Professor Rae uses the case of Polaroid cameras to highlight key features of the capitalist system. Polaroid's business model, corporate culture, and firm trajectory are discussed. Important firm decisions are analyzed, including product offerings and mergers. Professor Rae explores factors that led to Polaroid's demise, including the company's relentless focus on scientific innovation at the expense of market research and product development. Polaroid was unable to keep up with market changes, such as the advent of the one-hour photo processing and the revolution in digital photography.

Reading assignment:
Case: "Polaroid: Creation & Destruction Inside the Family Camera," Yale School of Management Case 08-037.

1. Exploding Worlds and Course Introduction
2. Thomas Malthus and Inevitable Poverty
3. Counting the Fingers of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand
4. Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and an Economic System Incapable of Coming to Rest
5. Property, Freedom, and the Essential Job of Government
6. Rise of the Joint Stock Corporation
7. Can You Sell a Scheme for Operating on Beating Hearts andMake a Business of It?
8. Mortal Life Cycle of a Great Technology
9. Guest Lecture by Jim Alexander: Managing the Crooked E
10. Guest Lecture by Richard Medley: Entrepreneurship in Business Information
11. Guest Lecture by Will Goetzmann: Institutions and Incentives in Mortgages and Mortgage-Backed Securities
12. Accountability and Greed in Investment Banking
13. The Mortgage Meltdown in Cleveland
14. The Political and Judicial Elements of American Capitalism
15. Mass Affluence Comes to the Western World
16. Braudel's Bell Jar
17. The Case of Mister Balram Halwai
18. Microfinance in South India
19. Plight of the Bottom Billion
20. Policy Targets for Capitalist Development
21. Guest Lecture by Paolo Zanonni, Part I
22. Guest Lecture by Paolo Zanonni, Part II
23. Marrying the Devil in Texas
24. Capitalist Enterprise and Clean Water for a Bolivian City

In this course, we will seek to interpret capitalism using ideas from biological evolution: firms pursuing varied strategies and facing extinction when those strategies fail are analogous to organisms struggling for survival in nature. For this reason, it is less concerned with ultimate judgment of capitalism than with the ways it can be shaped to fit our more specific objectives – for the natural environment, public health, alleviation of poverty, and development of human potential in every child. Each book we read will be explicitly or implicitly an argument about good and bad consequences of capitalism.

Course Structure:
This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 50 minutes, was videotaped for Open Yale Courses in Fall 2009.