Today, a growing number of voices call for a new American consensus that looks more like the corporatist world of the New Deal and post–World War II decades. If our present ambitions are to be modeled off this bygone era, however, then it would behoove us to investigate the lives and legacies of the men who made it so. David E. Lilienthal was one of them, and he embodies the New Deal era’s greatest successes and aspirations as well as its most troubling failures and missteps…

Gone are the days when corporate giving was confined to Little League, food banks, and other traditional causes. On today’s cor­porate websites, politically charged initiatives to end social or economic “inequity” or advance racial or environmental “justice” have largely replaced references to noncontroversial charities serving the common good. From the 1960s until a decade or…

The power of big corporations and other large private interests has attracted more attention from within a conservatism that’s refining or redefining itself, occasionally contentiously. For example, Compact magazine cofounder and editor Sohrab Ahmari explores private tyranny and countervailing power in his new book Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do…

Population aging is proceeding apace across the world, but there is little agreement on what to do about it or even whether it is a bad thing at all. On the upside, older, smaller societies will have a correspondingly smaller climate impact, will be able to invest more per child, and will suffer less congestion…

On September 11, 2023, Chile marked the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody military coup that toppled Socialist president Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet, who presided over nearly two decades marked by human rights abuses and radical econom­ic reforms, making the country a laboratory for neoliberal policies…

An historic irony is that the Communist Party of China has fostered an unprecedented wave of entrepreneurship in the developing world, by building mobile broadband networks throughout the Global South. A notionally communist party, that is, has become the most effective propagator of capitalism on record. This conclusion is richly supported by data on broadband…

To state the bias of the reviewer, I do not like the club profiled, with some detachment and flashes of insight and wit, by Angus Deaton in Economics in America, a book organized around economic policy issues and confected from commentaries originally penned over several decades. Deaton, a Scottish immigrant and winner of the Swedish Riks­bank’s prize “in memory of Alfred Nobel”…

When the Trump administration announced its first round of tariffs on China in 2018, few observers believed it would be the start of a new bipartisan consensus on industrial strategy. In each decade that protectionist sentiment rose following the end of the Second World War, calls to shield American industry and jobs were parried away by free trade politicians and appointed officials who…

The Russian-Ukrainian War has seen the rise of new tactics involving small commercial drones, including the use of drones as improvised anti-tank weapons, suicide weapons, and reconnaissance tools for artillery units. Ukraine goes through a staggering ten thousand drones a month—at a minimum. The United States has contributed drone technology to Ukraine in many forms…

Do we live in a world of “ever-increasing change” characterized by “disruptive innovation”? Is “technology moving faster than ever before”? Are these, in fact, “unprecedented times”? Contra the bromides of TED-talkers and Davos men, a growing chorus of contrarian scientists, scholars, and investors hold that the pace of innovation has slowed, not increased…