Matthew Axtell (Princeton): Towards a New Legal History of Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Law, Slavery, and Emancipation in the American Marketplace. Capitalism’s newest critics offer a groundbreaking account of slavery, but does their economic history add up? A review essay by Timothy Shenk. Alex Gourevitch interviews Greg Grandin, author of Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, on how our notions of freedom emerge from and depend on slavery. Richard Delgado (Alabama): Rodrigo's Equation: Race, Capitalism, and the Search for Reform. Kasey Henricks (Loyola) and Victoria Brockett (Valparaiso): The House Always Wins: How State Lotteries Displace American Tax Burdens by Class and Race. Stock market fraud is as old as the stock market: Chris Lehmann reviews Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds, and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ian Klaus. Caroline Fohlin (Johns Hopkins): A Brief History of Investment Banking from Medieval Times to the Present. Gregg D. Polsky (UNC): A Compendium of Private Equity Tax Games. Edward Peter Stringham (Texas Tech): It's Not Me, It's You: The Functioning of Wall Street During the 2008 Economic Downturn. Mark Totten (Michigan State): The Enforcers and the Great Recession. America’s bank bailouts worked: Pepper Culpepper on how American voters think that they got a raw deal from the bailout of the financial sector; in fact they did well, thanks to U.S. regulators' ability to bully big U.S. banks into accepting help they didn't want. Malcolm S. Salter (HBS): Crony Capitalism, American Style: What are We Talking About Here? Everybody knows that the financial world is the purest example of pay accruing to winners solely by merit (and more). Bankers are cheating cheaters who cheat: Bankers aren’t like the rest of us — they are more dishonest. Apple borrowing billions to pay shareholders is everything wrong with capitalism today.
From the New York Times’ The Upshot, a special series on the decline of work, including Binyamin Appelbaum on the vanishing male worker: How America fell behind; Amanda Cox on the rise of men who don’t work, and what they do instead (and more); and Claire Cain Miller and Liz Alderman on why U.S. women are leaving jobs behind. From The Washington Post, a special series on the floundering of the American middle class, including Jim Tankersley on why America’s middle class is lost: The middle class took America to the moon — then something went horribly wrong; and on the devalued American worker: The past three recessions sparked a chain reaction of layoffs and lower pay. Matt Bruenig on how poor, non-working black and Latino men are nearly non-existent. This is what it feels like to be unemployed for years. The NAIRU, explained: Why economists don't want unemployment to drop too low. Brad DeLong on American wellbeing since 1979. Many feel the American Dream is out of reach, poll shows. Linda Tirado on why poor people stay poor: Saving money costs money, period. The poor used to have the most opportunity in America — now the rich do. Inequality is not the problem: Herbert Gintis reviews The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph Stiglitz. New research reveals a startling truth about inequality: When the rich get richer, everyone else loses big. Robert Frank on another widening gap: The haves vs. the have-mores. Extreme wealth is bad for everyone — especially the wealthy: Michael Lewis reviews Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust by Darrell M. West. Fabian Kindermann and Dirk Krueger argue that high marginal tax rates on the top 1% of earners can make society as a whole better off. Sean McElwee on how to deal with Wall Street and income inequality in one fell swoop: If we want to curb the worst Wall Street abuses, and also make America a more equitable place, here's what to do. Capitalism was supposed to signal the end of poverty — what went wrong? David Aaronovitch reviews Hand to Mouth: The Truth about Being Poor in a Wealthy World by Linda Tirado; The Rich — from Slaves to Super-Yachts: A 2,000-Year History by John Kampfner; and Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling.
Jonathan Hopkin (LSE): The Politics of Piketty: What Political Science Can Learn from, and Contribute to, the Debate on Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Paul L. Caron (Pepperdine): Thomas Piketty and Inequality: Legal Causes and Tax Solutions. From the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at The New School, a symposium on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty IGM Forum: No, mainstream economists did not just reject Piketty’s big theory. Top economists say Piketty is wrong about wealth inequality — they misunderstood him. The best proof yet that nobody has actually read Piketty's book. Soak the Rich: David Graeber and Thomas Piketty discoursing on the deep shit we’re all in and what we might do about climbing out. Joseph Bankman (Stanford) and Daniel Shaviro (NYU): Piketty in America: A Tale of Two Literatures. When Piketty argued for income redistribution, he changed economics. Annie Lowrey on Bill Gates vs. Thomas Piketty. Hannes H. Gissurarson on Thomas Piketty, a latter-day Jacobin with a lot of data. Daniele Cuomo Coppola (Trento): Concentration of Wealth as an Intended Consequence of Green Revolution. Number of billionaires on Earth has more than doubled since the financial crisis, according to a new report from Oxfam. How the rich rule: Dani Rodrik says widening inequality drives economic elites toward sectarian politics; and on good and bad inequality. Tyler Cowen on how technology could help fight income inequality. How do we know Hillary’s approach to inequality won’t work? Brazil — there's no alternative to targeting the rich. The disparity between the rich and everyone else is larger than ever in the United States and increasing in much of Europe — why? Martin Wolf on why inequality is such a drag on economies: Big divides in wealth and power have hollowed out republics before and could do so again. Brad DeLong argues that it is time to call what is happening in Europe and the US by its true name: The Greater Depression. Obama says economic recoveries have to be slow — in a new paper, his former advisor Christina Romer argues otherwise. Matthew Yglesias on secular stagnation, the scary theory that's taking economics by storm. The myth of perpetual growth, how language shapes economic thought, and more: Lauren Kirchner interviews James K. Galbraith, author of The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth. From the Cato Institute, a special online forum to explore possible avenues for pro-growth policy reforms. George Monbiot on growth, the destructive god that can never be appeased: The blind pursuit of economic expansion stokes a cycle of financial crisis, and is wrecking our world — time for an alternative.
