I've been reading Veblen's Engineers and the Price System and thinking about what comes after markets. The price system we live under won't last forever. What replaces it, and how do you position yourself for the transition?

Veblen's diagnosis still holds up a century later: the people who know how to make things are systematically overruled by the people whose logic is financial. He thought the industrial system could produce far more and far better, but business management holds it back because full efficiency would crater prices.

The century since Veblen has shown us, repeatedly, that non-market coordination works. Toyota's production system coordinated supply chains through quality and flow rather than adversarial price signals, and it outperformed everyone. Walmart runs the most sophisticated logistics operation on Earth with no internal market whatsoever. The technical infrastructure for post-market coordination already exists. It's just been captured by the price system.

The issue is that operational excellence alone isn't enough to survive. Lia DiBello's research on business expertise shows that it rests on three pillars: operations, market, and capital. The best leaders know which matters most at any given moment. You can build a Deming-inspired operation with world-class quality and still die because the capital environment selects against you.

The capital leg of the triad dominates, and in the current US economy it pulls investment away from industrial capacity and toward financial and ethereal assets. Just look at Musk: he built extraordinary industrial capacity with SpaceX and Tesla, and even he is getting pulled toward selling AI applications, because that's the best allocation of industrial capacity.

So how could we possibly transition away from a market economy? I think there are really only two paths. Either the state becomes dramatically more competent and suddenly prioritizes long-term industrial reinvestment over short-term consumption — which requires a long-termism that modern democracies cannot sustain. Or firms grow powerful enough to rival states and develop the vision to see that what was once a "firm" could become a new and better kind of institution. Neither seems likely without a major crisis that actually allows new entrants to gain power.

It is much more likely that the best an individual or small group can do is to build a firm that is resilient and capable of riding the waves of modern markets. That way you have the chance to help build something better should an opportunity arise.

None of this touches on what seems most important, the question of the goal of a civilization, without which we are left questioning what the point of industrial capacity and the subsequent material plenty even is. We'll leave that discussion for the future.