America is in the midst of a potentially transformative moment with regard to regulation. After decades of rapid and steady expansion, the Trump administration promises to deliver an unprecedented retraction of red tape. Candidate Trump called regulation “a hidden tax on American consumers, and a massive lead weight on the American economy,” and he campaigned…
Read MoreIn The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism—a canonical work of economic sociology in the 1970s and ’80s—Daniel Bell argued that the productive and consumptive sides of capitalism had fallen into contradiction. Capitalism continued to rely on the Protestant ethic of sobriety and delayed gratification in the sphere of production, yet, contradictorily, had come to rely on modernist hedonism and credit purchasing in the sphere of consumption. Modern capitalism needed people to be sober by day and swingers by night. What is more, the displacement of the Protestant ethic by hedonism, Bell argued, was primarily the work of capitalism itself. Its mass production urbanized the population and created an economy of abundance…
Read MoreConservative polemicists have long presented a caricature of a decadent liberal elite, and liberals have offered a competing caricature of a conservative plutocracy. But few have attempted to understand how these ostensible opponents function as elements of the same elite, or how they have participated in maintaining the broader intellectual, political, and economic status quo.…
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