All Articles
Don’t Say “Scramble for Africa”
Debt and diplomacy on the African continent
Militarized Adaptation
War, energy, and NATO’s new climate framework
This essay first appeared in GREEN, a journal from Groupe d’études géopolitiques. When NATO held its two-day summit in Madrid in June 2022, the Spanish government deployed ten thousand police officers to cordon off entire parts of the city, including…
January 21, 2023
AnalysisUnmaking Orthodoxies
The reputational limits of central banks
After a decade of low or negative interest rates, central banks are back in the business of fighting inflation. One of the clearest signs of the change in monetary policy stance is the largely synchronized tightening across high-income countries—last year,…
The Dollar and Climate
How US dollar hegemony fuels the climate crisis
The climate crisis offers a new angle from which to evaluate US dollar hegemony, since carbon emissions are tied to economic activity.
Inflation and Energy
Can clean energy reduce inflationary pressures?
There has been little research into the inflationary implications of either climate change itself, or of responses to climate change. The majority of work on central banking and climate change is concerned with topics like firm-level or macroprudential regulation, collateral requirements, and asset-purchasing…
January 4, 2023
AnalysisThe Nokia Risk
Small countries, big firms, and the end of the fifth Schumpetarian wave
In the early 2000s, Finland was the darling of industrial and employment policy analysts everywhere. This small country with a population of 5.5 million and a GDP roughly equal to the state of Oregon experienced what looked like a high…
Facts on the Ground
Uncertainty and information in the global energy system
Assessing the crisis The energy system that underpins contemporary life is marked with blindspots. Take the fossil fuel sector. Facing simultaneous existential and geopolitical vulnerability—due to Russia invading Ukraine, advances in renewable energy, and the climate imperative—there is profound uncertainty…
December 20, 2022
AnalysisIndian Big Business
The evolution of India’s corporate sector from 2000 to 2020
“The systemic, long-term nexus between the political elites and big business will not go away anytime soon,” wrote journalist M. K. Venu in 2015. Writing in the aftermath of Obama’s second visit to India, Venu suggested that “crony capitalism” had…
December 17, 2022
AnalysisDroughts and Dams
The troubled future of World Bank-funded hydropower in Zambia
Most of Zambia’s grid electricity is generated by hydropower. Over the past decade, recurring droughts—in 2015, 2016, 2019, and now again in 2022—have exposed the deep vulnerabilities in the system. These droughts have unleashed unprecedented power outages, with low reservoir…
Europe’s “Leap Into the Future”
Do exceptional crisis-fighting policies signal the arrival of an interventionist Europe?
In 2020, as demand for liquefied natural gas boomed in Asia, the shippable fuel was an afterthought in Europe. But when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 imperiled the continent’s energy supply, Europe panicked and spent the intervening year…
Money and the Climate Crisis
COP27 and financing the green transition
The conclusion of COP27 reflected persisting uncertainties around coordinated global action towards decarbonization. Major agreements—including the establishment of a loss and damage fund—were reached, but the burden of mounting debt among global South countries continued to limit climate ambition. The…
December 3, 2022
AnalysisRealignments
Bolsonarismo and Brazil’s shifting middle-class vote
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva may have won last month’s presidential elections, but the strength of Bolsonarismo has been confirmed. In both houses of the National Congress, Bolsonarismo and its allies made gains, overcoming the traditional right wing. In the…
Development Bank Self-Sabotage
What’s stopping MDBs?
When the World Bank and IMF make radical noises, the US is typically the voice of restraint. So it came as a surprise to casual observers when, at October’s Annual Meetings, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged the Bank and other…
November 19, 2022
AnalysisThe Wall Street Consensus at COP27
The derisking roll-out at COP27
At COP26, US Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry sanguinely declared the need to “de-risk the investment, and create the capacity to have bankable deals. That’s doable for water, it’s doable for electricity, it’s doable for transportation.” UN Special Envoy…
Collective Action and Climate Finance
Can the COP move markets?
At UN climate summits, the items that appear on the agenda are usually those that advocates have fought hard to include. This year’s COP27 meeting in Egypt is no exception. Years of effort have culminated in getting loss and damage—finance…
November 12, 2022
AnalysisThe Sacrifice Zone
Mining communities in the wake of Chile’s constitutional referendum
In September 2022, 62 percent of Chilean voters rejected the country's proposed new constitution. The defeat took many by surprise—the demands to rewrite the existing charter had been loud and seemingly unanimous. For followers of Chile’s extractive industries, however, the…
A New Non-Alignment
How developing countries are flouting Western Sanctions and playing the great powers off each other
This essay first appeared in GREEN, a journal from Groupe d’études géopolitiques. In March of this year, as Russia’s war in Ukraine intensified, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a trip to New Delhi to speak with his Indian counterpart…
Domestic Politics & Planetary Change
Will a Lula victory be better for the climate than anything that happens at COP27?
Will a Lula victory be better for the climate than anything that happens at COP27?
October 26, 2022
AnalysisTown & City
Reading Brazil’s first round election results
Earlier this month, Brazilians went to the polls in an election billed as the most momentous since democratization in 1985. Far-right president Jair Bolsonaro faced off against former two-term president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Though Lula did win the…
An Introduction
An introduction to The Polycrisis
What crisis? A year ago, one might be forgiven for thinking there was a moment of relative calm for wealthy countries: a year of vaccinations had made the pandemic less acute, inflation hadn’t yet provoked interest rate hikes, and labor…
September 24, 2022
AnalysisAfrica’s Century of Growth?
On Morten Jerven’s The Wealth and Poverty of African States
On May 1, 2014, Nigeria’s then-president, Goodluck Jonathan, addressed a crowd of workers in the country’s capital Abuja. He declared that “the challenge of the country is not poverty, but redistribution of wealth.” The prompt for his comment was a…
September 20, 2022
AnalysisThe Finance Gap
Poverty finance from colonial Kenya to microcredit markets
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ foreword to the UN’s Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development’s 2021 Financing for Sustainable Development report, speaks to a prevalent piece of common sense in global development: Financing for sustainable development is at a crossroads.…
September 15, 2022
AnalysisTechnocracy and Crisis
Stagnation and technocratic rule in Italy
On September 25, Italians will be called to elect a new Parliament. The snap election follows on the heels of the forced resignation of the government in late July, led by former European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi. That…
August 24, 2022
AnalysisA Permanent Bailout?
Central bank interventions in noncrisis times
The 2008 crisis heralded a new age in central banking. The scale and nature of central bankers’ interventions was unprecedented. Traditionally, as lenders of last resort, central banks lend at escalating rates against good collateral to solvent institutions in times…
August 13, 2022
AnalysisRating Sovereigns
Sovereign ratings in a financialized world
As dark clouds gather on the horizon of the global economy in the third year of the pandemic—with debt stocks swollen, interest costs rising, and growth undermined by energy insecurity and war—policy makers and pundits are anxiously watching sovereign credit…
Pragmatic Prices
An excerpt from How China Escaped Shock Therapy
European and American traditions of economic theorizing on price control are intimately connected with war—practices and debates over price control peaked amid the two world wars. The experience of the First World War had been one of inflation and limited…
July 30, 2022
AnalysisOdious Debts
Iraq, Haiti, and the politics of illegitimate debt
In the aftermath of its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States was eager to restructure the ailing country’s sovereign debt. International sanctions since the Gulf War meant that Iraq was economically isolated, yet the country had a large stock…
July 16, 2022
AnalysisDevelopment Engines
NAFTA, electric vehicles, and the evolution of Mexico's auto industry
In December 2021, President Joe Biden announced a proposed consumer tax incentive for electric vehicles (EV) made in the US by unionized autoworkers. The tax incentive aims at tackling climate change while also strengthening unionized jobs. It promises to support…
July 9, 2022
AnalysisA New Labor Regime
The BJP's new labor reforms, the construction industry, and the mounting challenges for India’s trade unions
Since coming to power in 2014, India’s right-wing government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has introduced sweeping reforms aimed at strengthening the union government at the expense of the states, and catering to large corporations over smaller establishments and…
June 29, 2022
AnalysisGeographies in Transition
Mining-based development and the EU's critical raw materials strategy
Though it failed to resolve a number of contentious issues, the COP26 meeting in Glasgow solidified a consensus around the need for a global transition towards clean energy. Implicated in this transition is the widescale adoption of renewables—we must build…
June 10, 2022
AnalysisLeapfrog Logistics
Digital platforms, infrastructure, and labor in Brazil and China
In Spring 2018, two significant labor disputes broke out at opposite ends of the earth. The first, in Brazil, was a two-week-long mass strike of 400,000 truckers in response to successive price increases unleashed by the state oil company, Petrobras,…
May 28, 2022
AnalysisFarmland Assets
International finance and the transformation of Brazil’s agricultural lands
The election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 commenced a long agenda of environmental destruction in Brazil. Before taking office, Bolsonaro had openly threatened Indigenous communities with racist attacks, commenting that Indigenous peoples should not have “an inch of land” and…
The Price of Oil
The history of control and decontrol in the oil market
In October 2021 the price of gasoline in the United States rose to its highest level in seven years. There were many reasons for this: surging demand following a year-and-a-half of lockdown, a slower than expected recovery of oil production,…
Politics and the Price Level
Inflation and the governance of prices
In 1959, the leaders of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, now the OECD) appointed a Group of Independent Experts “to study the experience of rising prices” in the recent history of the advanced capitalist countries. Between the end…
May 14, 2022
AnalysisPersisting Paternalisms
The Auxilio Brasil in perspective
In recent months Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro appears to have shape-shifted. From a staunch ally of business interests, he now presents himself as a president of the poor. The basis of this transformation is his new conditional cash-transfer programme Auxilio…
May 12, 2022
AnalysisFinancing Schools
America’s kleptocratic public school divide
As the arrival of the pandemic forced schools shut, the Public Schools of Robeson County in North Carolina scrambled to save the rural district’s closed and crumbling buildings. At the same time, they faced the major task of providing education…
May 4, 2022
AnalysisWeimar Themes
Hilferding, Sohn-Rethel, and Hamilton
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has flung the international order into crisis. Understanding the causes of such cataclysms requires understanding not only the interests of states, but also the shape of society—its internal tensions, as well as its material and cultural…
April 30, 2022
AnalysisThe Whole Field
Markets, planning, and coordinating the green transformation
In recent years, an intense debate has unfolded over the policy and politics of the green transition. Politically, the tide appears to be receding: As the Biden agenda has lost momentum and rising inflation moves center stage, the near-term prospects…
April 27, 2022
AnalysisRegime Change?
The evolution and weaponization of the world dollar
The centerpiece of shock and awe of the West’s economic response to Russia’s invasion and bombardment of Ukraine was the freezing of Russia’s central bank assets. In the March 7 edition of his Global Money Dispatch newsletter, the Credit Suisse…
April 15, 2022
AnalysisEconomic War and the Commodity Shock
A discussion on sanctions and global commodity markets
The war in Ukraine has unleashed both geopolitical and economic strife, and nowhere is the latter clearer than in the volatile commodities market. Commodities prices have fluctuated wildly since the Russian invasion began and the US-led coalition retaliated with extraordinary…
April 13, 2022
AnalysisAusterity and Renewables
A new IMF-approved tax regime is crippling Pakistan’s green energy sector
After weeks of rising domestic pressure, a spiraling economic crisis, and the swift loss of crucial military support, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan was removed from office last weekend following a vote of no confidence. The political turmoil is the…
March 23, 2022
AnalysisA New Public Housing Model
Addis Ababa's Urban Transformation
In 2006, the government of Ethiopia embarked on a mission to construct half a million condominium apartments over a twenty-year period in its capital of Addis Ababa—a city of only five million. Now, sixteen years later, the initiative has transformed the…
March 9, 2022
AnalysisBargaining Chip?
On the speed and scope of the Russia sanctions, and the prospects for off-ramps
For the global hegemon, pulling the trigger on crisis management seems to consist primarily of posting PDFs to government websites. During the March 2020 financial panic, as the coronavirus first spread throughout the Global North, the Federal Reserve feverishly published…
February 14, 2022
AnalysisEskom, Unbundling, and Decarbonization
The history of South Africa’s state utility and the future of the energy transition
South Africa has one of the most carbon-intensive economies in the world. It is also in a staggering and protracted unemployment crisis—the real unemployment rate, including discouraged work-seekers, is near 50 percent. But there remain tens of thousands of workers…
February 11, 2022
AnalysisA New Developmentalism?
On the stages of Argentine developmentalism.
In 2003, led by the government of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007), Argentina’s developmental agenda regained momentum. From the ashes of privatization, deregulation, and liberalization emerged a consensus agenda that put the public sphere at the center of the growth engine. The…
February 3, 2022
AnalysisAcute Dollar Dominance
The dollar system, original sin, and sovereign debt since the pandemic.
In early 2020, the “dash for cash” in the US Treasury market prompted the Fed to relaunch its dollar swap lines, which it eventually did in mid-March of that year. In the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC),…
January 12, 2022
AnalysisControlled Prices
The history and politics of price controls and economic management in the United States
In the decades after the Civil War, Andrew Carnegie captured the American steel industry by pushing down prices. So effective was the Scottish-born telegraph operator at reducing costs, breaking cartels, and driving competition into bankruptcy during the downturns of the…
December 23, 2021
AnalysisStop, wait, go
Is Germany's new coalition government a return to the status quo?
The new coalition government in Germany, led by Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, is the first time that the SDP, the Greens, and the Liberals have joined together in a single government. The cooperation agreement, published on November 24, was the…
December 18, 2021
AnalysisHomeownership & the Student Debt Crisis
Rising student debt burdens in the past decade have contributed to a decline in homeownership for young adults.
The benefits of owning a home in the United States cannot be overstated. The housing market in the United States both reflects and causes widening cleavages in American society; owning a home is a functional prerequisite for financial security. The…
December 17, 2021
AnalysisDeath or glory?
New forms of fascism haunt Chile’s presidential election
In October 2019, a proposed thirty peso hike in public transport fares triggered protests in Santiago that spread to other major cities across the country, denouncing the country’s economic infrastructure with the slogan, “It’s not thirty pesos, it’s thirty years.” Chileans…
November 23, 2021
AnalysisTrade and Growth
Revisiting the effects of trade liberalization on economic growth
According to a survey on free trade from the University of Chicago, economists overwhelmingly agree that free trade’s net effects are good. A recent article by several IMF economists affirms that, “perhaps more than on any other issue, there is…
November 18, 2021
AnalysisThe Wall Street Consensus at COP26
Finance Day at COP26 shows a ruthless dedication to voluntary decarbonization
Wednesday, November 3, was private finance day at COP26. For those who follow central banks closely, the event was a chance to gauge whether their recent turn to climate-conscious policy making would translate into ambitious decarbonization announcements. After all, private…
November 12, 2021
AnalysisGrowth Towns
The Evergrande crisis, “common prosperity,” and the transformation of the Chinese growth model
The ongoing crisis for Chinese property developer Evergrande has made the giant company the focal point of global concern. Creditors, investors, contractors, customers, and employees of Evergrande within and outside China have watched anxiously to see whether the Chinese government would…
November 6, 2021
AnalysisTitans
Tracing the rise and the politics of asset manager capitalism
In mid October 2021, when BlackRock revealed its third quarter results, the asset management behemoth announced it was just shy of $10 trillion in assets under management. It’s a vast sum, “roughly equivalent to the entire global hedge fund, private…
November 4, 2021
AnalysisNegotiations
The Federation of German Industries’ agenda in the formation of the new German federal government
The new German government will be called upon, at a highly critical time for the global and European economy, to draw up a new economic and political strategy not only for Germany but also for the EU/Eurozone. The outcome will…
November 4, 2021
AnalysisManufacturing Stagnation
Intellectual property, industrial organization, and economic growth
$5.3 trillion of US federal government stimulus and relief spending have returned the economy to its pre-Covid growth trajectory. But that growth trajectory was hardly robust—either before or after the 2008 financial crisis. Nor was the slow decay of GDP…
November 2, 2021
AnalysisThe Diverging Gap
The history of the global infrastructure gap
On June 11, leaders at the G7 summit signed the Build Back Better World (B3W) Partnership, an agreement which commits signatories to meet the infrastructure needs of low- and middle-income countries. The deal is an explicit response to China’s Belt…
October 30, 2021
AnalysisUneven Channels
Climate diplomacy and the global financial architecture
This year’s Conference of the Parties (COP), opening October 31, is hosted by the United Kingdom, whose agenda-setting privilege as host has made private finance a central focus of the 2021 meeting. The UK ambition to center the City of…
October 19, 2021
AnalysisGas and Labor
The UK‘s petrol shortage is also a labor shortage driven by worsening conditions of work
The United Kingdom is in the midst of a protracted crisis in the supply of petrol. In the face of a plummeting sterling and severe disruptions to essential public services, military tanker drivers have been deployed to transport fuel to…
September 18, 2021
AnalysisDevelopmentalisms
The forgotten ancestors of East Asian developmentalism
2021 marked the centenary of the creation of the Chinese Communist Party, born of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. History textbooks tend to claim that the Movement emerged out of a widespread realization that China’s rights as a victorious…
How Schools Lie
The deceptive financial aid system at America's colleges.
No matter how talented, hard working, and committed a student is, if financing falls through, the dream of obtaining higher education can be dashed. But much of the financial data that prospective students receive is misleading. In the cost information…
August 24, 2021
AnalysisLegitimacy Gap
A history of central bank independence.
We live in the age of the central bank. The financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 crash of 2020 have made visible the central role of the US Federal Reserve and its overseas counterparts in the international financial system.
August 11, 2021
AnalysisBuilt Trades
Employer claims of unavailable labor are rooted in an unwillingness to raise wages and the long-term decline of the nation’s system of training and allocating labor
As the American economy reopened in the first half of 2021, reports of a “labor shortage” spread throughout US industries. But there was one sector where employer panic about hiring was old news: the massive and decentralized US construction industry.
July 20, 2021
AnalysisPath Persistence
Global trade hierarchies across two eras of globalization
What is the legacy of the First Globalization of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries on the economic fortunes of countries during the Second Globalization? To what extent have countries’ positions in the international economic order been persistent across the…
July 2, 2021
AnalysisRepressing Labor, Empowering China
Cheap money will boost inequality and geopolitical tension but not inflation
Though the lockdown in 2020 threw many workers out of work, the big fiscal stimulus, fueled by government debt and an unprecedentedly large monetary expansion, offered stimulus checks and elevated unemployment benefits to millions of Americans.
June 24, 2021
AnalysisPreferred Shares
Inflation, wages, and the fifty-year crisis
In one of her first statements as Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen said that the United States faced “an economic crisis that has been building for fifty years.” The formulation is intriguing but enigmatic. The last half-century is piled so high…
Hysteresis & Student Debt
How the Great Recession fueled the student debt crisis.
The geographic character of the Great Recession of 2008–2009 is, by this point, well-known. While everywhere in the United States experienced a sharp increase in unemployment, some areas suffered disproportionate exposure to subprime mortgages and the consequent bursting of the…
June 8, 2021
AnalysisThe Crisis Canal
Trade, bond markets, Suez, and the Ever Given.
Why did the Ever Given capture our collective imaginations? At the end of its week in the spotlight, the poet Kamran Javadizadeh wrote: “I too am ‘partially refloated,’ I too remain stuck in the Suez Canal.” Two fluorescent yellow-vested construction…
May 13, 2021
AnalysisInvestment and Decarbonization: Rating Green Finance
A proposal for a public ratings agency for green finance
The Biden administration has committed the United States to cutting its carbon emissions in half by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050.
April 28, 2021
AnalysisReconstruction Finance
Popular politics and reconstructing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
Like the world system as a whole, segregated cities in the United States have their own finance driven core-periphery dynamics.
April 6, 2021
AnalysisRisks and Crises
On market makers and risk managers post-2008.
For a long time, Bagehot’s rule, “lend freely, against good collateral, but at a high rate,” restored the Fed’s control over the money market and helped end banking panics and systemic banking crises. This control evaporated on September 15, 2008,…
Democracy or the Market
Third wayism and the problem of representation.
The problem of democratic representation has always turned on the question of the “have-nots”—that is, not only those without wealth and property, but also those marginalized on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, origin, religion and education. Even in a…
Revolution, Reform, and Resignation
In the 1980s, the left abandoned its language of transformation. Can it be regained?
Some time in 1991 I was invited to give a talk to the Andalusian Confederation of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE). Afterwards, the secretary of the confederation walked me back to my hotel. I asked him why there was…
François Mitterrand’s Austerity Turn
The rise and fall of the French Road to socialism.
The history of French socialism is filled with famous and heroic dates: 1789; 1848; 1871 1936; 1968. But less well remembered is another date of great significance: 1981. It was in May of that year that the French left achieved…
Transitions
Four voices on Spain's transition from the Franco dictatorship to parliamentary monarchy — and what didn't change.
It’s been some time since the term “transition” was fully incorporated into day-to-day usage in contemporary Spanish. It refers to the process of political change that began during the second half of the 1970s, a process which transformed Spain from…
The Italian Left After Keynesianism
From stagflation to the transformation of Italian left parties.
In 1977, Eric Hobsbawm published a book of interviews with Giorgio Napolitano, a leading figure in the Italian Communist Party (PCI)’s gradualist wing, the miglioristi. Hobsbawm proclaimed himself a “spiritual member” of the PCI and intended this book to depict…
January 22, 2021
AnalysisInflation, Specific and General
The many causes and effects of inflation.
Concerns over a generalized “inflation” loom in the recovery. Yet the prices that most heavily factor into the cost of living for US workers—housing, health, and education—have already been rising for decades. The question we should be asking is whether…
January 16, 2021
AnalysisSupercomputer
The Control Data Corporation and global value chains.
In March 1976, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defense (DOD), William “Bill” Clements invited William “Bill” C. Norris, CEO and Chairman of the supercomputer producer Control Data Corporation (CDC) to a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon.
January 9, 2021
AnalysisThe Deflationary Bloc
Hyman Minsky and the politics of inflation
An effective way to write the history of the last thirty years of the twentieth century,” economist Albert Hirschman wrote in 1985, “may well be to focus on the distinctive reactions of various countries to the identical issue of worldwide…
The Student Debt Crisis is a Crisis of Non-Repayment
Borrowers are increasingly unable to pay down their student loans, leading to mounting balances and an intensifying debt crisis.
Think of the student debt crisis as an overflowing bathtub. On the one hand, too much water is pouring in: more borrowers are taking on more debt. That is thanks to increased demand for higher education in the face of…
October 16, 2020
AnalysisData as Property?
On the problems of propertarian and dignitarian approaches to data governance.
Since the proliferation of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, critics of widely used internet communications services have warned of the misuse of personal data. Alongside familiar concerns regarding user privacy and state surveillance, a now-decades-long thread connects a…
October 1, 2020
AnalysisA Popular History of the Fed
n Populist programs and democratic central banking.
Since Lehman collapsed in 2008, central banks have broken free of historical norms, channelling trillions into the banking system to prop up global finance and the savings of depositors from Germany to Hong Kong. The corona crash has only accelerated…
September 25, 2020
AnalysisDirect Effects
How should we measure racial discrimination?
A 2018 National Academy of Sciences report on American policing begins its section on racial bias by noting the abundance of scholarship that records disparities in the criminal justice system. But shortly thereafter, the authors make a strange clarification: “In…
Unceasing Debt, Disparate Burdens: Student Debt and Young America
JFI’s interactive map presents the geography of student debt.
Since the Great Recession, outstanding student loan debt in the United States has increased by 122% in 2019 dollars, reaching the staggering sum of $1.66 trillion in June of this year. Student loan debt has grown faster than other debt…
September 5, 2020
AnalysisHot Oil
Gardiner Means, administered prices, and why the Texas Railroad Commission should regulate oil production again.
Even at the depth of the Great Depression, oil producers were always paid a positive price for their product. But on April 20 of this year the price of West Texas Intermediate oil traded for negative prices, reaching a record…
August 15, 2020
AnalysisAnother Lost Decade?
The systemic character of the global periphery debt crisis.
Contrary to common beliefs on fiscal fundamentals, the current debt crisis in the global periphery demonstrates that the solvency of sovereign states is determined by their monetary power. Crucially, liquidity has a cyclical character in the periphery of global capitalism…
July 27, 2020
AnalysisEssential Infrastructures
The case for sovereign investment in telecommunications infrastructure
How should the fabric of social life, especially as it is rewoven by the pandemic, relate to the private ownership of telecommunications?
July 22, 2020
AnalysisLaws of the Land
Property rights and extraction in the mineral frontier
“The Mining Law of 1872,” reported California Democrat Alan Lowenthal in May 2019, "is one of the most obsolete laws still on the books.”
July 16, 2020
AnalysisThe Dollar and Empire
How the US dollar shapes geopolitical power
What does the US dollar’s continued dominance in the global monetary and financial systems mean for geo-economic and geo-political power?
July 10, 2020
AnalysisThe Crisis and the Free Market
On crisis, partisanship, and public policy
Will the current crisis transform America’s politics and economic institutions? With unemployment higher than at any point since the Great Depression, rising food insecurity, and an increasingly muscular role for government—are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the…
July 3, 2020
AnalysisPandemic and Poverty
What the pandemic teaches us about poverty measurements
Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, more than 40 million people have applied for unemployment benefits.
Mapping concentration and prices in the US higher education industry During and after the Great Recession, public funding for higher education was slashed as part of state budget austerity. Staff and programs were cut and tuition rose; in many states,…
May 28, 2020
AnalysisDigital Scab, Digital Snitch
On automation and worker surveillance
Before Covid-19 hit, we'd become used to reports about Amazon's robotics innovations and the impending large-scale automation of warehouse jobs. But recent strikes and protests by Amazon's very human workers have exposed how far we are from robotic warehouses.
May 1, 2020
AnalysisThe Class Politics of the Dollar System
Managing an international public good
The global dollar system has few national winners. The typical frame for understanding the US dollar is that of “exorbitant privilege.”
April 17, 2020
AnalysisInside Out
Shaping the base of a renewable economy
The transition to a post-carbon energy economy will require extraction.
April 3, 2020
AnalysisCrisis and Recovery
The underlying problems in the US economy
Today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report hardly registers the cataclysm in the US job market. The sharp 0.9 percent uptick in unemployment—itself newsworthy—only grasps the very beginnings of the shutdown of the American economy.
March 25, 2020
AnalysisThe First Services Recession
The shape of the Covid-19 recession
It is hard to see how the United States can avoid a recession. Unemployment insurance claims have already surged, and this week's numbers look to be in the millions.
February 27, 2020
AnalysisThe Economics of Race
On the neoclassical and stratification theories of race
Black America has had less wealth, less income, less education, and poorer health than white America for as long as records have been kept.
February 6, 2020
AnalysisDecision Making in a Dynamic World
Exploring the limits of Expected Utility
I once wrote a post criticizing modern microeconomic models as both overly complex and unrealistic, leading their practitioners into theoretical dead ends without much corresponding increase in explanatory power. I suggested the entire enterprise of Expected Utility (EU) was a…
January 30, 2020
AnalysisThe Long History of Algorithmic Fairness
Fair algorithms from the seventeenth century to the present
As national and regional governments form expert commissions to regulate “automated decision-making,” a new corporate-sponsored field of research proposes to formalize the elusive ideal of “fairness” as a mathematical property of algorithms and especially of their outputs.
January 23, 2020
AnalysisWhat Would a UBI Fund?
Lessons from the 1970s experiments in guaranteed income
One of the questions at the heart of contemporary debates over the merits of UBI is ‘what would it fund?’ In other words, what type of activities would it encourage? There are of course the widely debunked quibbles about guaranteed…
January 17, 2020
AnalysisUBI & the City
A new working paper models the effects of a basic income in New York City
Skeptics of guaranteed income tend to worry about the policy’s inflationary effects; absent rent regulation, for instance, one might expect housing costs to rise in proportion to the increase in disposable income generated by the policy.
January 16, 2020
AnalysisMacro Modeling in the Age of Inequality
On incorporating distributional concerns into macroeconomic models
Recent years have seen the revival of academic conversation around rising wealth inequality and its distributional consequences. But while applied, microeconomics-oriented fields like public and labor economics have long engaged with questions around inequality, macroeconomics has historically paid less attention…
Mapping market concentration in the higher education industry In much of the existing higher education literature, “college access” is understood in terms of pre-college educational attainment, social and informational networks, and financial capacity, both for tuition and living expenses. The…
November 22, 2019
AnalysisDevelopment and Displacement
The effects of big development initiatives
Infrastructure lies at the heart of development. From transportation and telecommunication networks to electrical grids and water pipelines, large-scale infrastructure projects play a pivotal role in the global development landscape.
November 7, 2019
AnalysisCollective Ownership in the Green New Deal
What rural electrification can teach us about a just transition
This year, we once again shattered the record for atmospheric carbon concentration, and witnessed a series of devastating setbacks in US climate policy—from attempts to waive state protections against pipelines to wholesale attacks on climate science.
October 17, 2019
AnalysisDisparate Causes, pt. II
On the hunt for the correct counterfactual
An accurate understanding of the nature of race in our society is a prerequisite for an adequate normative theory of discrimination.
October 11, 2019
AnalysisDisparate Causes, pt. I
The shortcomings of causal and counterfactual thinking about racial discrimination
Legal claims of disparate impact discrimination go something like this: A company uses some system (e.g., hiring test, performance review, risk assessment tool) in a way that impacts people. Somebody sues, arguing that it has a disproportionate adverse effect on…
September 12, 2019
AnalysisMoney Parables
Three competing theories of money
In the past year, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shifted the policy debate in a way that few heterodox schools of economic thought have in recent memory.
August 23, 2019
Analysis
Statistical prediction is increasingly pervasive in our lives. Can it be fair? The Allegheny Family Screening Tool is a computer program that predicts whether a child will later have to be placed into foster care. It's been used in Allegheny…
August 1, 2019
AnalysisDecentralize What?
Can you fix political problems with new web infrastructures?
The internet's early proliferation was steeped in cyber-utopian ideals. The circumvention of censorship and gatekeeping, digital public squares, direct democracy, revitalized civic engagement, the “global village”—these were all anticipated characteristics of the internet age, premised on the notion that digital…
July 18, 2019
AnalysisStudent Debt & Racial Wealth Inequality
How student debt cancellation affects the racial wealth gap
The effect of cancelling student debt on various measures of individual and group-level inequality has been a matter of controversy, especially given presidential candidates’ recent and high-profile proposals to eliminate outstanding student debt.
July 3, 2019
AnalysisThe Politics of Machine Learning, pt. II
The uses of algorithms discussed in the first part of this article vary widely: from hiring decisions to bail assignment, to political campaigns and military intelligence.
Across all these applications of machine learning methods, there is a common thread: Data on individuals is used to treat different individuals differently. In the past, broadly speaking, such commercial and government activities used to target everyone in a given…
June 27, 2019
AnalysisThe Politics of Machine Learning, pt. I
On prediction, profits, votes, and militarism.
Terminology like "machine learning," "artificial intelligence," "deep learning," and "neural nets" is pervasive: business, universities, intelligence agencies, and political parties are all anxious to maintain an edge over the use of these technologies.
May 31, 2019
AnalysisCopyright Humanism
It's by now common wisdom that American copyright law is burdensome, excessive, and failing to promote the ideals that protection ought to.
It's by now common wisdom that American copyright law is burdensome, excessive, and failing to promote the ideals that protection ought to. Too many things, critics argue, are subject to copyright protections, and the result is an inefficient legal morass…
March 28, 2019
AnalysisExperiments for Policy Choice
If we wish to pick good policies, we should run experiments adaptively
Randomized experiments have become part of the standard toolkit for policy evaluation, and are usually designed to give precise estimates of causal effects. But, in practice, their actual goal is to pick good policies. These two goals are not the…
March 22, 2019
AnalysisThe Emerging Monopsony Consensus
On the theory of monopsony
Early on in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith asked who had the edge in negotiations between bosses and wage laborers. His answer: the bosses. In the case of a stalemate, landlords and manufacturers “could generally live a year or…
March 19, 2019
AnalysisIdeology in AP Economics
Uncovering the ideology embedded in economics
When the media talks about ideological indoctrination in education, it is usually assumed to refer to liberal arts professors pushing their liberal agenda. Less discussed is the very different strain of ideology found in economics.
March 1, 2019
AnalysisThe Case for an Unconditional Safety Net
The 'magic bucket' of universal cash transfers
Imagine a system where everyone had a right to basic material safety, and could say “no” to abuse and exploitation. Sounds utopian? I argue that it would be quite feasible to get there, and that it would make eminent economic,…
January 24, 2019
AnalysisWhy Rational People Polarize
Explanations of political polarization
U.S. politics is beset by increasing polarization. Ideological clustering is common; partisan antipathy is increasing; extremity is becoming the norm (Dimock et al. 2014). This poses a serious collective problem. Why is it happening?
November 9, 2018
AnalysisBanking with Imprecision
How medieval financiers lent in the age of uncertainty
In 1596, Spanish troops under the leadership of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia set fire to their own ships in the waters near Cadiz. The sinking of these thirty-two vessels was a tactical necessity: a joint Anglo-Dutch navy had annihilated the…
October 18, 2018
AnalysisMachine Ethics, Part One: An Introduction and a Case Study
Artificial intelligence, ethics, and public health social work
The past few years have made abundantly clear that the artificially intelligent systems that organizations increasingly rely on to make important decisions can exhibit morally problematic behavior if not properly designed.
October 10, 2018
AnalysisWho cares about stopping rules?
Can you bias a coin?
Take a coin out of your pocket. Unless you own some exotic currency, your coin is fair: it's equally likely to land heads as tails when flipped.
October 2, 2018
AnalysisThe “Next Big Thing” is a Room
New realities in Dynamicland
If you don’t look up, Dynamicland seems like a normal room on the second floor of an ordinary building in downtown Oakland. There are tables and chairs, couches and carpets, scattered office supplies, and pictures taped up on the walls.…
October 1, 2018
Analysis
Phenomenal World is a new publication that distributes research, analysis, and commentary on applied social science. We chose this name for our blog because we hope to publish work that addresses the social world in all its apparent complexity. Our…