Economy Archives - Public Seminar

Capitalism

Has Conservatism Outlived Its Usefulness?

A short note on a hoary concept

June 9, 2026 • by James Miller

Matt Walsh: The definition of conservatism … It has no definition, I think. We talk about the words that don’t mean anything anymore, words that used to be useful and maybe used to mean something and they just don’t anymore because of how they’ve been used and abused and overused. ...

Has Conservatism Outlived Its Usefulness?

Labor

The Artist Status as Managed Retreat

On the Artist Status in Belgium and the underlying issues caused by defunding cultural labor

June 8, 2026 • by Dominick DeJoy

In March last year, several hundred cultural workers gathered at the Place de la Monnaie in Brussels as part of a national strike. They were there because the Belgian federal government was considering whether to limit the Artist Status, a social protection system that provides unemployment benefits to freelance cultural ...

Economy

Sovereignty Through Technology

A conversation with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff on Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

June 1, 2026 • by Ben Tarnoff, Quinn Slobodian and L. Zhang

If Fordism named the operating system of the twentieth-century economy, what governs the twenty-first? Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff—a historian of global capitalism and a technology writer respectively—suggest that the answer lies in Muskism. Their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Harper, 2026) is not so much an ...

Interviews

Who’s the Boss?

In her new book, Beneath the Wage, Annie McClanahan offers an alternative history of service work that spans Pullman porters and Amazon Mechanical Turk clickworkers

April 27, 2026 • by Annie McClanahan and Lina Moe

Eighty percent of the US workforce now does service work, yet the protagonist that still anchors most histories of capitalism is the unionized, hourly, goods-producing manufacturing worker. In Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Zone Books/Princeton University Press, 2026), Annie McClanahan argues that this framing ...

Capitalism

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

To have family is to own something

March 30, 2026 • by Sophie Lewis

“The Left has largely abandoned questions of the family,” charged the queer and trans Marxists K. D. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson in 2015. “Tacitly, at least, leftist organizations today have accepted families as a feature of contemporary capitalist society, which they will do nothing to end.” The authors’ timely ...

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

Activism

Children of 2008

A guide to the changing landscape of the labor movement

March 12, 2026 • by Dave Kamper

Solidarity, we’ve always thought, is more difficult at a distance. The great, mythic union victories of the 1930s, like the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37, when the United Auto Workers beat General Motors and opened the door to organizing the auto industry, were won by workers who lived and worked ...

Interviews

Fresh Hope for Labor

A conversation with labor historian Dave Kamper on the growing strength of American unions, as recounted in his new book, Who’s Got the Power?

March 12, 2026 • by Shea Dean and Dave Kamper

In his new book Who’s Got the Power? The Resurgence of American Unions (The New Press, 2025), labor writer and organizer Dave Kamper delivers a bit of good news in a dark time. “Much of the last half century has, for the labor movement, sucked beyond the telling,” he writes. ...

Economy

Goldbugs

An excerpt from Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

November 17, 2025 • by Quinn Slobodian

People make bad money, and that money makes bad people.— Peter Boehringer Monetary issues have long divided neoliberals. Can you trust a central bank to manage currency? Can the growth of the money supply be made automatic? Should fixed or floating rates reign in global currency markets? Must money be backed ...

Democracy

A Republic, If We Can Afford It

Our Republic depends on both economic stability and civic participation

November 6, 2025 • by Larry Schwartz

When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the delegates had created. His reply—“A republic, if you can keep it”—was no mere quip from an aging sage. It was a warning that republics are fragile, rare, and never self-sustaining. What Franklin implied was that ...

Economy

Panama Against Trump

A country’s fate hangs in the balance as protestors take to the streets

October 13, 2025 • by Nolan Young

As Donald Trump prepared to take office in late 2024, the American president-elect issued a stunning threat: to “take back” the Panama Canal, almost a quarter century after the United States had returned control of the canal and the zone around it to the sovereign state of Panama. Once in office, ...

Capitalism

Peter Thiel and the Decline of the West

The last priest of a dead faith

September 24, 2025 • by Ahmed Bouzid

In the twilight of the secular Western project, as its elites scramble for a vision to forestall cultural entropy, Peter Thiel has emerged as one of its most articulate and celebrated prophets. In a remarkably candid interview with The New York Times, Thiel laments the stagnation of modern life—not just ...

Economy

Trump vs. the Fed

Or how history is forcing the question of a democratic politics of central banking

August 27, 2025 • by Adam Tooze

Donald Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook “for cause,” escalates his long-running battle with America’s central bank. The news has triggered outrage. In the pages of the FT, David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center for Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, warned: “President Trump seems determined to ...