> Capitalism is enormously productive but has many limitations. Some socialist institutions actually work well in a capitalist economy, but pure socialism hasn’t tended to work at all.
But this is actually a counter-example. Most socialists (and certainly all of the originators and main theorists) would contend that socialism represents a pure qualitative break with capitalism, that socialism is at odds with capitalism in many ways (law of value, commodity production, class society) and that to speak of implementing "socialist policies" is worse than meaningless, it is a misunderstanding. They have some good reasons to say that socialism represents such a qualitative break with capitalism.
So from my point of view, you can start out thinking "gray" (most people uninformed on the scholarly work on the difference between capitalism and socialism take the point of view of the article) but when you look further, you actually see that it's black and white.
This example, at least, undermined the author's point. "Quantitative scale-based thinking" means that quality rarely enters the mix (except, perplexingly, in the example that "trying heroin once is bad"). Quantitative thinking is not always a perfect fit, because (1) it assumes the object under investigation is quantifiable, (2) it assumes the object is mathematically and formal-logically comparable, (3) quantitative models often simplify beyond how a qualitative model would (as an example, Samuelson's "commodity 1" and "commodity 2", or the presumption that inputs=outputs in Steedman).
Qualitative and quantitative thinking are both important, and the preference for quantitative over qualitative has become increasingly common; as a famous German economist once pointed out (in the criticism of Bentham's utilitarianism), quality logically preceeds quantity. If you don't know what you're talking about, its measurement will be a lot more difficult. This is the same argument levelled at Ricardo (the confusion of form, substance and magnitude into one monstrous mess).