Economy

The Cold Calculus of Burden Sharing

Fighting climate change requires reinvigorated states.

Climate, State, and Utopia

The defeat of fossil fuel interests is the first step to social justice.

Taxing Toward Utopia

Taxes are good for democracy.

What’s Next for Music Criticism?

Pitchfork is dead, but good reviewing doesn’t have to die with it.

Freeing Free Trade

Is there anything left to anti-imperial visions of global commerce?

Is the State Here to Stay?

States are exerting greater control over capital. In the face of climate change, it may be too little, too late.

Can Divestment Campaigns Still Work?

Decades after apartheid South Africa, student activists face a new obstacle: the financialization of university endowments.

Walter Rodney’s Radical Legacy

On the Guyanese revolutionary’s writings on anticolonial struggle.

Saving Bidenomics

Biden’s industrial policy program promises a massive shift from decades of neoliberal orthodoxy. Can it deliver inclusive gains in time?

An Innovation System That Works

Before rushing to build the next DARPA, we need to assess the R&D model we have.

What Are Families For?

A liberal economist and a family abolitionist agree: our economic system makes human flourishing depend on social units it can’t sustain.

How Not to Do Industrial Policy

Instead of pouring public funds into private industry—as the U.S. did with COVID-19 vaccines—we must build public capacity and prioritize public objectives.

Bond Villains

How a little-understood feature of urban finance—municipal bonds—fuels racial inequality.

Neville Alexander’s Struggle Against Racial Capitalism

The late South African intellectual and activist—imprisoned on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela—fought for a world without race and class.

How Misreading Adam Smith Helped Spawn Deaths of Despair

A Nobel Prize–winning economist reflects on the dire consequences of libertarian economics.

Can Innovation Serve the Public Good?

Not as it’s traditionally done, but there are more equitable models.

The Localist

Why did Chicago become the headquarters of free market fundamentalism? Adam Smith offers a clue.

AI and the Specter of Automation

In a just world, productivity-enhancing technology would create more leisure and prosperity for everyone.

Why Inequality Is Unjust

Outcomes shape opportunities.

No Equality without Liberal Equality

There must be room for choice.

The American Way

Public opinion doesn’t support equal outcomes.

Equality of Results Revisited

The history of debates about educational outcomes holds important lessons.

The Art of Equality

Egalitarianism raises our expectations.

Beyond Choice

Choice talk distracts from structural injustice.

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