Since the financial crisis of 2007-9, the economics of Hyman Minsky has inspired calls to reduce financial instability so as to rebalance the current US growth model or even to replace that growth model with a new one that would distribute prosperity more evenly. Why did Minsky's economics fail to achieve even a modicum of such uptake during his lifetime? This article conducts the first systematic analysis of Minsky's archived correspondence to study his little-known but sustained efforts to influence policymakers. In the late 1960s, Minsky collaborated with the Federal Reserve to begin collecting data on the innovation that he considered the greatest source of financial instability, the money market. Yet Fed officials grew concerned that the project would be opposed by banks. They terminated the collaboration when Minsky said in a speech before the Board of Governors that there was no way of rebalancing the extant growth model that would be acceptable to its core constituencies. In the 1970s, Minsky developed a blueprint for a new growth model that he pitched to congressional Democrats. It centered on regulating the money market and shifting the backbone of employment and aggregate demand from private investment to a public job guarantee. The more Minsky rose to the challenge of explaining the economics of his proposal through narrow-bandwidth channels such as newspaper articles and congressional hearings, the more Democrats grew concerned about its politics. The article demonstrates that bringing growth model analysis into dialogue with the sociology and history of economics can be mutually beneficial.
Recent scholarship treats the firm as a regime of power in which workers are subject to arrangements analogous to those between state and citizen. Republican political theory is influential within these debates, identifying domination, the exposure to arbitrary power, as an obstacle to equal dignity and rights within firms. This article develops a new framework for understanding republican approaches to firm governance. It identifies three models: the regulatory-consultative model, which constrains managerial supervision; the workplace-democracy model, which addresses exclusion from governance; and the worker-ownership model, which treats ownership rights as the central source of domination. The article establishes the first systematic typology of republican institutional responses to domination in the firm and develops a configurational approach to their application. Rather than treating these models as rival blueprints or requiring their simultaneous application, it argues that the appropriate institutional response depends on the setting in which domination takes shape. This offers a new way of thinking about how relations of equal dignity and rights can be secured within firms.
Why do some capitalists in the Global South come to firmly support far-right movements while others do not? This article explores this question by examining divisions among Brazilian industry leaders over the right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro, from 2019 to 2023. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with leaders in Brazil's main industrial association, the Federation of Industries of the State of S & atilde;o Paulo (FIESP), this article argues that distinct relations to the state and varying degrees of economic precarity led FIESP leaders to either remain staunch supporters of Bolsonaro's government or grow critical. Leaders in medium-sized firms from shrinking domestic manufacturing sectors decried their exclusion from policymaking under previous administrations and became some of Bolsonaro's most ardent backers. In contrast, while initially supportive of Bolsonarismo, many leaders from more competitive, internationalized sectors dominated by large firms grew critical of Bolsonaro, particularly following his chaotic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These moderate leaders recognized the structural power they leverage over state actors, while prioritizing gradual reform and a stable political environment. In this way, different relations to state actors led to a politics of moderation or militance. The article concludes by arguing how the political rationalities tying capital to the state shape intraclass cleavages and business' response to emergent far-right movements.
According to official statistics, the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program is no more. After a 2013 federal court ruling declared the program unconstitutional, recorded stop-and-frisks fell from a peak of nearly 700,000 in 2011 to fewer than 10,000 by 2020. We demonstrate that this portrayal of the program's demise is more fiction than reality—a simulation sustained through underreporting and reclassification of pedestrian stops into categories that draw less attention. The simulation persists not through deception but through a working consensus involving police, politicians, media, and even advocacy groups. These actors tacitly accept the statistics despite countervailing evidence, allowing each to hold otherwise incompatible positions: officials proclaiming stop-and-frisk outmoded even as the same stops continue under new labels, advocates celebrating its end even as the communities they represent report no real change. Our analysis shows how mechanisms designed to ensure government accountability can become instruments that enable highly scrutinized agencies and programs to evade reform.
There is general sentiment that insecurity is on the rise across countries. However, some groups are likely to be more vulnerable to shocks than others, indicating that we may not expect insecurity to be equally distributed across the population. In this article, we examine how subjective insecurity is distributed and then turn to the question of whether welfare states can reduce potential gaps in subjective insecurity. Using multilevel models with cross-national data for about 35,000 individuals in twenty advanced democracies from two waves of the OECD's Risks That Matter (RTM) survey (2020 and 2022), we find that the poor are more insecure and that, in general, welfare state schemes have the capacity to reduce overall subjective insecurity. However, welfare state interventions do not meaningfully reduce the subjective security gap between income groups. With regard to the subjective insecurity gap between women and men, welfare policies similarly have only a very small effect. We complement this with national, over-time survey data from Denmark. We not only see that subjective insecurity has increased over time, but also that there is a growing subjective security gap, echoing the cross-national findings.
