Bhaskar Sunkara

Things Bhaskar Says on Podcasts

Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of The Nation magazine and the founding editor of Jacobin.

Where to Find Them

Bhaskar Sunkara writes The Nation's Substack and writes The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali . They have also been a guest on Lex Fridman Podcast , Odd Lots , The Ezra Klein Show , Interesting Times with Ross Douthat , Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast , Conversations with Coleman , Luke Savage and Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast . They also write for Bhaskar Sunkara on Substack.

Recently: “Bhaskar Sunkara Thinks the Market Has a Place Under Socialism” on Odd Lots (October 2026); “Take Action Now: Stop the Arming of Israel” on The Nation's Substack (October 2026); “'Socialist Manifesto' author on past failures and governing in the real world” on Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast (October 2026); “Rick Wilson & Bhaskar Sunkara” on Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast (October 2026); “Can Democratic Socialism Save America?” on The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali (September 2026); “Take Action Now: Sign for Climate Week” on The Nation's Substack (September 2026).

What They Said

“I think AI can help form a better plan, but it wouldn't actually help you execute that plan. ... My normal response there is to point to incentive problems. ... 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.” — Bhaskar Sunkara, Odd Lots

The socialist author and Jacobin founder was asked whether AI could finally solve the old problem of central planning. He said market socialism is now the norm on the socialist left, and that he sides with the free-market economists in the socialist calculation debate.

Odd Lots · 2026-10-22 Permalink → Listen →
Odd Lots Around 47:26 into the episode
Bhaskar Sunkara

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. Well, this is

Tracy Alloway

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

Bhaskar Sunkara

…think it still doesn't make sense. Like, 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 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 this is probably the largest grouping of a very fragmented set of set of beliefs. But serious interrogation with the history of socialist economies and also just thinking and laying out, we spend 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…

Joe Weisenthal

know, when 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…

Bhaskar Sunkara

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 work. They're modeling. If you believe

Joe Weisenthal

in a super intelligent AI, we are not going to revisit this in 10 years. Even

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

Collections They Appear In