Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Economics

Ben Tarnoff

Better, Faster, Stronger

Two recent books illuminate the dark foundations of Silicon Valley.

September 21, 2023 issue

Osita Nwanevu

The Life of the Party

In his latest book, Michael Kazin argues that the Democrats have long sought to build a “moral capitalism.” Have they ever succeeded?

September 21, 2023 issue

Trevor Jackson

The Price of Crypto

Despite its boosters’ frequent references to democracy and freedom, cryptocurrency reflects a radical marketization of politics in which major players can rewrite the rules as needed.

June 8, 2023 issue

Willa Glickman

The Fight for Fair Wages

America’s lowest-paid workers are at a breaking point, and grassroots labor organizing may offer the only way out.

May 25, 2023 issue

Jerome Groopman

Saving Lives and Making a Killing

A new book reveals the split personality of the biotech industry: an altruistic enterprise that creates breakthrough treatments for patients in need, and a bare-knuckle business that seeks to generate astronomic profits and stop competitors from developing better treatments.

May 25, 2023 issue

Nicholas Guyatt

Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

Two new books argue that the innovations the Lincoln administration used to finance the Civil War transformed the nation from a modest and decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

May 25, 2023 issue

E. Tammy Kim

The Safe Harbor

The longshoreman labor leader Harry Bridges may no longer be widely known, but his philosophy of inclusive, democratic unionism imbues much of today’s most ambitious organizing campaigns.

April 20, 2023 issue

Robert Kuttner

300 Years of ‘Too Big to Jail’

In Impunity and Capitalism, Trevor Jackson shows how, between about 1690 and 1830, financial crises stopped being crimes and were treated as everyone’s fault and no one’s.

April 20, 2023 issue

On Strike!

Willa Glickman

‘A Wakeup Call from Hell’

By striking for safe staffing levels, New York City nurses joined a wave of labor unrest that has swept the health care industry in response to Covid-19.

March 1, 2023

Hannah Appel

Tenant, Debtor, Worker, Student

In their historic strike, academic workers at the University of California took on one of the biggest employers, landlords, and financial actors in the state.

February 8, 2023

Alice Driver

Working in Their Sleep

Meatpacking workers in Arkansas, grieving loved ones lost to Covid and struggling to pay medical bills, are organizing for justice from their employer.

December 23, 2022

Andrea Sempértegui

Ecuador’s Historic Strike

With this summer’s strike, the country’s powerful Indigenous movement united two agendas long in tension: resistance to austerity and opposition to natural resource extraction.

October 5, 2022

The Latest

Edward Chancellor

The Naturalist

In a new biography, Friedrich Hayek emerges as a paradoxical figure: a passionate liberal whose most enthusiastic supporters have been conservative.

December 7, 2023 issue

Daniel Immerwahr

Zoning Out

A recent book contends that the global economy has a new geography of special zones, islands, and enclaves that benefit the world’s wealthiest residents.

November 23, 2023 issue

Kim Phillips-Fein

Conspicuous Destruction

Two new books argue that the private equity industry has created an economic order in which getting rich quickly preempts every other value, undermining companies and evading the law.

October 19, 2023 issue

E. Tammy Kim

Storyboards and Solidarity

The current Hollywood strikes have a precedent in Disney’s golden age, when the company was a hothouse of innovation and punishing expectation.

October 5, 2023 issue

Daniel J. Kevles

Unreasonable Terms

In Owning the Sun, Alexander Zaitchik shows how American drug companies have exploited government contracts to pursue profit over public interest.

October 5, 2023 issue

Anjan Sundaram

White Bay

Life under the chemical megafactories of Ingeniero White, Argentina.

May 28, 2023

Matthew Desmond

The High Cost of Being Poor

The American government gives the most help to those who need it least. This is the true nature of our welfare state.

April 20, 2023 issue

Hermione Lee

The Soft-Power Brokers

A new history focusing on the English Rothschilds tells how the women were centrally involved in business, politics, social welfare, and culture—all while caught between the advantages of wealth and the burdens of anti-Semitism and sexism.

February 23, 2023 issue

Ian Frazier

Grim Reapers

Mega-agriculture is destroying the Corn Belt and the Central Valley, which the country’s food system depends on. Can midsize farms survive to save it?

February 9, 2023 issue

Corey Robin

The Trouble with Money

John Maynard Keynes thought that in forgetting that money is a means and not an end, we abandon the reality of the present for the fiction of the future.

December 22, 2022 issue