World
A YEAR IN REVIEW
Over the past year, Phenomenal World has investigated the challenges facing the global green transition, the relationship between the monetary and real economies, mounting trade tensions, the politics of batteries in Hungary, American healthcare, the effects of sanctions, democracy and central banking, and the impacts of dramatic electoral contests in Argentina, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the UK, and the US. In an effort to bring rigorous and illuminating research from around the globe to your screen, we also expanded our editorial team—PW now works from five countries and in three languages, publishing and translating original analysis across Portuguese, Spanish, and English.
If you’ve enjoyed reading, we ask that you forward this email to any colleagues and friends who might be interested. And please encourage them and others to subscribe to this newsletter, PW Sources, and to publication alerts for our Spanish and Portuguese editions.
We will be off until 2025, when we’ll return with updates on new projects and much more research and writing. Until then, here is a roundup of some of our favorite series, essays, and newsletters from 2024. Thank you for reading.
PHENOMENAL WORLD
+ New from recent weeks: Juvaria Jafri on austerity and authoritarianism in Pakistan. Link. Jack Gross and Dylan Saba interview with Elham Fakhro on the Abraham Accords. Link. And for the Polycrisis, Lara Merling and Kate Mackenzie anticipate the global effects of new trade measures during Trump’s second term. Link.
+ This year, PW launched both Spanish- and Portuguese-language editions, with an inaugural event in São Paulo in April featuring Brazilian Minister of Finance Fernando Haddad, historian Adam Tooze, and economists Julia Torracca, Clara Brenck, and Pedro Marques. Some Brazil-focused highlights from the publishing that followed in Portuguese (and English): Fernando Rugitsky on the soy-meat complex and the green transition, Lena Lavinas and Bruno Mader on the financial inclusion agenda under Lula 3, and Nicole Herscovici on Brazil’s business lobby. In Spanish (and English), read Renato Rivera Rhon on Ecuador in the global drug trafficking chain, Victor Mijares on state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, and Sandra Jaramillo on dependency theory in Colombia. We’ve looked closely at climate politics, conducted interviews with leaders of trade unions representing workers in Petrobras and Ecopetrol, examined Milei’s policies in Argentina, and probed the future of industrial policy in the region.
+ In July, we began a new interview series on the geopolitics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, probing international law, the politics of aid, the state of the West Bank, the Lebanon-Israeli war and more. In August, Tim Barker and Dylan Saba interviewed former US Department of Defense attorney Sarah Harrison: “That pause on 2,000 pound bombs is the only time in the war that the Biden Administration has publicly used its considerable leverage… This underscored an obvious fact, which is that when you use your leverage you can change the trajectory of a conflict. This President has refused to do that.” Link.
+ Arguing that planning has always been intrinsic to market functions, Sanjukta Paul wrote a detailed account of the First New Deal: “If planning and coordination are understood as intrinsic to markets, then we should probably not seek to understand specific pricing problems, nor conditions of chronic instability, as symptoms of either a special or general breakdown of the ideal market mechanism. Rather, since avoiding these outcomes is generally what planning, or economic coordination mechanisms, seek to do, we might look to see if and why those particular mechanisms may have broken down.” Link.
+ In September, Andrew Yamakawa Elrod carefully recounted the journey from Biden’s Build Back Better agenda to the suite of measures that have come to be known as Bidenomics: “Having shed its more social democratic, public services-oriented skin, the corporate claims on the national treasury now made their sleek advance. Quarterly lobbying expenditures from electronics manufacturing and equipment makers increased 28 percent over the course of 2021, to $52.3 million by Q4 2021. As 2022 began, electronics and equipment manufacturers were ready to seize from the 117th Congress what its gridlock was refusing to the constituencies of hospital patients, healthcare workers, retirees, students, teachers, and parents: government spending.” Link.
+ During election season, Aida Hozic wrote about Florida’s FIRE economy and “anti-woke” politics: “The state has emerged ahead of the rest in offering a new vision of capitalist society—one that, at the state level, can serve either a second Trump administration or launch a vision of defiant independence following a second Trump defeat.” Link. For more reflections on US politics before and after the November election, see Gabriel Winant on the care economy and healthcare, and Tim Barker and Andrew Elrod’s interview with Thomas Ferguson. Link, link.
+ Finally, our shared project with the great Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay, The Polycrisis, continued in its second year to track the dramatic geoeconomic shifts of our climate changed world. This year, their The Polycrisis newsletter has covered topics such as the global dollar system, the US trade war with China, social unrest in Kenya and Bangladesh, and the gap between current political coalitions and the internationalist cooperation required to decarbonize and develop the globe.
PW SOURCES
Our Saturday newsletter brought recommended research and reading to you on a wide range of topics. Here are some favorite archived letters.
+ In May, the FTC banned Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield from the Exxon-Pioneer merger on the grounds of collusion. To understand the context for the decision, we turned to a 2020 paper by Binlei Gong on the shale revolution and its global impact: “Marketization and commercialization are the keys to a significant breakthrough in the shale gas boom in the United States. In the United States, there is no mutual restraint among natural gas production, transportation, and sales activities. Thousands of companies are active in the shale gas industry, thereby ensuring the diversification of shale gas exploration and production entities. In many developing countries, however, state-owned oil companies or municipal engineering companies have monopoly power over natural gas supply infrastructure and have no motivation to innovate new technologies.” Link to the newsletter, link to the chapter.
+ As student protests demanding divestment from Israel swept across US university campuses, we spotlighted Charlie Eaton’s article on US higher education’s growing reliance on financial investment returns: “Endowments play an increasing role in financing US higher education. Since the 1980s, more institutions have sought to build endowments and thereby assume the role of financial investors. NACUBO reports show that just 148 undergraduate-enrolling systems reported operating endowments to NACUBO in 1977 and just 36 of them were public. By 2009, the number of public systems reporting endowments had grown to 158, with an increase to 501 for undergraduate-enrolling systems overall.” Link to the newsletter, link to the article.
+ In April, following the victory of Prabowo in Indonesia’s 2024 election, we spotlighted Yasuyuki Matsumoto’s 2007 report on how speculative finance made Indonesia particularly vulnerable during the 1998 East Asian financial crisis: “A number of studies link debt accumulation by the private sector to the liberalization policies that were actively pursued in East Asia’s crisis-affected countries in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, the private sector’s external debt problem is viewed as a result of capital account liberalization. Indonesia undertook a dramatic deregulation of its financial sector in the 1980s and by the 1990s had one of the most liberalized financial markets in the world.” Link to the newsletter, link to the report.
+ With Israel’s extremist Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich imposing continued sanctions on the West Bank in 2024, we spotlighted Tariq Dana’s 2024 chapter explaining how Israel’s control of the Palestinian Authority’s tax revenue has been implemented as a form of indirect rule after Oslo: “The economic dependency on Israel meant the continuation of Israeli control over vital resources for the PA’s institutional sustainability. In this way, Israel managed to subjugate the PA to heavy pressure to accept its demands. A prominent example is Israel’s control of the PA ‘tax clearance system,’ which is levied and transferred to the PA by Israel on a monthly basis. As the tax transfer accounts for more than 60 percent of all the PA revenues, Israel often uses this financial leverage to extract political concessions through withholding these amounts to force the PA to comply with its policies.” Link to the newsletter, link to the text.
Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org