To paraphrase economist Robert Solow, once you start thinking about state capacity, it’s hard to think about anything else. Or, at least, that’s been the case for Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America, a deputy CTO during the Obama administration, and the au­thor of Recoding America, a scintillating new book about how government services are actually implemented. Pahlka’s camp of policy wonks (of which I am a member) is broadly concerned with improving state capacity, the ability of the government to accomplish its policy goals. Pahlka is most interested in what happens when policies get implemented…

Do we live in a world of “ever-increasing change” characterized by “disruptive innovation”? Is “technology moving faster than ever before”? Are these, in fact, “unprecedented times”? Contra the bromides of TED-talkers and Davos men, a growing chorus of contrarian scientists, scholars, and investors hold that the pace of innovation has slowed, not increased…

The Russian-Ukrainian War has seen the rise of new tactics involving small commercial drones, including the use of drones as improvised anti-tank weapons, suicide weapons, and reconnaissance tools for artillery units. Ukraine goes through a staggering ten thousand drones a month—at a minimum. The United States has contributed drone technology to Ukraine in many forms…

When the Trump administration announced its first round of tariffs on China in 2018, few observers believed it would be the start of a new bipartisan consensus on industrial strategy. In each decade that protectionist sentiment rose following the end of the Second World War, calls to shield American industry and jobs were parried away by free trade politicians and appointed officials who…

To state the bias of the reviewer, I do not like the club profiled, with some detachment and flashes of insight and wit, by Angus Deaton in Economics in America, a book organized around economic policy issues and confected from commentaries originally penned over several decades. Deaton, a Scottish immigrant and winner of the Swedish Riks­bank’s prize “in memory of Alfred Nobel”…

An historic irony is that the Communist Party of China has fostered an unprecedented wave of entrepreneurship in the developing world, by building mobile broadband networks throughout the Global South. A notionally communist party, that is, has become the most effective propagator of capitalism on record. This conclusion is richly supported by data on broadband usage, business formation, and eco­nomic growth. There is a wealth of literature denouncing China for imposing “debt traps” on countries participating in the $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and other studies that present China as “an international lender of last resort” for the world’s poorest countries. To be sure, some of China’s loans…

On September 11, 2023, Chile marked the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody military coup that toppled Socialist president Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet, who presided over nearly two decades marked by human rights abuses and radical econom­ic reforms, making the country a laboratory for neoliberal policies…

Population aging is proceeding apace across the world, but there is little agreement on what to do about it or even whether it is a bad thing at all. On the upside, older, smaller societies will have a correspondingly smaller climate impact, will be able to invest more per child, and will suffer less congestion…

The power of big corporations and other large private interests has attracted more attention from within a conservatism that’s refining or redefining itself, occasionally contentiously. For example, Compact magazine cofounder and editor Sohrab Ahmari explores private tyranny and countervailing power in his new book Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do…

Gone are the days when corporate giving was confined to Little League, food banks, and other traditional causes. On today’s cor­porate websites, politically charged initiatives to end social or economic “inequity” or advance racial or environmental “justice” have largely replaced references to noncontroversial charities serving the common good. From the 1960s until a decade or…

Today, a growing number of voices call for a new American consensus that looks more like the corporatist world of the New Deal and post–World War II decades. If our present ambitions are to be modeled off this bygone era, however, then it would behoove us to investigate the lives and legacies of the men who made it so. David E. Lilienthal was one of them, and he embodies the New Deal era’s greatest successes and aspirations as well as its most troubling failures and missteps…

Out of all the contemporary social and political movements extant in the West today, the sprawling “green” movement ranks as one of the most—if not the most—influential. As an ideology and a cultural zeitgeist, the green movement holds great sway among a large segment of the college-educated “knowledge workers” of Western economies. (Noticeably lower enthusiasm…

“They’re not all crypto-fascists and right-wing nut jobs,” comments Kendall Roy, the scion of his late father’s media empire on the show Succession, the night before he and his kid brother enthrone a politician answering to that description as America’s newest president. “We also have some venture capital Dems and centrist ghouls. Dad’s ideological range was . . . wide.” So was the ideological range of the Republican Party over the last fifty years. And so it still is…

Samuel Moyn’s latest book, Liberalism against Itself, begins and ends by invoking my 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed. Moyn employs my book as a bookend in order to refute its thesis: “liberalism failed because it has succeeded.” Moyn seeks to counter, in effect, “liberal­ism has failed until now because it hasn’t really been tried.” In spite of a fundamentally opposite view of how to understand the current travails of the liberal order, Moyn and I, and our respective books, share a good deal in common…