Economic Development

February 26, 2022

UW Political Science Faculty Panel – The Future of Afghanistan

Last week, Profs. and Forum Affiliates Asli Cansunar, Tony Gill, and James D. Long spoke on the UW Political Science Faculty Panel on the Future of Afghanistan. Afghanistan remains an important US foreign policy matter despite the US military withdrawal in 2021. There is a looming economic and humanitarian crisis, a potential refugee crisis,…

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 22, 2021

The Geography of American Innovation, introducing Moretti Podcast

It’s the early 21st century. That means déjà vu all over again: the US economy remains an innovation powerhouse. Silicon Valley, the Puget Sound, Austin, and the Greater Boston Metro area all boast highly productive companies across variegated high-tech industries—and, in the process, they have created coveted jobs for well-educated people. At the same time,…

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 21, 2021

Menaldo & Wittstock’s new working paper

Victor Menaldo and Nicolas Wittstock wrote and posted a new working paper: Bidenism as Trumpism 2.0: America’s Bipartisan Embrace of Neo-Mercantilist Policies and What this Entails A hefty dose of nationalism infuses Build Back Better, U.S. President Joe Biden’s economic policy priorities. Echoing Trump’s Make America Great Again promises, it embraces a zero-sum logic regarding…