Joe Biden Archives - Public Seminar

Economy

Trump vs. the Fed

Or how history is forcing the question of a democratic politics of central banking

August 27, 2025 • by Adam Tooze

Donald Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook “for cause,” escalates his long-running battle with America’s central bank. The news has triggered outrage. In the pages of the FT, David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center for Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, warned: “President Trump seems determined to ...

Democracy

Trump Returns

Anyone who knows what will happen in 2028 probably doesn’t know much

February 6, 2025 • by David Plotke

The following remarks were first presented on November 13, 2024, in a public lecture at the New School for Social Research. Donald Trump’s substantial victory was a big deal, but not yet a full-scale political shift. Trump made a successful move in the trench warfare that now defines American politics, ...

Migration

Immigration and the US Presidential Election

A conversation on the US-Mexico border, inflammatory rhetoric, and policies that can serve migrants and citizens alike

October 30, 2024 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Alexandra Délano Alonso

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have emphasized US-Mexico border security as one of the top concerns of their 2024 presidential campaigns. Why? In a conversation hosted by the New School for Social Research, Eugene Lang College, and the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, politics and global studies professor ...

Immigration and the US Presidential Election

Capitalism

Behind the Balancing Act of Kamala Harris’s Industrial Policy

What should Kamala Harris learn from the complicated history of post-1970s New Liberals

October 21, 2024 • by Henry Tonks

Breaking with the strategic ambiguity of her presidential campaign’s early months, Vice President Kamala Harris served up a clearer distillation of her economic agenda in a speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on September 25. The speech was fêted as Harris’s “pragmatic,” “moderate-friendly” pitch. Harris also, however, pointed to ...

Behind the Balancing Act of Kamala Harris’s Industrial Policy

Capitalism

Biden’s Green Protectionism

Behind rhetoric about jobs and green energy is a bid for a $650 billion industry

September 16, 2024 • by Yannis Bougiatiotis

Domestic economic commentators tend to describe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the rise of American green industrial policy along three lines. Lawrence Summers, former United States secretary of the treasury under Clinton, has criticized Biden’s protectionist policies as a “manufacturing-centered economic nationalism.” Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has supported Biden’s ...

Middle East & North Africa

Israel Has Weaponized Trauma. Should We Talk About It?

Mourning and motherland

June 20, 2024 • by Jordan Osserman

Within left-leaning circles, any attempt articulate an emotional tie to Israel is fraught—understandably, given the scandalous forms of censorship and repression facing Palestinian perspectives in the mainstream....

Israel Has Weaponized Trauma. Should We Talk About It?

Colonization

The US Should Only Support a Multiethnic, Nonsectarian Israel

If Israel chooses to continue its current course, it should do it alone, without our funding

February 13, 2024 • by Stephen Zacks

Whether or not it sways Netanyahu, we should certainly withhold military funding now and make our support contingent on clearly stated humanitarian objectives and an ultimate governing framework that conforms to our ideas of justice....

The US Should Only Support a Multiethnic, Nonsectarian Israel

Middle East & North Africa

Wars of De-Civilization

Anti-democratic regimes and the politics of annihilation

February 5, 2024 • by Hamit Bozarslan

Syria, Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh and now Gaza: connecting all recent wars is disregard for national sovereignty as recognised by international law....

Middle East & North Africa

The Moral Failure of My Left

I wrote as a leftist against the Left, which has discarded the values that have sustained it for over two centuries

January 10, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor

If it was incumbent on the left to condemn attacks on civilians by Israel, it was equally so to condemn attacks on Israeli civilians. ...

Activism

Scholars Call for an End to the Violence in Israel and Palestine

This war must end now!

December 11, 2023 • by Public Seminar

We write as scholars and educators in the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts to call for an immediate and permanent cease-fire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, for the immediate lifting of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and for the immediate release of all hostages. This war must ...

Scholars Call for an End to the Violence in Israel and Palestine

Habitats

Market Failures

How do we protect consumers from their own mistakes?

November 27, 2023 • by Cass R. Sunstein

Most motor vehicles emit pollution, including greenhouse gases, and use gasoline that increases national dependence on foreign oil. On standard economic grounds, the result is a market failure in the form of excessive pollution, for which some kind of cap-and-trade system or corrective tax is the best response, designed to ...

Activism

Reflections on the War between Israel and Hamas

Voices of sanity are in danger of being drowned out by the rhetoricians of all-out war

October 16, 2023 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

For a long time many civilians, Israeli and Palestinian, have suffered, as their leaders have failed to bring about a civil, peaceful, and at least modestly just end to a long and violent conflict. I feel for them all, and particularly for the children who have grown up knowing nothing ...

Joe Biden

Trump vs. the Fed

Or how history is forcing the question of a democratic politics of central banking

Trump Returns

Anyone who knows what will happen in 2028 probably doesn’t know much

Immigration and the US Presidential Election

A conversation on the US-Mexico border, inflammatory rhetoric, and policies that can serve migrants and citizens alike

Behind the Balancing Act of Kamala Harris’s Industrial Policy

What should Kamala Harris learn from the complicated history of post-1970s New Liberals

Biden’s Green Protectionism

Behind rhetoric about jobs and green energy is a bid for a $650 billion industry

Israel Has Weaponized Trauma. Should We Talk About It?

Mourning and motherland

The US Should Only Support a Multiethnic, Nonsectarian Israel

If Israel chooses to continue its current course, it should do it alone, without our funding

Wars of De-Civilization

Anti-democratic regimes and the politics of annihilation

The Moral Failure of My Left

I wrote as a leftist against the Left, which has discarded the values that have sustained it for over two centuries

Scholars Call for an End to the Violence in Israel and Palestine

This war must end now!

Market Failures

How do we protect consumers from their own mistakes?

Reflections on the War between Israel and Hamas

Voices of sanity are in danger of being drowned out by the rhetoricians of all-out war

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