Within days after he seized power in the 1961 military coup d’état in South Korea, Major General Park Chung-hee ordered the arrest of fifty-one of the country’s leading businessmen. The head of Samsung, the largest chaebol (family-owned conglomerate), who had been travelling in Japan, was immediately placed under house arrest when he returned to Korea.…
Read MoreIn the 2020 election cycle, corporate America seems under attack from all directions. Elizabeth Warren and Mark Zuckerberg are in a war of words; Bernie Sanders has proposed codetermination, partial employee ownership, and other major corporate governance reforms; Joe Biden has called for insurance company executives to be jailed; and Donald Trump regularly attacks Jeff…
Read MoreOn a great many metrics, a strong and innovative financial services sector contributes significantly to growth, jobs, and productivity in the wider economy. For example, it is well established that measures of financial depth—such as the size of the banking sector, the market capitalization of stock markets, and the scale of corporate debt markets—have an…
Read MorePolitics is fundamentally agonistic. Not all interests and desires can be harmonized. Periods of cultural and economic hegemony supplant one another through material and ideational conflict. Within these periods there are winners and losers. Competing political parties quibble at the margins, but it is rare that an election gives rise to more than superficial change.…
Read MoreThree recent books provoked by the Trump presidency grapple with identity and nationalism, drawing radically different conclusions. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian and staff writer at the New Yorker, wishes that “nation-states didn’t already exist.” She finds them abhorrent. Nevertheless, she allows that as long as the world is organized into nations, it is probably necessary for the United States to be one, with the caveat that ours must be a dry, creedal affair, based on a commitment to democracy and the Constitution with no ethnicity involved. Except, that is…
Read MoreAmerica’s two major political parties appear to be in the process of swapping their historic coalition constituents. With that shift, many of our assumptions about what it means to be a Democrat or a Republican are coming apart at the seams. The most significant development seen in recent polling data is the exodus of college-educated…
Read MoreAs the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, so too, it seemed, did the dream of socialism. The German sociologist Rolf Dahrendorf declared, “The point has to be made unequivocally that socialism is dead and that none of its variants can be revived for a world awakening from the double nightmare…
Read MoreAmerica’s emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a dramatic break from the past. The United States came on the scene with only vestiges of the old European feudal order—mostly in the plantation economy of the Deep South. There was no hereditary nobility, no national church, and, thanks to George Washington’s modesty, no royal…
Read MoreIn January 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found a perhaps unexpected vein of popular support when she proposed raising the top marginal tax rate from 37 percent to 70 percent for those with annual incomes of over $10 million.1 Polling conducted by the Hill and HarrisX soon revealed that 59 percent of Americans supported this idea:…
Read MoreToday Britain finds itself in an odd position. In the wake of the vote to leave the European Union and its aftermath, the Conservative Party has been given a new mandate. A substantial portion of the voting public wants a more independent Britain to pursue national restoration and regeneration. On an emotional level, most of…
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