Activity

The IBM PC was a departure point for the home computer’s intellectual property regime, raising and answering questions in equal measure. By effectively waving away IP claims on the market’s hottest commodity, Big Blue made room for some of its contractors to pursue their own. Two of these contracto…

For cronies attached to America-supported regimes, California was irresistible. A cornucopia of start-up and suburban development and shopping-center and office-tower projects promised high returns on big investments under safe conditions, even if things went badly at home. “They come over here wit…

Talking about how the American labor market channeled various groups of post-1965 immigrants risks repeating tired ethnic stereotypes that still plague the country’s psyche. But not talking about it risks naturalizing the same patterns, reinforcing false ideas about ethnic suitability for certain j…

With Reagan in office, the hard-core ideological capitalists running the White House used American might to leverage a global policy revolution along Hooverite lines. By shifting the balance of class power everywhere toward local elites, they triggered a virtuous cycle of financial growth, analogou…

Instead of treating human capital as a national resource the way David Starr Jordan and company first planned it, America’s new leaders applied Garrett Hardin’s tragic-commons logic: If they were giving it away, people would go to school and, say, invent radical new theatrical art practices instead…