Tag
Economics
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The “Emotional Economy” of Parenting: A Conversation with Nina Bandelj
“I am an observer of how intellectual ideas travel and enter into everyday life, or how they come to be performed by families in ways that give those ideas a reality of their own.”
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Economics: Theories vs. Stories
In the rubble of the Richard Nixon years, a University of Chicago economist named Arthur Laffer drew a diagram on a napkin to illustrate the hidden blessings of …
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Against Human Capital
My parents were on the brink of retirement at the same time as I was researching pension strategies in Israel. So, I couldn’t help thinking about them whenever retirees were discussed. It made things difficult for me, because every insurance agent and pension-fund manager I’d interviewed circled back to the same point: people were living…
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Public Thinker: Kim Phillips-Fein on Austerity and the Fall of New York
With New York City teetering on the brink of fiscal collapse at the end of 1975, Congress passed … [none-for-homepage]
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San Francisco; or, How to Destroy a City
As New York City and Greater Washington, DC, prepared for the arrival of Amazon’s new secondary headquarters, Torontonians opened a section of their …
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Guns Made the State, and the State Made Guns
Industrialist and philanthropist, lobbyist and cultural leader: Samuel Galton Jr. was in 1795 a prominent member of Birmingham’s bourgeoisie. He was also …
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Bearing Risks and Being Watched
If two features define contemporary capitalism, they are first the tendency of each individual to increasingly bear alone the risks associated with living in a …
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Birth of a Queer Parent
By virtue of their youth, trans and queer kids offer something new. Coming out today is less exclusively a narrative of young adulthood or middle age, and increasingly an experience of childhood or early adolescence. When kids embrace models of social identity newly available to their generation, the parents who love and care for them…
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The Political Ascendancy of Creditworthiness
The widespread resurgence of authoritarian nationalism in recent years has been met by the left with fear and loathing—but also a bit of envy. For it is …
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The Inequality of “Human Rights”
What if the global struggle for human rights has accidentally helped make the world more unequal? What if, in seeking human rights, Samuel Moyn asks, we’ve …
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Disaster Capitalism Strikes Puerto Rico
It has been a year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving a trail of destruction: ruined infrastructure, destroyed homes, and thousands …
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Black Banks Can’t Fix Racial Capitalism
In this article I interview University of Georgia School of Law professor Mehrsa Baradaran, whose latest book, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial …
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Reading with Strangers
On a visit to Bogotá in 2006, riding on the then new TransMilenio bus rapid transit system, I discovered that it sponsored Libro al Viento (Books on the Wind), a series of free publications distributed at bus stops, markets, and municipal services offices.1 In 2007, I learned that 50,000 Chileans had submitted entries to the…
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Betting on Other People’s Lives
Jockeys pressing their horses forward along a muddy track grace the cover of Ivan Ascher’s Portfolio Society. The horse race, Ascher claims, is the best image …
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The Big Picture: Coalthink
If we trust the president, we believe that he is, if nothing else, a businessman. Towers glittering across real estates seem to proclaim the truth of this; but when it comes to coal, both business and sense exit the scene. Mercurial to his core, the diligence with which Mr. Trump maintains his fidelity to coal—the…
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The Big Picture: Resource Extraction
Trump has a range of cons going, but one of the most outrageous is this: he is about to fleece his working-class supporters in the Rust Belt, coal country, and the rural Pacific Northwest …
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Choosing Growth
Recently, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt defended the withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord by alleging that the agreement had placed “constraints on the economy.” Rather than regulations, Pruitt promised, it was “technology and innovation” breakthroughs in the private sector that would curb carbon emissions, create new jobs, and spur economic…
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Who Can Save the University?
That the public university has followed a disastrous trajectory for roughly four decades is a matter of broad agreement. In The Great Mistake, Christopher …
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A Meeting of Two Minds
We all make mistakes. No matter how well trained, smart, or astute we are, faulty reasoning marks our thinking and leads us astray. The psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed us just how predictable our errors are. Coming together and breaking up across decades, these fervent collaborators changed the way we think. And the…
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Brazil’s Malaise
A whiff of the apocalyptic surrounds the compounding crises currently afflicting Brazil. A surge in violent crime unfolds alongside a new and dangerous illness; a financial crisis begets a political crisis and the two quickly converge; an incestuous political elite forsakes investment in basic infrastructure in favor of profit-driven sporting spectacles; a president is chased…
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Keyword of the Week: France
On Sunday, eyes were on the French election as two candidates, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, advanced to a runoff that will determine the presidency next month. This week’s Public Bookshelf features four of our favorite PB articles about France, ranging from a special series on Thomas Piketty (in collaboration with La Vie des Idées) to an essay about the PEN–Charlie Hebdo controversy.…
