This is an archived version of the PW Sources newsletter from Saturday, July 20, 2024. Sign up to receive PW Sources directly to your inbox here.

IRAN’S ELECTIONS

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 Zarif, the former foreign minister who led the Iranian negotiations in the Iran nuclear deal.

In a 2017 book, TRITA PARSI chronicles how Iran and P5+1 countries pushed through fierce resistance to secure the Iran nuclear deal:

“The conventional wisdom in Washington is that diplomacy succeeded because multilateral sanctions crippled the Iranian economy and forced Iran back to the negotiation table. Had it not been for the sanctions, Iran’s nuclear program would have expanded and the United States and Iran would have drifted toward war. Conversely, Tehran believes the acceleration of Iran’s enrichment program during the sanctions and the Rouhani government’s improvement of the economy without sanctions relief convinced the United States that sanctions were a dead end and forced it back to diplomacy. ‘Once Rouhani got elected and we began improving the economy without any sanctions getting lifted, we sent the US a clear signal that sanctions wouldn’t break Iran,’ President Hassan Rouhani’s chief of staff, Mohammad Nahavandian, argued. ‘The utility of sanctions had come to an end and the Americans chose diplomacy.’

Though both narratives contain grains of truth, neither explains the full picture. In reality, it wasn’t so much the pressure the two sides exerted on each other that broke the deadlock as it was the compromises they made. The U.S. side pressured the Iranians either to capitulate or to engage with the United States directly without any conditions regarding enrichment. Rather than halting or slowing down its program, Tehran counter-escalated by enhancing its nuclear activities. Iran went from having 123 centrifuges in 2003 to 22,000 by 2013 and grew its stockpile of low-enriched uranium from 1,500 kilograms in 2009 to 12,000 by 2013. ‘In other words, despite sanctions, despite everything that was offered, Iran continued its program because they believed deeply that they had a right to do this as an NPT country, to have a peaceful nuclear program,’ Kerry told the Council on Foreign Relations on July 24, 2015. ‘Well, folks,’ he added, ‘sanctions hasn’t done anything to stop their program.'”

+  “As a first measure, my administration will urge our neighboring Arab countries to collaborate and utilize all political and diplomatic leverages to prioritize achieving a permanent ceasefire in Gaza aiming to stop the massacre and prevent the broadening of the conflict.” Pezeshkian’s “message to the new world” published in the Tehran Times. Link.

+ “The color green eventually emerged as the campaign color of Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s bid to become the Iranian president and almost instantly fled into the varied mazes of Islamic, Iranian, and Persian sacred and mundane registers.” Hamid Dabashi on Iran’s 2009 elections and the Green Movement. Link. 

+  “Pezeshkian’s coalition of political and economic interests advocated a series of measures to solve the crisis: market liberalization, the stemming of middle-class capital flight, the empowerment of the private sector, and the courting of foreign investment.” Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi in Sidecar. Link. More reactions to the election: Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi for Chatham House, and Ali Vaez for Foreign Policy. Link, link. And, previously in PW, Esfandyar Batmanghelidj and Zep Kalb find that sanctions have disproportionately favored the wealthy in Iran. Link. 

NEW RESEARCHERS

Labor Volatility

CÉSAR CASTILLO-GARCÍA is a PhD candidate in economics at the New School for Social Research. In a 2022 working paper, he examines the origins of neoliberalism in Latin America by looking at the case of Peru. 

From the paper:

“I argue that the Peruvian case is an ideological precursor of the South American neoliberal authoritarianism before the 1950s. The alternative narrative I propose studies the Peruvian neoliberalism as an opening episode of the deep transnational connection between the two foundational events (the Walter Lippmann Colloquium (WLC) and the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS)) and Latin American economic experts, who played a role in influencing public opinion through political relations and media outlets and directly devising economic policies. The first wave shows the public appearances of the French neoliberal Louis Baudin (WLC and MPS) in Peru. Throughout his book L’Empire socialiste des Inkas (1928), Baudin contributes to the critique of socialism and Indigenism in the Peruvian society and introduces the term neoliberalism in his conferences of 1947 in Lima. In the second wave, the economists Pedro G. Beltrán and Rómulo Ferrero (first member of MPS) appear in the design of free-market policies implemented during Manuel Odría’s dictatorship of the 1950s. Those Peruvian economists implemented developmental policies during the conservative government of Prado Ugarteche (1955-1961). While Beltrán succeeded in bringing Kennedy’s Alliance for the Progress to countervail the advance of Castroism in South America, Ferrero acted as a pundit and technocrat in favor of austerity and developmentalist policies.”

+ + + 

+  “The best route to holding together and growing Labour’s 2024 coalition in 2029 is by wielding the power of the state to drive up quality of life, rather than waiting for the market to deliver.” New on PW, Mathew Lawrence and Sacha Hilhorst on the Labour victory in the UK. Link.

+  “While rising interest rates in other countries reduce liquidity, aggregate demand, investment, and consumption, in Brazil, by contrast, higher interest rates augment financial wealth.”Also new on PW, Clara Zanon Brenck and Rafael Ribeiro on Brazilian interest rate policy. Read in English or Portuguese. 

+  “The new bonds are thus structured to game the IMF’s fiscal targets and increase the return bondholders get out of Sri Lanka’s debt exchange rather than to insulate Sri Lanka against future risks.” Brad Setser on Sri Lanka’s macro-linked bonds. Link. 

+  Angus McNelly on Luis Arce’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party and Bolivia after the attempted coup. Link. 

+  “India is simultaneously becoming both more democratic and more illiberal.” Milan Vaishnav reflects on India’s recent elections. Link. 

+  “The fundamental problem for Ruto is that he faces a very difficult fiscal crisis at a time when the old playbook of Kenyan politics doesn’t work anymore.” Ken Opalo on the Kenya protests. Link. 

+  Cecilia Rikap on US big tech, artificial intelligence, and national innovation systems. Link. 

+  “We construct the first consistent market rent and home sales price series for American cities across the 20th century using millions of newspaper real estate listings.” By Ronan C. Lyons, Allison Shertzer, Rowena Gray, and David N. Agorastos. Link. From Paul Williams and Yakov Feygin at the Center for Public Enterprise, a proposal for a national housing construction. Link.

+  “The prominence of chiaroscuro in late 18th-century French oil painting posed significant challenges for tapestry weavers, which led artisans and chemists to seek chemical solutions for replicating in textiles the style’s high contrast between light and dark. Textile manufacturers struggled to reproduce the intense gradations of painters like Jacques-Louis David, and innovations in dye technology were driven by the need to match the naturalism and Enlightenment symbolism of contemporary paintings. Napoleon’s investment in dye chemistry and the establishment of a dyeing school aimed to standardize colorants and rebrand traditional arts with political imagery. The integration of scientific expertise in the decorative arts led to advancements that laid the groundwork for future developments in synthetic colorants.” By Delanie Linden. Link. 

Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org