Latest Posts
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 9, 2022
UW Political Economy Forum hosts former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best
On July 14th, 2022 the UW Political Economy Forum hosts former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best for an author meets critics event where we’ll discuss her new book, “Black in Blue: Lessons in Leadership, Breaking Barriers and Racial Reconciliation.” The first African-American woman to hold the top policing job in Seattle, Washington, Chief Carmen Best (Ret.) served…
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…
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