Why does a podcast about capitalism want to talk about science?Modern capitalism and science have evolved together since the Enlightenment. Advances in ship building and navigation enabled the Age of Discovery, which opened up new trade routes and markets to European merchants. The invention of the spinning jinny and cotton in the 18th century spurred textile production. The United States’ Department of Defense research and development agency helped create the precursor to the internet. The internet now supports software and media industries worth trillions of dollars. On the flip side, some of America’s greatest capitalists and businesses, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Bell Labs, gave us everything from electricity production to the transistor. Neither science nor capitalism can succeed without the other.However, science’s star is now dimming. Part of this is due to political intervention. In the U.S., the federal government has cut funding for scientific research. The Covid-19 pandemic diminished the public’s trust in scientific experts, which social media has exacerbated through misinformation. Restrictions on immigration may further hamper scientific research as some of the world’s brightest minds lose access to funding and state-of-the-art facilities.But so too has capitalism played a hand in science’s struggles. While corporations sponsor a significant portion of funding for scientific research, this funding too often comes with undisclosed conflicts of interest. Or corporate pressure may influence results in other ways.Stanford University professor John Ioannidis is a physician, writer, and one of the world's most-cited scientists. He studies the methodology and sociology of science itself: how the process and standards for empirical research influence findings in ways that some may find inaccurate. His 2005 essay "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" is one of the most accessed articles in the history of Public Library of Science (PLOS), with more than three million views. Ioannidis joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the future of the relationship between capitalism and science, how both will have to respond to contemporary politics, and how one even conceptualizes robust measurements of scientific success.Listen:Science for Sale, with David Michaels: Learn how corporate-funded science uses doubt to its patrons' advantage.The Money Behind Ultra-Processed Foods, with Marion Nestle: Examine the role of Big Food in public health.The Capitalisn’t of the U.S. COVID Response: Understand the factors that exacerbated the pandemic’s fallout for the most vulnerable in society.Read:Food for Thought: An excerpt from the second edition of Marion Nestle’s book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.How Conflicts of Interest Shape Trust in Academic Work: What is the impact of various conflicts of interest on readers’ trust in academic research findings? What are the implications for academia and policy?There’s More Bias Than You Think: To protect the integrity of academia, we must also encourage the injection and consideration of new and contradictory unconflicted ideas.Academic Bias Under the Microscope: That scholarship often reflects conscious and unconscious biases has long been an open secret in academia. What are the sources of industry bias in economic and business research, and possible avenues of mitigation?“Doubt is Their Product”: The Difference Between Research and Academic Lobbying:Reflecting on the intersection of academic economics and policymaking – and advice to young scholars.Watch:John Ioannidis’ Keynote at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference 2025: Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of IdeasHow Conflicts of Interest Impact the Marketplace of Ideas: WebinarDe-Biasing Academic Research: Panel Discussion at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference 2022 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
This week, the Trump administration announced it would sell around 5% of mortgage giants and government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The sale would begin to reintroduce the two firms to private markets after 17 years of government conservatorship. The decision to re-privatize two of the largest mortgage firms in the world, and a prominent reason why the United States is one of the only countries where people can get 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, will have enormous implications for the U.S. economy, housing market, and the American dream.Fannie Mae was founded during the Great Depression with the idea of making mortgages more widely available to Americans by buying mortgage loans from banks. Freddie Mac came along in 1970 to provide competition and increase liquidity for mortgages. In part, Fannie and Freddie increased liquidity by repackaging their mortgages into mortgage-backed securities and reselling them to investors. In the early 2000s, the subprime mortgage crisis began as smaller, unregulated financial actors started offering risky mortgage loans and likewise repackaged them to investors. When the crisis imploded in 2008, it gutted the market for mortgage-backed securities, and the U.S. government seized Fannie and Freddie to prevent them from collapsing. The government feared that without Freddie and Fannie, many Americans would no longer be able to afford home ownership. Today, Fannie and Freddie still back roughly 50% of all mortgage loans, with other government agencies making up another chunk.The Trump administration’s plans to take these GSEs public again will allow the two firms to raise billions through new stock offerings and shift risk back to the private sector. But the question is, why is the government doing this? Will it help fix the country’s housing crisis—which Trump has reportedly called a national emergency—or will it make matters worse? Bethany and Luigi get together to discuss what it would mean for Fannie and Freddie to go public, who benefits from these developments, and their implications for home loans, the housing market, and the American economy.Also check out Bethany’s book, published in 2015: Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
For decades, private equity has been the darling of pension funds, university endowments, and sovereign wealth funds, promising high returns and low volatility. Now, President Donald Trump has made it possible for everyday investors to get in on the magic with his executive order, "Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors.” The order relieves regulatory burdens that limit the access of defined contribution plans, like 401(k)s, to alternative assets such as private equity (but also cryptocurrency and real estate). The hope is to give American workers access to greater choice, diversification, and potential growth towards a comfortable retirement.But Trump's order comes just as longstanding questions about private equity’s promise of high returns and low risk are coming to the fore. Has the distribution of returns slowed to a trickle? What does data actually say about private equity’s performance, and where is the industry headed? There is also a long standing debate whether private equity is good for society, independent of financial returns.Is private equity actually a ponzi scheme that now threatens the retirements of millions of American workers? To make sense of it all, Luigi and Bethany are joined by Dan Rasmussen, an experienced investor and author who began his career in private equity but has emerged as one of the most prescient critics of the industry. Together, the three of them distill what the state of the industry means for the future welfare of investors, workers, and the American economy as a whole.Bonus: Check out ProMarket’s recent series on the impact of private equity in the health care industry. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
What is the right way, if there is one at all, to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) technology into our education system? For Sal Khan, CEO of one of the world’s largest nonprofit education technology platforms, the answer is to take a step back and ask: Where can AI best complement current pedagogy? If a problem can be solved by pencil and paper, should we really be using AI instead?Khan joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss his recent book, “Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (And Why That’s a Good Thing),” in which he makes the case for why the education sector will not only survive but thrive in the age of AI. He shares his 17-year journey to build and grow his organization, which now provides over 10,000 videos on everything from integral calculus to art history, reaching more than 170 million registered users in over 20 languages, mostly for free. Together, the three talk about how and where AI can enhance the learning process: how AI has shifted Khan’s philosophy and approach to pedagogy, how it could democratize educational and economic opportunity, and what this all means for traditional modes of learning and instruction in schools and universities. They also discuss concerns about data ownership, Khan’s partnerships with tech companies, and the guardrails he proposes to protect education against the monetization of students’ data and the concentration of benefits to privileged children. Ultimately, he makes the case for why teachers aren’t going anywhere—and leaves aspiring nonprofit and civic leaders with advice on how to build a successful, mission-driven organization.Read a review of Sal Khan’s book on ProMarket, written by Capitalisn’t team member Matt Lucky. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Americans are often told that they benefit from the privilege of the dollar serving as the world's currency. A strong dollar makes imports cheaper, facilitates demand for American companies, and is tied to cheap government borrowing. But what happens when this powerful privilege weakens? What does it even mean for the dollar to be “strong” or “weak” as a medium of exchange and investment? Why should Americans care that the dollar serves as the reserve currency for the world’s central banks?In his new book “Our Dollar, Your Problem,” Ken Rogoff, a Harvard professor and former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, argues that the dollar is past “middle age” and that its global dominance will erode in the coming years. He predicts the dollar will eventually share power with the European Union’s euro and Chinese renminbi in a “tripolar” world.Rogoff joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss why the dollar's shifting dominance matters so much to the United States and what implications this has for the rest of the world’s payment network. He describes how the dollar has come under pressure from multiple directions, both now and in the past. Outside the U.S., these include past and current international challengers, such as the Soviet ruble, the Japanese yen, and the European euro. From within, the current instigators are rising federal debt, increased use of economic sanctions, and growing political dysfunction. The three also discuss if President Donald Trump’s boisterous support for cryptocurrency further undermines the U.S. dollar. Ultimately, they tease out how the dollar has underpinned American economic prowess for the last half century and what the consequences will be for the American economy – and the world at large – if the dollar is dethroned.Read a review of Rogoff’s book by Capitalisn’t team member Matt Lucky in ProMarket: https://www.promarket.org/2025/07/24/what-happens-after-the-dollars-hegemony-ends/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
After the 2008 financial crisis, and especially after the COVID pandemic of 2020, an increasing number of Americans are questioning the wisdom of unregulated markets and envisioning a more active role for the state. Scholars have coined a panoply of neologisms to capture this view of the political economy, including political scientist Steven Vogel’s “marketcraft.” The term indicates that the state not only lays the foundation for markets through the protection of the rule of law and property rights, but it also shapes market economies through policy interventions and regulatory institutions like the Federal Trade Commission.Chris Hughes’ new book, “Marketcrafters: The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy,” traces how governments led by both major parties have worked with the private sector since the country’s founding to intentionally and strategically shape markets. The narrative reveals how Adam Smith’s proverbial “invisible” hand has always been rather quite visible.Hughes is a co-founder of Facebook who left the company in 2007 to work for former President Barack Obama and is now completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Hughes joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the government’s historical role, both in success and failure, of marketcrafting to rebalance economic power and create fairer and more efficient markets. Their journey takes us from the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 in response to a series of banking failures to recent mass investment in the semiconductor industry. Together, they discuss how to stop marketcrafting from becoming a victim of the political process, how it is operationalized differently in times of normalcy versus times of crisis, and how it must navigate the limits of individual and institutional power. Finally, they also discuss whether it is truly possible to craft markets in advance or only to correct market flaws after a crisis, with Hughes’ own prior stomping grounds at Facebook as their case study.Read an excerpt of the book on ProMarket here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Democratic Party has become too focused on appeasing its billionaire donors and has failed to communicate its commitment to the working class, argues long-time political journalist David Sirota. The question moving forward, he says, is if the party can ever refocus its brand orthodoxy from prioritizing social and cultural issues to economic populism.Sirota joins Bethany and Luigi to dissect the outsized role of money in American politics and how it has rendered Democratic messaging incoherent by prioritizing wealthy donors over the public. He describes the current moment of populist rage against the Democratic leadership, as evidenced by polls, as a “long overdue” opportunity and offers an explanation for how economic populism became pivotal to winning elections – thus shedding light on how to reclaim the platform moving forward. He describes how former President Barack Obama's "selling out" to Wall Street and big banks became a “generational tragedy,” why Trump’s tariffs are more of a power grab than legitimate economic policy to revive manufacturing, and responds to Luigi’s hypothesis that populist rhetoric and policy are much easier from the right than from the left.Sirota is the founder and editor of the investigative news outlet The Lever, served as a speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, earned an Academy Award nomination for screenwriting the 2020 Netflix climate apocalypse drama Don’t Look Up, and has written three books, including one on how corporate interests have shaped American economic policy.Over the last four years, Capitalisn’t has interviewed conservative thinkers like Oren Cass, Patrick Deneen, and Sohrab Ahmari to understand how the political right developed a new platform after President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. With this episode, we continue the same project with the left, by asking: What could be the economic basis for a new progressive platform?Also check out: How Democrats Forgot to Be Normal, with Joan WilliamsHow Big Money Changed the Democratic Game, with Daniel ZiblattWhat Happened to the American Dream? With David Leonhardt Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Are financial markets becoming less efficient? Famous investor Cliff Asness certainly thinks so. In his paper published last year, “The Less-Efficient Market Hypothesis,” Asness argues that social media and low interest rates, among other factors, have distorted market information so that stocks have become disconnected from their true values. This distortion has directed funds toward undeserving assets and firms and staved off necessary market corrections.Asness is the founder, managing principal, and chief investment officer at AQR Capital Management. He is an active researcher on various financial and investment topics and received an MBA and PhD in finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. From her early days as a journalist reporting on Wall Street, Bethany recounts Asness as an outspoken, successful quant investor: one who invests based primarily on the fundamentals of the market rather than those of the firm. She also remembers him being “colloquial” and willing to be “experimental” with ideas. Asness’s recent paper continues that experimental style as he challenges the legacy of the efficient market hypothesis on which his PhD advisor, Nobel Prize laureate Eugene Fama, made his name, and which argues that asset prices reflect all available information, making it impossible to “beat” or outperform the market.Asness joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss how the market has fundamentally changed due to new technologies and macroeconomic trends and how investment strategies must adapt, what these changes mean for long-term productivity and growth, how researchers and investors should think about emerging market factors like tariffs and artificial intelligence, and why he's not investing in TrumpCoin anytime soon.Disclosure: In October 2024, Chicago Booth received a $60 million gift from Cliff Asness and John Liew to name its Master in Finance program.Bonus: Revisit our recent episode with Eugene Fama, Why This Nobel Economist Thinks Bitcoin is Going to Zero Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Back in 2016, Joan Williams, distinguished professor of law (emerita) at UC Law San Francisco, wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review on why President Donald Trump attracted so many non-college voters. It went viral with almost four million views, becoming the most-read article in the 90-year history of the publication.Williams’ new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, outlines how the seemingly common view that her fellow progressives must abandon their social causes to win back those non-college-educated voters is wrong. What is required, she argues, is a renewed understanding of class. She introduces her conceptualization of the “diploma divide,” or the gap between Americans with and without college degrees. Her worldview divides the electorate into three class-based groups: the college-educated, upper-class “Brahmin left”, the low-income working (middle) class, and the right-wing merchant class, which pushes for economic policies that benefit the rich. Her argument is that a new coalition between the latter two has shifted politics to the right.In this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, Luigi and Bethany invite Williams to discuss whether our society indeed breaks down so neatly. If it does, how does her breakdown help us understand recent electoral shifts and trends in populism and why the left is on the losing end of both? As she writes in her book and discusses in the episode, “[the Brahmin] left’s anger is coded as righteous. Why is non-elite anger discounted as “grievance?” Together, their conversation sheds light on how the left can win back voters without compromising on progressive values.Over the last four years, Capitalisn’t has interviewed conservative thinkers like Oren Cass, Patrick Deneen, and Sohrab Ahmari to understand how the political right developed a new platform after President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. With this episode, we begin the same project with the left by asking: What could be the economic basis for a new progressive platform?Show Notes:Read an excerpt from Joan Williams' new book, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” out now at St. Martin's PressQuiz: “Are You in a Class Bubble?”What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class, by Joan Williams, Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Lina Khan recently concluded her term as one of the Biden administration’s most controversial leaders. Her tenure as chair of the Federal Trade Commission raised the profile of the relatively obscure antitrust agency charged with protecting competition. Her anti-monopoly outlook and more aggressive enforcement strategies, particularly toward Big Tech market power and protecting workers, earned the ire of the business community and the dedicated vitriol of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.Khan began her term as the youngest-ever appointee of the FTC. She initially rose to prominence for her 2017 Yale Law Journal article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which went viral among the antitrust community for its argument that scholars and regulators must look beyond prices to understand what constitutes a harm from a lack of competition, especially in today’s digital economy where many services are nominally provided for free to consumers. Fresh out of law school, Khan appeared on a Capitalisn’t episode in our first season and wrote for our sister publication at the Stigler Center, ProMarket, as far back as 2018. She also delivered two keynote addresses at the Stigler Center’s annual Antitrust and Competition Conferences while FTC chair.On this episode, Khan returns to Capitalisn’t to reflect on her tenure, her vision of capitalism, and how her approach to enforcing existing laws with new thinking may have impacted the everyday lives of Americans. How does she respond to her critics, who include major Democratic business leaders? How does she view the new Trump administration, which is continuing many of her transformative policies, including revised merger guidelines and major lawsuits? As a senator, Vice President JD Vance said she was “one of the few people in the Biden administration actually doing a pretty good job.” Reflecting on her work, Khan also touches upon how conflicts of interest among corporate lawyers and consultants, former bureaucrats, and academics distort policymaking, court rulings, and market outcomes. Finally, she highlights the antitrust issues to pay attention to moving forward, such as algorithmic collusion.Show Notes: Also, check out ProMarket’s series on the future of the Neo-Brandesian movement, of which Lina Khan is an emblematic figure. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The rule of law is essential to the flourishing of liberal democracy and capitalism. Yet, it is now under pressure in the United States, and corporate law firms are in the eye of the storm. Over the last few weeks, President Donald Trump has issued executive orders against several prominent law firms that represented his political adversaries and promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Some of these law firms have caved into the administration’s demands to end such practices and provide pro bono services to the government, whereas others are fighting back.To discuss the financial reasons why some firms have capitulated while others have held out, and what the consequences are for the survival of the rule of law, Bethany and Luigi speak to John Morley, Augustus E. Lines Professor of Law at Yale University and an expert on the economics of law. Are Trump’s orders unconstitutional, and if so, why have so many law firms reached a deal with him? How have changes to law firms’ business models left them particularly vulnerable to a moment like this? Why are some firms more vulnerable to political attacks than others? Together, the three discuss the firms’ reciprocal agreements with the administration, the possibilities for a collective-action response, and how this moment may profoundly reshape the future of law, democracy, and capitalism in America.Show Notes:Watch a recording of the panel “Antitrust and the 1st Amendment” from the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference, featuring Greg Day, Eleanor Fox, and Matt Stoller, and moderated by Maciej Bernatt. The panel highlights how antitrust may stand in the way of collective action, competitive markets, and free speech. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
All too often, capitalism is identified with the for-profit sector. However, one organizational form whose importance is often overlooked is nonprofits. Roughly 4% of the American economy, including most universities and hospital systems, are nonprofit.One prominent nonprofit currently at the center of a raging debate is OpenAI, the $300 billion American artificial intelligence research organization best known for developing ChatGPT. Founded in 2015 as a donation-based nonprofit with a mission to build AI for humanity, it created a complex “hybrid capped profit” governance structure in 2019. Then, after a dramatic firing and re-hiring of CEO Sam Altman in 2023 (covered on an earlier episode of Capitalisn’t: “Who Controls AI?”), a new board of directors announced that achieving OpenAI’s mission would require far more capital than philanthropic donations could provide and initiated a process to transition to a for-profit public benefit corporation. This process has been fraught with corporate drama, including one early OpenAI investor, Elon Musk, filing a lawsuit to stop the process and launching a $97.4 billion unsolicited bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit arm.Beyond the staggering valuation numbers at stake here–not to mention OpenAI’s open pursuit of profits over the public good–are complicated legal and philosophical questions. Namely, what happens when corporate leaders violate the founding purpose of a firm? To discuss, Luigi and Bethany are joined by Rose Chan Loui, the founding executive director of the Lowell Milken Center on Philanthropy and Nonprofits at UCLA Law and co-author of the paper "Board Control of a Charity’s Subsidiaries: The Saga of OpenAI.” Is OpenAI a “textbook case of altruism vs. greed,” as the judge overseeing the case declared? Is AI for everyone, or only for investors? Together, they discuss how money can distort purpose and philanthropy, precedents for this case, where it might go next, and how it may shape the future of capitalism itself.Show Notes:Read extensive coverage of the Musk-OpenAI lawsuit on ProMarket, including Luigi’s article from March 2024: “Why Musk Is Right About OpenAI.”Guest Disclosure (provided to The Conversation for an op-ed on the case): The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article. They have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Silicon Valley’s traditionally Democratic tech leaders are turning toward President Donald Trump, but are the reasons as straightforward as lower taxes and favorable regulations? Perhaps not, if we consider the influence of a convoluted political philosophy called the “Dark Enlightenment.” Washington and Silicon Valley power players, including Vice President JD Vance, Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, have all cited the philosophy’s ideas and one of its leading developers, Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin was reportedly present at Trump’s inaugural gala as an informal guest of honor.In a nutshell, Dark Enlightenment rejects liberal democracy as an outdated software system incompatible with freedom and progress. Instead, it argues for breaking up the nation-state into smaller authoritarian city-states, which Yarvin calls “patchworks.” These patchworks will be controlled by tech corporations and run by CEOs. The theory is attached to another idea called accelerationism, which harnesses capitalism and technology to induce radical social change. In fact, Yarvin proposed a plan he called “RAGE”—or “Retire All Government Employees”—as far back as 2012.So, how did this obscure and oxymoronically named philosophy reach the highest echelons of business and political power? Bethany and Luigi trace the theory from its origins to its practical manifestations in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Silicon Valley’s race to develop artificial intelligence, and the growing push for “Freedom Cities” unfettered from federal regulations. Are the people embracing Dark Enlightenment espousing its ideas because they genuinely believe it is the way forward for humanity? Or do they believe it because it's a way for them to make money? What does it mean for capitalism and democracy if the administration runs the federal government like a tech company? Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In President Donald Trump's recent joint address to Congress, he said, "To unshackle our economy, I have directed that for every one new regulation, ten old regulations must be eliminated." Elon Musk, whom Trump has assigned to execute this vision, has argued that it is time to get rid of all regulations, or as Musk said, “regulations, basically, should be default gone.”Joining Bethany and Luigi to discuss this intensified commitment to deregulation and laissez-faire capitalism is Sam Peltzman, perhaps the leading living expert on the economics of regulation. Peltzman is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and director emeritus of the Stigler Center, which sponsors this podcast and is named after his mentor, Nobel-Prize laureate George Stigler. Together, the three of them chart a historical perspective on regulation, from Stigler’s ideas of regulatory capture to the unintended consequences of deregulatory efforts over time to today’s “chainsaw” approach to gutting federal agencies. To understand the costs and benefits of regulation, they discuss how federal agencies have recently intervened in markets, if the private sector could not have accomplished these interventions more efficiently, and if these interventions did more harm than good. Their case studies include the funding, testing, and rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, the regulation of cryptocurrencies, the management of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and the role of the government in addressing climate change. In the process, they answer the trillion-dollar question: Are Trump's deregulation efforts actually efficient?Episode Notes:Revisit our recent episode with Federico Sturzenegger, the Argentinian Minister for State Transformation and DeregulationRead the op-ed Bethany mentions writing in the wake of the financial crisis: Who Wants a 30-Year Mortgage?At the end of the conversation with Peltzman, Luigi asks him about his recent academic papers tracing marriage and happiness. Read these papers on the Stigler Center’s Working Paper archives: The Socio-Political Demography of Happiness (2023) and The Anatomy of Marital Happiness (2025) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Skyrocketing costs of attendance, declining enrollment, the advent of artificial intelligence, campus debates about free speech, and a crackdown on diversity initiatives: Today's universities are in a pickle. Adding to this pickle are President Trump's threats and actions on slashing research funding — the financial lifeline of modern universities. Last month, the Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted a new survey of a diverse group of university presidents who were asked if they “believe the Trump Administration is at war with higher education” — and 94% answered they strongly agree.Luigi and Bethany speak to one academic leader with deep experience at the heart of these debates: Nicholas Dirks, former Chancellor of UC Berkeley (2013-2017) and author of the book, "City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University." Together, the three of them discuss which idea of the university is still valid in the 21st century, how fundraising changed the governance of higher education, and how universities might navigate the challenges of Trump's second administration.Revisit our previous episodes:Universities and Politics: Should They Mix? with Hanna GrayThe Economics of Student Protests Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
“Homeownership is the American Dream.” This saying is so ingrained in our zeitgeist that most Americans don't even pause to question it. However, according to the Black Knights Home Price Index, the average US home price increased nearly 80% from April 2015 to April 2023. Census data reveals that the median household income only increased by 4% during this period. Homeownership has thus become increasingly out of reach, especially for young professionals. So, how did the American Dream become an American nightmare?In his brand new book, “Stuck: How the Privileged in the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity,” The Atlantic’s Deputy Editor Yoni Appelbaum offers a contrarian view, arguing that the crisis in American homeownership isn’t actually about cost—it’s about mobility. There are many places in America where housing remains affordable and even dirt cheap. The problem is that those affordable options are in less desirable locations, with fewer opportunities for high-quality jobs, education, and health care. Thus, young professionals continue to migrate to communities where opportunities are bountiful, but housing is not.Appelbaum joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss how Americans got “stuck.” Why does mobility matter so much? What are the implications of reduced mobility for Americans’ faith in capitalism and the belief that our country is still the land of opportunity? If treating a home as an investment—which many of us do—means less mobility, is being “stuck” so wrong for society? Together, the three of them unpack this entangled question of mobility, homeownership, and what it means for the reformulation of the American Dream.Capitalisn't episodes mentioned:Shattering Immigration Myths: Data Beyond Borders, with Leah BoustanRaj Chetty's Surprising New Insights on How Children SucceedWhat Happened to the American Dream? With David LeonhardtRead an excerpt from Appelbaum's book on ProMarket (Penguin Random House) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
This week, Elon Musk—amidst his other duties of gutting United States federal government agencies as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE)—announced a hostile bid alongside a consortium of buyers to purchase control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman vehemently replied that his company is not for sale.The artificial intelligence landscape is shifting rapidly. The week prior, American tech stocks plummeted in response to claims from Chinese company DeepSeek AI that its model had matched OpenAI’s performance at a fraction of the cost. Days before that, President Donald Trump announced that OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank would partner on an infrastructure project to power AI in the U.S. with an initial $100 billion investment. Altman himself is trying to pull off a much-touted plan to convert the nonprofit OpenAI into a for-profit entity, a development at the heart of his spat with Musk, who co-founded the startup.Bethany and Luigi discuss the implications of this changing landscape by reflecting on a prior Capitalisn’t conversation with Luigi’s former colleague Sendhil Mullainathan (now at MIT), who forecasted over a year ago that there would be no barriers to entry in AI. Does DeepSeek’s success prove him right? How does the U.S. government’s swift move to ban DeepSeek from government devices reflect how we should weigh national interests at the risk of hindering innovation and competition? Musk has the ear of Trump and a history of animosity with Altman over the direction of OpenAI. Does Musk’s proposed hostile takeover signal that personal interests and relationships with American leadership will determine how AI develops in the U.S. from here on out? What does regulating AI in the collective interest look like, and can we escape a future where technology is consolidated in the hands of the wealthy few when billions of dollars in capital are required for its progress?Show Notes:On ProMarket, check out:Why Musk Is Right About OpenAI by Luigi Zingales, March 5, 2024Who Will Enforce AI’s Social Purpose? By Roberto Tallarita, March 16, 2024 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In December 2024, Bitcoin, one of the earliest cryptocurrencies and undoubtedly the most famous, hit $2 trillion in market capitalization, bigger than Tesla, Meta, and Saudi Aramco. In this episode, Nobel Prize-winning economist and Chicago Booth finance professor Eugene Fama—widely considered the “Father of Modern Finance”—predicts it will go to zero within ten years.Legendary investor Ray Dalio called crypto a bubble a decade ago; now, he calls it “one hell of an invention.” Larry Fink of BlackRock previously referred to Bitcoin as an index of money laundering. Today, he sees it as “a legitimate financial instrument.” Less than 36 hours after launching his own cryptocurrency before his second inauguration, United States President Donald Trump appeared to have made more than $50 billion on paper for himself and his companies. (During his first term, Trump called crypto “not money, whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”) Amidst this noise of crypto doubters changing tune, Fama joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss why he remains dubious about Bitcoin’s ambitions.Bitcoin uses more electricity than many countries—around 91 terawatt-hours annually. Is this amount unsustainable? What makes its value so volatile, and what are the implications for the banking sector and our economy? If cryptocurrencies’ purpose is a reaction to an underlying distrust in financial institutions, can decentralized blockchain, the technological ledger that enables anonymous crypto exchange, fix it? Last but not least, why do supporters of a decentralized service, whose value lies in its existence outside traditional government structures, need to spend billions in lobbying to convince politicians, including the president, of its utility?Show Notes:Read ProMarket’s archives on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.Revisit our prior Capitalisn’t episode with author Zeke Faux, The Capitalisn’t of Crypto: SBF and Beyond. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The public often imagines corporations as self-contained actors that provide a set of goods and services to consumers. Underpinning this image have been ideas of ownership, rights to capital and intellectual property, and corporate responsibility to stakeholders including consumers, workers, and shareholders. But what if almost everything we are told about the essence of the firm is wrong? So writes Sir John Kay, a British economist, corporate director, and longstanding fellow of St John’s College (Oxford) in his new book, The Corporation in the 21st Century.The book revolves around contrasts between historical conceptions of corporations, capitalism, and contemporary practices. Kay writes, “A central thesis of [this] book is that business has evolved, but the language that is widely used to describe business has not.” In the 19th and 20th centuries, firms could be defined in terms of their control over material forms of productive capital (factories, steel foundries, railways, etc.) Socioeconomic critiques of capitalism, most prominently from Karl Marx, often centered on firms’ control of the means of production. Kay contends that firms today access productive capital as a service. For example, Amazon does not own its warehouses but rents them from another firm. Kay writes that today’s corporations and capitalism “[have] very little to do with ‘capital’ and nothing whatsoever to do with any struggle between capitalists and workers to control the means of production.”Kay joins Luigi and Bethany to discuss the implications of this evolution in firms’ relation to capital: Why is it important to capitalism that its biggest firms no longer own their means of production? Why does the language used to describe this matter? What do Apple's manufacturing facilities, Amazon's warehouses, and TikTok's algorithms tell us about our notions of business ownership? How have these changes to capitalism redefined the struggle between the owners of capital, managers, workers, and consumers? In the process, Kay, Luigi, and Bethany explore the failures of capitalism and imagine what could and should be the purpose of the 21st-century corporation.Show Notes:Read an excerpt from the book (published by Yale University Press) on ProMarketIn Bethany and Luigi’s closing discussion of Kay’s book, Luigi cites several articles he has published on the topic, which we have linked below for the listener’s reference. In this past scholarship, Luigi studies how a firm and its operations often intertwine with other firms to form an ecosystem, and it is only through this ecosystem that value is created. Apple and Foxconn provide one example. Legally, they are distinct firms, yet Luigi contends they can be understood as elements of an ecosystem that creates value. Hence, it is sometimes productive to think beyond legal boundaries to consider how multiple firms may compose such a value-creating ecosystem in practice. Within the Apple/Foxconn ecosystem, Apple has a significant influence in dictating terms for Foxconn. Further, if Apple has such dominating power over its suppliers, then Apple could be said to have market power that raises antitrust concerns, which are less obvious if we take the legal boundaries of firms as the correct method of conceptualizing them.Zingales, L., 2000. In search of new foundations. The Journal of Finance, 55(4), pp.1623-1653.Rajan, R.G. and Zingales, L., 1998. Power in a Theory of the Firm. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 113(2), pp.387-432.Rajan, R.G. and Zingales, L., 2001. The firm as a dedicated hierarchy: A theory of the origins and growth of firms. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(3), pp.805-851.Zingales, L. (1998) Corporate Governance. In: Newman, P., Ed., The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, Palgrave Macmillan, London.Lancieri, F., Posner, E.A. and Zingales, L., 2023. The Political Economy of the Decline of Antitrust Enforcement in the United States. Antitrust Law Journal, 85(2), pp.441-519. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Daniel Ziblatt is an American political scientist, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, and the co-author (with Steven Levitsky) of several bestselling books, including How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Ziblatt writes from the position that what defines strong democracies is free and fair competition for power, inclusive participation, and a package of civil liberties that make those first two conditions possible.2024 saw voters in more than 60 countries go to the polls—and deliver difficult outcomes for incumbents and traditional political parties. This week, Ziblatt joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the fate of democracy after 2024. They explore how big money and corporate power have destabilized democracies worldwide by interfering with the conditions for free and fair competition for power. The consequence has been the movement of voters toward political extremes, which in turn can often threaten economic growth, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Nevertheless, should we judge the strength of democracy by process or outcome? Does democracy still thrive when the people vote for undemocratic politicians and parties?Together, Ziblatt and our co-hosts discuss how to curb global democratic decline by realigning government away from the interests of corporations or big money and back to those of the people.Episode Notes:Revisit ProMarket’s series seeking to understand the issues of political economy driving global populist movements during the 2024 “year of elections.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
ncooty
@9:50: This story about the evolutionary basis for liking sugar seems specious and poorly substantiated. It's a hypothesis, and one that seems amenable to empirical tests, but there are simpler, more straightforward explanations.
ncooty
It's very strange that Bethany pronounces "food" as "fud". To me, it sounds like either laziness or performative apathy... as if she can't be bothered to enunciate.
ncooty
The interviewer's questions are frustratingly narrow, closed-ended, and self-involved. It's as if he's insecurely trying to perform or to frame the discussion on his terms so he can preen his ego. I wish he'd just ask questions that allow guests to make their cases. I truly don't care to listen to him administer oral exams to grade his guests on whether or not they share his brain.
ncooty
@15:32: Said like a true economist--essentially: "This doesn't count as evidence unless it's in the vernacular of economics." You might like to see additional analyses--and I invite you to do them--but they aren't a necessary condition of relevance. Also, maybe you could polish your interviewing skills to sound a little less arrogant, dismissive, and narrow-minded? Currently, your interviewing tone often sounds as if you're smugly deriding guests for not being economists, which is a bit ironic on a podcast largely about the shortcomings of economists. Economists aren't half as well educated as they think they are, and the evidence suggests their analyses are quite errant. Numerical obsession is no substitute for actual numeracy. Even in the question cited at the time-stamp above, you seemed to overstate the interpretability of statistics despite poor methods, all so you can have your precious numbers, calculated out to 10 or 15 decimal places... while simultaneously implying the in
ncooty
In the future, if there's a mic problem, please fix it. E.g., just ask the guest if they can adjust the mic. You can edit out that little portion before broadcast. Even better, you could do a sound check before recording.