At the Blog
On Monday, Sophina Clark proposed a non-reformist response to the shortage and maldistribution of working hours: work-spreading. Instead of pursuing a policy of infinite work, as the United States has largely done for the past century, she argues, we should pursue a policy of freed time. For this approach to succeed, highly paid white-collar workers will have to confront their own attachment to a work-based social order.
On Tuesday, Jason Jackson kicked off a symposium on his new book, Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India. Tracing debates about foreign investment policy since the late colonial period, Jackson shows how Indian elites developed a moral hierarchy of market actors, enabling certain firms to position their interests as good for society and thus deserving of regulatory protection.
And on Thursday, Amy Cohen continued the symposium, considering what Jackson’s framework might tell us about the recent return of patrimonial capitalism in the United States. Is this merely an inversion of the prevailing moral hierarchy, or a post-moral turn in which firms no longer justify their privileged status in terms of a shared future?
In LPE Land
In Phenomenal World, Lenore Palladino explains how private credit has become the unregulated industry at the heart of the American economy and how we might address this looming crisis.
In the New York Times, Lev Menand and Joel Michaels lay out why Trump’s latest tariff gambit is also illegal. Maybe the Supreme Court shouldn’t let them disrupt the economy for a year before putting a halt to them?
On Death Panel, Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with William Boyd about how “risk assessment” became a central focus of regulation since the 1970s, and how this shift resulted in law and policy far less likely to protect against environmental and health hazards.
In Equator, Melinda Cooper discusses how the billionaire patriarchs of the American far-right want to rule an economy of masters and servants.
In the New York City Policy Forum, Jack Gross interviews Pablo Bustinduy, Spain’s Minister of Social Rights, Consumer Affairs, and the 2030 Agenda, about the impressive policy achievements of Spain’s progressive governing coalition—from parental leave and child allowances to consumer protections and rent freezes.
In the New York Review of Books, Trevor Jackson reflects on the struggle for the Federal Reserve.
