U.S. trade deficits measure the gap between the income generated at home and the amount spent on consumption and investment. Without the U.S. government’s deficits, spending demand would have been lower and, unless the trade deficit fell by the same amount, domestic output and employment would have fallen. As the United States had a structural liquidity trap, either the trade deficit had to fall, unemployment had to rise, or the United States had to run a large persistent budget deficit. The decision made in favor of budget deficits was not because they were welcome; rather, the alternatives seemed either unattainable in the case of lower trade deficits, or unbearable in the case of unemployment. It is, however, a policy that is no longer viable, because the rate at which the national debt is rising is much faster than the trend growth rate of national income…

Smith des­paired of ever returning to a premercantile system precisely because of the problem of corporate capture. Thanks in no small part to his own efforts, he was wrong. But in reducing The Wealth of Nations to a polemic against tariffs, we have managed to end up exactly where he did not think we should be: allowing corporate interests to wield too much influence over government and undermining the public interest as a result. Nearly a quarter of a millennium after Smith first identified the problem, we are, in a sense, back to where he started. But just as we overcame the infamous abuse of the monopolists who prevailed in earlier times, so can we overcome them again today, as long as we recognize the true nature of the problem. It’s not tariffs: it’s power…

A new consensus is emerging, or maybe an old consensus is reemerging, within the Democratic Party: namely, that “it’s the economy, stupid.” The party can no longer win on “defending democracy,” protecting rights to abortion and same-sex marriage, and modest defense of preexisting welfare and entitlement programs. The neoliberals who once trafficked in cultural policing have returned to insisting that, when Democrats open their mouths, it should be to say something about the economy. But what should they say? For these newly politically conscious Democrats, this is the difficult part, and this is the backdrop of the furious “abundance debate” consuming left-liberal circles since the debut of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s much-talked-about book…

Darryl Campbell’s Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software seeks to explain the unexplainable digital webs around us. Campbell is both a veteran of the tech world (having worked at Amazon, Uber, Tinder, and other firms) and a chronicler of it (as a former reporter at The Verge). Armed with this experience and perspective, he tells the story of the rise of “managerial software” and the takeover of the tech industry by a class of narrow-minded, bungling elite managers. Fatal Abstraction gets at something essential by placing the unholy marriage of managerialism and software at the center of modern tech’s dysfunctions, but he misattributes their cause. For the unity between software and the managers, between the Computer Revolution and the Managerial Revolution, is no arbitrary, reversible thing but the reflection of an enduring tension between the growth of information and the need for control. Software has not been co-opted by managerialism; it is co-constitutive with it…

Twenty years ago, allegations that a large corporation was facilitating sexual predation of children would have been widely disseminated and the perpetrators punished, or at least noticed. But today, it goes largely unremarked, unnoticed. There have been dozens of scandals involving Facebook, everything from political censorship to a UN report accusing the firm of aiding genocide in Myanmar to Mark Zuckerberg offering to let Xi Jinping name his firstborn child. It’s evident that Meta is a threat to American children, insofar as Zuckerberg was forced at a congressional hearing to apologize to the parents of kids exploited on the platform. It is also a threat to American national security, insofar as it has now been confirmed that Meta explicitly offered to help transfer technology to China so that nation could outcompete American firms. But our political leadership class just cannot muster the energy or willpower to enforce any sort of moral or security order, and no one expects laws to be anything but guidelines for the powerful…

Nearly seventy years after its creation, the S&P 500 may be fit for purpose, but it is clearly no longer the narrow one of the 1950s. While the S&P was initially a tool for measurement and understanding, it has over time become a central actor in shaping investor behavior. The widespread use of S&P-based products now actively influences the market the index was intended merely to observe. Though not a true observer paradox in the quantum physics sense, the feedback loop between measurement and subject has become pervasive. The consequences have been many, but perhaps the most significant one has been the widening gap between investment in the stock market and actual ownership of businesses through the stock market. This phenomenon, in turn, is a distinguishing characteristic of “financialization,” a criticism leveled against Wall Street in recent decades for focusing on generating financial returns regardless of, or even in opposition to, outcomes in the real economy…

Democracy is messy, complicated, divisive, compromised, emotional, and prone to disappointment. Most democracies suffer periods of overbearing executive domination alternating with periods of diffuse oligarchy. This does not make an authoritarian regime, unless one is convinced that democracy actually means that one’s partisan side (who are naturally smart, well bred, and morally just elites) can or should never lose. In at least two periods in U.S. history, for example, we have seen major episodes of fraught regime politics: that of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime government during the American Civil War and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive-dominant New Deal administration in the 1930s and 1940s. While these eras are rightly remembered and celebrated as high points in the life and evolution of American democracy, the fact is that persistent rights violations, court-packing schemes, executive aggrandizement, bureaucratic manipulation, one-party hegemony, and per­sonalist politics were all prominent. Someone looking for “democratic backsliding” or burgeoning autocratization could certainly find piece­meal evidence in these periods. And yet American democracy survived…

How to describe decadence? It is easier to agree on its features than to arrive at a consensus conceptualization: economic decline, low productivity growth, withered state capacities, and a social landscape characterized by high inequality and crumbling infrastructure—but also fused with high-tech innovations, often directed to surveillance and control. But what could it all mean, other than “down”? The concept du jour is premised on the notion that we are leaving capitalism and entering a new form of feudalism, which recalls the hierarchy, domination, and stagnation of the old. This understanding of contemporary decline has given rise to the technofeudal thesis. And while the observations of technofeudal theorists are not without use, feudal talk is ultimately a distraction from decay; it is a mediatic plaything. It cannot function as a fire alarm, nor a pair of binoculars. What its theorists describe may be real, but they misunderstand its nature…

With the return of the Trump administration, the worst of America’s self-induced border crisis ended abruptly. Trump’s new National Defense Areas and personnel increases have made the U.S.-Mexico border more secure than ever. The Biden-era programs that encouraged asylum fraud and immigration parole have been eliminated. But challenges remain.

Any solution to the Cuban conundrum, therefore, will require more pragmatism from both sides. But until the old orthodoxies can be rejected and replaced, citizens on the island will remain hostage to the pointless and counterproductive machinations of neoconservative grandees in Miami and party apparatchiks in Havana, both fighting a Cold War without end…

To try to be a meaningful bridge from Europe to America, that’s a daunting project for even the most agile of European leaders. Understandably, most do not even try. The United States, after all, was born in revolt from Europe—from the “Old World.” The great exception proves the rule. Winston Churchill was a fellow member of the Anglosphere who came to power at a time of crisis, the Second World War, that begged for close cooperation between Europe and America. As for Thatcher, she was never, as Churchill was for Americans, an adopted folk hero. She was a link to the Reagan Revolution and its cadres. In her Thatcher-patterned play for ideological sympathizers across the pond, Giorgia Meloni’s target is what she vaguely calls, in I Am Giorgia, a deeper America…

Like the civil rights movement, the successes of the women’s movement have bent the moral arc of the universe. That, however, is not the question here. Our focus is on what feminism’s effect has been on American party politics. And from the standpoint of what feminists and Democrats have wanted to achieve, the answer is decidedly mixed. Beginning in the 1970s, as Republicans wooed the religious Right, and continuing through the Donald Trump era, feminism has brought women into the Democratic Party and strengthened its ranks. It has also opened new avenues for women’s leadership in the states and in Washington. Opposition to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade also helped Democrats win the House of Representatives in 2018. In the first months of the second Trump administration, college-educated women have led the charge against what has been, for them, something of a political horror show. As a group, they have been the most critical of Trump’s stances. But the preeminence of feminism and of college-educated women has also provoked a backlash, one that’s benefited Republicans while em­powering a stridently anti-feminist conservative opposition…

Men in our society, especially young men, are in the position of not knowing who they are, what they want, or how they are supposed to live, and of being, in an anthropological sense, exampleless. The cliché of American masculinity, widely disseminated in the academy, is that masculinity is in a crisis. This is the exact inverse of the truth. Masculinity is desperate for a crisis. It is docile, unsure, and formless. At most, it is at the germinal phase of crisis, lacking a catalytic agent to propel it to its full-blown state, which at least can be registered and reckoned with. After all, crisis implies that something is happening, that something is at stake. The uncatalyzed proto-crisis, or the noncrisis, of American masculinity is repressed, unexpressed, yet omnipresent. The proto-crisis exists in the first place because tradition has been replaced by representation. Instead of learning from fathers and grandfathers and brothers, from coaches and teachers and priests and pastors, the American male learns from watching images on screens: films and television have been playing the role of surrogate father for a long time now, but at least those media tended to have forms, arcs, and archetypes. Today’s privileged mediatic forms—five-second clips, parasocial personality brands, algorithmically constructed collective identities—do not have even that…