Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro on Minds Wide Shut March 31, 2021 Polarization may be pushing democracy to the breaking point. But few have explored the larger, interconnected forces that have set the stage for this crisis: namely, a rise in styles of thought, across a range of fields, that literary scholar Gary Saul Morson and economist Morton Schapiro call “fundamentalist.” Read More
Dying from despair in the USA March 16, 2021 Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row—a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. Read More
Our (Un)Civil War November 09, 2020 To say that our nation is politically divided between Democrats and Republicans could not be more of an understatement. How did we get to this point, and is there anything that ordinary citizens can do to reduce or manage the rift? Read More
Marc Levinson on Outside the Box September 14, 2020 Globalization has profoundly shaped the world we live in, yet its rise was neither inevitable nor planned. It is also one of the most contentious issues of our time. Read More
Robert Inman and Daniel Rubinfeld on Democratic Federalism August 06, 2020 Around the world, federalism has emerged as the system of choice for nascent republics and established nations alike. In this book, leading scholars and governmental advisers Robert Inman and Daniel Rubinfeld consider the most promising forms of federal governance and the most effective path to enacting federal policies. Read More
Listen in: The Economics of Belonging August 05, 2020 Fueled by populism and the frustrations of the disenfranchised, the past few years have witnessed the widespread rejection of the economic and political order that Western countries built up after 1945. Read More
A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you June 22, 2020 Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life—money, power, jobs, university admission—should be distributed according to skill and effort. Read More
Deaths of despair strike women too March 01, 2020 When Angus Deaton and I began to document the dramatic increases in mortality from drug overdose, alcoholic liver disease and suicide—the deaths of despair that we describe in our new book—we found many things that surprised us. Read More
Robert Frank on Under the Influence January 07, 2020 Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street—our environments are themselves products of our behavior. Read More
Chile’s “awakening” and the troubled relationship between neoliberalism and democracy November 04, 2019 Last week Chile went through the most extreme moment of political turmoil since Pinochet’s dictatorship. Read More
Robert Shiller on the power of viral stories and economic change October 17, 2019 In a world in which internet troll farms attempt to influence foreign elections, can we afford to ignore the power of viral stories to affect economies? Read More
Walter Mattli on Darkness by Design April 02, 2019 Capital markets have undergone a dramatic transformation in the past two decades. Algorithmic high-speed supercomputing has replaced traditional floor trading and human market makers, while centralized exchanges that once ensured fairness and transparency have fragmented into a dizzying array of competing exchanges and trading platforms. Read More
J. C. Sharman on Empires of the Weak February 13, 2019 What accounts for the rise of the state, the creation of the first global system, and the dominance of the West? Read More
Leah Boustan: What hundreds of thousands of census records can teach us about the Great Black Migration February 01, 2018 Learn more about the Great Black Migration with this post by Leah Boustan, author of Competition in the Promised Land. Read More