Inequality & Distribution

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.

Since 2007, recurring food-price spikes reveal hunger as a problem of market design and underinvestment, not scarcity. With Brazil’s COP30 on the horizon, aligning climate commitments with food systems could cement policy space to manage markets and advance the right to food.

The soaring costs of city life appear to be sending urban voters toward progressive leaders who promise relief, both in the U.S. and globally.

The argument that free trade is always the correct policy is based on a flawed welfare analysis. Free trade results in winners and losers and economists are not competent to analyze the impact on well-being as a whole or the spillover social consequences of the discontent of the losers.

From political slugfests to classroom battles, historian Marc Egnal talks with INET’s Lynn Parramore about the need for a new approach to our national story.

The idea is finally catching on, but many still miss how deeply it’s driving inflation, masking wage losses, and complicating recovery.

We examine the World Bank’s protracted and conflicted attempts at shareholding reform from 2008 to the present, situating them within the broader context of multipolarity and intensifying geopolitical rivalries.

The argument that free trade is always the correct policy is based on a flawed welfare analysis. Free trade results in winners and losers and economists are not competent to analyze the impact on well-being as a whole or the spillover social consequences of the discontent of the losers.

The focus of this year’s monsoon school is on pluralistic approaches to research on inequality, bringing together perspectives from varied streams of economic thought. It will provide an interactive platform for advanced-level PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and scholars affiliated with Indian research institutes to engage with diverse concepts, debates, and methodologies related to inequality.

Inflation persists not just because of spending or interest rates, but because underlying social conflicts over income, expectations, and power remain unresolved.

How inflationary inertia, driven by distributional conflict, disrupts the economy’s path to an effective demand equilibrium.

In Capitalism and Its Critics, New Yorker writer John Cassidy brings to life the figures who warned of monopoly power, inequality, environmental peril, and authoritarianism—forces still at work today. He discusses his book with Lynn Parramore.

Times have changed. Now we have David Brooks, of The New York Times, and economics blogger Noah Smith defending neoliberal globalization from the pincer movement of anti-trade populists from both the right and the left.

The most likely outcome of the second Trump administration is a recession and an exacerbation of inequalities, and a further degradation of the living standards of working and middle-class Americans.

The conference aims to examine the complex interplay of housing, law, economics, and spatial justice in an unequal world, and we welcome scholars and practitioners to participate.