As recent Supreme Court cases make clear, the conservative legal movement seeks to replace the New Deal settlement not with a libertarian vision of market freedom, but rather an arrangement in which the market is embedded in a conservative Christian social vision.
In charting economists’ pernicious influence on public policy, Beth Popp Berman contrasts an “economic style,” which focuses on efficiency, choice, and competition, with an alternative approach that favors equality, stability, and democratic participation. But that framing is not faithful to the actual debates that took place, out of which the economic style achieved its dominance, because it gives no account of the alternative economic views and theories that were displaced.
Why have Democrats remained committed to an incrementalist, modestly ambitious vision of governance, even as the country has faced unprecedented challenges? One critical yet underappreciated piece of the explanation is the rise of a distinctive “economic style of reasoning” that has become prevalent in Washington.
The existing system of international economic law is under great strain. This post offers a reading of the problem and proposes alternative directions for the future. In brief, the system has evolved from what John Ruggie called “embedded liberalism” to what David M. Trubek and I describe as “embedded neoliberalism.” The past couple of decades have witnessed something of a truce between those who designed the system and those who now are actors within it. But today this truce is largely crumbling.
When vacant land and structures fall into the hands of the state, new possibilities emerge. How can local governments transform these assets into co-governed spaces?
Hot dogs are not sandwiches, work meetings are not retreats, and shareholders are not investors. Yet only one of these conceptual mistakes illicitly lends support to the idea that all corporate activity should benefit shareholders.
Over the past four decades, a tidal wave of corporate mergers has resulted in industry concentration, higher prices, and reduced productive capacity. The U.S. wireless industry in the 2010s offers a case study of the public benefits of strong anti-merger law.
Jobs have come roaring back since the big losses of 2020, GDP has grown at its fastest annual rate in nearly four decades, and family balance sheets have become much stronger. Why, then, are Americans so unhappy about the economy?
In Braddock, Pennsylvania – home to America’s first mill for the mass production of steel – more than a third of residents now live beneath the poverty line. How did Braddock go from a steel town to a hospital town to broke?
We live in a condition in which capital drives significant social reforms while also undermining their impact and longevity by leaving destabilizing matters of economic inequality unaddressed. From this perspective, current LGBTQ+ victories are built on a shoddy foundation.
In the wake of a historic victory by India’s farmers, Veena Dubal and Navyug Gill reconvene to discuss the events that have unfolded over the past year, how to understand Modi’s capitulation, and what lessons other social movements can draw from this victory.
Muscles and arteries. Hammers and parasites. Addictions and complexes. Destin Jenkins concludes our Bonds of Inequality symposium by reflecting on the political implications of the metaphors we use to describe municipal debt.
Powerful monopolies have captured our core communication infrastructures, subjected them to the unbridled pursuit of advertising revenues, and generated profound social harms. Media democracy, as a political and intellectual project, seeks to provide solid theoretical foundations from which to understand and respond to this worsening crisis.
To ensure support for its Global War on Terror, the United States has exploited the Pakistani government’s reliance on foreign credit to guarantee cooperation in US counterinsurgency operations. In leveraging its role as a lender to provide Pakistan with short-term financial relief, the United States has deepened Pakistan’s economic dependency, undermined the nation’s chance for a more equal domestic political and economic arrangement, and consolidated the power of its domestic military elite.
Supply chains, properly understood, are political entities seeking to govern us. Once we appreciate this fact, it becomes easier to see how we might hold this form of corporate power to account.
