Policy Fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley
Columbia University Press
My first book project argues that financialization was a response to a political crisis within liberalism, and that financialization in turn rolls out neoliberal governmental policy that displaces democratic processes and accountability. Both claims move against conventional wisdom, which treats neoliberalism as a response to a crisis of capitalism, and financialization as the offspring of neoliberal deregulation. The book begins by exploring the ways that liberal political doctrine disavows the problem of distributive conflict—the general condition in which people vie for increasing shares of the social product—and is consequently vulnerable when these conflicts erupt. It then revisits the nature of the crises that produce the turn to financialization to show how finance both responds to renewed conflicts and enacts a fundamental transformation in liberal democratic governance. The second half of the book presents three case studies in which one sees vividly how governing for the people, while never fully realized in capitalist democracies, was radically displaced by the shift to financial market constituencies: the bankruptcy of Stockton, California; the investment strategy of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System; and the 2008 financial crisis.
Table of Contents:
1. Liberalism and Distributive Conflict
2. The Crisis of Inflation
3. The Financialization of Liberalism
4. Democracy and Finance in California
5. Growth Machine Politics
6. The Crisis of Finance
7. Finance or Democracy?
Policy & Society
This article examines the challenges of regulating artificial intelligence (AI) systems and proposes an adapted model of regulation suitable for AI's novel features. Unlike past technologies, AI systems built using techniques like deep learning cannot be directly analyzed, specified, or audited against regulations. Their behavior emerges unpredictably from training rather than intentional design. However, the traditional model of delegating oversight to an expert agency, which has succeeded in high-risk sectors like aviation and nuclear power, should not be wholly discarded. Instead, policymakers must contain risks from today's opaque models while supporting research into provably safe AI architectures. Drawing lessons from AI safety literature and past regulatory successes, effective AI governance will likely require consolidated authority, licensing regimes, mandated training data/modeling disclosures, formal verification of system behavior, and the capacity for rapid intervention. Though AI poses novel hurdles, thoughtful adaptation of established frameworks can facilitate the public interest while enabling innovation.
New Political Economy
Over the course of the 1970s, inflation became a monetary phenomenon. At the beginning of the decade, price increases were attributed to a complex intersection of domestic and international forces. By the end of the decade, inflation was widely seen as a consequence of misguided government policy. What began as a partisan battle cry became a social scientific premise: the history of inflation in the 1970s in the United States is told by the political victors. This article recovers a set of facts buried beneath decades of ideological sedimentation. Through a decomposition of the statistical index of inflation, this article demonstrates that price increases in the 1970s were driven by a confluence of contingent events propagating through politically constructed markets. Sharp increases in the prices of tradeable global commodities combined with unprecedented interest rate hikes to send the Consumer Price Index to new highs. Through these component histories, the article demonstrates how the aggregate phenomenon of “inflation” and its subsequent remission after 1982 marked the confluence of otherwise unrelated disruptions rather than “too much money chasing too few goods” decisively upended by the Volcker shock.
New Media & Society
This article establishes a theoretical link between the business model of social media and the recent upsurge of antiliberal populism. Through a novel set of tactics I term identity biopolitics, political campaigns and foreign governments alike can identify voters as members of socioculturally differentiated populations, then target them with political messages aimed at cultivating voters' awareness of their particular disadvantage within the prevailing liberal order. Identity biopolitics exploits a positive feedback loop between targeting and content: the sociocultural differentiations liberalism declares politically irrelevant are used to target content that cultivates awareness of the subject's particular depoliticized disadvantage within the prevailing liberal order. The antiliberal populist seeks to parlay this perception among voters into support for their political program. This article presents case studies of the Internet Research Agency and Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 general election in the United States to demonstrate this symbiosis.
Cambridge Journal of Economics
This article critically examines the role of the neoclassical model of the market within Rawlsian liberalism. Although Rawls claims agnosticism towards particular economic theories, I show how the neoclassical model anchors Rawls's approach of transmuting distributive efficiency into distributive justice. However, the assumptions underlying the neoclassical model are not descriptively accurate as Rawls's key construct of pure procedural justice requires. Without the neoclassical model and the pure procedural approach to distribution it uniquely enables, I show how Rawlsian liberalism recreates the same problem of reasonable pluralism in the domain of economic doctrines that it is premised on resolving in the domain of religious, moral and philosophical doctrines. This article surfaces this paradox for Rawlsian liberalism: it relies essentially on market distribution yet cannot justify these arrangements within the confines of the theory.
with Laura Tyson and John Zysman
Forthcoming in New Global Dynamics: Managing Economic Change in a Transforming World (Brookings Institution Press)
Money: The First 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta reviewed in the European Journal of Sociology
The Machine from God: Kosmos and the Spontaneous Order Tradition (under review)
The Political Economy of AI (in preparation for an edited volume)
UC Berkeley, Fall 2021, Fall 2022
How are individuals forged (or not) into political communities? By whom? For what ends? How can these political projects face the reality of division, diversity, and difference? Is there even such a thing as a common interest? Is solidarity possible in a world constructed and striated by social powers of all kinds? To what extent can solidarity resist the individualization that characterizes contemporary political and economic life? In this course, we will consider these questions through a variety of historical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory. We will endeavor to understand these texts on their own terms, in their historical contexts, and their broader implications for contemporary political life. We will not settle these questions but deepen our understanding of the complex theoretical and political history of social solidarity.
The Political Economy of Finance Deep Springs College, Spring 2018UC Berkeley, Fall 2022
This course examines the history, theory, and operation of the American Financial System. Key questions we will consider include: What is money? What is finance? How did the financial system evolve historically in the American context? What are some of its theoretical valences? How does the financial system operate in practice? To answer these questions, we will first look to histories and then canonical theorizations before turning to the operation of money and the nuts-and-bolts of American financial markets. Finally, we examine the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath in light of these considerations. The goal of this course is for students to develop a basic understanding of the historical development, theoretical underpinnings, and actual practice of the American financial system.