What follows is an incomplete list of people pushing important ideas. A complete list might span hundreds or thousands of names. However, many people in both the public and private sectors read these writers and thinkers from this list to help make sense of the nature of politics and economics of today. For anyone who’s ever asked themselves: Why does U.S. politics appear to be breaking down today? I think these authors shine a lot of light on the answer to that question. Regardless of the answer to the question though, one thing seems certain: big changes do appear to be in motion and these authors and activists are doing a phenomenal job framing many of the problems we are confronted with as of 2019, leading into 2020.
1. Adam Tooze: His book Crashed (video) takes a wide angle look at the financial crisis and expands quite a bit outside of Varoufakis’ (below) outlining of the financial crisis of 2008. Varoufakis’ financial collapse analysis was much more U.S. centric, where Tooze analyzes the crisis’ tentacles of destruction to farthest streches of the globe. Because of the magnitude of the crash, the tepid response to the crash on both sides of the Atlantic, and for a ton of other reasons, a natural conclusion to Tooze’s book is that a new politics must be forged. Considerations for this new politics are discussed here. It’s hard to really understand the world today without understanding the significance of the financial collapse of 2008 that started on Wall Street and spread throughout the world, and it’s best explained to date by Adam Tooze.
2. Stephanie Kelton: Say goodbye to the days of the unchallenged dominance of the ideas used to manage the economy of the last 40 years. To obtain an outline of the theory struggling to replace the old dominant, and crisis-ridden, world view with an emerging set of ideas, you can pick up anything written by Stephanie Kelton (video) or others from the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) crowd. The ideas running the US economy hit a serious snag in 2008 and have never really fully recovered. The era of implementing these unquestioned status quo ideas coming from status quo economists and politicians of the last 40 years is likely coming to a close. A potential gap filler or replacement, MMT is a doctrine (video) of political-economy with decades of research behind it. After all, the status quo of economic thought of the last 40 years brought us the financial collapse in 2008, the endless war on terror, declining life spans, and Donald Trump, so today’s status quo defenders ain’t exactly credible voices regarding American economics moving forward. Understand them, but take their advice with a grain of salt.
3. Yanis Varoufakis: One of his primary works for understanding the financial collapse his the book The Global Minotaur (Minotaur). In Minotaur, Varoufakis provides a very readable and accessible explanation of the financial collapse (video). He also provides a historical context regarding imbalances in trade and finance between the US and the rest of the world (video) in the lead up to the financial collapse. Varoufakis also wrote Adults in the Room about his brief five months as Greek’s finance minister in 2015. In Adults in the Room (video) Varoufakis takes you through SYRIZA’s rise to power in Greece in 2015. Having meteorically risen from almost no support in the polls to taking parliament, the SYRIZA story is gripping. Conversely, the European Union was waiting to crush the meteorically ascended and democratically legitimated political party.
4. Naomi Klein: She provides a framework for understanding how crises have been and still are exploited (video) by extremely wealthy interests in order to exploit those devastated, crisis ridden, regions in the future. She’s also written extensively on how to think about and react to climate change (video). In addition, Klein has been an indispensable voice in this age of hyper-marketization run amok all over the planet.
5. Glenn Greenwald: The NSA and Silicon Valley surveille the world twenty-four hours a day, seven days per week. Greenwald’s No Place To Hide lays out the expansive spying done on the American public by the National Security Agency based on the Edward Snowden Archive. What to do in the age of big data, big surveillance, and endless war, Greenwald raises some crucial questions around digital privacy and human rights. Greenwald’s With Liberty and Justice for Some, outlines a detailed explanation of the brokenness of the U.S. legal system. Political elites abuse it, and have for decades. The intersection of privacy, surveillance, law, and war all have tremendous implications on American politics, global politics, and fundamental human rights.
6. Michelle Alexander: Mass incarceration is a stain on American society. In her book The New Jim Crow Alexander threads the needle from America’s slave era, through the Jim Crow Era, on into the War on Drugs era. There is a growing and undeniable belief that America’s justice system has deep biases based on class and race. There need to be massive criminal justice reforms immediately and, in my view, tens of thousands of pardons for nonviolent drug offenders probably need to happen.
7. Jaron Lanier: Serves as a constant reminder that technology, as Donald Glover said in his This Is America music video, “it’s a tool.” Technology is a value-neutral tool, a video camera can film a birth or a beheading. Tech can be used by its designers to addict you. It’s value neutral, it’s the people who’re either good or bad. Lanier’s Who Owns The Future? explains how rich and powerful interests in our society own the biggest and fastest computers. Their ownership over these assets create tremendous informational and spying asymmetries between the elites and the population(video). Right now the elites can know almost anything about a population by way of their powerful computers and spying apparatuses. Conversely, the population, in most respects, knows very little about the elites. Consolidation of data & processing power is essentially just our economic inequality represented in the form of computer hard and software, power begets power. Anyway, he’s suggested a really interesting solution to his perceived problem(video).
8. Murtaza Hussain, Mehdi Hasan, & Molly Crabapple: Each provides extremely thoughtful insights into the post-9/11 U.S. & world, War on Terror, Geopolitics, Syria (Brothers of the Gun), and much more. Also, very possible you’ve watched one of Mehdi’s hard-hitting viral interviews of some powerful official of global renown/infamy. He has a wide variety of guests on.
9. Chris Hedges: Hedges is a bit apocalyptic, but at least he’s honest about the origins of his apocalyptic tendencies. He accredits his dark view towards American Empire and Climate Change(video) to his beliefs in an often darkly apocalyptic Calvinism. I don’t share his dark world view, but I do share his urgency. I also share much of his analysis of the problems confronting our so-called globalized world. He covers a wide array of topics, but routinely covers news around war and empire and/or climate change.
10. Anand Giridharadas: Anand’s book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World is at the center of today’s zeitgeist. Everyone intuits the economic & political system we live under is rigged, but it’s hard to really know how this rigging is happening. It’s subtle. Anand’s book is a modern myth buster. The myths he busts? That meritocracy is a real thing that is alive and well: It’s not. The other, the myth that billionaire philanthropists will solve our political and economic and environmental (video)problems of the day: They won’t.
11. David Graeber: Graeber has done a lot to offer an alternative, evidence-based perspective on the nature of debt and money (video), work, and politics that either run counter to or overturn some of these fundamental societal concepts. Read Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years offers an anthropological and somewhat historical analysis of the concept of debt. Spoiler: debt’s historical function departs quite a lot from the way we view debt today. Feel free to read Bullshit Jobs(video link) too. Here Graeber explains today’s phenomena of people working jobs they believe offer no real value social or economic to the world and maybe shouldn’t exist. He claims the response to this book has been surprising…and international. And finally, if you’re stuck in the mindset that humans went straight from hunter gathers civilizations to agricultural based civilizations, to some kind of industrial societies, then you really want to read this piece. Here’s a last sentence of the piece entitled Are We City Dwellers or Hunter-Gathers?: “Rather than idling in some primordial (pre-historic) innocence, until the genie of inequality was somehow uncorked, [Graeber argues] our prehistoric ancestors seem to have successfully opened and shut the bottle on a regular basis, confining inequality to ritual costume dramas, constructing gods and kingdoms as they did their monuments, then cheerfully disassembling them once again.
If so, then the real question is not “what are the origins of social inequality?” but, having lived so much of our history moving back and forth between different political systems, ‘how did we get so stuck?’”
12. Nicholas Eberstadt: An important recent contribution by Eberstadt is to provide a pretty concise analysis of deep issues around employment in the U.S. or more specifically, structural long-term unemployment among prime aged (15–59) men. In Men Without Work Eberstadt shows a lot of blind spots that exist in the U.S. economy. He also shows holes in the way we understand and talk about the economy. The problem of long-term unemployment is much more pervasive than just men, the problem is serious and likely to grow more serious across all races and genders in the years ahead thanks to automation and AI. If you want a full understanding of the deep structural problem that Andrew Yang is trying to tap into in his Presidential campaign, (video) read men without work or you could just read Yang’s book. Both probably cover a lot of the same arguments and content.
13. Corey Robin, Patrick Deneen, & The Big Ideas Dilemma: Barack Obama amplified Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen when he published Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (audio) in Obama’s 2018 book list. One of Deneen’s theses hits at the heart of the both the Republican and Democratic Parties: the international promotion of economic liberalism. Deneen cites inequality, cultural homogeneousness, and environmental limitations to signal a potential breaking point of economic liberalism’s dominance in thought. With all of these points of failure, Deneen’s critique raises the very real possibility that we are at an end point of a 200+ year project. I guess the more appropriate way to describe the point to be more transitional than a hard “end”. Though, considering the scope of the changes ahead, I can see why many view the approaching transition as an ending. An implicit question to Deneen’s book is: Well, what’s next? That’s what a lot of powerful people, groups, and institutions are all asking at the current moment.
Corey Robin wrote The Reactionary Mind in an attempt to place (or outline) the conservative mind in this moment in history. A solid work. Robin traces conservativism’s origins back to Edmund Burke, (video) who was responding to the revolutionaries in France and traces various versions of conservatism up through today. Definitely worth the time to read. Some other people to read might be Darren Beattie (rebuttal). He’s a political theorist, a right-winger, but thoughtful and credentialed. I don’t agree with him, but his ideas have an audience, so might as well be familiar with them. Rutger Bregman rose to fame by pushing the conversation of taxes at Davos, Switzerland. It’s been an annual congregation of the world’s so-called economic elites. They never want to talk about taxes, he forced the conversation and started pushing his ideas. I don’t blame him, I’d do the same thing.
I guess I’ll end this by throwing in the inequality crew: Thomas Picketty, Emmanual Saez, Gabriel Zucman. These French economists are likely responsible for your understanding of inequality if you have one.
One last one thinker is Matt Stoller at the Open Markets Institute. He’s does competition policy, monopoly/monopsony law, and political commentary.
