Zingales

In Italy is even worse. There is very little welfare state, the vast majority are transfers from the young to the old. This is the reason why at the #festinteconomia I proposed an estate tax on the boomers giornalelavoce.it/news/attua…

If you want to pierce through the noise and listen to an analysis of the different economic proposals of the midterm candidates, listen to the latest episode of Capitalisn’t

Larry @Lessig is providing a ray of hope. You should listen to this episode just for that.

Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls the American workplace a dictatorship on our latest Capitalisn’t podcast. Absent competition, it is. We spent three centuries designing constitutions to limit the sovereign's power against its citizens. Against private power, absent competition, we have none. I am not the person to write the Bill of Rights for workers and customers, but someone should. Full podcast here: youtube.com/watch?v=MI0za8Ci…

I agree, but in a well functioning system extraordinary wealth should be the reward of extraordinary accomplishments. @omizidar and Zwick fail to show this link.

The American Dream Is Still Alive, for Cronies Is the American dream still alive? In a recent @WSJ article, @omzidar and Eric Zwick claim it is. Yet, their book provides a more nuanced picture. The millionaires they celebrate are not inventors, creative entrepreneurs, disruptive innovators: they are mostly rent seekers. From car dealers to beer distributors, from real estate brokers to real estate developers, their “everywhere millionaires” resemble more a list of antitrust violations than a monument to American ingenuity. Does the American dream amount to achieving an antitrust exemption? To find out, listen to the latest episode of Capitalisn’t where Bethany and I discuss these issues with Eric: youtube.com/watch?v=qHha_z-0…

The war economy and Operation Warp Speed. Why is the state able to act efficiently during these times but not others? What these moments share is the threat of annihilation. When people believe they may not survive, the political economy disappears, and government becomes remarkably competent. The question we debated with @MazzucatoM is how to get those outcomes without those incentives. Listen to our full conversation on Capitalisn't here: youtube.com/watch?v=N9KlofuS…

Thanks!

You bought an index fund, not a philosopher-king. Who should decide how it votes on climate, lobbying, and social issues? With Oliver Hart and Hélène @landemore, we propose investor assemblies: give a voice to the people whose money it is. journals.law.harvard.edu/hbl…

How can you tell apart an Italian from a Spaniard? But how much they move their hands when they talk :)

If credentials lose their signaling value to AI-generated resumes, we will revert to a world where personal connections dictate who gets hired. That isn't competitive capitalism, it’s cronyism. We discuss this future and how to get out of it with @lugaricano, author of “Messy Jobs: The Work That AI Cannot Reach” on our latest Capitalisn’t podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=Vnp8yFsS…

Everybody has heard of the Luddites, but few know Sir Thomas Maitland, the man who defeated them. Rather than using brute force to take them all out, Maitland simply identified the men he took to be ringleaders, had them arrested on evidence that was often thin, and executed them. Hit one, educate a hundred. This is the strategy that the British magazine The Economist seems to have adopted toward the new version of the Luddites: AI critics. Rather than the public execution, they use the public humiliation of the anti-AI ringleaders, with equally scant evidence. Whatever its editors intended, the critical piece against @DAcemogluMIT, published by the magazine on August 17th, functions less like a conventional assessment of scholarship than like an act of intellectual discipline. I have long criticized important parts of Daron’s work, and I am not afraid to expose weaknesses in his reasoning, as I have in the latest episode of my Capitalisn’t podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=rOnrvBzJ…. But I would never have written that piece. If The Economist had objections to his Nobel Prize, it should have raised them when it was awarded. But it did not. If it had objections to his paper on demography, it should have raised them when the paper came out. But it did not. Why does the British magazine raise these questions only now? Why does it do a review of a book that is not about AI, but only reviews the half-chapter he wrote about AI? I have read The Economist for more than thirty years. I cannot remember it ever attacking a living economist in this ad hominem way, let alone one of Daron's caliber. The piece is not really about Daron. It is a warning shot. If the Economist can humiliate the leading economist of my generation, imagine what it can do to anybody else who criticizes AI. Criticize the new incarnation of the latest technological wonder, and your weakest paper becomes your body of work. Praise it, and your weakest paper is never mentioned at all or even celebrated like a great piece of scholarship. If AI delivers even half of its promises, it will be transformative, ushering in a new era of productivity and growth, as the first industrial revolution was and possibly even more. Many professional economists only see these long-run benefits. Yet, the path to Nirvana is littered with the bodies of the people hurt during the transition. It took between 50 and 70 years after the start of the First Industrial Revolution for workers' wages to begin rising. In the meantime, life expectancy stagnated, and average height declined, a clear sign that the Dickensian stories of squalor and misery were not the product of their author’s imagination but a real account of what the country went through. Criticizing AI is not necessarily resisting progress; it is pointing out the costs it entails. Unlike 19th-century Great Britain, today, the democratic West is not forced to maximize the speed of innovation at all costs. We need a serious public debate on the costs and benefits of acceleration, with concrete proposals for minimizing transition costs. This debate needs critical voices like Daron’s. In the undemocratic Great Britain of the early 19th century, Lord Maitland was not serving the British people, but the British merchant elite, who had only to gain by putting the innovation pedal to the metal, since the costs were borne by others. In the interest of whom is The Economist publicly humiliating Daron?

Randy Picker, the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the Chicago Law School, passed away suddenly last night. It is an enormous loss. He was a true scholar and a real gentleman. Read below the tribute from one of his many students linkedin.com/feed/update/urn…

If AI lets every nurse do a doctor's work, will the nurse get a raise or the doctor a wage reduction? In our latest Capitalisn’t podcast, @Bethanymac12 and I discuss with Nobel economist @DAcemogluMITabout the impact AI will have on wages and jobs. Listen to this clip from the latest Capitalisn’t podcast on Daron Acemoglu’s new book "What Happened to Liberal Democracy?" and catch the full episode here: youtube.com/watch?v=rOnrvBzJ…

I am a big believer in the power of disclosure, but disclosure is not free. An economist has to ask where the optimum lies. I pressed former SEC official Renée Jones on exactly this in our latest Capitalisn’t podcast.

"Human beings are not created for the purpose of selling their labor." That's not a labor organizer, it's the policy director of the conservative @AmerCompass think tank on our latest Capitalisn’t podcast. Fourteen years ago in "A Capitalism for the People," I asked whether populist anger could be directed at crony capitalism rather than at markets. @Chris_Griz is one of the most serious attempts I've seen to make that case from the right. Listen to the clip below and the full episode here: youtube.com/watch?v=GAnKzBnZ…

The constitutional convention failed to do that too. It took the Bill of Rights to have those protections.

We often think of our Constitution as a triumph of democracy, but Harvard legal historian Michael Klarman argues in our latest Capitalisn’t podcast that the Framers used layered elections, like the Electoral College, to filter ordinary men out of high office. Was it an elitist view of democracy or a conspiracy to protect the wealthy? We discuss it with Klarman, author of The Framers' Coup, on the latest Capitalisn’t. Watch the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=-Rcc-JUi…

I agree, it is a very nice paper. Trump stopped disclosing the White House log, so it is impossible to replicate the study under him. The very fact he did it suggests how much more valuable access has become. Yet the problem did not start with him . It has been long in the making.

In 2012, I warned America risked sliding into a Berlusconi-style economy where access matters more than efficiency. Fourteen years later, investors are pricing presidential attention alongside earnings and cash flow.  I spoke to @YasminKhorram at @politico about what that means: politico.com/news/2026/07/10…