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.
Nick French
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.
Elon Musk secured shareholder approval for a new stock-based package designed to double his voting power at Tesla, potentially making him the first trillion-dollar employee. As this plan cements Musk’s control it ties vesting to audacious market-cap and production targets and diverts focus from progressive value creation. Musk’s governance, layoffs, and politicization could imperil Tesla’s EV leadership and ambitions in AI and robotics.
Elon Musk is, once again, taking stock
As the government shutdown drags on, official economic data has slowed to a crawl, leaving policymakers, markets, and citizens increasingly reliant on private-sector numbers. That’s a problem.
If the 2008 financial crisis proved anything, it’s that economic stability is not a given but a fragile construct – one that can collapse at warp speed when trust, transparency, and accountability erode.
Reality has a way of reminding us if we forget.
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.
From New York to California and beyond, soaring costs seem to be rewriting city politics, as voters respond to candidates who promise to ease the financial squeeze. Zohran Mamdani’s historic win in NYC underscores a shift that has been emerging in recent years – both in the U.S. and globally -- and could extend to other major cities.
How can history help us understand the world economists study—and change how we confront the climate crisis?
The LEPC is a flagship initiative, designed to bring together leading voices in Law, Economics, and Public Policy to engage with complex, real-world challenges in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary manner.
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 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.
In his new book Challenging the Myths of U.S. History, historian Marc Egnal takes aim at the stories Americans like to tell themselves -- on both the right and the left.
