political economy 
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SOURCE: The New Republic
2/27/2023
Review: The Right-Wing Abuse of Adam Smith
by Kim Phillips-Fein
Glory M. Liu's account of Adam Smith's reception in America explains how American politicians read selectively in Smith's capacious writings on political economy and public morality to construct a self-interested view of the market as a natural phenomenon, writes historian Kim Phillips-Fein.
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SOURCE: Dissent
2/17/2023
Clara Mattei on the History of Austerity Politics
A decade before the Great Depression, capital responded to a serious crisis of legitimacy by adopting measures that punished a restive working class through scarcity, argues a new economic history; maintaining hierarchy, not growing the economy, is the objective.
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SOURCE: The Nation
12/13/2022
How the "Third Way" Made Neoliberal Politics Seem Inevitable
by Lily Geismer
The Third Way never presented a coherent case for what it stood for or how it might balance the roles of the market and the state. But it led to a generational reworking of the role if government and a sidelining of mass political movements.
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SOURCE: Slate
12/5/2022
Libertarianism's Philosophers Come Out Worse For Wear
by Rebecca Brenner Graham
A fellowship at a leading libertarian institute convinced the author that the movement sees its luminaries as icons, not as historical figures.
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SOURCE: The Nation
9/3/2022
Virtue and Vice: Looking for the Real Adam Smith
by Glory Liu
Smith's work on political economy has long been seen in tension with his investigation of empathy and other moral sentiments. Paul Sagar's new book argues that scholars have mistaken Smith's intentions in order to falsely reconcile the market and morality.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
7/21/2022
Review: Gerstle on Free Markets and Besieged Citizens
by Robert Kuttner
Gary Gerstle's new history aims to define the political order that began under Jimmy Carter and resulted in the overturning of New Deal liberalism for the empty promises of a market society, with the power of the state insulating capitalism from democracy.
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6/19/2022
Will Artificial Intelligence be the Agent of Capitalism's (and Humanity's) Creative Destruction?
by Jim Castagnera
Between science fiction and the political economy of the present, the author wonders if artificial intelligence will constitute humanity's successor species.
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SOURCE: N + 1
6/1/2022
Review Essay: Who Did Neoliberalism?
by Erik Baker
New books wrestle with the rise and collapse of the 1960s New Left and the gulf between its aspirations and achievements, and assess whether 1960s radical intellectuals are responsible for present-day neoliberalism.
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SOURCE: The Nation
4/13/2022
Gary Gerstle: Is the Neoliberal Era Over?
"Will new political movements emerge with the strength to compel a serious redistribution of wealth away from elites and toward the masses without reproducing the tyranny that became so intrinsic to communism? This is one of the key questions of our time."
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SOURCE: Foreign Policy
3/11/2022
We're Talking about Climate Change with Outdated Colonial Language
by Priya Satia
The dominant climate activist theme of sacrificing in the present to protect the future is rooted in the intellectual history of economics which has driven the profligate consumption and gross inequality that threatens the planet.
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SOURCE: New York Times
7/13/2021
America’s 40-Year Experiment With Big Business Is Over
by Nelson Lichtenstein
Biden's executive order returns to a longstanding American view of concentrated economic power as a threat to democracy.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
6/28/2021
The Age of Neoliberalism is Ending in America. What will Replace It?
by Gary Gerstle
It will be difficult for the Biden administration to revive a (Green) New Deal Order, but making progress may be key to stopping the nation's slide toward authoritarian and racist forms of populism.
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SOURCE: The Metropole
12/10/2020
The Growth Of Market-Oriented Urban Policy — A Review Of Neoliberal Cities
by Tracy Neumann
A new collection of essays seeks to develop a historical understanding and grounding for the often vague term "neoliberalism" through its transformation of urban space and politics.
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SOURCE: Aeon
10/2/2020
This Vanishing Moment and Our Vanishing Future: John Hersey, Hiroshima, and the End of World
Postwar prosperity depended on a truce between capitalist growth and democratic fairness. Is it possible to get it back?
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SOURCE: Public Books
9/22/2020
How the Welfare State Became the Neoliberal Order (Review)
by Pablo Pryluka
Although the Tennessee Valley Authority was a pioneering public works project, its alumni worked in Latin America to advance redevelopment projects that elevated the authority of big business, a model now associated with the neoliberal turn in the developed world.
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SOURCE: The American Prospect
5/18/2020
Keynes and the Good Life
by Jeffrey Sachs
Keynes did not give us a checklist of dos and don’ts other than general ones: Don’t waste human talents and physical resources through wanton unemployment, avoidable wars, or breakdowns of social and trade relations.
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