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The US government's expanding role in assisting businesses with the development of new technologies has significantly increased corporate dependence on the state. This dependence creates new opportunities for social movements to extract significant concessions from capital., The Left's standard theoretical tools are inadequate for making sense of US politics in the current period. They give us little leverage to explain the threat of authoritarian or neofascist [...]

This essay revisits an earlier article, published in 2008, that argued that the United States had created a "hidden developmental state" that helped move technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. In the intervening fifteen years, this apparatus has become more elaborate with ever more government initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels. Moreover, the major pieces of legislation passed in the first two years of the Biden administration have added considerable new funding. Nevertheless, this set of programs has not yet become a part of political debates outside of the federal government. It remains hidden to most of the electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a story that has been told by both the physicist Stephen Hawking and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. They report that a famous scientist was lecturing on the structure [...]

It is a great honour to deliver the third annual Wheelwright lecture, and I am deeply grateful to the faculty, students, and alumnae of the Political Economy Department at the [...]

The business community in the United States forged an alliance with the religious Right in 1970s and ever since then there is a divergence in the trajectories of market societies between the United States and Western Europe. A neo-Polanyian theoretical framework is suggested to understand the dynamics within contemporary market societies because it effectively identifies the key mechanisms that drive the developmental trajectories of contemporary market societies.

As dynamic collaborations between networks of specialists have become more central to developing cutting‐edge innovations, designing and sustaining innovation policies that foster them has become an increasingly central concern. This article reviews the characteristics of the "developmental network" or "neo‐developmental" states that have been shown to foster innovations at the technological horizon. It then analyzes the US case to suggest why some developmental network approaches to governance have proven relatively durable, while others have not. We conclude with a discussion of what can – and cannot – be learned from the US case, and suggest the importance of comparative work on the sustainability of effective innovation‐centered approaches to governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic analysts have used trends in total factor productivity (TFP) to evaluate the effectiveness with which economies are utilizing advances in technology. However, this measure is problematic on several different dimensions. First, the idea that it is possible to separate out the relative contribution to economic output of labor, capital, and technology requires ignoring their complex interdependence in actual production. Second, since TFP growth has declined in recent decades in all of the developed market societies, there is good reason to believe that the decline is an artifact of the slower rates of economic growth that are linked to austerity policies. Third, reliance on TFP assumes that measures of the gross domestic product are accurately capturing changes in economic output, even as the portion of the labor force producing tangible goods has declined substantially. Finally, there are other indicators that suggest that current rates of technological progress might be as strong or stronger than in earlier decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. economy has undergone a major transformation over the past quarter century. This transformation has the potential to improve living standards and humanize working conditions as advanced technologies increase [...]

This paper challenges the conventional belief that household saving in the U.S. declined during the Reagan Years. The paper proposes a definition of the household financial surplus that is available for use by corporations and the public sector. It shows how existing measures of household saving diverge from this definition, and it proposes alternative estimates of the trend of this household financial surplus in the 1980s. These alternative estimates show no downward trend, and in most years, the available supply of funds has exceeded business and government demands., The variable components of household saving during the Reagan administration was presented. Factors such as capital gains and capital consumptions, which are not considered by the traditional approaches in measuring household savings, are taken into account as well as other factors including financing for household extensions, capital gains and losses, social security surplus and public pension funds. It was conluded that household savings did not decline during the Reagan administration.

President Bill Clinton's plans of federal investment in infrastructure, training, and education, though better than its predecessors, needs institutional reforms if it is to give greater latitude to democracy, equality, personal liberty, and environmental protection. The possible areas of institutional reform to be integrated with the economy are reform in the election process, in banks and corporate bodies, and in the use of capital.

Capital could be made more readily available by reforming the rules governing corporations, preventing capital flight to foreign countries and legislating against the misdirection or withholding of capital for political ends. The task is to reduce the power of those who hold assets without creating a huge state apparatus. To ensure productivity in corporations owned by employees, management decisions will have to be institutionalized. Profits could then be redistributed through taxation.

This essay introduces a special issue of Politics & Society in memory of Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, written in memory of Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019), outlines nine characteristics of a future socialism. It elaborates socialism as a set of processes and institutional arrangements that would open the way to a society that is radically more democratic, more just, and more sustainable than the existing order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, there has been little agreement between advocates of radical financial reform and socialist theoreticians. However, in the new circumstances of the twenty-first century, a productive synthesis of these two traditions might be possible. Drawing on the franchise model of credit creation elaborated by Robert C. Hockett and the dysfunctions created by the extreme concentration of private financial institutions, this article outlines a reform agenda that would both democratize finance and facilitate the flow of funds into valuable forms of investment that are currently starved for resources. If the new institutions envisioned in this proposal were able to take root and expand, they could ultimately facilitate a transition to socialism, defined as the subordination of the market to democratic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the articles and commentaries in the special issue titled "Democratizing Finance." Here, the term "democratizing finance" focuses on reducing inequalities of income, wealth, and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social welfare is a field marked by a huge chasm between what the public believes and what social scientists 'know.' For example, it is part of the society's common-sense that [...]