Michael Roberts argues that capitalists invest only when it is profitable, and that when profitability falls across the major economies, investment and hiring give way to a slump. In response to Marshall’s question about whether falling profitability causes depressions or only accompanies them, Roberts sets out Marx’s law of the…
Michael Roberts argues that the 1929 crash had its roots in falling profitability in the United States and Europe during the late 1920s, even as the Roaring Twenties appeared to be an upswing. He describes a stock market driven by heavy borrowing and euphoria while the productive economy weakened, notes…
In this second of a three-part conversation, Marxist economist Michael Roberts takes the central claim from Part One — that the 2008 crash opened a long depression — back to the two historical cases on which his 2016 book The Long Depression rests. He begins with the 1870s, answering the…
Roberts defines a "depression" with technical precision — not simply a downturn, but a slump whose recovery never returns to the prior growth trend. He walks through the two historical precedents, the depression that followed the 1873 crash and the Great Depression of 1929–41, before turning to 2008: arguing that…
Michael Roberts lays out the core thesis of his Marxist economics: production for exchange rather than direct use puts control of investment, wages, and layoffs in the hands of a tiny ownership class. He traces how that structure has driven both real human progress — rising productivity, rising living standards…
In this first of a three-part conversation, Marxist economist Michael Roberts joins Notions of Progress to lay out the central argument at the heart of his 2016 book The Long Depression: that the 2008 financial crash was not an ordinary recession, but the opening of a longer structural depression driven…
Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things at Work, argues that what makes AI particularly galling isn't just job displacement — it's that these systems were built on decades of uncompensated human activity: Wikipedia entries, scraped books, ordinary conversation online. Mueller ties this “training data without consent” problem back to his…
Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things at Work, points to a surprising development: opposition to data centers is cutting across party lines, with roughly 92% of US productive investment this year going toward AI, and most of that into data centers that generate almost no local jobs. Mueller argues this…
In Part 2 of this conversation, Gavin Mueller traced Marx's own ambivalence toward machinery through the split between orthodox and heterodox Marxism, Taylorism's theory of workplace control, the Technocracy Movement, and Norbert Wiener's early warnings about automation. In this final part, Mueller brings that history into the present — from…
What happens when the founder of cybernetics realizes his own invention could gut the labor movement? Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things at Work, describes how Norbert Wiener reached out to Walter Reuther's United Auto Workers to warn that automation was coming for factory jobs — an overture that stalled…
In Episode 17, Gavin Mueller traced the Luddites back to the guild economy of England's Midlands — skilled workers organizing to defend their wages, their working conditions, and their craft. In Part 2 of this conversation, Mueller follows that struggle forward into the century that reshaped it: Karl Marx's own…
They've been remembered as machine-smashers who tried to stop the future with a hammer — but historian Eric Hobsbawm called what they were doing "collective bargaining by riot." In this episode, Prof. Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam), author of Breaking Things at Work, walks through who the Luddites actually were:…
What happens to an ethics built on belonging to a city once that city stops being able to protect anyone? This episode opens the Hellenistic arc of Notions of Progress with one of the strangest and most memorable answers: Diogenes of Sinope, a philosopher who lived in a discarded wine…
Is artificial intelligence quietly convincing us that human judgment no longer matters? In 2023 Senate testimony, philosopher Shannon Vallor argued that a widespread AI narrative treats practical wisdom — what Aristotle called phronesis — not as a real human capacity worth defending, but as something already outdated. Her claim is…
Aristotle asks a question most modern philosophy has stopped asking: what is a human being for? In Part 1 of this two-part episode, Marshall works through Aristotle's argument that every activity aims at some good — and that there is a highest good, eudaimonia, that makes the others intelligible. Drawing…
In this clip from the Notions of Progress conversation with Matt Ehret, Ehret develops one of the episode's most striking arguments: that adopting a particular intellectual method produces not genuine freedom but its simulation. Drawing on Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Ehret argues that as a person becomes more enmeshed…
What if the divide between Plato and Aristotle is not a chapter in the history of philosophy — but a structural fault line that still determines how civilizations think about knowledge, progress, and discovery? In the final part of his conversation with Matt Ehret, Marshall examines Ehret’s argument that this…
Did Plato’s most famous allegory get hijacked by the very class of rulers it was meant to expose? Matthew Ehret argues that the Allegory of the Cave is one of the most systematically misread passages in Western philosophy. According to Ehret, self-styled Neoplatonists extracted the imagery of shadow-control and applied…
What if the most cited passage in Western philosophy has been deliberately misread — by both its critics and its supposed followers? In Part 2 of his conversation with Matt Ehret, Marshall examines the Allegory of the Cave, the Sophist movement, and a lineage of misuse running from ancient Athens…
Did the idea of progress originate with the ancient Greeks — centuries before the Enlightenment claimed it? In this clip from Part 1 of a three-part conversation, host Marshall establishes the premise that animates the Ehret Interview Arc: tracing the idea of progress back to ancient Greece is itself a…
This is the first of three episodes with Matt Ehret tracing the Plato–Aristotle divide and its consequences for Western intellectual history. In this episode, Matt Ehret argues that the fault line between Plato and Aristotle is not a historical curiosity — it is a living divide that continues to shape…
What principle did Aristotle carry out of Plato's Academy — and what did the institution he built in its place say about the one he left? Prof. Christopher Moore, in Calling Philosophers Names, identifies what makes Aristotle's departure philosophically decisive. For Aristotle, philosophical progress was cumulative: earlier thinkers were genuinely…
In episode 8, Plato coined the word philosopher and made a wager: that genuine philosophical knowledge could be institutionalized and accumulated across generations. Last episode 9, we examined the Academy he built to make that wager pay off — its curriculum, its method, its claim that episteme, anchored knowledge, could…
What did Plato actually found in 387 BCE — and why does the answer matter for how we think about progress? Prof. Guthrie’s account of the Academy reveals a community unlike anything that had existed before it: philosophers who lived, studied, argued, and ate together over decades in the grove…