Winter 2019 / Volume III, Number 4
Economic Policy for a New Era
Disruptive Innovation in America and China
The concept of disruptive innovation arose from the study of innovation in companies, but it can also be applied to nations. In this essay I will use some of the concepts of disruptive innovation to analyze the dynamics of national innovation and growth in America and China.1 The United States is supposed to be the…
Rebuilding British Industry: A Plan for the Post-Brexit Economy
Today Britain finds itself in an odd position. In the wake of the vote to leave the European Union and its aftermath, the Conservative Party has been given a new mandate. A substantial portion of the voting public wants a more independent Britain to pursue national restoration and regeneration. On an emotional level, most of…
Tax Sovereignty in the Age of Global Capital
In January 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found a perhaps unexpected vein of popular support when she proposed raising the top marginal tax rate from 37 percent to 70 percent for those with annual incomes of over $10 million.1 Polling conducted by the Hill and HarrisX soon revealed that 59 percent of Americans supported this idea:…
The Rewards of Poor Performance: CEO, Hedge Fund, and Private Equity Compensation
The story of upward redistribution over the last four decades is overwhelmingly a story of money going to high-end wage-earners. While there has been a shift in income from wages to corporate profits in this century, it appears that this shift is being reversed in the tight labor market of the last four years. That…
Feudalism, Capitalism, and Socialism
America’s Drift toward Feudalism
America’s emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a dramatic break from the past. The United States came on the scene with only vestiges of the old European feudal order—mostly in the plantation economy of the Deep South. There was no hereditary nobility, no national church, and, thanks to George Washington’s modesty, no royal authority. At least among whites, there was also far less poverty in America, compared to Europe’s intense, intractable, multigenerational poverty. In contrast, as Jefferson noted in 1814, America had fewer “paupers,” and the bulk of the population was “fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.” Yet in recent decades…
The Cubicle Archipelago
“Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.” Our current moment of corporate wokeness and “extremely online” pearl-clutching has made this phrase something of a cliché. In its most sympathetic rendering, it means that a free exchange of ideas allows everyone to decide who they wish to associate with…
The Socialist Revival
As the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, so too, it seemed, did the dream of socialism. The German sociologist Rolf Dahrendorf declared, “The point has to be made unequivocally that socialism is dead and that none of its variants can be revived for a world awakening from the double nightmare…
The Politics of the Professional Class
The Characterless Opportunism of the Managerial Class
My first reaction to the work of Barbara Ehrenreich was one of complete indignation and contempt. A professor had assigned Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed (2001) for an English prerequisite at my commuter college—the urban satellite campus for two major universities intended to cater to low-income and nontraditional students. (Go Jaguars!) The book was a committed work of first-person journalism premised on a compelling challenge: to “see whether or not I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day.” What Ehrenreich “revealed” was the constant struggle to make ends meet, a total lack of security in employment, housing, and resources, declining health from backbreaking…
Will Shifting Party Coalitions Change Policy Priorities?
America’s two major political parties appear to be in the process of swapping their historic coalition constituents. With that shift, many of our assumptions about what it means to be a Democrat or a Republican are coming apart at the seams. The most significant development seen in recent polling data is the exodus of college-educated…
The Real Class War
Since at least 2016, the divide between the “working class” and the “elite” has been considered a defining issue in American (and Western) politics. This divide has been defined in occupational terms (“blue collar” versus “information workers”), geographic terms (rural and exurban regions versus major urban cores), and meritocratic terms (non-college-educated versus those with elite…
Questions of Culture
Liberalism and the National Question
Three recent books provoked by the Trump presidency grapple with identity and nationalism, drawing radically different conclusions. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian and staff writer at the New Yorker, wishes that “nation-states didn’t already exist.” She finds them abhorrent. Nevertheless, she allows that as long as the world is organized into nations, it is probably necessary for the United States to be one, with the caveat that ours must be a dry, creedal affair, based on a commitment to democracy and the Constitution with no ethnicity involved. Except, that is…
Missionaries of Humanity: Popular Confucianism in China
In a state where one may not criticize the regime, one learns the art of the unsaid. In China, as in the premodern West, a citizen can complain freely about bad roads or corrupt officials, but it is considered seditious to criticize the form of government. If a citizen does criticize…
Ending the Interregnum: A Way through the Culture War
Politics is fundamentally agonistic. Not all interests and desires can be harmonized. Periods of cultural and economic hegemony supplant one another through material and ideational conflict. Within these periods there are winners and losers. Competing political parties quibble at the margins, but it is rare that an election gives rise to more than superficial change.…