Political Economy Forum

Assistant Professor Asli Cansunar and Morgan Wack discuss how perceptions can shape policy preferences. They also touch on the influence social media and local conditions serve in shaping individual economic perceptions.

Prof. Victor Menaldo and Nicolas Wittstock host Roddy Lindsay, CEO of Hustle and opinion columnist at The Information, to discuss the implications of President Trump's ban from Twitter for free speech on social media. 

Prof. Victor Menaldo of UW Political Economy Forum discusses with James whether the mob that attacked the Capitol is a coup attempt, insurrection, or sedition, the 25th amendment, and future prosecutions. James and Victor also discuss these issues in a recent piece published in The Conversation: Why Trump’s challenges to democracy will be a big problem for Biden.

Professor Mark Alan Smith and Forum Fellow Nicolas Wittstock debate to what extent the results of scientific inquiry can inform public policy and resolve political disputes.

PhD Candidate Beatrice Magistro and Professor Victor Menaldo make the case that all populist leaders pursue similar economic policy - regardless of their professed ideology. Almost without exception, these policies hurt the very people populists claim to champion. 

Dennis Young, PhD student in Political Science at the UW,  presents his research on Immigration Detention Centers in the US. 

Will Gochberg, Postdoctoral Research Associate at Washington University in St. Louis speaks to Morgan about his dissertation project on community-level dynamics of land rights in Uganda.

In this episode, Professor Victor Menaldo and Nicolas Wittstock explore the facts, logic, and evidence behind the consumer welfare approach to antitrust. That approach asks very simple questions: what is the effect of mergers between competitors or the behavior of firms with market power on prices and innovation? Since the early 1980s, this paradigm—away from a populist “big is bad” approach—has undergirded some of the greatest innovations the world has ever seen, including smartphones, software, and digital platforms that connect the globe together while charging a price equal to zero for their services. The consensus that antitrust should be exclusively about the price of goods and services and innovation is currently under attack by some scholars, pundits, politicians, and advocacy groups. Critics claim that lax antitrust has led to increased market concentration and monopolies in the tech sector, ushering in “less entrepreneurship”, “restrictions on free speech”, “lower privacy protections”, and “the abuse of consumer data”. Companies like Amazon are accused of harming players up and down the retail supply chain from selling their own goods in a digital marketplace they control or pricing out brick and mortar retailers. They are also accused of exacerbating inequality and being too systemically important due to their size, market impact, interconnectedness, and low “substitutability”. Finally, there is the fear that big tech firms’ economic power translates into political power and is bad for democracy. We  set the record straight on what digital platforms actually are (explain the economics of multi-sided markets),  what market concentration actually says about competition and consumer  welfare (fewer rivals may imply greater efficiency and thus lower  prices), how to define and measure “monopoly” (none of the big tech firms satisfy the  definition), how to identify whether firms abuse their market power to crimp competition (a technical issue that is actually quite rare) and what remedies, if any, should be employed by  policymakers in relation to digital platforms. We suggest that breaking up big tech is a radical solution in search of a problem.

UW Economics Professor and Forum Co-Founder Rachel Heath joins Forum Fellow Morgan Wack to discuss her paper on the effects of international scrutiny on worker conditions, wages, and contracts in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza factory collapse as well as contemporary issues in the global manufacturing sector. See links on the showpage here. 

Victor Menaldo and James Long of Political Economy Forum discuss why a coup is unlikely in the US, the anxieties & realities of political transitions, and what the historical record can teach us about contested elections. See links on the showpage here.