Analysis

Mercenary State

One of the greatest remnants of South Africa’s apartheid state is a vast securitization complex. South African militarization is now “exported” through a privatized network of military services and weapons sales for a host of different clients, including states, multinational corporations, and other armed groups. The reach of these industries has spread beyond the African continent, implicating geopolitical warfare across the world.

The Real Economy

No discipline in the humanities or social sciences today has a convincing theory of the economy. Long preoccupied with honing methods, the core of the discipline of economics has abandoned investigation into what the economy really is. Preoccupied with either appropriating or criticizing the methods of economics, other disciplines have failed to articulate any alternative conceptions of the economy.

Concentration Spiral

In Colombia, economic and political power is concentrated in the hands of a few major economic players. From 2000 to 2022, thirteen conglomerates have risen to dominate the sector, shaping profitability, access to credit, and pricing. These conglomerates not only contain the country’s banks, but they also own the country’s largest pension funds and insurance companies. Together, these conglomerates have opposed President Petro’s proposals for financial and economic reform.

The Canal Zone

Trump’s vows to “take back” the Canal are part of a broader push to return to the heyday of American expansionism, throughout which Panama served as a key neocolonial outpost. Over the past two decades, Panamanian control of the canal has solidified the consensus around the country’s transit-oriented developmental model, but it has failed to challenge the foundation of an economy vulnerable to whims of the global market and interimperial rivalry.

How to DOGE USAID

We often hear that the new Trump administration inaugurates the age of technofeudalism. But the gutting of USAID represents a continuity from the Biden years. DOGE is turbo-charging the lesser known but increasingly dominant agenda within development finance: “mobilizing private capital.”

Slashing the State

Unlike on economic issues, where Milei’s agenda made swift concessions to macrismo, his cultural and ideological crusade only escalated once in power.

After the Diamond Rush

For over 150 years, mining has constituted a core feature of the South African economy. The seemingly inexhaustible bounty of the earth made the country the wealthiest in the continent and financed one of the most all-encompassing systems of racial segregation in the world. Blessed with the largest gold deposits on the planet, successive governments in the colonial and apartheid periods cultivated a tight relationship between industry and the state. Mining wealth was used on a large scale to economically uplift white residents and to finance industrialization through state-owned corporations.

State and Development

The world economy has seen a resurgence of industrial policy in recent decades. National development programs are at the center of a variety of polarizing geopolitical axes: carbon emissions, world manufacturing shares, and integration into rival trade and investment blocs. The primary antagonism between the US and China over core technologies has shaped both industrial policy’s revival among countries that abandoned it at the height of neoliberalism, and its further development as an economic tool among countries that historically adopted it.

After Antitrust

During the 1950s and 1960s, 35 percent of workers were unionized, 25 percent of the economy by GDP was price regulated, the corporate tax rate was 53 percent, and the top marginal income tax rate was 94 percent. Inequality fell to the lowest levels on record. The antitrust bandaid taped over the gaps in this regulatory web was of limited importance to this qualified Progressive triumph. 

Developmental Tracks

Recent years have seen an astonishing resurgence of industrial policy as a legislative agenda and topic for lively debate. Thanks in large part to the waning political fortunes of neoliberalism, deliberate efforts by governments to shape the economic trajectories of their countries are no longer condemned or dismissed. And somewhat surprisingly, given the country’s longstanding reputation as a bastion of liberalism, the origins of industrial policy as a concept are now routinely traced back to the early United States, particularly to Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures in the aftermath of the American Revolution, Henry Clay’s American System in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and Henry Carey’s neomercantilism in the decades straddling the Civil War. The political designs of these elite figures reveal that what would later be called “industrial policy” was never antithetical to American traditions and ideals.

Selling Power

A comparison of the New Deal power program and the IRA exposes key design questions regarding the financing of power systems.

Brave New World

Endogenous dynamics have crippled the current growth wave that began in the 1980s—yielding the period of decay in which we are now living. Rather than achieving a new stability of horizontal competition, the turn toward the market brought about a vertical domination of brand-name intellectual property claims and captive supply chains. What is next as we pass through a historical inflection point? Yogi Berra, the Prophet of Prudence, suggests waiting a few decades to see what the Owl of Minerva says.

Transfer and Transition

Over the past years of escalating trade disputes between China and the US, the latter has repeatedly highlighted a practice it considers anathema: technology transfers that US companies need to offer to their Chinese collaborators if they want to do business in the country. Donald Trump railed against them and Joe Biden branded them “unfair.” Across the other side of the Atlantic, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen explained that such practices by China threaten Europe’s “economic and national security” and necessitate multi-pronged “de-risking” measures to unlink the two economies. In this framework, technology transfers are being “forced” by a major competitor.

Class Cleavages

Within the American business lobby, it seems there is no classwide consensus about the direction of the country’s future. The large blocs of organized money that found Trump a threat to democratic institutions in 2021 evidently no longer do—proposals once thought bad for American capitalism, such as a twenty-percent universal tariff and “mass deportations,” are no longer outside the realm of possibility. As a result, today, the American capitalist class’s record of partisanship could best be described as incoherent. What accounts for business’s inability to challenge the Republican Party? And are there any patterns in the chaos?