Despite the media hype about corporate CEOs having abandoned their shareholder value maximization credo, the recent statement from the Business Roundtable contains nothing new of substance. CEOs still firmly convinced that their firms’ main goal remains to maximize shareholder value could sign it without batting an eye.
Read more
In the same way that Capital in the Twenty-First Century transformed the way economists look at inequality, Piketty’s new book Capital and Ideology will transform the way political scientists look at their own field.
Read more
The two big ideas that animated American public policy since the end of World War II, employer-sponsored social benefits and neoliberalism, are failures. We need better options.
Read more
In his review of Paul Collier’s recent book The Future of Capitalism, Branko Milanovic discusses ideology, social democracy, and the “ethical world.”
Read more
Americans used to have a relatively egalitarian view of markets. How did they come to accept extreme inequality as an innate part of their economic system? At the heart of this change is a radical shift in the meaning of American capitalism itself.
Read more
Booming stock markets and the collapse of house prices in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis have increased wealth inequality in the US to a new historical high. Meanwhile, the racial wealth gap has stayed put for over 70 years, with virtually no progress in reducing wealth inequality between black and white households.
Read more
Surveillance capitalism is not the capitalism of old, writes Harvard professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff in her new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Read more
Silicon Valley today resembles the deepest part of the jungle known as the triple canopy, where tall trees block out all the light and nothing can grow on the ground. Who knows how many good businesses are not funded because of the fear of the tech monopolies?
Read more
In a wide-ranging interview with ProMarket, media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan explains why Facebook has become “too big to manage” and why he believes the only solution to its bigness is a global political movement aimed at breaking it up.
Read more
In an interview with ProMarket, Open University’s Peter Bloom talks about his provocative new book CEO Society and why he believes celebrating corporate CEOs too much erodes democratic values.
Read more
Some 130 years before Friedman could begin arguing that a corporation’s sole responsibility was to make a profit for its shareholders, Boston’s Charles River Bridge Company had to convince the Supreme Court that corporations were private entities whose interests could diverge from the public interest. While it lost that case, the partial success of the Charles River Bridge Company’s reasoning with the court laid the foundations for corporate personhood as it exists today.
Read more
In the inaugural episode of the new podcast from the Stigler Center and Chicago Booth Review, economists Kate Waldock and Luigi Zingales probe the dangers of marrying business power with government power—without once uttering the name Trump.
Read more