Beneath the grand claims and vast capital spending, AI is delivering weak productivity, mounting losses, and growing financial strain. If the boom cannot generate profits, jobs, or durable gains, how much longer can the bubble hold?
AI surveillance and algorithmic management threaten worker autonomy and dignity. It’s time for a rethinking of rights. 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.
“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.” ~ The Trial (1925), Franz Kafka
What should courts prioritize in determining antitrust cases: measurable welfare effects, or the protection of competitive rivalry itself? The Consumer Welfare Standard and the Protect Competition Standard offer different answers.
Should antitrust law focus primarily on measurable performance outcomes such as price and output as indicated by Robert Bork's Consumer Welfare Standard? Or is it more important to concentrate on whether conduct undermines the competitive process itself as per the newly revitalized Protect Competition Standard?
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.
As the Supreme Court’s unitary executive theory reaches the Federal Reserve, a deeper constitutional question comes into view: who holds the power to make money?
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?
The global medicine-access crisis is not simply a failure to balance innovation and affordability. It reflects a deeper system in which shareholder-driven pharmaceutical governance and fragmented donor structures undermine public health and block the shift toward more equitable value creation.
Less capital, more risk, familiar consequences. The latest move on big-bank rules suggests that too big to fail was never solved, only deferred.
The latest move to ease capital rules for large banks is being sold as a technical adjustment. It is nothing of the sort. It is another step in a long retreat from the post-2008 financial crisis promise to discipline concentrated financial power and protect the public from having to underwrite private risk.
That is the old too-big-to-fail bargain, dressed again in the language of efficiency.
A case for tackling the corporate machinery driving extreme wealth, and the reforms that could truly curb it.
Targeting billionaires with California’s proposed wealth tax is an eye-catching idea, but perhaps the real problem is how some of these people become billionaires in the first place.
