Wall Street and the U.S. VC industry have mostly ignored China’s guidance funds. But anyone interested in the future of U.S.-Chinese economic competition—or maybe just the future—should not. Guidance funds involve subsidies to industry through equity investments; unlike previ­ous Chinese methods of delivering subsidies through cheap loans or outright grants, they involve some market involvement. Guidance funds also show the enormous resources China is directing toward industrial policy, and the country’s ambitions to not just catch up with, but to actually surpass, the United States in advanced technology…

The most powerful economic force financialization has unleashed to benefit share­holders is not greed, but consensus. By creating incentives to maximize overall industry profit pools and minimize competitive investment, a shareholder-centric asset governance model has undermined the com­petitiveness of markets and encouraged a de facto coordination among firms that benefits asset owners at the expense of broader prosperity…

As Hannah Farber’s Underwriters of the United States makes clear, property insurance is a powerful social force in any complex economy. And surprisingly, this excellent academic analysis of underwriting in the American shipping industry, up until 1860, has much to say about America today. Most of all, it makes us consider how corporate entities, and more generally concentrations of private wealth and power, can and should interact, and be permitted to interact, with the rest of the nation…

The current set of rules generate dysfunctionality. But this dysfunctionality does not stem from a mismatch between the alleged needs of an intangible economy and contemporary institutions. Contemporary institutions serve the inter­ests of IPR-rich firms and a small set of financial firms quite well, if we understand those interests as maximizing the volume of profit that those firms capture, and the diversion of those profits…

America wants to decarbonize. Tackling climate change has broad public support. The primary avenue we’re pursuing to achieve this goal is the decarbonization of our electricity system and “electrifying everything.” This is more than achievable; indeed, we have historical prece­dents. France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history; since…

In the end, regardless of U.S. foreign policy positions, the different trajectories of Afghanistan and Ukraine show that nations have their own capacities for self-determination, and nations choose their own futures. Ukraine is a lesson in how foreign invasion, as well as the higher pursuits of language, culture, and identity, can inspire a sense of national solidarity. Afghanistan is a lesson in how foreign intervention, money, and factionalism can erase the same dreams…

The Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have answered the question of the European order by reinstating the model, long believed to be history, of the Cold War: a Europe united under American leadership as a transatlantic bridgehead for the United States in an alliance against a common enemy…

In The Triumph of Broken Promises, Fritz Bartel convincingly demonstrates that the West won the Cold War because it was better at imposing economic discipline than authoritarian state socialism. But did the process of “breaking promises” end up breaking democracy too?…

The tensions introduced by the prominence of a still partially medieval institution in modern society can only be resolved in two possible ways: the creation of institutions of education and knowledge production on a more modern model; or a partial neo-feudalization of the modalities, if not the class structure, of modern society, a process already underway…

During the pandemic, American politics showed signs of unwonted turbulence. Ideas and actions that had existed on the political fringes assumed center stage. On the right, a political theory called “QAnon” gained acceptance among a sizable minority. On the political left in 2020, conventional protest demonstrations against specific injustices turned into protracted riots and spread nation­wide…

Contemporary social critics, having no recourse to older con­cepts such as honor, must of necessity argue that insulting utterances have the power to cause literal harm to their targets (rather in the manner of a magical incantation); hence the predictable assertion, com­monly heard among modern academics, that words constitute “vio­lence”…

The problem Illich diagnoses is not that the modern world has abandoned Christianity, but that institutionalized Christianity, in the centuries after Christ, initiated destabilizing tendencies that would be radicalized in the modern world. The result was a “temptation to try to manage and, eventually, legislate this new love. . . . This power is claimed first by the Church and later by the many secular institutions stamped from its mold.” Education, medicine, and NGOs promoting development, he argued, are all the Church’s unrecognized offspring.