Fall 2019 / Volume III, Number 3
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Prospects and Challenges for Economic Reform
New Gilded Age or Old Normal?
Since the mid-1970s, inequality has increased under Democratic as well as Republican administrations and Congresses. In retrospect, the four and a half decades from 1933 to 1978 were a historical aberration. The longer-term trend toward more inequality in capitalist economies, which prevailed before this period, has resumed after it. That leads us to conclude that there may well be no technocratic or tax policy fix for capitalism’s tendency to generate ever more inequality…
Corporate Power Beyond Lobbying
The biases that private interests can introduce into politics have always been a key concern for democratic theory. Lobbying in particular has come into the focus of social science research since the beginning of the twentieth century. After a century of study, there is a general consensus that the freedom of political participation creates an…
Squaring the Circular Economy
Phillips and Rozworski are at their best in analyzing the scale and scope of central planning in economies dominated by large corporations. In doing so, they demonstrate the inadequacy of ideological debates premised on the opposition between “free markets” and a “command economy.” People’s Republic of Walmart also scores points against the dwindling band…
Human Capital
Affirming the American Family
Family policy brings into focus the importance of direct, government-driven measures ordered to achieve outcomes in accordance with the common good. For too many years in the United States, however, family policy has, in effect, been caught in the middle between Republican Party libertarianism and Democratic Party welfarism—both out of step with the broad wishes…
Rotten STEM: How Technology Corrupts Education
The U.S. education system spent more than $26 billion on technology in 2018. That’s larger than the entire Israeli military budget. By one estimate, annual global spending on technology in schools will soon total $252 billion. But the technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development and an unredeemable waste…
The Politics of Sebastianismo
The New Brazilian Right
Ten years ago, Brazil was a left-wing success story. The Workers’ Party’s generous cash-transfer programs for poor families, bankrolled by buoyant commodity prices and constructed on a preexisting foundation of fiscal discipline, helped to lift millions out of poverty. Constitutional order was maintained. The economy grew, and arrangements were reached between the reigning patronage party…
Indispensable Nation Nostalgia
What might be called “Indispensable Nation Nostalgia” represents a misty remembrance of things past by a certain stratum of elite Americans. These pangs tend to afflict a fairly narrow group of people who run, or used to run, foreign policy, along with the coterie of folks that think and write about foreign policy at think tanks and ideas-oriented publications…
The Liberal Order: Views from China
China and the Rule of Law
If any political concept could be said to have universal appeal, it would have to be the rule of law. Virtually no government rejects the idea of the rule of law. On the contrary, most, if not all, governments claim to seek its realization. In 1992, the World Bank officially deemed the rule of law…
New China and the End of American “International Law”
The question plaguing contemporary analysis of China is what its emergence, or reemergence, as a great power means. To answer this question, we must confront the fact that we have turned, even in China, away from the concept of “great powers”—or even states—in writing the history of modern politics and international relations. Over the past…
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
The Financialization of the American Elite
On October 1, 2018, the newly christened Klarman Hall opened to much acclaim on the campus of Harvard Business School. The stunning $120 million building houses a conference center as well as a gleaming auditorium built around a 32-million-pixel, 1,250-square-foot video wall and a state-of-the-art, modular design that seats up to a thousand attendees. To mark the opening, the school held a daylong series of speeches and lectures, headlined by the building’s namesake and one of the school’s wealthiest living graduates, billionaire investor Seth Klarman…
Trivial Pursuit
It would not be possible in the space of even a lengthy review to do justice to either the scope or the style of Brooks and Papola’s cinematic achievement. I can only share some of what I saw. After a brief credit sequence we meet “Arthur,” which is what I will call the Brooks-esque character in the film. (I am going to assume we are not quite meant to identify him with the real-life Brooks, who cannot possibly be as stupid and sinister by turns as this guy…