In an interview with ProMarket, Glen Weyl, co-author of the wildly ambitious (and wildly controversial) new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, talks about antitrust, data as labor, and why he thinks the free market system is not actually free. “The entire business community has been speaking with one voice in the common interest of capital as a class,” he says.
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George Mason University faces controversy over its relationship with donors; the former CEO of Volkswagen is charged in relation to the company’s diesel emissions cheating scandal; and are Google and Facebook already trying to undermine Europe’s new privacy rules?
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We normally think of income inequality as a function of differences in class or socioeconomic status. But much more than generally realized, geographic differences are a major source of inequality as well, argue Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles in this extract from their new book The Captured Economy.
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Why is Europe so much more vigorous than the US when it comes to antitrust enforcement? In an interview with ProMarket, Monti, who served as the EU’s Competition Commissioner between 1999 and 2004, offers a possible explanation: American antitrust’s sensitivity to election outcomes and industry lobbying.
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Why has Facebook’s scandal not dented its earnings? How much are states and local governments giving to corporations in economic-development incentives? And did CFPB head Mick Mulvaney really say “the swampiest thing ever”?
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With a few cronyist tweaks, China’s communist leaders made capitalism safe for Party rule. But will cronyism become China’s next booming export?
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A new Stigler Center working paper examines a more roundabout way that companies can influence legislators: by donating money to charities in lawmakers’ districts. The authors find that the magnitude of these tax-exempt charitable flows dwarfs what firms spend in PACs.
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Back in the 1960s, George Stigler called into question whether states should require firms to publicly report their financials. A recent Stigler Center working paper revisits this issue and measures the impact of the different levels of financial reporting and auditing mandates around Europe on resource allocation.
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This week in political economy.
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Does investment-relevant information leak from the Fed? A new Stigler Center working paper finds surprising and novel evidence in a public dataset.
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This column on the “gun-control paradox”—the fact that gun regulations continually fail in the US Congress despite being supported by around 90 percent of US citizens—appeared in 2013 on VoxEU.org after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary and was republished in 2017 after the Las Vegas mass shooting. Following the Parkland mass shooting, we are republishing it with a new preface by one of the coauthors.
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This week in political economy.
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