Can we be frenemies?
Working with the political economy what we've got—or not
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller chowed down on blintzes. Today, the Biden administration promises “the most significant action in US history to tackle the climate crisis and strengthen US energy security.” This is a friendly kind of capitalism! What’s the catch?
This week at Public Seminar, Henry Tonks tracks the rise and fall of a “moderate Republican.” Mark Setterfield chats with Anna Pick about moving past the tribalism of economics. Yannis Bougiatiotis identifies the blindspot in mainstream responses to Biden’s green industrial policy.
And Alexandra Panzarelli remembers Venezuela’s six-day uprising of 1989—and wonders how today’s despot can forget the lessons oppressed Venezuelans taught the dismissive political classes the last time they took to the streets.
Biden’s Green Protectionism
Yannis Bougiatiotis
The manufacturing of net-zero technologies is a promising field of profitability—and the United States wants in. According to the International Agency of Energy, the global market for key mass-manufactured clean energy technologies will be worth $650 billion a year by 2030, while value added per $ invested in the clean energy industry will largely surpass the fossil fuels industry and traditional manufacturing sector.
How Moderate Republicans Went Extinct
Henry Tonks
Grandson of the great oil tycoon, Nelson Rockefeller was a man of omnivorous and voracious enthusiasms. Pursuing the Rockefeller dynasty’s third-generation enterprises of finance, philanthropy, and public service, “Rocky” helped build Rockefeller Center, roamed Latin America to promote inter-American accord, and lobbied his way into a bewilderingly diverse range of advisory roles in the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations. Restlessly, Rockefeller collected modern art, mistresses, and policy entrepreneurs (he was Henry Kissinger’s first patron). Richard Norton Smith’s 2014 biography of Rockefeller is called On His Own Terms; it might more appositely have been titled “With His Many Appetites.”
Social Capitalism
Anna Pick and Mark Setterfield
Setterfield: Over the last 30 or so years, you could, at risk of being a little bit reductive, boil it down to inequality, stemming from the systematic disempowerment of labor that we’ve witnessed since circa 1980, which caused real wages to slow relative to productivity growth. People haven’t seen the benefits of increased productivity. That helps you understand a number of things: that the neoliberal boom from 1990 to 2007 was characterized by growing inequality, stagnation of real wages as exemplified by the disconnect between real wage growth and productivity growth, which then in turn led households towards financial markets—households turned to borrowing to finance their consumption.