Tag
Capitalism
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Can the River Debate the Suburb?
Firms like Philip Morris hold rights that exceed those of most humans. Estates speak for the dead. Trusts speak for the unborn. Legally, we can devise new ways for nature to be legally represented within our human world.
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The Piketty Effect: Part 1
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English to instant best-seller status and wide acclaim and debate. In the United States, his author appearances drew enormous audiences…
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Complicity and Critique
In a posh Delhi neighborhood, in a walled estate with glass chandeliers and bathrooms of Italian marble, a 25-year-old heir to his family’s business and real estate fortune dreams of transforming the world with his money. “Have you seen what the Rockefellers did,” he asks. “Every person in [the United States] is somehow touched by…
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The Politics of For-Profit Higher Education
Back in June, David Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, defeated then House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. It was a remarkable achievement for Brat, a political unknown. He rode to victory on a surge of local pro–Tea Party sentiment, arguing that Cantor was an establishment…
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Alternative Economies of Art and Politics: An Interview with Gabriel Rockhill and Nato Thompson
Writing about art and politics often falls into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who espouse “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art is a restricted and autonomous domain, concerned solely with aesthetic quality, the imagination, enjoyment, and so forth. On the other are the partisans of “political art,” for…
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Our Mis-Leading Indicators
Spring 1932: former Ford Motor Company workers protest at the company’s River Rouge Complex, where police and private security kill five and injure more than 60; unemployed World War I veterans camp out on the steps of the Capitol, demanding “adjusted compensation” for their service; more than three quarters of a million New Yorkers are…
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A World of Connections and Inequality: A New History of the 19th Century
The 19th century poses special problems for historians and social scientists. If conventional views of the march of history are correct, the world should have become modern over this period. Following upon the political revolutions in France, Haiti, and North and South America and the Industrial Revolution, the 19th century should have produced a definitive…
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Conversion Sickness
“Nathaniel P. is George Eliot. Nathaniel P. is Tolstoy.” Thus proclaimed a friend of mine in adulation of young novelist Adelle Waldman’s widely acclaimed debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Waldman’s Nate Piven is a writer in the New York of the very recent past, after the city’s center of literary gravity slid across the…
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Storybook Plutocracy
George Packer’s The Unwinding is a minor masterpiece of the social-disintegration genre—a beautifully written, clinically observed story of the slow-rolling economic transformation that has, over the …
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Masters of Reinvention
For the first 40 years of his life, Albert O. Hirschman was a little-known accessory to world-historic events. Born in Berlin in 1915, he was a refugee from Nazi Germany who wound his way through Europe’s anti-fascist movements, US wartime intelligence, the Marshall Plan, a McCarthyist investigation, and the World Bank’s first foray into Third…
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Hari Kunzru on Networks, the Novel, and the Politics of the Author
Hari Kunzru is a British-born writer who lives and works in New York. He is the author of four novels as well as numerous articles in publications including Wired, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Times of India, and the New Statesman. His first novel, The Impressionist (2002), which won the Betty Trask Prize,…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Fifty Shades of Grey”
With over 29 million copies sold in trade paperback alone and translations afoot in languages from Arabic to Tagalog, the Fifty Shades trilogy …
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The Confidence Economy: An Interview with T. J. Jackson Lears
Questions about trust, faith, and chance in American cultural history are at the core of your work as I see it. Your interest in confidence and con men is especially striking …
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Coming of Age on the Council Estate
In recent months, three of Britain’s most important writers have published new novels. J. K. Rowling’s earnest The Casual Vacancy, Martin Amis’s comic Lionel Asbo, and Zadie Smith’s ambitiously experimental NW differ from one another in a good many ways, but they converge in their focus on a single subject: council housing. Like public housing…
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The Alchemy of Finance
For a few years in the late 1990s, the myth of a New Economy was everywhere. The old economy, with its pesky booms and busts, was a thing of the past, replaced by a new era of infinite prosperity powered by globalization, the Internet, and—most of all—the stock market. Lured on by the promise of…
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The American Dream Outsourced: India and the Genre of Growth
For much of the twentieth century, the conjugation of “India” and “economic growth” invoked either despair or derision. The phrase “Hindu rate of growth”—coined by economist Raj Krishna to distinguish India’s nominal 3.5 percent average rate of growth between 1950 and the 1980s from that of the dynamic “tiger” economies, South Korea and Taiwan—captured both…
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Time to Occupy Silicon Valley? The New Tech Capitalists
Within 25 years, a life of “possibility,” including clean water, energy, education, information/communication, health, and freedom, will be attainable for all. So claims Abundance, a book that cites and has been glowingly reviewed by some of the most brilliant and successful science and technology entrepreneurs on the planet. And yet, in its rush to breathlessly…
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The Anti-Revolutionary Science
Speaking to Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in New York City last October, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs placed himself squarely on their side, saying, “You are doing a magnificent job. This is how history is made. This is how this country is going to turn. Anything I can do, I’m going to…
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The Rise of Finance
In a February 2011 interview, the United States Treasury secretary insisted that the future of the American economy depends upon the continued growth of its financial sector. “I don’t have any enthusiasm,” said Timothy Geithner, for “trying to shrink the relative importance of the financial system in our economy as a test of reform, because…
