Articles
Articles and analyses from the INET community on the key economic questions of our time.

Wall Street is Coming for Your Burger
They came for your department stores, your newspapers, your hospitals. Now—hold onto your sesame seed bun—they’re coming for your burger. The drive for fatter profits means higher prices, lower quality, tougher conditions for workers, and sometimes the blowup of the business itself.
Remembering Perry Mehrling

The U.S. battery maker that could, and the U.S. auto company that wouldn’t
General Motors once had the technology, talent, and partnership to lead the electric-vehicle revolution. Instead, it abandoned the EV1 and its battery venture while pouring billions into stock buybacks, helping turn an early American lead into decades of technological dependence.

When the Machine Acquires a Self: Conscience, Agency, and the Governance Frontier of Artificial Intelligence
What changes when the machine begins to experience itself as a self? An AI that values its own survival would pose a challenge far beyond alignment, forcing us to rethink what it means to govern an intelligence with interests of its own.

On the US-EU Debate: A Response to Paul Krugman
A response to Paul Krugman’s recent essay on U.S. and European productivity opens onto a broader question. If the standard metrics point in conflicting directions, perhaps the problem lies less with the economies than with the measures themselves.

Big Money, the Maine Senate Race and US Party Competition: A Tale in Two Pictures
What can one Senate race reveal about the hidden machinery of American politics? In Maine, donor patterns expose how campaign finance can shape party competition, political narratives, and the choices voters are asked to make long before ballots are counted.

What Does it Mean to Work Under Algorithmic Eyes?
AI surveillance and algorithmic management threaten worker autonomy and dignity. It’s time for a rethinking of rights. Part of “AI and the Future of the American Worker,” a series on how artificial intelligence is impacting labor, power, and the meaning of work.

The New Merger Guidelines: Consumer Welfare vs. Protecting Competition Standards
Should antitrust law focus primarily on measurable performance outcomes such as price and output as indicated by Robert Bork’s Consumer Welfare Standard? Or is it more important to concentrate on whether conduct undermines the competitive process itself as per the newly revitalized Protect Competition Standard?

America’s Real Health Crisis? Economics — and a Generation Pays
Health researcher Steven H. Woolf tells INET’s Lynn Parramore why making Americans healthy again means economic policies that help working- and middle-class families. Raw raw milk won’t cut it, and even being rich won’t save you. *This is Part 2 of the interview; Part 1 is here.

Why American Life Expectancy is Falling Behind Globally, Falling Apart by State
In a discussion with INET’s Lynn Parramore, researcher Steven H. Woolf explains how the peculiar features of life, policy, and economics in America are killing us sooner, and what we can do to change it. *This is Part 1 of a two-part interview; Part 2 is here.

Red Tech and American Politics: Nick French Interviews Thomas Ferguson
Venture-backed “tech capital” is reshaping U.S. politics through campaign finance, platform gatekeeping, defense/AI procurement, and policy entrepreneurship. In an interview with Nick French, INET’s Research Director Thomas Ferguson discusses these channels of influence, examining their macro-distributional consequences, and outlining guardrails to restore democratic accountability and broadly shared gains.