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 ...
Tag: Economics
The Student Debt Crisis and Its Deniers
The year 2016 seemed to begin with the promise of actual reform to federal student loan policy, with meaningful consequences for the industry. Bernie Sanders thrilled ...
Atlas Mugged
If the books of our time tell us anything anymore, capitalism has jumped the shark. Not even its most erudite defenders and critics know what to say about its future—the sense of an ending saturates ...
Cuba’s Next Chapter
In April 2016, Cuba’s Communist Party (PCC) convened its Seventh Party Congress. Sprinkled throughout the published proceedings were a few attempts at levity by the otherwise laconic Raúl Castro. One ...
The Holocene Hangover
As a child growing up in the early 1980s, I often daydreamed of space exploration and interstellar frontiers. The leap into outer space seemed tantalizingly close. In the science fiction stories I ...
The Mortal Marx
In the mid-1860s, as an anxious and ailing Karl Marx worked on the 30-page essay that would billow into Das Kapital, his daughter Eleanor—“Tussy”—would play under his desk. With her dolls, kittens ...
On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom.
Graphic Novels for MBAs
Over the course of the two-year program at Harvard Business School, an MBA student will read over five hundred case studies. They range in length from a single page to over 50, but their format is ...
The New Working Class
Tamara Draut is a policy expert and social critic based at Demos, a progressive think tank. Her latest book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, calls attention to the ...
Cheese in Your Bones: The Sheep and Shepherds of Pag
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The island of Pag, which protrudes into the Adriatic like an accusing finger, has more ...
A Laborless Eden?
A utopian fantasy has always served as an engine for scientific progress—the fantasy that, one day, we might harness enough fossil fuel, enough computing power, and enough mined mineral wealth to ...
To Laugh, So as Not to Weep: Paul Murray’s Modern Banking Satire
Paul Murray’s novel The Mark and the Void is set in the bleak landscape of 21st-century banking. It’s a story about the relationship between an idealistic banker named Claude and a jaded writer named ...
Diversity Doublespeak
Goldman Sachs values many things—money most of all—but you might be glad to hear that it also values diversity. “We strive for excellence,” they tell their clients and potential employees. “To ...
A Global Neuromancer
Neuromancer is now more than 30 years old, a considerable time to remain a classic. Its publication in the Orwellian year will seem ironic and laden with symbolism only for those who think Orwell has ...
The Piketty Effect: Part 2
Back in November, we began our first collaboration with the French online journal La Vie des Idées, to examine what we call “The Piketty Effect.” Our first pair of essays, by American sociologist ...
Showdown at the University of Texas
In June 2014 there was a showdown in Texas. The University of Texas Board of Regents and its chancellor, who runs the system, had been trying to fire the president of the university system’s flagship ...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
