Departments

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economics

  • SOURCE: Harvard Magazine
    12/16/2020

    The American Exception: How Faith Shapes Economic and Social Policy

    by Benjamin M. Friedman

    Historian Benjamin Friedman's new book examines the importance of changing religious ideas in American Protestantism as influences on the development of social and economic policy. Part of the concluding chapter is excerpted here. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    12/2/2020

    The Gadfly of American Plutocracy (Review)

    by Simon Torracinta

    A new biography of the social theorist examines how his approach to understanding a past gilded age can offer lessons for our present one. 

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg
    9/21/2020

    Look What Has Been Taken From Black Americans

    It's difficult to quantify the financial cost to Black Americans of racism and segregation. But the destruction of property and denial of trade by white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919 was quantified by Ida B. Wells-Barnett; her findings can put the scope of a reparations program into some perspective.

  • SOURCE: Frank Interviews
    9/10/2020

    The Debt We Still Owe

    Economist Sandy Darity summarizes the case for reparations through the persistent Black-White wealth gap. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    8/6/2020

    The Real Reason the American Economy Boomed After World War II

    by Jim Tankersley

    Citing recent economic research, the author argues that fighting employment discrimination and ending the idea that white men have a privileged claim on good jobs will be a potent engine for economic growth if and when America recovers from the pandemic. 

  • SOURCE: Current Affairs
    6/9/2020

    Capitalism as Religion (Review Essay)

    Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity examines the ways in which capitalism, despite its purported scientific rationality, operates as a perverse kind of religion.

  • SOURCE: The American Prospect
    5/18/2020

    Keynes and the Good Life

    by Jeffrey Sachs

    Keynes did not give us a checklist of dos and don’ts other than general ones: Don’t waste human talents and physical resources through wanton unemployment, avoidable wars, or breakdowns of social and trade relations.

  • SOURCE: Foreign Policy
    4/9/2020

    The Normal Economy Is Never Coming Back

    by Adam Tooze

    The latest U.S. data proves the world is in its steepest freefall ever—and the old economic and political playbooks don’t apply.

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    3/25/2020

    We’ve Never Been Here Before

    by Adam Tooze

    There are historical analogies to this kind of collective shutdown, but they are not attractive.

  • SOURCE: NY Times
    6/24/19

    Whatever Happened to Moral Capitalism?

    by Michael Kazin

    Let one loyal, if anxious, Democrat offer a solution: “moral capitalism,” a system that, in the words of Congressman Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts, would be “judged not by how much it produces, but how broadly it empowers, backed by a government unafraid to set the conditions for fair and just markets.”