Some Clear Explanations from KSR

I'm not sure how I missed this essay by Kim Stanley Robinson back in November 2018. Here's the part I saw quoted that took me to it:

This market that rules the world also systematically underprices things. Sellers compete to charge less than each other, eventually lowering their prices below what they paid to make their products in the first place. Those costs are ignored or hidden in various ways, but they are never unpaid; they are merely translated into other, more dangerous currencies. Cutting labor costs? That means hurting workers. Externalizing environmental costs? That means pollution damaging the biosphere, which ultimately is our extended body and our life-support system. The upshot is this: Neoliberal market capitalism, an experiment in power that since 1980 has been doubling down on the previous forms of capitalism, is wrecking people’s lives and creating a climate catastrophe.

Only the richest people on Earth defend this system, perhaps because they benefit enough in the present, and are still insulated enough from the impacts, to outweigh in their minds the obvious costs to others and our future. They nervously assure each other that things are okay, at Davos and elsewhere, but they can only hope things will hold together through their lifetimes...

And later he made this point:

Political economy is not the same as economics. Right now, economics is the study of capitalism as such. There are many university departments and think tanks and hedge funds that study and practice economics in meticulous detail, and they give themselves tenure and awards and huge bonuses for doing that work, but they do not try to imagine a different, better economic system. Tweaks are often suggested, but new systems, no. It’s political economy that did that kind of imaginative work, back in the 19th century, when it was still possible to imagine that a different economic system might be enacted in the world. 

I remember hearing the words "political economy" in college and then much more in graduate school, but never having such a clear idea of what they meant and how it was different from economics, until now.