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The COVID virus as the desert sun.

How Covid Shaped Climate Policy

Five years from the emergence of the disease, the world — and the climate — is still grappling with its effects.
by Tim Sahay, Kate MacKenzie via Heatmap on December 18, 2024
Harris carved in stone next to Mount Rushmore.

Kamala Harris Must Grapple with America’s Founding Fathers

To achieve a new political settlement, she has to resolve a tension dating from the Revolution.
by Justin H. Vassallo via New Statesman on October 12, 2024
Stone hands holding up a bronze globe.

The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire and the Birth of Global Economic Governance

A new history explores the emergence of international economic institutions that continue to wield immense influence over the domestic politics of many states.
by Kevin P. Gallagher via LSE Review Of Books on February 22, 2023
Stock traders watching Jerome Powell in conference on screens in the New York Stock Exchange.
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Seeing Americans as Consumers Threatens the Fairness of Our Economy

The Federal Reserve keeps increasing interest rates to try to bring prices down — but that may erase gains by non-White workers.
by Suzanne Kahn via Made By History on August 11, 2022
Store window selling shirts and ties mentioning the "Nixon Squeeze"

The Burglaries Were Never the Story

The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another.
by Andrew Yamakawa Elrod via n+1 on July 13, 2022
Drawing of a crowd of delegates at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. (Franklin McMahon / Getty Images)

A Big Tent

The contradictory past and uncertain future of the Democratic Party.
by Nicholas Lemann via The Nation on July 11, 2022
Woodcut illustration from 1934 economics textbook depicting people walking from tenement houses past an advertising billboard and straight to a loan office.

Bad Economics

How microeconomic reasoning took over the very institutions of American governance.
by Simon Torracinta via Boston Review on March 9, 2022
Reprint from the September 1966 issue of AFL-CIO American Federationist, Box 38, Folder 4, William Page Keeton Papers, Special Collections, Tarlton Law Library, The University of Texas at Austin.

Controlled Prices

Before the rise of macroeconomics that accompanied World War II, price determination was a central problem of economic thought.
by Andrew Yamakawa Elrod via Phenomenal World on January 12, 2022
Black and white photo of John Maynard Keynes and wife Lydia Lopokova

Left, Right and Keynes

Today's centrists are a hot mess.
by Zachary D. Carter via In The Long Run on September 23, 2021
President Truman with Sadie Alexander and the Committee on Civil Rights.
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The Ideas of the First Black Economics PhD Offer Solutions to Our Problems Today

Full employment could solve job discrimination and inadequate wages.
by Nina Banks via Made By History on June 15, 2021
Entrance to CitiBank branch.

Nationalization Is as American as Apple Pie

Nationalization may seem like an alien idea in the hyper-capitalist United States. But the country has a long history of nationalizing all sorts of industries.
by Thomas M. Hanna via Jacobin on November 11, 2019
Photo over Obama's shoulder facing Larry Summers and Timothy Geitner on the other side of a conference table.

Obama's Original Sin

A new insider account reveals how the Obama administration’s botched bailout deal reinforced neoliberal Clintonism.
by Eric Rauchway via Boston Review on April 23, 2019

Other People’s Blood

On Paul Volcker.
by Tim Barker via n+1 on February 26, 2019

Ten Years After the Crash, We’ve Learned Nothing

The great financial catastrophe of our times is still badly misunderstood, despite its grotesque consequences.
by Matt Taibbi via Rolling Stone on September 13, 2018

Ten Years After the Crash, We Are Still Living in the World It Brutally Remade

A seismic reading of the financial earthquake and its aftershocks, including those that still jolt us today.
by Christopher Caldwell, Malcolm Harris, Frank Rich, Timothy Shenk, Hanna Rosin, Rachael Combe, Sarah Leonard, Lauren Levy, Heather Havrilesky, Allison P. Davis via Intelligencer on August 5, 2018

The New Old Democrats

It’s not the 1990s anymore. People want the government to help solve big problems. Here’s how the Democrats must respond.
by Jake Sullivan via Democracy Journal on June 20, 2018

The Cold War and the Welfare State

If you look hard enough, you can almost find ideological consistency in the Republicans’ breathtaking tax bill.
by Nils Gilman via The American Interest on December 4, 2017

How Fast Food Chains Supersized Inequality

Fast food did not just find its way to low-income neighborhoods. It was brought there by the federal government.
by Max Holleran via The New Republic on August 2, 2017

The Architect of the Radical Right

How the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan shaped today’s antigovernment politics.
by Sam Tanenhaus via The Atlantic on June 20, 2017

Our Mis-Leading Indicators

How statistical data came to rule public policy.
by Stephen Macekura via Public Books on September 15, 2014
The words "the world you were born in no longer exists" covering Trump's eyes.

The Present Crisis and the End of the Long '90s

On the constitutional settlement that governed America from the end of the Volcker Shock in 1982 to the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024.
by Samantha Hancox-Li via Liberal Currents on April 24, 2025
U.S Custom House.

Lessons from Early America’s Tariff Wars

The 1790s debate shows that, even when they aim at moral goods, tariffs abet cronyism and corruption.
by John C. Pinheiro via Law & Liberty on April 23, 2025
William McKinley's presidential inauguration.

A Warning for Democrats From the Gilded Age and the 1896 Election

Effective Republican organizing and intraparty divisions among Democrats solidified GOP political dominance until the 1930s.
by Adam M. Silver via The Conversation on April 22, 2025
A political cartoon of Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland emptying the U.S. treasury.

Radical Tariffs Aren’t New, But They Have Been Disastrous

An American story.
by Scott Reynolds Nelson via Perspectives on History on April 14, 2025
Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan

American Populists Used to Run Against Tariffs. It Could Happen Again.

William Jennings Bryan stoked a worker revolt against protectionism that led to the first income tax.
by Tony Annett via Washington Post on April 9, 2025
Political cartoon showing a dog named 'income tax' running from a can called "supreme court decisions."

No, President Trump, the Income Tax Wasn’t A Mistake. But It Was an Accident.

Trump claimed that the income tax was passed for “reasons unknown to mankind” and caused the Great Depression. Here’s the real history.
by Jesse Eisinger via ProPublica on April 8, 2025
A bread line on New York's Lower East Side in 1930.

Trump Tariffs Conjure Specter of Smoot-Hawley Act, a Depression-Era Blunder

The 1930 tariff bill hurt exporters and provoked other countries to enact their own tariffs as the U.S. economy grappled with the Great Depression.
by Andrew Jeong via Washington Post on April 8, 2025
Floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Regime Change in the West?

Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures.
by Perry Anderson via London Review of Books on March 25, 2025
Francis Townsend
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Creating the “Senior Citizen” Political Identity

On the movement that fought for old-age pensions during the Great Depression.
by Linda Gordon via HNN on March 19, 2025
"Made in U.S.A." sticker

The Return of Political Economic Nationalism

The populist turn in our politics is best understood as a revival of old categories of political economy.
by Matt Wolfson via Law & Liberty on February 25, 2025
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