Research
I currently work on three research projects: the relationship between capitalism and democracy, the epistemology of sustainable finance, and the economic and political history of the 1970s in Germany, France, Britain, and the United States.
The relationship between capitalism and democracy
How have past thinkers analysed and described the relationship between capitalism and democracy? What is it? What should it be? My dissertation, supervised by John Roemer (chair), David Grewal, and Douglas Rae, was a first attempt to answer these questions.
In it I observed that the majority of past thinkers saw the two in conflict with another. The chapter surveying past interpretations of the democracy-capitalism nexus is now published in History of Political Thought.
Analysing their relationship in the North Atlantic core since WWII, I argued that their relationship is akin to that of water and oil: capable of temporary emulsion, but tending towards separation. For an illustration of this simile, see this working paper offering a stylised history of the transition from Bretton Woods to Neoliberal Globalism in the financial sector.
Normatively speaking, finally, I argued that democracy should be prioritised over capitalism, because there are multiple equilibria in market economies that produce disparate outcomes for different groups. No minority—in particular no minority of investors—has either the knowledge or the legitimacy to choose one equilibrium over another. The broad outlines of our division of labour should therefore be decided by majorities.
As part of my dissertation research, I also investigated various variants of the thesis that capitalism is self-destructive. An offshoot of this work is an article on the causes of low inflation, and the inferences that can be drawn from it for the distribution of power under contemporary capitalism.
As an extension of this research, I am now working on a book project on the intellectual history of how the relationship between democracy and capitalism has been theorised over the last two centuries.
The epistemology of sustainable finance
Sustainable finance is the attempt to render the financial system compatible with, and ideally conducive to, sustainable development. In this project I investigate what I believe to be the core of this endeavour: how to distinguish between sustainable and non-sustainable investments.
No definitive answer to this question is possible when analysing a single activity or commodity in isolation. Whether electric vehicles are sustainable, for example, depends on where and how their raw materials are extracted and processed, on battery recycling rates, on the source of electricity used for charging, and so on. Questions of project-level sustainability thus shade into questions of system-level interactions, about how to evaluate and coordinate complex divisions of labour. Who defines what is sustainable, and how? How are definitions of sustainability translated into mechanisms and processes that effectively coordinate a division of labour? What information infrastructure do these mechanisms and processes require?
This project has resulted in a first report, published with the Royal Academy of Belgium, that lays out an argument why bottom-up methodologies that start from individual project characteristics and seek to arrive at sustainability judgements are inherently flawed; an op-ed in the Financial Times; a chapter in Politiques de l’interrègne (Paris: Gallimard, 2022) as well as an shorter piece (in German) on the pitfalls and promises of sustainable finance reforms, published with Makronom.
The roads not taken: the 1970s reconsidered
In recent years, political scientists and historians have identified the 1970s as a pivotal decade and the origin of the contemporary dominance of finance. Perhaps the central problem facing elected officials, civil servants, trade unionists, and others during this decade was stagflation. In this project I ask an epistemological and a political question: epistemologically, how were different narratives about the causes of stagflation established? Which scientific, discursive, and political processes shaped the collection and interpretation of economic and other data, and their aggregation into overall narratives and explanations?
Politically, once a structural decline in profitability was identified as among the key causes of low investment and hence stagflation, why did a restoration of profit rates crystallise as the dominant policy response? Given still-recent New Deal and wartime experiences, particularly with the US Reconstruction Finance and Defense Plant Corporations, why was the socialisation of investment eschewed—which Keynes had long ago identified as likely necessary to full employment in the long run?
Tackling these questions, I hope, will eventually allow me to tell a revisionist history of the 1970s, centring on the road(s) not taken and the options left under-explored. Geographically, this project’s focus is on the US, France, the UK, and Germany, with a substantive focus on deindustrialisation, the reconstitution of international capital markets, and linkages between the Cold War international context and domestic economic decision-making.
This project is in its early stages. A first output is a paper exploring deindustrialisation in a Cold War comparative context, published in Critical Historical Studies.