An early autopsy of capitalism

In some sense capitalism is already behind us. We live here in its fevered midst, to be sure, but a recognition is emerging, especially among younger generations: It isn't sustainable.

- CHARLES FINCH

The devastation of the natural world; the mindless consumerism; above all, the human misery that corporations trawl the world to extract, like ore, from souls as divine as yours or mine. All of it, increasingly, in service to the pathological greed of a few thousand mentally ill men. It cannot last. What comes next may be better, or it may be worse. But it won't be this.

Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke, by Leigh Claire La Berge, offers an early autopsy. Set in the years just before the turn of the millennium, it recounts the time La Berge, now a writer and English professor, spent in the corporate world, helping a Fortune 500 company prepare for Y2K.