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Winter 2020 / Volume IV, Number 4
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Financial and Social Capital

Reshoring Production and Restoring American Prosperity: A Practical Policy Agenda

The Covid-19 pandemic has made one thing absolutely clear: China is the workshop of the world. This has significant strategic and geopolitical implications. By playing its initially weak hand to perfec­tion, China transformed its position of dependence into one of dominance during the last several decades. The highly touted inter­dependence of countries in manu­facturing processes…

Savings Glut or Investment Dearth: Rethinking Monetary Policy

Unasked questions are unanswered ones, and a virtue of Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth is that it forces attention on why governments ever go to the expense of issuing bonds in the first place. Her critique of the weaknesses of conventional economic policy should receive wide acceptance. Things become more complicated, however…

Utah’s Economic Exceptionalism

On my drive home from work on March 11, 2020, I could tell something was awry. The Utah Jazz game against the Okla­homa City Thunder was set to tip off, but the radio play-by-play announcer seemed confused. Players and officials mingled on the court, but nobody walked to the center circle for tipoff. There was…

Up from Laissez-Faire: Reclaiming Conservative Economics

The market fundamentalists are wrong, regardless of who wins the election. The reemergence of “economic nationalism” does not represent a departure from the Anglo-American conservative tradition; it is a long overdue return to it. It is the doctrinaire lib­ertarians and neoliberals who represent something outside of…

Fault Lines in the Global Economy

Trade Wars Are Strategic Sector Wars

Trade Wars Are Class Wars is an excellent guide to one kind of trade war, the competition for limited global consumer demand, a trade war which is indeed a class war within nations. About the other kind of trade war, the competition among nations for strategic indus­tries, the book has nothing to say. Those seeking guidance on this issue must look elsewhere…

Misunderstanding Investment in the United States and China

America and China have very different views of the role of invest­ment in creating economic growth. In America, we believe in shareholder value. Companies should invest in activities that have high rates of return, which will maximize productivity and growth. The job of government is to get out of the way. China believes the opposite.…

Foxconn’s Rise and Labor’s Fall in Global China

Amid the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing U.S.-China “trade war,” many multinational corporations are reconsidering the opportunities and risks of global supply chains, particularly those based in China. Within China, another long-festering ques­tion is growing more acute on the ground, even though it has faded from international view. Hundreds of millions of Chinese workers, toiling…

Nonliberal Capitalism: The Exception or the Rule?

Branko Milanović’s Capitalism, Alone is not a thick book, but its title and subtitle hint at its ambition. Epigraphs from Aristotle, Plato, Marx, Adam Smith, and Max Weber do the same. Milanović varyingly plays the unsentimental historian, the scientific-minded economist, the policy wonk, the sociologist, and the moralist…

Soft Power

A New Cultural Cold War?

With or without Covid-19, the United States and China were headed for a clash. The economic fallout from the pandemic will merely accelerate developments that had already been set in mo­tion by the rise of China as a strategic and technological rival. Nor does this seem likely to end when Trump leaves office, whether that…

Regime Change with Chinese Characteristics

There is something a little unsettling about a nation that deliberately sets about increasing its “soft power.” Soft power, in the classic 1990 formulation by the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, is a nation’s ability to persuade other countries to follow its lead willingly, thanks to the appeal of its culture, political values…

Cultures of Alienation

The Forest for the Trees: Billionaires in the Wilderness

In America over the last fifty years, class divisions have widened in both economic and social terms. Gone are the days when the upper, middle, and working classes attended the same churches and participated in the same civic organizations. Gone too are the days when most American children attended the same schools…

The New Superfluous Men

It may seem quaint to recall the hand-wringing that accompanied the cancellation of the South by Southwest music and film festival back in March 2020. Yet one of the documentaries slated to premier there has nevertheless resonated in a post-Covid world. Focusing on five young men who channel their alienation into offensive internet humor, Alex…

Liberal Fundamentalism: A Sociology of Wokeness

Six years on from the events at Ferguson, Missouri, and the explosion of cultural radicalism that Matthew Yglesias calls the “Great Awokening,” it’s now possible to see the woke movement for what it is: a decentered liberal ideology whose moral innovators impel it toward fundamentalism. The Awokening’s roots are more liberal than socialist. At this…

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