Government & Politics

The collapse of America’s political center isn’t a mystery. What looks like a sudden political crisis is really the result of an economy that’s been quietly abandoning ordinary workers for decades.

The collapse of America’s political center isn’t a mystery. What looks like a sudden political crisis is really the result of an economy that’s been quietly abandoning ordinary workers for decades.

Silicon Valley promises abundance, but corporate America is built for extraction. The underlying operating system is stuck on making big shareholders rich the expense of everyone else. It’s time for a reboot. *From the “AI and the Future of the American Worker,” a series on how artificial intelligence is impacting labor, power, and the meaning of work. (Read Part 1 of this article here).

AI is powered by more than algorithms – underneath is a flawed, decades-old corporate operating system that redirects gains away from workers. The good news: It doesn’t have to be this way. 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.

Senate Finance Committee Democrats are seeking evidence and proposals to shape health-care legislation. Their critique of insurers has merit, but reforms confined to insurance risk leaving hospitals, conglomerates, and much of the system’s extraction untouched, sets the stage for further disappointment.

Senate Finance Committee Democrats have invited outside evidence and proposals for their next health-care agenda. Their critique of insurers has force, but the remedies leave most of the system untouched, risking further disappointment unless reform reaches hospitals and entire conglomerates.

Social Security runs on the paycheck. But a growing share of American wealth now comes from profits, assets, and ownership. The program that ended old-age poverty was never built for an economy that pays people this way.

The upheaval in Maine’s Senate race has focused attention on candidates and party leaders. Less noticed is what the campaign finance data reveal about the state’s Democratic Party and its structural dependence on national organizations and large out-of-state donors.

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.

We’ve inherited a stubborn reflex for resisting fatcats, oligarchs, profiteers, and anyone who tries to run roughshod over us.

SOAS Anti-Corruption Evidence and the Institute for New Economic Thinking are convening a two-day conference for UK-based early career researchers working on governance, corruption, and related political economy issues in the Global South.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and the Cambridge Central Asia Forum, University of Cambridge, in partnership with The Green Industrial Policy in the Age of Rare Metals: A Transregional Comparison of Growth Strategies in Rare Earth Mining Project (Funded by European Research Council (ERC) administered by University of Sussex, UK., are organizing the Research in Action Workshop 2026: The Science of Critical Minerals and the Realigning Global Order, on 27–28 April 2026 at the University of Cambridge.

Equality runs deeper than preference or policy fashion, rooted in human social instincts and reflected in outcomes across societies. It is time for economics and policy alike to reckon with how profoundly distribution shapes well-being and social stability.

The struggle over the Federal Reserve is not just a dispute about central bank independence. It is a constitutional conflict over democratic sovereignty itself: in a representative system, the power to make money belongs first to the legislature, not the executive.

Affordable medicines remain out of reach for millions because pharmaceutical innovation is organized around value extraction, not public health. How do shareholder-driven governance and fragmented global health financing reinforce inequity, and what structural reforms are needed to reverse it?