Capitalisn't

Is the era of manufacturing-led growth officially over? For decades, the path to a stable middle class was paved through industrialization, but today, even manufacturing giants like China are losing millions of factory jobs to automation.
In this episode, Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales sit down with Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard and author of Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World. Rodrik argues that we have "no other choice" but to look toward the service sector to anchor our future economy.
But there’s a problem: we still treat these essential roles as "bottom rung" jobs in terms of pay and respect. Is it possible to elevate a job’s status and pay simply because society needs it to be better? As Rodrik argues, it’s a future we must learn to navigate if we want to preserve a stable society.

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Is the Federal Reserve’s independence a pillar of democracy or a convenient shield that allows elected officials to duck their responsibilities? This week on Capitalisn’t, we confront a shift in Washington after the Justice Department served subpoenas on the Fed. 
Joining the conversation is Former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Paul Tucker, who complicates the definition of central bank autonomy. If monetary policy is a "latent instrument of taxation," should it be shielded from the King—the executive branch—and reclaimed by the legislature? We explore the provocative argument that the Fed has become dangerously wary of its relationship with Congress, acting as a self-governing entity rather than a delegated authority. Does the U.S. model, where the Fed defines its own version of price stability, explain the accountability gap we see when supervisory failures like the SVB collapse result in zero consequences for leadership?
Finally, we address an unsettling mystery regarding the global financial system. If Fed independence is truly degrading, why are the markets so strangely sanguine? Are global investors simply anesthetized by the AI boom, or does the dollar’s global monopoly allow the U.S. to decay without paying an immediate price? We debate whether the market has ceased to be a barometer for institutional health and instead become a tool for protecting shareholder rents—failing to interpret a "catastrophic forecast" until it is already too late.
Tucker is also the author of "Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State" & "Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order".

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Is the American tax code a fair engine for growth, or a "second estate" where the rich choose whether or not to pay? 
We are often told that the top 1% of earners already pay 40% of all taxes, while nearly half of Americans pay nothing at all. Legal scholar Ray Madoff argues that this statistic is a deliberate "bait-and-switch" designed to confuse the public. The reality is that the truly rich often have little to no income to tax, living instead on borrowed gains and tax-free inheritances.
In this episode, Madoff joins Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean to discuss her new book "The Second Estate: How The Tax Code Made An American Aristocracy" covering how and why our current tax system allowed the ultra-wealthy to opt out altogether. She argues that to fix the system, we shouldn't just raise rates, we need to bring inheritances and investment gains directly into the income tax system and eliminate the "cover" provided by a broken estate tax.
 

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Is capitalism a force of nature, or a human-made order that we have the power to shape? In this episode, Luigi and Bethany sit down with Sven Beckert, a Harvard historian and author of the new book A Global History of Capitalism, to tackle a question that seems basic but remains surprisingly difficult to answer: what exactly is capitalism?
Beckert argues that capitalism is not defined simply by the existence of markets—which are found in all human societies—but rather by a specific economic logic of privately owned capital productively invested to produce more capital. He challenges the popular narrative that capitalism and the state are antithetical, suggesting instead that the state has been constitutive of capitalism throughout its history, from the colonization of the Americas to the industrial expansion of the 19th century.
Beckert also argues that capitalism is fundamentally "undogmatic", pointing out that it has thrived under radically different political systems from the British Empire and the slave plantations of the Caribbean to modern liberal democracies and authoritarian city-states. Rather than existing in opposition to the state, does capitalism actually rely on state power to construct markets and enforce the expansion of its logic? 

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There’s a word that’s gained a lot of popularity in the last year: “ensh*ttification”. It refers to a trajectory many see with digital platforms: they initially offer immense value to users, only to systematically degrade that quality over time in order to extract maximum surplus for shareholders. 
We invited the coiner of this term, science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow, on the podcast to discuss whether he thinks this decline is an inevitable feature of digital markets or a consequence of specific policy failures. And, most importantly, how he thinks it could be reversed.
For Doctorow, "ensh*ttification" is not simply a result of "revealed preferences", where users tolerate worse service because they value the platform, but rather the outcome of a regulatory environment that has permitted the creation of high switching costs and the elimination of competitors. 
Doctorow also argues that historically, interoperability acted as an engine of dynamism, allowing new entrants to lower the barriers to entry. But current IP frameworks, such as anti-circumvention laws, have been "weaponized" to prevent this, effectively allowing firms to enforce cartels and engage in rent-seeking behavior.
Finally, Doctorow offers a critical assessment of the current AI boom, arguing that the sector is creating "reverse centaurs", where human labor is conscripted to correct algorithmic errors, and warns of a potential asset bubble driven by inflated revenue attribution.

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