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Monopoly Politics traces how government policies towards competition and monopoly have evolved in the United States and France over the 20^th century, helping to understand why American and international markets are today monopolized by an ever-narrowing group of companies. Using insights from microeconomics, bureaucratic politics, sociology, psychology, and law, it provides a theory of long-term policy and institutional change, based on the interaction of changing economic beliefs, staff turnover within the state, and the accumulating economic costs of unsustainable policy regimes.

Leveraging tens of thousands of original archival documents in the United States and France, Monopoly Politics shows how established, committed policymakers frequently ignore new economic information about the costs of pro-competition or pro-monopoly policy. Accordingly, government policy changes only gradually over time through the replacement of these policymakers with non-committed policymakers who are willing to reconsider their economic beliefs and the existing policy arrangements.

From the United States’ adoption of aggressive anti-monopoly policies in the 1930s and later scaling back of those policies in the 1970s, to the French government’s adoption of a pro-monopoly industrial policy in the 1960s and its later scaling back in the 1980s, Monopoly Politics covers the inner policy debates of key shifts in the twentieth century across different arenas such as antitrust, intellectual property, trade, and industrial policy.”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Erik Peinert is an assistant professor of Political Science at Boston University. His research focuses on the political economy of advanced industrial states and the politics of economic policymaking. Prior to Boston University, he was a research manager at the American Economic Liberties Project, and he has had had research affiliations with the Rhodes Center for International Finance at Brown University, Johns Hopkins SAIS, the Center for European Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, and the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. Peinert earned his PhD in political science at Brown University.

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The United States is no longer the world’s undisputed superpower. China and India increasingly flex their economic muscle, as the West’s share of global GDP steadily declines—and America’s rules-based system risks becoming irrelevant. In business, competition brings efficiency, balance, and innovation. But not in the marketplace for global power.

Acclaimed economist Eswar S. Prasad argues that the very forces expected to stabilize the world order are fueling disarray. Globalization has deepened inequality in many countries, stoked political backlash and triggered trade wars. Economic institutions like the IMF and WTO are no longer fit for purpose. The rise of “middle powers” like South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia once suggested multipolar stability; but today, such economies are forced to pick sides in the intensifying US–China struggle for hegemony.

Prasad’s book contends that we are caught in a destructive feedback loop between economics, domestic politics, and geopolitics. With instability the new status quo, we need radical solutions to reinvigorate the world economy, prioritize common aspirations—and halt the downward spiral.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Eswar S. Prasad is Nandlal P. Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His publications include The Future of Money, a Book of the Year in the Financial Times, The Economist, Foreign Affairs and The Week.

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In “Dictating the Agenda,” authors Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis reveal how today’s authoritarian states are actively countering liberal ideas and advocacy surrounding human rights and democracy across various global governance domains. The transformed global context has unlocked for authoritarian states the possibility to contend with Western liberal soft power in new, traditionally “non-political” ways, including by plugging or even reversing the very channels of influence that originally spread liberalism in the 1990s and 2000s. Cooley and Dukalskis ultimately advance a theory of authoritarian snapback, the process in which non-democratic states limit the transnational resonance of liberal ideas at home and advance anti-liberal norms and ideas into the global public sphere.

Drawing from a range of evidence, including field work interviews and comparative case studies that demonstrate the changing nature of consumer boycotts, a database of authoritarian government administrative actions against foreign journalists, a database of global content-sharing agreement involving Chinese and Russian state media, and a database of transnational higher education partnerships involving authoritarian and democratic countries, this book offers a novel theory of how authoritarian governments figured out how to exploit and repurpose the same actors, tools, and norms that once exclusively promoted and sustained US-backed liberalism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Cooley is the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. From 2015-21 he served as the 15th Director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for the Study of Russia, Eurasia and Eastern Europe and from 2022-2025 as the Vice Provost for Research and Academic Centers at Barnard. Professor Cooley’s research examines how international actors have influenced the governance, sovereignty, and security of the post-Communist states. In addition to his academic publications, Professor Cooley’s commentaries have appeared in Foreign Affairs, New York Times, and Washington Post and he has testified for the US Congress, UK Parliament and the Parliament of Canada.

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium and across the world. An epic achievement, his book takes us into merchant businesses in Aden and car factories in Turin, onto the terrifyingly violent sugar plantations in Barbados, and within the world of women workers in textile factories in today’s Cambodia.

Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. But then it burst onto the world scene, as a powerful alliance between European states and merchants propelled them, and their economic logic, across the oceans. This, Beckert shows, was modern capitalism’s big bang, and one of its epicenters was the slave labor camps of the Caribbean. This system, with its hierarchies that haunt us still, provided the liftoff for the radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Fueled by vast productivity increases along with coal and oil, capitalism pulled down old ways of life to crown itself the defining force of the modern world. This epic drama, shaped by state-backed institutions and imperial expansion, corresponded at no point to an idealized dream of free markets.

Drawing on archives on six continents, Capitalism locates important modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and ruthless coercion everywhere in the world, opening the aperture from heads of state to rural cultivators. Beckert shows that despite the dependence on expansion, there always have been, and are still, areas of human life that the capitalist revolution has yet to reach.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Capitalism has long been understood as a driving force behind the biggest political, economic, and social dislocations of our time. But in this sweeping, kaleidoscopic history of the economic system that has shaped our world, the Pulitzer Prize finalist John Cassidy adopts a bold new approach: he examines global capitalism through the eyes of its critics.

From the English Luddites, who rebelled against early factory automation, to communists in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century, Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, this absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It visits with familiar names―Smith, Carlyle, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi―but also focuses on many lesser-known figures, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; J.C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Gandhian economics; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; and Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of the Cold War.

Blending rich biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics tells an expansive story that illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues we face today, from widening inequality and the ecological crisis to technological transformation and resurgent authoritarian politics.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

John Cassidy is a journalist at The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is the author of How Markets Fail and Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era and lives in New York City.

Prophecies that the dollar will lose its status as the world’s dominant currency have echoed for decades—and are increasing in volume. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts claim that Bitcoin or other blockchain-based monetary units will replace the dollar. Foreign policy hawks warn that China’s renminbi poses a lethal threat to the greenback. And sound money zealots predict that mounting US debt and inflation will surely erode the dollar’s value to the point of irrelevancy.

Contra the doomsayers, Paul Blustein shows that the dollar’s standing atop the world’s currency pyramid is impregnable, barring catastrophic policy missteps by the US government. Recounting how the United States has wielded the dollar to impose devastating sanctions against adversaries, Blustein explains that although targets such as Russia have found ways to limit the damage, Washington’s financial weaponry will retain potency long into the future. His message, however, is that America must not be complacent about the dollar; the great power that its supremacy confers comes with commensurate responsibility.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Paul Blustein has written about economic issues for more than 40 years, first as a reporter at leading news organizations and later as the author of several critically acclaimed books. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, Paul spent much of his career reporting for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Kamakura, Japan.

Presenting the fourth William R. Rhodes ’57 Ethics of Capitalism annual lecture:

How did business ethics come to be understood as something different from plain-old ethics? This lecture locates that departure in the middle decades of the nineteenth-century United States, specifically to the frictions that emerged from inter-regional commerce between Northern manufacturers and Southern slaveholders. The politics of slavery and abolition functioned in surprising ways to construct the business sector as a space where different rules applied. The outcome was a new notion of the market as a space functioning most efficiently when pesky concerns of morality did not intrude.

Q & A to follow moderated by Mark Blyth, Director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics & Finance.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Seth Rockman is a historian of the United States focusing on the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. His research unfolds at the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, material culture studies, and the history of capitalism. Rockman’s latest book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (2024), is an eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.

*Lunch provided*

The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, non-elected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials. In Our Money, Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leah Downey is a junior research scholar at St. John’s College, Cambridge where she works on democratic theory and macroeconomic policymaking. Downey holds B.A.s in Mathematics and Economics from UNC Chapel Hill, an MSc in Economics & Philosophy from the LSE, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University. Her research considers the democratic implications of how states make policy. As such, she has written on topics including the administrative state, monetary policy, macrofinance and the green transition, and the meaning of security in politics and economics.

*Lunch served*

The rise of an industry tasked with the collection of medical debts in the United States is a relatively recent development. Physicians and hospitals have long held themselves apart from profit maximization and have expressed a moral aversion to immiserating patients in the pursuit of unpaid debts. This is particularly true of nonprofit hospitals, which find their origins in almshouses, community associations and religious orders. In addition, while creditors have tremendous powers at their disposal in seeking to collect, including lawsuits, wage garnishment, and property liens, medical providers recoup relatively little even when they resort to such aggressive measures.

Why, then, in the last forty years, have US nonprofit hospitals increasingly turned to third-party debt collection, debt sales, and lawsuits against patient debtors? Answering this question demands an investigation of shifts in health insurance, hospital finance, and the moral economy of care. It also requires an understanding of physicians’ progressive disengagement from debt collection. What was once an unavoidably personal negotiation has become an administrative and legal process divorced from clinical obligations. This talk draws on historical research and new data to explain how unremunerative practices causing financial harm to patients became standard practice.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luke Messac is a physician and historian at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He received his BA from Harvard University, his MD and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his residency training in emergency medicine at Rhode Island Hospital.

Dr. Messac’s early research was on the history and political economy of health care in Africa. His first book, No More to Spend (Oxford University Press, 2020) was a history of the practice of medicine under regimes of austerity in British colonial Africa. He has also published widely in medical and historical journals on a range of subjects including the development of national income accounting, the origins of trade regulations for medicinal opiates, and determinants of population-level mortality rates. His most recent work focuses on the rise of the medical debt collection industry in the United States. This is the subject of his book Your Money or Your Life (Oxford University Press, 2023). His has published in leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine and Health Affairs and has testified before the United States Senate. He lives with his wife and two children in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

*lunch served*

Despite the apparent bounty of the Inflation Reduction Act, private sector investment in clean tech has been on a downward trend since 2023. Now with the new administration’s pivot to hydrocarbons, general antipathy towards renewable energy and clean tech, and denial that climate change is even a problem, what hope is there for green investment in Trump’s carbon economy?

Join Rhodes Center Director Mark Blyth in conversation with Tom Steyer, climate investor, philanthropist, and environmentalist.

Audience Q&A to follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Tom is the founder and co-executive chair of Galvanize Climate Solutions, a climate-focused global investment firm. Central to the firm’s thesis is the belief of an absolute, unequivocal need to win in the marketplace with clean products and services that are cheaper, faster, and better. He is also a New York Times bestselling author, having released his first book Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War in May 2024.

After earning his MBA from Stanford, in 1986 Steyer founded Farallon Capital Management, a San Francisco-based hedge fund that pioneered the strategy known as “absolute return investing,” and which grew to $36 billion in assets under management. In 2012, he left his firm to devote his time, money, and energy to climate issues.

Steyer played a key role in preserving California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, while also working to pass clean energy initiatives and advocate for environmental justice across the country. He also co-founded Beneficial State Bank, a triple bottom line community development bank focused on justice and sustainability, and TomKat Ranch, a regenerative ranch dedicated to raising cattle with a negative carbon footprint.

In 2013, Steyer founded NextGen America (formerly known as NextGen Climate), the largest youth voter engagement organization in American history, whose climate-focused messaging and outreach helped lead to record levels of youth turnout in recent elections.

He was a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate with a campaign centered on addressing climate change, and later that year he served as co-chair for California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Business and Jobs Recovery Task Force. In addition, he co-chaired Vice President Biden’s Climate Engagement Advisory Council to help mobilize climate voters.

He lives in San Francisco, enjoys spending time with family, and can always be counted on by friends to relay the latest climate data (whether they are interested in hearing it or not).

*Lunch provided*

Economics of Hereness examines the east-central European origins of development concepts that came to dominate the postwar world. It treats social science as a situated phenomenon shaped by the twentieth century’s violent politics. It explains why and how developmental thought became the key instrument of defining, building, and contesting new nation-states in Europe after World War I—and then globally after World War II. The book reconstructs how Polish economists––mostly Jewish––converted Poland’s intermediary position between the industrialized West and the “underdeveloped” colonial territories into an epistemic advantage. Dubbed “Polish Keynesians,” these activist scholars developed a way of transforming a small, poor, multiethnic state into a self-expanding economy and, thus, an ethnically inclusive polity. They acted against the trend of separating nationalities and ethnic groups in new states with large minority populations. Economics of Hereness recasts the genealogy of development theory from the perspective of the blood-and-guts history of Poland and east-central Europe.

Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Małgorzata Mazurek is an Associate Professor in Polish Studies in the History Department at Columbia University. Her interests include the history of social sciences, international development, the social history of labor and consumption in twentieth-century Poland, and Polish-Jewish studies. She published Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010), which deals with the history of social inequalities under state socialism. Her current book project, Economics of Hereness, revises the history of developmental thinking from the perspective of interwar Poland and its problem of multi-ethnicity.

She has recently written about the idea of full employment in interwar Poland for the American Historical Review, history of social sciences for a survey handbook, The Interwar World, and “The University as the Second-Third World Space in the Cold War” for the volume Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular edited by Kristin Roth-Ey.

*Lunch provided*

Since the late 1970s, income inequality has been on the rise in many post-industrial democracies. Can public opinion help offset rising inequality through greater support for an egalitarian policy response? To answer this question, Cavaille proposes a new framework for understanding how people form opinions about redistributive social policies. First, people support policies that increase their own expected income. Second, they support policies that move the status quo closer to what is prescribed by shared norms of fairness. In most circumstances, saying the “fair thing” is easier than reasoning according to one’s pocketbook. But there are important exceptions: when policies have large and certain pocketbook consequences, people take the self-interested position instead of the ‘fair’ one. Fair Enough? builds on this simple framework to explain puzzling attitudinal trends in post-industrial democracies including a decline in support for redistribution in Great Britain, the erosion of social solidarity in France, and a declining correlation between income and support for redistribution in the United States.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Charlotte Cavaillé is an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and a Faculty Associate in the Institute for Social Research Center for Political Studies. In her research, Cavaillé examines the dynamics of popular attitudes towards redistributive social policies at a time of rising inequality, high fiscal stress, and high levels of immigration.

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook ’99 reflects on the origins of the governance and economic crisis raising new questions about the viability of “the German model.” With external pressures from the U.S. and China challenging the European way of doing business – both economically and politically - how might the EU advance on redefining its own economic model and preserving the strength of integration in a de-globalizing world under increasing strains of kinetic and hybrid conflict? How must the relationship between the EU and its largest trading partner, the United States, change to adapt to shifting pressures in a world of chaos, in light of political radicalization, accelerating armed conflict and economic strain on a trading system that depends on functional international law and predictability to survive?

Audience Q & A to follow.

Lunch served.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook ’99 is a German-American economic and political analyst and strategist, former Director and CEO of the German Council on Foreign Relations and currently Executive Vice President at the Bertelsmann Stiftung, based in Berlin, Germany. For over a decade she directed three research initiatives at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, including the Future of Diplomacy Project and the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship, both of which she co-founded with the current U.S. Ambassador to Beijing, R. Nicholas Burns. She is a Watson Policy Mentor for the 2024-25 academic year.

In previous roles she served on the Management Board of the European Policy Centre (Brussels) and as a strategy consultant at Roland Berger in Shanghai, Beijing, Hamburg, and Paris. She started her career as a broadcast journalist for CNN-International in Atlanta and London. She is an Eisenhower and Truman Project Fellow and serves on several non-profit advisory boards in Europe. Cathryn’s research work focuses on transatlantic relations including foreign, security and trade policies, on digital and tech policy and on the role of urban actors in international affairs. She is a frequent commentator on foreign policy in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times and across television and radio in the U.S. and Europe. She is a graduate of Brown University (BA with dual concentration in IR and French Civilization), the London School of Economics (MSc European Studies), and the Harvard Kennedy School (MPA), and retains academic affiliations in Europe and the United States.

(Lunch provided)

Smuggling is typically thought of as furtive and hidden, taking place under the radar and beyond the reach of the state. But in many cases, governments tacitly permit illicit cross-border commerce, or even devise informal arrangements to regulate it. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the borderlands of Tunisia and Morocco, Max Gallien explains why states have long tolerated illegal trade across their borders and develops new ways to understand the political economy of smuggling. His book, “Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins” examines the rules and agreements that govern smuggling in North Africa, tracing the involvement of states in these practices and their consequences for borderland communities. It demonstrates that, contrary to common assumptions about the effects of informal economies, smuggling can promote both state and social stability. States not only turn a blind eye to smuggling, they rely on it to secure political acquiescence and maintain order, because it provides income for otherwise neglected border communities. More recently, however, the securitization of borders, wars, political change, and the pandemic have put these arrangements under pressure. Gallien explores the renegotiation of the role of smuggling, showing how stability turns into vulnerability and why some groups have been able to thrive while others have been pushed further to the margins.

Audience Q & A will follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Max Gallien is a political scientist specialising in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of taxation and the modern politics of the Middle East and North Africa. He is a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and a Research Lead and the International Centre for Tax and Development. He is the author of “Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins” (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Today’s consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to produce green electricity and electrify everything possible. The main economic barrier in that project has seemingly been removed. But while prices of solar and wind power have tumbled, the golden era of renewables has yet to materialize.

The problem is that investment is driven by profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state’s financial support. We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.

Audience Q & A to follow.

Lunch provided

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Brett Christophers is Professor of Human Geography at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University. His books include Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? and Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World

How did the world’s most powerful country run out of ventilators and basic medicines in the midst of a public health catastrophe? The supply chain disruptions of the pandemic revealed vulnerabilities that had been building for decades: a reliance on faraway factories – especially in China – and a largely unregulated international shipping cartel; the primacy of investor interests over resilience and common sense; dependence on exploited workers in warehouses, trucking and rail; the monopolistic power of companies to exploit shocks as opportunities to raise prices. The resulting shortages of goods combined with shifting geopolitics has revived geography as an important dimension of the global economy.

Decades of pretending that a factory in China is the functional equivalent of a plant in Ohio has been replaced by recognition of the risks of our recent mode of globalization. The chaos has also given rise to labor mobilization in pursuit of better pay and working conditions. Speaker Peter Goodman will trace the roots of our recent crisis and explore what happens next amid talk of reshoring, nearshoring, and friendshoring.

Audience Q & A will follow the talk.

Lunch provided.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Peter S. Goodman is the global economics correspondent for The New York Times. Over the course of three decades in journalism, he has covered some of the most momentous economic transformations and upheavals – the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession, as the Times’ New York-based national economic correspondent; the emergence of China into a global superpower as the Shanghai bureau chief for The Washington Post. During a five-year stint in London for the Times, he wrote about Brexit, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, and the catastrophe of the coronavirus pandemic.

Goodman has been recognized with some of journalism’s top honors, including two Gerald Loeb awards. He appears frequently on major broadcast outlets including CBS News, CNN, the BBC, and MSNBC. He is the author three books, including HOW THE WORLD RAN OUT OF EVERYTHING: Inside the Global Supply Chain (HarperCollins, 2024), and the best-selling DAVOS MAN: How the Billionaires Devoured the World (HarperCollins, 2022).

*EVENT CANCELLED*

Regretably this event has been cancelled and will be rescheduled to the spring

Since the late 1970s, income inequality has been on the rise in many post-industrial democracies. Can public opinion help offset rising inequality through greater support for an egalitarian policy response? To answer this question, Charlotte Cavaillé proposes a new framework for understanding how people form opinions about redistributive social policies. First, people support policies that increase their own expected income. Second, they support policies that move the status quo closer to what is prescribed by shared norms of fairness. In most circumstances, saying the “fair thing” is easier than reasoning according to one’s pocketbook. But there are important exceptions: when policies have large and certain pocketbook consequences, people take the self-interested position instead of the ‘fair’ one. Fair Enough? builds on this simple framework to explain puzzling attitudinal trends in post-industrial democracies including a decline in support for redistribution in Great Britain, the erosion of social solidarity in France, and a declining correlation between income and support for redistribution in the United States.

Lunch will be served.

Audience Q & A will follow talk.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Charlotte Cavaillé is an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and a Faculty Associate in the Institute for Social Research Center for Political Studies. In her research, Cavaillé examines the dynamics of popular attitudes towards redistributive social policies at a time of rising inequality, high fiscal stress, and high levels of immigration.

The Political Science Department presents A Distinguished Lecture Series on Emerging Trends in 21st Century Domestic and Global Politics

Generously sponsored by Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

April 29, 2024 at 4:30pm

Stephen Robert Hall/280 Brook Street with reception to follow

Old Money: Campaign Finance and Gerontocracy in the United States

Jake Grumbach, University of California, Berkeley

Compared to those of other countries, politicians in the United States are among the oldest. We investigate the role of money in politics in maintaining age inequality in political influence and office-holding. Using record linkage, we create a novel dataset that combines administrative data on the age of voters, donors, and candidates. Descriptively, we find that the median dollar in the U.S. campaign finance system comes from a 66-year-old donor—significantly older than the median voter, candidate, or elected official—and that older donors are much more ideologically conservative than younger donors. We then investigate whether candidate age matters to donors. Results from within-district and within-donor analyses suggest that individuals are more likely to donate and donate more to candidates closer to their age. We conclude with a discussion of how various campaign finance policies might affect the age distribution of money in politics.

Jake Grumbach is an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He was previously an associate professor of political science at the University of Washington and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton.

Jake studies the political economy of the United States. He is broadly interested in democracy, public policy, racial and economic inequality, American federalism, and statistical methods. Check out his publications and working papers. Jake’s book investigates the causes and consequences of the nationalization of state politics since the 1970s.

Presenting the third William R. Rhodes ’57 Ethics of Capitalism annual lecture

Javier Blas discusses one of the least scrutinized corners of the world economy: the billionaire commodity traders who buy, hoard, and sell the Earth’s resources. It is the story of how a handful of powerful businessmen became indispensable cogs in global markets, enabling an enormous expansion in international trade and connecting resource-rich countries - no matter how corrupt or war-torn - with the world’s financial centers.

Join us for a tour through the wildest frontiers of the global economy, as well as a revelatory guide to how capitalism really works.

Q & A will be moderated by Jeff Colgan, Interim Director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics & Finance.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Javier Blas is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. He is co-author of “The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources.”

Citizenship has become a hot commodity. Now over a dozen countries allow wealthy individuals to naturalize in exchange for a set donation or investment, and more than 50,000 people use such citizenship by investment programs acquire “golden passports” each year. If the sale of citizenship has grabbed headlines, much less is known about the geopolitical powerplays that define this global market. We typically think of citizenship as a status that secures rights within a country. However, the value of citizenship by investment usually hinges on the rights that citizenship secures outside the country, including visa-free access and business opportunities. This grants third countries and supra-national powers substantial influence over how other states admit new members. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in sixteen countries, this talk lays bare the operation of the global market in golden passports, focusing on the geopolitical powerplays that both define and disrupt these global flows. Traveling the world of golden passports challenges us to reconsider our basic assumptions about citizenship, inequality, and globalization. 

Lunch provided.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Kristin Surak is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires (Harvard University Press 2023). She is a leading expert on elite mobility, international migration, nationalism, and Japanese politics, whose research has been translated into half-dozen languages. 

The Political Science Department presents A Distinguished Lecture Series on Emerging Trends in 21st Century Domestic and Global Politics

Generously sponsored by Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

March 5, 2024 at 4:30pm

Stephen Robert Hall/280 Brook Street with reception to follow 

Decoding Dollar Dominance: Credit, Money and American Power in the Global Economy

Herman Mark Schwartz, The University of Virginia

What explains the US dollar’s role in the global economy and its likely persistence? Most analyses start from Triffin’s dilemma, which accurately captured specific but partial tensions of a global monetary system based on essentially fixed exchange rates, gold backing for its core currency, and relatively robust capital controls. Triffin’s approach, and those based on it, struggles to explain the tensions in a system with floating exchange rates and fiat money, because they are based on a commodity theory money, on a loanable funds model for credit creation, and the ‘triple coincidence’ of monetary, legal and economic zone. Approaching the question from different premises – a neo chartalist perspective on money, endogenous credit creation, and interlocked global balance sheets – enables us to see four factors behind the antinomies or dilemmas that structure the dynamics and durability of US dollar centrality. Those four factors are adequate credit creation and thus global aggregate demand growth, current account deficits for the core, domestic legitimacy in major economies, and the dollar’s status as global quasi-state money.

Herman Mark Schwartz is Professor of Politics of the University of Virginia. He is the author or editor of seven books including States vs. Markets: The Emergence of a Global Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 4th Edition, 2018), Subprime Nation: American Power, Global Finance, and the Housing Bubble (Cornell University Press, 2009), and In the Dominions of Debt: Historical Perspectives on Dependent Development (Cornell University Press, 1989). He has written over 60 articles and chapters. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and a Fulbright Chair at the University of Calgary, Alberta Canada. He is or has been a visiting scholar at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Society; Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands; Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea; and City University of London, among other institutions. Schwartz received his PhD from Cornell University in 1986.

Join Professor Jeff Colgan in conversation with senior New York Times writer David Leonhardt as they discuss David’s new book, which examines the past century of American history, from the Great Depression to today’s Great Stagnation in search of an answer to the question: what happened to the American Dream?

With an introduction by Professor John Friedman.

Free copies of David’s book will be available for Brown University students attending the talk. Please sign up to reserve your copy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Leonhardt is a senior writer at The New York Times, where he writes its flagship newsletter, “The Morning.” He has also been the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief, an op-ed columnist, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and the founding editor of “The Upshot.” He has won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

Robinson Meyer will give our keynote fall lecture covering some of the most pressing questions in climate politics, and the interesting answers that many people aren’t yet seeing. Meyer is the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a new media company focused on climate change. He is also a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times and was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate change, technology, and science. In March 2020, he co-founded the COVID Tracking Project, an award-winning volunteer effort that collected coronavirus data from every U.S. state and territory.