December 27, 2024

Analysis

Brave New World

A third industrial divide?

Endogenous dynamics have crippled the current growth wave that began in the 1980s—yielding the period of decay in which we are now living. Rather than achieving a new stability of horizontal competition, the turn toward the market brought about a vertical domination of brand-name intellectual property claims and captive supply chains. What is next as…

Longform

January 8, 2025

Analysis

Selling Power

The design of energy finance, from the New Deal to the IRA

A comparison of the New Deal power program and the IRA exposes key design questions regarding the financing of power systems.

December 18, 2024

Analysis

Structural Dependence

Austerity and authoritarianism in Pakistan

In November 2024, demonstrators from various cities of Pakistan defied lockdowns to gather in Islamabad and demand that Imran Khan, former Prime Minister, be released immediately from jail. Khan, incarcerated since the summer of 2023, has been charged with a…

December 13, 2024

Interviews

Normalization and the Future of the Middle East

An interview with Elham Fakhro on the Abraham Accords

Before October 7, 2023, the pursuit of diplomatic and economic normalization between Israel and Arab states appeared to be the central trajectory for regional politics in the Middle East. With the prospect of an Iran deal buried, this path represented…

December 12, 2024

Interviews

Political Investments

An interview with Thomas Ferguson on the 2024 US election

As the nation prepares for a second Trump administration, the mood among many Democratic Party officials has been one of bafflement and astonishment. How could voters have failed to rise to the defense of the democracy and “institutions” that Democrats…

December 6, 2024

Analysis

Energy Offshoots

Transformations in Petróleos de Venezuela and geopolitical realignments

Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) has been integral to Nicolás Maduro’s government and the greater Chavista project. Despite the state-owned oil company controlling the largest crude oil reserves in the world, its production capabilities have fallen sharply since 2014: the country…

December 2, 2024

Analysis

Class Cleavages

The irrationality of American business partisanship is a symptom of its own success

Within the American business lobby, it seems there is no classwide consensus about the direction of the country’s future. The large blocs of organized money that found Trump a threat to democratic institutions in 2021 evidently no longer do—proposals once…

November 29, 2024

Analysis

Labour’s Choices

Policy experiments of the 1970s

The threat of a return to the 1970s has long been a rhetorical feature of the British establishment. From the New Labour government’s Third Way reforms, to Jeremy Corbyn’s ambitious manifestos, and through to the current Labour Government’s rather modest…

November 21, 2024

Analysis

Beyond Growth

Can Labour rise to the politics of growth after fourteen years of stagnation?

“At the election we promised there would be no return to austerity,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves explained to the British Parliament on October 30. “Today we deliver on that promise.” The remark came halfway through the newly elected…

November 16, 2024

Interviews

Weaponizing Aid

An interview with Lisa Bhungalia on UNRWA

On October 28, the Israeli Knesset voted to shut down the operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and to designate it as a terrorist organization. While this drastic attack…

November 1, 2024

Interviews

Where Americans Work

An interview with Gabriel Winant on the care economy in the 2024 election

Healthcare and education are two of the most important sectors of the US economy. Together they comprise over $8.44 trillion in annual expenditure. When including the $1 trillion-plus health insurance industry, these three industries of private education and healthcare, public…

Shortform

December 18, 2024

Analysis

Transfer and Transition

Technology transfer and green industrial transformation

Over the past years of escalating trade disputes between China and the US, the latter has repeatedly highlighted a practice it considers anathema: technology transfers that US companies need to offer to their Chinese collaborators if they want to do…

December 18, 2024

Analysis

America First?

Escalation and reverberations in the trade war

The reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency has sent shockwaves around the world. And just hours after results came in, the ruling three-party German coalition government, which had been teetering for months, collapsed. The survival of dominant political coalitions in…

October 16, 2024

Analysis

Breaking Up Google

Antitrust, competition, and the intricacies of monopoly

In late August, Judge Amit P. Mehta of US District Court for the District of Columbia found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly in online search. Google had paid billions to device manufacturers and browser developers—including Apple, Samsung and…

October 11, 2024

Analysis

Marshall Plans

New green industrial diplomacy?

At September’s UN General Assembly in New York, Brazil’s President Lula described the international financial system as a “Marshall Plan in reverse” in which the poorest countries finance the richest. Driving the point home, Lula thundered, “African countries borrow at…

October 9, 2024

Analysis

Adaptation in the Sanctioned Economy

Domestic manufacturing, overcapacity, and the limits of Iran’s economic resilience

The oil boom of the late 2000s created significant headwinds for Iranian manufacturers. As the value of oil exports surged, the Iranian rial appreciated, real wages rose, and foreign goods flooded the Iranian market. Middle-class families relished in their newfound…

September 4, 2024

Analysis

Labor’s Gains?

What do large-unit elections tell us about the state of the American labor movement?

In 2023, a “banner year” for labor in many regards, only 115,551 workers voted in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections, out of roughly 160 million workers in the United States labor force. In FY 2018, that number was…

August 30, 2024

Analysis

The Contest to Shape “Country Platforms”

IMF reforms and Bangladesh’s revolt

Last month, young people in Bangladesh revolted against their government over a jobs quota bill that would have reserved 30 percent of public-sector jobs for family members of veterans of the 1971 war with Pakistan. Protestors did manage to drive…

August 15, 2024

Reviews

Who Benefits From Sanctions?

On “How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare” by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez

Sanctions against Iran amount to some of the harshest and longest-running restrictions in the world. Dating back to the 1979 revolution that overthrew one of America’s closest allies in the region, early sanctions imposed primarily by the US froze Iranian…

July 20, 2024

Sources

Promising economic prosperity, president-elect Masoud Pezeshkian won the Iranian election on a reformist platform oriented toward improving economic relations with the West, a departure from a period of conservative dominance led by the late president Ebrahim Raisi. As part of his campaign, Pezeshkian recruited Mohammad Javad…

July 18, 2024

Analysis

Mansfield is Open for Business

Market rule and Keir Starmer’s Labour Party

In 2017, the town of Mansfield pointed the way for the Conservative Party. The Conservative candidate defeated a longstanding Labour incumbent who had tried, among other things, to sue the Mansfield Town FC supporters’ association. Amid the density of local…

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Series are collections of works published by Phenomenal World on a single subject or area of research. Series are commissioned to analyze particular issues or historical moments, and are either ongoing projects or collected as one-time volumes.

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