A Review of Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo
by Paul Krugman for the New York Times

As a former MIT faculty member, a Nobel laureate, and a man who has been wrong about inflation in ways that would embarrass even a DEI-admit sophomore, I am uniquely qualified to review Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits — a book that elevates being wrong into an ontological condition.

Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo argue that capital has broken free of human agency, no longer requiring labor, production, or material reality to generate value. Rather, it perpetuates itself as a self-sustaining algorithm.

The book’s most inspired chapter concerns “Drag” — the authors’ discovery that friction, latency, and inefficiency are sources of value. This will come as news to every economist since Adam Smith. It is also not news to anyone who has observed high-frequency trading, which Poliks and Trillo might have simply called “front-running” had they chosen the word that the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 used before Wall Street discovered that old grifts sound better in French.

Then there is “Lift” — capital ascending indefinitely, labor left behind. Where Marx located value in the exploitation of workers, Poliks and Trillo locate it in the exploitation of gaps, which requires no workers at all, only the interposition of latency. This is an academically elegant description of picking the pockets of two parties milliseconds before they notice each other.

The writing draws on Deleuze, Guattari, and Suhail Malik, which will reassure readers who felt that what economics most needed was more sentences that cannot be falsified.

Exocapitalism is, in short, a decoder ring for the growing incoherence of everyday contemporary life — which, at $34.99, generates value from nothing, precisely as the authors predicted.

In schola, falsitas. In theoria, nihil.

Story suggested by the MIT Radius newsletter