Money

How did freedom become synonymous with having lots of options?

Advocates of “military Keynesianism” present it as a boon for the working class. In reality, it diverts resources away from social provision.

The Interstate Highway System created a national polity defined by circulation. To rethink the Interstates is to rethink the United States.

Expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit could make a successful program even better—and address a major crisis.

A look at popular interpretations and actual labor fluctuations in the Rust Belt over time.

The state of design in 1970.

Trump’s war against elite academia has created an uncanny parallel to the most dramatic fight in Jackson’s day—the attack on the 2nd Bank of the United States.

Were you to vanish Marx from every library, you’d destroy the central interlocutor around which most of capitalism is built.

The author on capitalism’s critics, why everyone is so unhappy with the system, and what may come next.

The 1970s campaign fought to get women paid for their work in the home—and envisioned a society built to better support motherhood.

How could two renowned, high-ranking men of the American Revolution have fallen into such dire straits that they feared the loss of all they worked for?

Hayek suspected that nothing about the vindication of neoliberalism was likely to be straightforward.

The 1881, Henry George’s ”Progress and Poverty” proposed a land value tax — helping to usher in the Progressive Era.

Conservatives think we need traditional hierarchies to reverse social decline; But it’s the economic equality created by strong unions that Americans miss.

During World War I, the government constructed entire communities for workers and their families, setting new standards for housing and neighborhood planning.

Efforts to restrict immigration have long coexisted with — and even reinforced — the nation's economic reliance on Mexican laborers.

The trio of interests atop business, military, and government depicted in C. Wright Mills’s postwar critique is no longer united in setting the national agenda.

The film illustrates the near-impossibility of upward mobility during the segregation era.

The omissions in Trump's historical narratives reveal how he views national wealth: only the people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder matter.

Trump is not alone in his support for tariffs. Henry Carey also believed tariffs could help American workers.

A former garment worker reflects on rank-and-file agitation in the US garment industry just before the industry fled the country.

The 1790s debate shows that, even when they aim at moral goods, tariffs abet cronyism and corruption.

Today no one on either side of the political spectrum would present themselves as an enemy of choice. Sophia Rosenfeld exposes the complex legacy of this idea.

Building the assumption of work’s meaningfulness happened across many different institutions and types of media.

As Americans file their taxes this tax season, the Trump administration threatens to unravel the modern fiscal state.

How the dystopian visions of the nativist right are in keeping with a long tradition of neoliberal ideology.

An American story.

How today’s far right manages to combine the call for economic freedom with pseudoscience about natural hierarchies of race and IQ.

How endless options became our only option.

On the robust influence of labor reform and antislavery ideas and movements on each other from the early National period to the Civil War.