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[...] Art objects critical of their own status as assets are still assets. Contemporary art has shaped the world like any other market. Freeport art storage is just a new take on the Swiss bank, housing millions of artworks in tax-free and mostly extraterritorial storage zones. In “If You Don’t Hav…

As Steinbaum writes with startling frankness, income and wealth “tend to diverge because the ideological commitments of capitalism prohibit policies that would check divergence.” If there is a formula here, it is about power and ideas, not a purely economic understanding of r>g. The state produces …

[...] As Naidu writes, financial markets and labor relations are both arenas in which state power plays the determining role; both are shaped by the contingencies of government interference or lack thereof. When values collapse and debts go unpaid, or when a strike threatens the health and safety o…

[...] Yale Law professor David Singh Grewal asks how our theory of history changes when we see capital as a “social relation” rather than “simply a stock of assets, whose equilibrium rental price may be established through conventional supply and demand considerations.” Grewal argues that the abili…

When economists aggregate all the various types of capital into a single quantity — corporate paper, equipment, patents, real estate, et cetera — they make it impossible to know whether the right tax incentives will channel this abstraction into labor income, productivity, or growth. Most often, li…