Enron, the Houston-based energy giant that fell on the sword of its own greed in the early 2000s, has become a symbol of financialization and corruption. When people discuss Enron today, they think of its stock market implosion and accounting fraud—and now, thanks to Sam Bankman-Fried, crypto. It’s synonymous with con men. Less attention is…

Katherine Blunt’s California Burning takes its readers through a history of PG&E, its financial motivations amid California’s manic political landscape, and its lack of focus in the face of many distractions on the maintenance of the critical infrastructure in question, all leading to this terrible denouement. Blunt has extensively covered these events…

An economic tool to penalize greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and incentivize the adoption of low-emission technologies is carbon pricing. The goal of carbon pricing is to force the GHG emitter to internalize the costs of abating the negative effects of emissions on society—such as additional health care costs or property damage from extreme weather events—through…

In Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, Cornell sociologist Karen Levy explains how a once highly regarded and well-paid job—which occupied such a place in the Ameri­can cultural consciousness that it was possible for a film like Smokey and the Bandit to become wildly successful—is now bereft of money, glory, or fun, and of characters…

The breakdown of the neoliberal order does not mean that a new one has emerged to take its place. As the dogmas of free trade and marketization slowly become a thing of the past, Eric Helleiner’s book, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History, seems timely. It describes a col­lection of ideas—marginalized during the Cold War—that constitute a third current of thought…

The war in Ukraine has exposed some serious misperceptions about the relative economic size and military power of major nations. Before the war, it was fashionable to say—usually sardonically—that Russia possessed an economy similar in size to that of Italy or smaller than that of Texas. “The Russian economy will be cut in half,” President…

Between 2017 and 2018, a single Chinese billionaire bought over 140,000 acres of land next to an American military base in southern Texas, and the government did not even know how many LLCs were initially involved in buying the land. It was not even the federal govern­ment that discovered these purchases originally, but a small…

From the early 1990s to the present day, Chinese policy speeches and documents regarding the economy have been rife with the expression hongguan tiaokong. Translating this phrase into English is not entirely straightforward. Hong means large, wide, vast, and guan means to watch, to view, as well as appearance. Their combination…

As Republicans rubbed their eyes on the morning of November 9, it became painfully clear that the much-predicted red wave had turned out to be a mirage. A slew of unremarkable Republican candidates lost their bids to unseat Democratic congressmen, and prominent “MAGA-style” Trump-backed candidates lost as well. Both groups within the GOP blamed the other, with MAGA Republicans saying that the establishment GOP was milquetoast, and mainstream Republicans criticizing the crass populism of many Trump candidates. In spite of rampant inflation and general economic anxiety, Republicans only nar­rowly reclaimed the House of Representatives and failed to take the U.S. Senate. Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, many…

American government is crippled, but not for the reasons most people think. Hopeful talk of an imminent American political realignment too often elides its premise: that an alignment exists to be rearranged. Of course, this assumption holds for the electoral aspects of American politics. Running on that endlessly renewable energy that aims not so much…

The Federalist Society may be the one legacy institution that both old‑line conservatives and the New Right admire. And Fed Soc bears none of the unsightly blemishes of other conservative organizations, staffed as they are with incompetents, weirdos, and malcontents. The success of the Federalist Society also means that it is one of the most powerful…

White Noise catapulted DeLillo from a novelist on the fringes of American culture to the literary mainstream. It received immediate critical acclaim, winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1985. Almost forty years later, it’s still taught in university classrooms as a masterpiece of late twentieth-century American fiction, and one that seems to grow increasingly relevant…

Western politics has seen a shift in values and assumptions. We have reached the end of the end of history. Alternatives await. Whether in the form of conservative populism or economic progressivism, they often appear more creative and compelling than the status quo. Though insurgent movements of the Right and the Left have met with varying degrees of success…