

  Do some of them have bigger tents than others?

• 3:51Joe Weisenthal?

  They do.

• 3:52Tracy Alloway?

  That was a joke.

• 3:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, but it's true. But also, you know, so like the main, when I was there in 2012, Syriza, the main socialist party or the left party, they had a tent and then there was a communist tent. And then there were two other communist tents and they were both right across the street from each other. They both had like the hammer and suckle on their logo. And I was like, what's the deal? Like, why are you like not? And they're like, well, that's the internationalist communist party and we're the ones who don't want to. So like, so when you say there's different flavors of socialism, this is like the classic thing on the left, which is just this extraordinary ability to splinter itself over small differences.

• 4:27Tracy Alloway?

  Absolutely.

• 4:28Joe Weisenthal?

  What does even left politics mean is a fight in itself, regardless of then the broader fight about whether the left will gain influence in the Democratic Party and then perhaps the United States.

• 4:40Tracy Alloway?

  But we're going to talk about a very specific flavor of socialism. One that's kind of controversial among a lot of other socialists, right?

• 4:47Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. Let's just get right to it. I'm very excited to say, we really do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Bhaskar Sunkara, co-author of The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World. He's a longtime DSA member, founding editor of Jacobin Magazine and currently president of the nation. So truly the perfect guest to talk about all these topics. So Bhaskar, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 5:12Joe Weisenthal?

  So this book that you've co-authored with Ben Burgess and Mike Beggs, The Blueprint. We'll get into what The Blueprint is, but I'm curious like who the audience is. And by which I mean, is this sort of like the left's answer to abundance in which it's trying to sort of influence where the Democratic Party goes? Or is your argument to fellow socialists about what social, what flavor, what socialism should be and how it can work?

• 5:40Speaker 04

  I think the argument is broadly to egalitarians. And it doesn't necessarily have to be socialist. But I remember I first became interested in socialist ideas when I was 14 years old or so.

• 5:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Many such cases, but usually they don't follow through, right?

• 5:54Speaker 04

  I'm very stubborn. I kept my commitments. It took me until I was 17 to join the Democratic Socialists of America. But my first question was, wouldn't this just lead to breadlines? And the response I got when I sought out socialists was often really bad responses. It was, isn't it better that there's, you know, a line for bread than no bread at all? Which is like a plausible answer if you're living in China in the 1930s. You're living in, you know, but not in the wealthiest societies known to man. And I really was needed convincing. And it took me actually encountering other models of socialism, mostly market socialist models,

• 6:37Speaker 04

  to be like, okay, this could in fact work. And I think a lot of socialists just say, we start with our critique of the present and we start with our demands and our demands, our immediate demands are demands that a lot of people who are liberals or even moderates might find agreeable. Like, let's say we should have a single payer health insurance like they have in much of Europe or things like that. But to me, when the left was at its strongest in the 1930s, later on in the 60s and 70s, we had a model to look for. And we now know that the model was pretty bad. We now know the Soviet economy wasn't really working in the 1930s. And we now know the depth of the authoritarianism, but the communists could point to that.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  And the 60s and 70s, there was people on campus that could point to what was going on in Cuba and they could join the Vence Ramos Brigade. And in a way, I thought it was necessary now, and my co-authors did as well, to really dive into the argument of is socialism technically possible? And then we could debate whether or not it's desirable. So I think you have to be an egalitarian to get that far with me.

• 7:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  But if you are, I think you should be confident that there is a different model in capitalism.

• 7:52Tracy Alloway?

  So what's market socialism then? And how does it, I guess, differ from more traditional definitions of socialism?

• 7:59Speaker 04

  Well, I think to start with, you could say that we're taking a look at what already exists in the real world and we're trying to create a coherent model around it. So we know that today's capitalism is a lot different than the capitalism of the 19th century. I think it was Ezra Klein who had the line that the United States is an insurance company with a military, which I think whether he knows it or not was a play on the line about the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is like a gas station with a military or something. It was a common refrain in the 80s. So we know that there can be extensive welfare states. There can be certain guarantees. We know that there's tools of demand management that you don't have to be a socialist to believe in.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  We know there's this huge role for the state. We also know from experience that labor managed firms actually work in practice. There's all sorts of reasons why people wouldn't want to start or participate in a labor managed firm. In part, it often requires putting in your own money. So you're putting in both your labor and your savings. All your eggs are in one basket. But we do know that once those firms do start.

• 9:07Joe Weisenthal?

  So for example, Goldman Sachs.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  There's actually, yeah, there's plenty of models in which there's partner-based

• 9:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  base firms that exist and that they work. Mondragon, the Spanish cooperative that at one point was the fifth or sixth largest entity in Spain is the example that I like to use. But now that I'm venturing further afield from the left to places like, you know, the Bloomberg offices, I might pull that one out of my hat, my hat, too. But we know that those two work. So how can they work together? Can you have, in fact, a sphere for commodity production where consumer goods and services are produced, run by cooperatives? And can you still have an expansive public sector? And we already have public banks, from small public banks to development banks, which serve a different purpose.

• 9:54Speaker 04

  And can you connect the three together into a system that is more egalitarian than capitalism, but is at least reasonably close to its efficiency? I would argue more efficient, but let's say reasonably close to its efficiency.

• 10:06Joe Weisenthal?

  So you mentioned the fact that, okay, we could have entities, organizations, companies that are labor-owned and sort of internally egalitarian. Another thing that you talk about in the book is you think like, basically, consumer choice is good, or that consumer choice is important. And one way that you're maximizing welfare is to not just tell people, like, you get your fixed allocation of kale and Dr. Bronner soap and almond butter and all this stuff, that actually there is an important role for like, a market for goods.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I normally don't drink coffee. It would be insane if a demand for a socialist society was that all three of us should have an equal allocation of coffee. My co-authors are more careful in how they articulate this argument than me. They get along better with people on the left at times.

• 10:58Joe Weisenthal?

  That's why we like having the least careful person on the podcast.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  But, you know, markets are great. I think they're an objective good. And the socialist problem with markets boils down to, one, the uneven distribution of income, which means if we are voting with our dollars, then, you know, someone else has a lot more dollars than me, and they're going to skew the economy towards luxury goods. And yes, there is a trickle-down effect from that spending on luxury goods, but it's less useful than an economy rooted towards where the median person is. So they have that criticism. They also have the criticism that the things that we're consuming in markets are produced under conditions of exploitation.

• 11:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  And this is obviously a normative argument, to use this word.

• 11:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Like junior analysts, like junior analysts at a bank.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  Junior analysts at a bank are absolutely exploited. Paralegals and law firms are exploited, mid-levels. You know, partners, I imagine like you're a true dream of an alienated.

• 11:56Tracy Alloway?

  They've gone through the exploitation to become partners.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. That's kind of a extreme example, but there's also just the exploitation that people feel on factory floors and, and things like that. So in this model, there is a more equal distribution of income. There is also a condition in which if the firms are controlled by its workers, if management is elected, if people not only receive a wage, but receive a share of residual profits, like a dividend, then it's hard to say that this is a condition of exploitation. Then there's a broader set of criticism that has to do with like, more philosophical, like alienation from production and things like that. And honestly, I think that those can maybe be abated if you're really an egalitarian,

• 12:43Speaker 04

  if you're a member of the far left in a future socialist society. I might be a member of the center-left, or maybe even center-right of this future society. And you could say, well, we're going to have mandatory job rotations and things like that to reduce alienation. But I think that's just a product of living in a society with a very complex division of labor.

• 13:17Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 14:52Speaker 01

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• 17:20Tracy Alloway?

  So just to help us conceptualize the idea of market socialism and the blueprint that you lay out in your book, can you maybe describe, if I'm a would-be restaurateur, I want to open a restaurant, where does the financing actually come from? How am I hiring my employees? How am I distributing, I guess, the profits from my business? Although it is a restaurant, so there probably won't be money, but let's just assume there are some. Because when I think about the traditional economy, you know, open up a new business, you go to a bank, maybe you inherit the money if you're lucky.

• 17:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Increasingly.

• 17:53Tracy Alloway?

  You keep the profits, you probably exploit some of your low-paid, you know, cooks and linemen and things like that. But walk us through, step by step, the process of starting a new business in a market socialist economy and where the money actually goes.

• 18:08Joe Weisenthal?

  And does Tracy get to keep the profits for the risk of opening up the restaurant?

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Well, I think this gets to the useful things that capitalists do. And I mean useful in the sense that as a socialist, it's very easy to just fall into the hyperbole of calling capitalists parasites or whatever else, at least in the old 20th century language. But capitalists contribute entrepreneurial risk and obviously their own managerial labor.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  In this case, with new firm creation in the book, The Blueprint, we lay out a vision, which is obviously an abstract stylized vision, in which there is no wage labor. And we sort of explain why we believe this to be an exploitative relationship at a normative level. We draw actually on kind of Rawlsian liberalism to do so, which I'm sure will win many favors with me on some parts of the actually existing far left. But when you start this firm, you would be applying for financing from a public bank the same way you would apply for financing today. You would have to have a business plan. You would have to receive a loan that would be at a interest rate that the bank feels comfortable with.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  A loan for a restaurant would probably be set at a higher interest rate than a loan for the expansion of an already profitable, successful business. And you would then, at that point, form with other people who are looking to join your firm, a first operating agreement. This first operating agreement would probably set you up as a manager. It'd probably allow you a large differentiation, potentially, in income, a four to one differentiation, a six to one differentiation, whatever it might be. And you would set up your firm. But from the start, the people who are working at the firm would be partners in the firm.

• 19:54Tracy Alloway?

  So they're paid in equity, not income?

• 19:57Speaker 04

  They would be member owners, but they would be paid both a base rate and paid residuals. And there's many reasons why you have to have this sort of benchmark wage system. As far as I know, The Blueprint is the first sort of model of market socialism that includes this. But for one, when I think about what I would do if I was in this future society, you know, I've started a bunch of entities in the past. I sort of like--

• 20:23Joe Weisenthal?

  You're an entrepreneur.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  I definitely like entrepreneurialism. I thought of the example of, and I don't know how much of this is apocryphal. I hope I'm not going to offend any listeners. I believe this is an accurate story, of like, the first Indian American who decided to buy a motel in New Jersey. And as far as I know, he encountered a motel that had a very, very low profit rate, maybe like 1%, 2%, barely surviving. And what he did was essentially fire most of the staff and work 60 to 80-hour days and bring in his children, his wife, and others into the business. And they turned it around to it's making enough profit that he's able to buy the next place.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Then he brought over his nephew to go run it along the same line. And now, an extraordinary amount of hotels and motels in the US are run by Indian Americans, particularly Goodjotis. That is exactly what I would do in a socialist society. I would sweat out my own labor. I like work. I like entrepreneurialism. I have a large extended family. I have lots of first cousins that I could solicit into any odd task. And I would pursue this low road of development. The question is, like, do we really want any society, much less a socialist society, be structured that way? So this system has benchmark wages, which you consider sort of minimum wages for broad categories of professions.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  And this is not unlike the old award system in Australia. It's not unlike the dynamics of centralized bargaining like you had in Northern Europe and places like Sweden. So basically, you're saying, okay, a line cook must be paid $15 an hour. It's not an extraordinary amount of money, but it ensures that a business pursues the high road of more efficiency. And in other firms, it's investment and labor-saving technology. It's these capital investments. In a restaurant, it would just be better management techniques and maybe having a better product. And if not, the firm would go under, which is also resolves one of the main problems that socialist economies had in the 20th century.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  These state socialist economies suffered from what Yanis Kornai called "soft budget constraints," right? So their political legitimacy came from maintaining full employment. So you would have these very inefficient firms that were kept alive. And also, an inefficient firms that was producing screws, if you got rid of it and tried to restructure it, you would end up jeopardizing your computing sector that relied on those screws because of the nature of command economies. So I think you would need this base to encourage firm failure, which is a good in itself. It's a sign of like, health that firms go under. Obviously, there's always the risk of hard budgets, right? You know, there's always a risk of there's a pandemic and all the restaurants go away.

• 23:10Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, so who gets the upside? Because my employees now have some stake in the company. I did take out a loan from the bank, but it's a public bank. And, you know, the interest rate might be relatively high. And then presumably, as an entrepreneur, I would like to see some upside as well.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  You get the upside just merely in terms of what you're being paid for your labor. If you are, in fact, a competent manager, if you are the person who should be running this, then workers will agree to pay differentiation. So after your first operating agreement, when that expires and getting ready to get another operating agreement, you'd be paid more than your peers. All those entrepreneurial projects that I mentioned before that I've started are either nonprofits or they're subject to, you know, a board, right? I think a lot of people actually operate in these conditions. You could think of a CEO of a big company where obviously they have some equity, but they're compensated in large part by their incomes, which are justified and voted for by shareholders under capitalism. It's not so different here.

• 24:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Speaking of hotels, I saw the July 4th, 1999, one of my favorite all-time headlines from the New York Times, "A Patel Motel Cartel," to describe the prevalence of--

• 24:23Tracy Alloway?

  That's excellent.

• 24:23Joe Weisenthal?

  It was so good. I remember reading that in the house. I was like, oh, that's really good. And it's interesting, you talk about the importance of firm failure. We associate that importance with Joseph Schumpeter, who many on the sort of capitalist embrace him, but he himself was much more ambiguous in terms of where he fell in the sort of ideological spectrum than the sort of pure laissez-faire, failure is good, that many people now reduce him to. Talk to us about like, the big one. Or a big one is housing and the provision. So we have like, some public housing in America, but not that much, et cetera. Talk to us about like, a vision of housing, because this is much more important probably than restaurants.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  It's very funny, because I just knew immediately that this would be the hardest sell. Because this was even a hard sell for me, because this is one of the most radical parts of the book. You know, I'm from the suburbs of New York. My dream is homeownership, you know, maybe a nice place in Long Island, escape the city, put some of my savings into home. But when I think about what I actually want from a home, what I actually want from a home is some level of security. I don't want my landlord to be able to say, tomorrow, your slightly undermarket rent-- hopefully he's not a listener-- slightly undermarket rent goes up by $1,000 a month because I'm on a month-to-month lease. So in my vision of a just housing market, all housing, all the land is socialized.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  You know, I am a socialist, so there has to be some room to kind of get under the skin of your listeners. All the--

• 25:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's how they do it in Singapore, and our listeners probably love Singapore.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  All the land and housing is public, but there's still a market for rents. So if you want to live on, you know, Manhattan Beach or something like that, and, you know, I'm comfortable as I am living on like, very loud roads, like, that's been my trick to surviving rent in New York, then it makes sense that you would pay more for your house. And then, if construction is all kind of commissioned by the public sector itself, even if individual firms are all worker-owned, but the state itself is triggering housing construction, then they just start building where there's high demand and rents are getting higher. There would have to be some smoothing, because I do believe in secure tenure.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  So if the market value of your area that you're living in goes up by 20, 30, 40%, like some of our friends in the Hudson Valley had happen around the pandemic, then I think that would have to be smoothed out by the state. So there is some element of administrative price setting, which does create distortions. But the state is making up for it with rapid construction. So there's no zoning barriers, there's no community board barriers. So in a way, it is a very statist vision, but it is, I also think, a very gimby vision.

• 27:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I was a renter for a very long time. The reason I decided eventually like, okay, I'm gonna bite the bullet and buy a home is because I have two children. And at that point, it really becomes difficult to move. And so for your point of like secure stability, I never really cared about homeownership per se, until I wanted to solve that problem of I just don't want to be forced to be in a position to move again. And a couple of times in my previous rentals, the landlord sold the house and the person wanted to move in. And so like, I had to move. So I, in theory, if I could just have a stable place to live, I would be totally fine with just like being a renter for a very long time. But when we think about like sort of the public provision of housing, one issue that

• 27:54Joe Weisenthal?

  comes up is sometimes your neighbors really suck. You're apparently okay with like really loud noises. I don't like loud noise. I like to get sleep.

• 28:03Tracy Alloway?

  I live next to a violinist now. That's fun.

• 28:06Joe Weisenthal?

  That doesn't sound too bad. I live near.

• 28:08Tracy Alloway?

  She's learning.

• 28:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay, oh, that's different. So I live three nights a year. Someone in a neighboring house will just have like these insane raves and like, I can't sleep those nights. And I can accept three nights. But sometimes neighbors are not good. And sometimes the answer is police in terms of like, okay, there's drug use or just insanely loud parties, et cetera. And some people on the left are very uncomfortable, clearly. There was a big abolish the police movement. I know you've criticized police abolition. But sometimes for public goods, whether we're talking about public housing, public transportation, et cetera, in order for them to be nice, in order for them to be desirable, there has

• 28:50Joe Weisenthal?

  to be like a role for like, we're gonna like, remove or penalize miscreants. And I'm curious in your vision of like the public provision of goods, how we deal with like, this is not going to be desirable if like I'm in the vicinity of miscreants.

• 29:08Speaker 04

  Well, I think you have to address antisocial behavior. So I would probably address it in the same way as you would want to address it. I would maybe put my emphasis a little differently on the actual person doing the antisocial behavior and say, is the person engaging in drug use really putting themselves in a position where they're gonna reach their God given potentials, right? Like, I think the social democratic response is basically the same. And I think the democratic socialist response is basically the same. But it's one that centers a little bit more the lives and experience of those engaging in antisocial behavior rather than bystanders. Same thing with if you're passing an encampment on your way to work.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  I think we hear a lot of concerns about the people passing the encampment. We don't hear as much about the need to actually criminalize the behavior, not to punish people, but to actually get them into state programs where they could kind of get healthy and reach their potentials. But I think the toolkit would be much the same.

• 30:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay. But, you know, the subway. And I actually think the problems of the subway are way overrated. It is in, the subway is very good. I really like the subway. But like, there are two things. There are some people who, different from me, they perceive, oh, there's a bunch of lunatics on the subway. And then there are other people who just say like, oh, the lunatics aren't bothering you, it's fine, et cetera. And this is where I'm trying to get like, this is the intra, the left fight, which is like, if we're gonna have public provision of these goods, like, how do we make them good and desirable?

• 30:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think Americans tend to vacillate between like libertarianism and fascism. You know, it becomes like, oh, just put your headphones on, who cares? And then it becomes like a very violent response to it. You know, I would say obviously, public goods have to be protected. For one, in a more egalitarian society, at least a portion of these problems would be solved by just people having access to more resources and there being a larger social safety net. Doesn't solve everything, but I think there is a degree to which in the United States, we invested more heavily in policing in prisons rather than the social welfare state. And that is a very typical leftist line. But the traditional leftist line would imply that the costs are equal, or if anything,

• 31:23Speaker 04

  policing in prisons are more expensive, when in fact, they are actually much cheaper than the amount of, you know, if, let's say, if you're gonna have a good prison system in a more progressive society, your staffing ratios would have to be completely different. You would have to, instead of training prison guards for a month or three weeks, you would have to train them for over a year and then put them in a probationary period. It's incredibly expensive to do these things. But I think that would resolve at least a portion of the problems. Other than that, it just is a matter of, yes, there's, there's a role for policing. There is a role for enforcing standards of like decorum. Like, I lean on the more conservative side of some of these questions in terms of like, I have a vision of what the good life is.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  I think there are limits to a majoritarian vision of a good life and trampling on the rights of others who want to have a good time and want to smoke a joint or whatever else. But I would lean towards, let's say, banning any shop that is selling weed from, oh, first of all, I would just stop there. But, but let's say, from especially putting up a big sign outside their shop that says, you know, weed for sale.

• 32:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Tracy Alloway?

  I have a different concern to antisocial behavior and drug use, which is interior decorating. And I actually mean this, I actually mean this kind of seriously because I take the point that one of the reasons you buy a home is for security, so your landlord can't force you out with rent increases. But another reason to buy a home is you get to make it your own. You don't have to live in a white box, you know, with plain walls. You can install a really cool kitchen if you're a cook. You can really customize it. You can improve it. And so the question when it comes to public provision of housing is, A, can I still do that? Can I customize it and make home improvements?

• 33:08Tracy Alloway?

  And then B, if I make the apartment or the house a lot better, who captures that upside? Does some of that value come back to me? Or does it just fall into, I guess, the public pool of housing?

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think investments can and should be requested and approved. So there is an administrative level and this is.

• 33:30Tracy Alloway?

  And someone has to approve my wallpaper?

• 33:32Speaker 04

  There's a difference between investments, let's say, today. If you were to make an investment of your home, like a wallpaper change, you would be able to do that yourself. You could do that in a rental. I get you're being like, obviously, a little hyperbolic in that example. But a lot of these changes to your home, you could do. But I think a good test would be, is it taxable or not? I'm not a homeowner, so I only vaguely know this. But if I were to, let's say, install a HVAC system in my home or a big boiler or something like that, I would not be taxed on at least the labor to install in a state like New York, right? It would be sales tax free. To me, that's like sort of a capital improvement. That's a thing that would probably have to be approved beyond like normal maintenance.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  That capital improvement, you should be reimbursed for reasonable capital improvement. Other changes that you're making that are more eccentric, I think that people should be allowed to make those changes. There's secure tenure, so there's probably gonna be less turnover of homes unless people are moving or moving job markets. And in those cases, I think people should have to pay out of pocket. But there are, you know, I think functional examples, Singapore is a good one, places with really extensive public housing where this works in history. And obviously, this is the one part of the book that does lean into the more status end. And it does lead into even some of the things I was saying before about rental changes being smoothed out and so on.

• 35:01Speaker 04

  Obviously, there are both distortions and layers of like bureaucracy that come up as a result of this, which leads to inefficiencies. But I think overall, unleashing the power of the state to encourage construction and that effect will grossly, grossly, grossly outweigh any of these inefficiencies. And the rest of the book is largely focused on, I think, a role for the state that doesn't necessarily play this sort of gatekeeping way.

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• 40:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's talk about another important service that the government already provides, and that's education. You probably read the big Nikole Hannah-Jones piece about her daughter going to school. And that, I was very dismayed, I think, actually, by a lot of the discourse it spawned, because I saw basically people taking one of two sides. People were like, oh, well, this is why school choice is important and people should not have to have their children stuck in a failing school, et cetera. And then I saw a lot of people on the left basically saying like, it's egalitarian and counter-left to sort of be so obsessed with like the success of your particular child. What's so special about the daughter of a New York Times journalist

• 41:14Joe Weisenthal?

  that they have to be, you know, better educated than their peers, et cetera? And I did not see many people respond, which is how I responded with like, let's just make every school excellent. Like, my son goes to an excellent public school. And when I went to his curriculum night, I got saddened by the fact that this was not the default school in New York City, that it's actually kind of rare. And I'm curious why we don't hear more just like, let's just have all schools be great and let's hold the schools to high standards for educating all children.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  The tricky thing is, in a place like New York, the bad schools are better funded per pupil than the good schools. So it's not a funding problem, but is a wider problem in society. If people are going to school and they're in unstable living conditions at home, if their parents are struggling with maintaining a job, if there's other issues in their wider community, if there's safety issues and they feel unsafe walking from school, if in the name of egalitarianism, which I believe in, we have that kid traveling across town because we have some form of busing and equalization. All these things, I think, create factors of disparities

• 42:29Speaker 04

  that people want to resolve purely through public education. Where I think, you know, the roots are obviously deeper in a more egalitarian society with an extensive social safety net, with employment guarantees and with a more equal distribution of income. I think a lot of these things would resolve themselves. But, you know, the problem isn't really, in my mind, the school choice end of it.

• 42:53Joe Weisenthal?

  I share the skepticism of education as the solution to inequality. Like, I'm skeptical that there's some obvious link. But also, I think like, education is good in its own right. Like, it's good to learn things. We're given this brand and it's like, good to like, exercise it. So yeah, sure, maybe we could have a society in which the schools you get into are less important for your ultimate economic outcome. But that doesn't necessarily satisfy me if one of my concerns is, no, people should expect that they can get a good education.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think to begin with, we should say that public education in the US is radically better than it was 100 years ago. It's radically better than it was for most of human history. We live in a society with universal literacy. We live in a society where we protect children and they're not in the labor market, unless they're in, you know, voluntarily from, you know, age 15 to 18. But they're not in the labor market until they graduate from high school. And I kind of think that, that if you solve the background issues and you have similarly well-invested schools, if you have societies in which the state has a bigger role and the state is able to maybe play a heavier hand dealing with special interests,

• 44:11Speaker 04

  like, let's say, a community group that says, we don't want our children to have to travel 30 minutes away for school or this sort of local community pressures on education or people in, you know, deep red districts that want particular tailored curriculum. They don't want a national curriculum. They want to do their own reading on the virtues of, of this, that, you know, eccentric belief or the other. I think you would solve part of that problem. And also, obviously, there's the overarching question of public sector employees. And public sector employees now are in a huge battle often when they make contracts because they feel like they're underpaid, which they often are.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  They feel like the thing that they get for being underpaid is security of tenure. And in a different sort of society where you have full employment guarantees, where you have like broadly more, more abundance, you could probably tell teachers, you're going to be paid a lot more, but 10% of you are going to be fired every, every year. And I think that resolves at least some of the questions that actually went unresolved. I think actually the correct right-wing opposition to that piece centered around the questions of what are the teachers doing? Are they performing? And why do we have summer breaks, you know, that are this long? Instead of just breaks longer and how much, how much math?

• 45:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Holidays, oh my god.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, and also now it's like, you know, I actually, I'm, you know, five years until my kid is ready to enter the, the public school system. And I'm going to launch a campaign against kids getting Diwali off.

• 45:45Joe Weisenthal?

  You know what? Can you and I make a trade here, which is that I'm Jewish. I will lobby for like, let's chill with the number of Jewish holidays that we take off and you campaign for getting rid of day off for Diwali. And then we can have this united thing where all of us agree that some of our holidays don't have to be days off.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  I think South Asians and Jews can definitely band together to value education over communalism.

• 46:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Great, let's do it.

• 46:13Tracy Alloway?

  This is terrible.

• 46:14Joe Weisenthal?

  No, we don't, there's, no, no, no, no, no. There's so many holidays. It's crazy. And I think everyone should just voluntarily say, you know what? Maybe I'll take my student out that day, but the entire school district does not have to shut down for all of our holidays.

• 46:28Tracy Alloway?

  Um, moving swiftly on.

• 46:31Joe Weisenthal?

  People are going to love this part of the segment.

• 46:32Tracy Alloway?

  I have a sort of backup big picture question, but you've mentioned a stronger social safety net a number of times in this conversation. Why is the answer to a more egalitarian society? Why is it necessarily market socialism versus just your sort of classic higher taxes on the wealthy and more government spending? And, you know, healthcare for all, better education, et cetera?

• 46:59Speaker 04

  So at least part of this is normative. I'm a socialist. I think that wage labor is a condition of exploitation. I think that it's an inequality that a good society should not have. I think the more practical reason why is that we've already seen plenty of societies that have gone down the road of building bigger and bigger welfare states. These societies have often had to kind of stop at a certain point. They've had a lot of their gains eroded. And in part, this was because of the political power of capitalists who get to make the decision whether or not to invest.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  And when you have a condition of full employment, like you did in, let's say, Sweden in the 1960s, you have an economy that's actually functioning with full employment. It doesn't have runaway inflation as a result of full employment. There's all sorts of tools, macroeconomic tools that the government is doing to keep that into check. But what you do have is workers who feel really comfortable and really secure, and they start demanding higher and higher wages and also more industrial democracy. So your Swedish capitalists who could say, yes, I have to deal with this really strong state and these powerful unions, but at least I have production 300-something days a year instead of my colleagues in France where there's strikes all the time

• 48:24Speaker 04

  or in Britain, not nearly as social democratic as a country, but a country with a really deep militant workers movement. At least I have my stability. That capitalist can say, you know, I'm getting squeezed. I'm going to stop investing. And especially you had contingent things like the OPEC shock and greater globalization starting in the 70s and onward. But it actually turned out to be a system that was economically possible, but politically unstable. And as a result. You know, the smart social democrats realized that they had to pursue a different road. I think there was a left wing, more socialist resolution to this crisis that involved worker ownership was tried like the Mider Plan and other attempts to move

• 49:07Speaker 04

  shares from capitalists to ordinary workers. But the common route it went in was the route of the third way that said, you know, we're going to maintain redistribution, we're going to maintain these existing welfare states, but we're going to stop the deeper advance of the welfare state. And we're also going to have to restore, you know, slightly higher unemployment and sort of other constraints on the ability of workers to bargain. So these are certainly better societies than we have now. But I think it is fundamentally a different sort of model. And especially for me, I believe that workers should not have just the power of exit in production. So what social democracy does is unlike feudalism,

• 49:49Speaker 04

  we're not serfs, workers can leave production. In reality, in a country with a weak welfare state, or really just like a poorly structured welfare state, I should say, like the US, you're often tied to your employer in such a way that your power of exit is limited. Like maybe I could find a job with comparable salary, but I can't find the benefits, or there'll be a disruption, or whatever else, your power of exit is weakened. But you also really have limited voice in the workplace as well. And in my view, there's all sorts of radical economic benefits that could come from giving people more voice as well. We're making it very soft claim that we think the system could be comparable to capitalist

• 50:31Speaker 04

  development. But when I think about these battles over, let's say, AI and labor saving technology, a workplace filled with people who get residual profits, who get dividends, are less likely, these ordinary workers would be less likely to hide their knowledge from their employer. They'd be less likely to resist the automation of elements of their work. I actually think there's huge advantages in an economy in which workers have more voice. But obviously, for me, even if there wasn't, I should say, I would be in favor of that on egalitarian grounds.

• 51:07Joe Weisenthal?

  You have interesting politics because you're socialist, you also have, you know, some liberal tendencies in which you believe in the sort of premise of consumer choice, et cetera. And you're also a conservative because you're sort of like, let's get rid of the weed shops and police are important. It's interesting. I don't usually read a lot of like, French, European continental theorists, et cetera. But I saw this ad, it was on the Verso Books website, this guy, Frederic Lordon, who wrote a book in 2020, it came out in 2022, Imperium Structures and Effects of Political Bodies. And I thought I loved it. I was surprised. But he argued that the solution to like, I like coffee

• 51:52Joe Weisenthal?

  and you like almond milk, or that basically, like, he said, like, we can't have, like, once we start with the premise of sort of like voluntary association, voluntary goods, we can see that the unit of society is the individual, and that's liberal, and that the solution to that is changing people. That actually, like, the solution is modification. And if we like different things, then the answer is like, we have to modify people so that they all like the same things. And that is the sort of key step on the path to, he's a communist, but that is the step. Why not just like embark on an effort to

• 52:32Joe Weisenthal?

  just make everyone the same? Or to aspire in a direction of this sort of what he, the word he uses, modification, such that the individual no longer has to be the unit of politics or society?

• 52:47Speaker 04

  Well, in part, I believe in a reconciliation of liberalism and socialism. And I think actually, most democratic socialists today have already made that reconciliation.

• 52:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  That reconciliation is actually in the bones of its tradition. So by saying the state doesn't have the right to, let's say, direct your labor, why? Why doesn't it? If there's a utilitarian, and why doesn't the state have the right? Because it just doesn't, right? I think there's all sorts of ways in which we should trumpet the defense of the individual as something that's very important. The question is, should the state be involved in the project of shaping behavior? Well, states are, and I think it's a good thing, right? I think it makes sense that the state should create the very least friction in antisocial behavior.

• 53:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  So I would love tomorrow, the state said, even if we're not going to ban sports betting, we at least are going to put a ban on sports betting apps notifying you on your phone, even. Let's say, even that is, well, maybe I want to be notified if the line changes on the Giants game. Well, no, the state is saying that there's an end, we're shaping behavior. We have a lot less smoking now than we did when, you know, when I was growing up.

• 53:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, but it's coming back. Zoomers are smoking. Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, we need to create more friction, right? And we also need to maybe tax other nicotine products. So it's a little bit less expensive, so if you are going to smoke.

• 54:04Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, can I just, I'm stuck on the school holiday thing for a second.

• 54:09Joe Weisenthal?

  This is the most controversial thing I've said. Now you're gonna, yeah.

• 54:12Tracy Alloway?

  No, but I think it relates to some of what we're discussing. So I'm assuming that both of you want to spend quality time with your children. And so your opposition to school holidays is it's a hassle for people who are working, you have to arrange childcare, it's a friction that you have to deal with. In a socialist society, could we not just have more worker holidays that line up with school holidays? Wouldn't that be the solution, rather than getting rid of the school holidays?

• 54:38Speaker 04

  Well, like anything, there's going to be a trade off, right? We have more worker holidays, then there's obviously less being produced, there's less surplus for society. So obviously, if society wants to make that trade off, be a little bit poorer, have a little more holidays, that's fine. Actually, I believe in those trade offs, I guess, to some degree. I do believe that like a pursuit, a good society would have more leisure time. And we should just make sure, like, I work 60 hour plus weeks. If there was a law really mandating that everyone really sticks to 35, I guess I would find things to do and I would enjoy it. Well, I think education is like a particular thing where, you know, our children need education. There's obviously been slippage in educational outcomes, at the very least since the pandemic. I would actually argue that some of the better parts

• 55:22Speaker 04

  of No Trial Left Behind have been abandoned, and we've, we've kept some of the annoying parts. So, I mean, this isn't even really a political argument, but my vision is kids in school, nine to five, high frequency of low stakes standardized testing. I don't even know how this is a socialist argument, but that's just my vision. And no Diwali off, you know? Diwali really starts in the evening, anyway. Like, it doesn't, it isn't like a, you know, doesn't make sense.

• 55:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Like I said, I'll trade. I'll, I'll take one of mine off the board. I just have one last question. Okay, DSA, I've never been to a DSA meeting. I don't know, really, like, the left in this country is so broad. And some of it, to me, seems less left and more like hyper liberal. There could be anything from like, someone is advocating Medicare for All, and someone is advocating for abolish landlords, and someone else is advocating for decriminalizing sex work. And there are many things that seem to fall under what people call the left in this country. And I don't really know, like, how many people who self characterize as the left are sort of like, class based leftists per se. Like,

• 56:34Joe Weisenthal?

  if I were to go to a DSA meeting, never been to one, I don't think they'd want me in there. How small or big is your contention? Where do you, how, you know, how much, like, with just fighting the intra fight of the left, how much do you have to grow yet in order for the Bosker view to be the view that is the left?

• 56:52Tracy Alloway?

  And what's the general perception of market socialism, too? I guess classical DSAs?

• 56:58Speaker 04

  I think market socialism is now the norm on the socialist left. But the question is, how much people say, oh, we need markets now, but maybe in the future, AI will solve calculation problems? And then my response-

• 57:13Tracy Alloway?

  Well, this is true. The Soviets didn't have the kind of pricing data that you could get nowadays, right?

• 57:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think it still doesn't make sense. Like, I think, I think AI can help form a better plan, but it wouldn't actually help you execute that plan. Then if something changes, you would then have to reform the plan. It's kind of would be the worst of both worlds in many ways. But my normal response there is to point to incentive problems, and that normally wins the argument. Though I am actually a pure believer, I'm on the Von Mises Hayek side of the calculation debate. And I also believe in the inherent good of the market as a coordinating mechanism. But I would say the, this is probably the largest grouping of a very fragmented set of beliefs. But I've been serious interrogation with the history of socialist economies, and also just thinking and laying out, like,

• 58:03Speaker 04

  we spent a lot of the book laying out the normative case for a very radical form of egalitarianism. But kind of starting with the, here's what we believe, actually helps lay the groundwork for making the technical argument. But, you know, Jacobin, for all its heterodox views, is the largest publication on the socialist left in generations. This appealed to reason since, you know, over 100 years.

• 58:26Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I got to the socialist calculation debate. It reminds me of the early, I've been reading a lot about AI lately because it seems pretty important. The early AI pioneers tried to embed intelligence in the form of an algorithm, and it didn't work. They tried to like, write down what intelligence is and teach it to a computer, and it didn't work. It only worked after, let's just collected a lot of data, and it was very different from the early AI pioneers. And my expectation is that as AI gets better and better, it will get better at predicting the results of experiments, so you don't have to run the experiment. And if you perceive capitalism as a series of entrepreneurs making hypotheses and then testing them with the firm, I actually, not only do I think it's possible, I think

• 59:11Joe Weisenthal?

  there's a very good chance that AI leads to essentially a form of communism by which we no longer need the firm as a hypothesis of what will work. Anyway-

• 59:21Speaker 04

  The AI thing does not work because there's not like a data set to collect. Like, people's wants and needs change constantly. And also then it doesn't-

• 59:30Joe Weisenthal?

  We're modelable. But if you believe in a super intelligent AI, we are, you know what? Let's revisit this in 10 years.

• 59:38Speaker 04

  Even the trade offs are so constantly, like, you could answer the calculation problems, like, the most efficient way for the state to build like a railroad and like the correct allocation. But the reason why we have like market driven prices is obviously for the trade off end of it. I think AI can create a static, like, perfect plan, but I think it would fail in execution. But we will see.

• 1:00:01Joe Weisenthal?

  We'll see. Bosker, thank you so much for coming on Outlets.

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:00:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Congrats on the book.

• 1:00:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, I thought that was a really fun conversation. I have to say, my guess is, like, if the quote "broad left" in the United States were just represented by Bosker and Zoran, that would be an upgrade from many of the voices that you hear across the left.

• 1:00:33Tracy Alloway?

  It's still, as you said, a very interesting mix of politics.

• 1:00:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying, right.

• 1:00:38Tracy Alloway?

  No weed shops, but, you know, public provision of housing.

• 1:00:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Consumer choice, you have to apply to the public bank to get your restaurant, and then no weed shops, and also, we still need lots of-

• 1:00:48Tracy Alloway?

  And less exploitation of workers, but fewer school holidays.

• 1:00:52Joe Weisenthal?

  And fewer school holidays, and lots of options at the bread line. Or not, lots of options at the bread aisle, not, not in a bread line.

• 1:00:59Tracy Alloway?

  That $70 sourdough loaf that's on sale in New York. Well, the other thing, and we didn't get into it because the book purposely doesn't get into it, is the transition, right?

• 1:01:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:10Tracy Alloway?

  Of how do you go from an ultra-capitalist society to something that resembles market socialism? People own their houses right now. They own, you know, publicly traded stocks and things like that. How do you manage that process? Because you would imagine there would be quite a lot of opposition.

• 1:01:26Joe Weisenthal?

  And then what happens, also, I think this is a really important point, is what happens when you transition to socialism? And then four years later, the voters don't like it. Do you transition back to capitalism?

• 1:01:36Tracy Alloway?

  Right.

• 1:01:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Like, that's like, so like, part of like, the question of like, democracy as its structure is like, all right, you know what? We're gonna elect Bernie Sanders president, and we're gonna embark on this road to socialism. And then it's like, four years later, it's like, okay, now we're gonna elect Donald Trump, whatever. Like, there are many, you know, I think as a blueprint, it's like, very interesting. It's very interesting to think about these things. Getting there, I guess that's always been the challenge, but getting there and then maintaining there, so that actually, like, we have to like, stick with it and follow through on it, that strikes me as difficult in a country that has elections every two years.

• 1:02:12Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, for sure. Shall we leave it there?

• 1:02:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 1:02:15Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at TracyAlloway.

• 1:02:20Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStalwart. Follow our guest, Bosker Sankara, at SunraySunray. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmond, Dashiel Bennett at Dashbot, Cale Brooks at CaleBrooks, and Kevin Lozano at KevinLloydLozano. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots. And for even more Odd Lots content, check out our daily newsletter, which you can find at Bloomberg.com/oddlots.

• 1:02:47Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we talk about the different flavors of socialism, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you're watching on video and you enjoyed the show, then please like or leave a comment, or better yet, subscribe.

• 1:03:02Joe Weisenthal?

  And remember, if you're a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there.

• 1:03:13Tracy Alloway?

  Thanks for joining.

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