Blog

May 4, 2023

Democratizing Democracy: Is More Democracy Always Better?

By Jorge Rojas-Vallejos[*] Over the past decade, Chile experienced two monumental political reforms. Under the old rules, the country’s two main political blocks, Concertación (center left) and Chile Vamos (center right), jointly dominated congressional representation after the country’s return to democracy in 1990. Yet, they both spearheaded changes that weakened their political oligopoly. The…

July 6, 2021

Is Silicon Valley upending Democracy? w/Carles Boix

Beginning in the 1970s, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs commercialized a set of information and communication technologies that revolutionized almost all aspects of our lives. Personal computers, the internet, and smartphones created new industries such as digital platforms and cloud computing that continue to power advanced economies. Might the forces unleashed by these technologies undermine the post War…

June 29, 2021

Daniel Markovits on The Meritocracy Trap

Starting in the 1960s, computers powered by silicon chips and, later, the internet, dramatically reshaped the geography of the US economy. The newest general purpose technology that builds on these innovations is artificial intelligence. With this context in mind, Daniel Markovits and Nicolas Wittstock discuss Daniel’s new book, The Meritocracy Trap, where he argues that…

June 25, 2021

Breaking up Amazon? 2021’s Worst Idea, by Victor Menaldo

The House Judiciary Committee has been working feverishly on several blockbuster bills intended to rein in Big Tech. It just approved three of the most far-reaching. The so-called Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching, or Access, Act, compels the largest digital platforms to become interoperable with each other. The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act…

June 15, 2021

Free Speech: an Instrumental Defense of the Marketplace of Ideas

This piece is forthcoming in “Divided we Fall” By Victor Menaldo Traditional defenses of free speech revolve around limiting the government’s ability to infringe on citizens’ expression and association. They also center on treating free speech as an unalloyed right, something sacrosanct, no matter the consequences. Here, I depart from this orthodox approach. On the…

Wittstock & Martin on Innovation to Fight Climate Change

It has now become a platitude: technological innovation is the key to human prosperity. COVID-19 has demonstrated this once again: global research networks and swashbuckling pharmaceutical companies (incentivized, regulated, and nudged along by governments, of course) gave us several vaccines in record time—most of them using entirely new techniques such as mRNA technologies. What about…

June 8, 2021

Recent Tech-centric Political Economy Podcasts

The Digitization of State Repression – with Steven Feldstein In this episode, Senior Fellow Steven Feldstein of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program discusses his new book, The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology is Reshaping Power, Politics, and Resistance, with Forum Affiliate Morgan Wack. The conversation touches on the…

May 12, 2021

IP Waiver on Covid-19 vaccine patents: populism, not solutions

By Victor Menaldo Soon after World War I broke out, the U.S. government expropriated several patents from Bayer, a German Chemical and Pharmaceutical company. It then sold them to US Winthrop Chemical Company. Cue America’s sly statesmen gloating with self-satisfaction: take that, Kaiser Wilhelm II. We just showed you! The only problem with this seemingly…

April 26, 2021

Forum Podcast “Can Taxes Improve Politics?” – with Jonathan Weigel

Guest: Jonathan Weigel, Assistant Professor of International Development at LSE In this episode, Dr. Jonathan Weigel of the London School of Economics discusses his work on taxation and state capacity with Forum Affiliate Morgan Wack. Throughout the episode Jonathan discusses his work aimed at improving the efficacy of tax collection efforts alongside officials in the DRC. He details the…

March 12, 2021

Say it Ain’t So, Joe: Please Don’t Mess with the U.S. and China’s Shared Prosperity

By Victor Menaldo and Nicolas Wittstock On February 24th, Joe Biden signed an executive order to review U.S. supply chains. The review seeks to establish if the U.S. relies too heavily on foreign suppliers in four key industries: computer chips, large-capacity batteries, pharmaceuticals, and rare earth minerals used in electronics. The problems it seeks to address are growing…