Episódios
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Dialysis is a medical miracle, a treatment that allows people with kidney failure to live when otherwise they would die. It also provides a captive customer for the dialysis industry, which values the steady revenues that come from critically required long-term care that is guaranteed by the government.
Tom Mueller's six year deep dive into the dialysis industry has yielded his latest book, How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death, and Dollars in American Medicine (W. W. Norton, 2023). It's both an historical account of this lifesaving treatment and an indictment of the industry that is dominated by two for-profit companies that control ~80% of the market.
There is a precarious balance between ethical care for patients and the prioritization of profits for the providers, a tension that has led to ethical, political, and legal debates about the rationing and exploitation of life-saving care and quality of life.
Dialysis services are desperately needed by patients who require the dangerous, uncomfortable, and exhausting treatments multiple times per week, and pay for it through complex insurance procedures.
Tom Mueller’s book includes a vivid account of CEOs who lead their companies with messianic zeal to drive revenues continually up while simultaneously reducing the cost of care. He introduces us to the doctors charged with reducing those costs even at the expense of high-quality care and negative health outcomes. And we meet the patients themselves, who have little choice but to put their lives and well-being at the mercy of this system.
How did a lifesaving medical breakthrough become a for-profit enterprise that threatens many of the people it’s meant to save? And who are the brave people -patients, doctors, and employees of the system who are willing to tell their stories despite tremendous pressure to remain silent? And why do we as Americans accept worse outcomes at higher costs than the rest of the world?
Tom Mueller's highly readable yet devastating book illustrates the dialysis industry as a microcosm of American medicine.
Mueller challenges us to find a solution for dialysis, an approach that could also provide the opportunity to begin fixing our country’s dysfunctional healthcare system and a fighting chance at restoring human health outcomes, rather than the extraction of profits, as its true purpose.
To contact Tom Mueller, visit www.tommueller.co
Suggested reading:
The Body's Keepers by Paul L. Kimmel, M.D.
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott
Also mentioned:
How to Get Away with Merger by Thomas G. Wollman (NBER working paper, 2020)
"How Acquisitions Affect Firm Behavior and Performance" by Eliason, Heebsh et al. (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020)
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The UAW's Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants (IRL Press, 2023) is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. Stephen J. Silvia chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan and documents the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization.
Silvia shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The UAW's Southern Gamble makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry.
Stephen J. Silvia is a Professor at American University's School of International Service, where he teaches international economics, international trade relations, and comparative politics. He is the author of Holding the Shop Together.
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On this episode of International Horizons, Francesco Duina, Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Bates College and Luca Storti, Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Turin in Italy and a Research Fellow of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, discuss the rise of inequalities around the globe and the divergent attitudes towards them since 1970. How can those inequalities be broken down?
In this week’s episode, Duina and Storti preview their book-in-progress on The Social Acceptance of Inequality, and they examine four types of logic leading us to accept inequalities in today’s world. Not surprisingly, the concept of meritocracy plays a major role in our thinking about contemporary inequality, although perhaps more so in the United States than in Europe.
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A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, in Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Carola Binder reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented—not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures.
Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present.
Carola Binder is Associate Professor and Chair of Economics at Haverford College. Twitter.
Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.
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Peter Ireland (Boston College Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career as a monetary economist, his views on the history of monetarism, New Keynesian models, and the Shadow Open Market Committee which Peter sits on and celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a research associate at the Hoover Institution.
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In November, it will be 25 years since the Battle of Seattle – the summit and street fight that marked the end of a half-century of ever-broadening global trade negotiations. Between 2013 and 2016, the same “anti-globalisation” movement sank a US-EU bid to build a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership but it wasn’t until 2016 – with the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as president – that the postwar trade liberalisation process threatened to go into reverse.
With his trade expertise and a voice made for Twitter, Dmitry Grozoubinski was – as he admits in Why Politicians Lie About Trade: … and What You Need to Know About It (Canbury Press, 2024) - “in the right place at the right time with the right credentials to stand in front of the firehose of bullshit that was the public debate around trade policy in the late 2010s and cry: ‘um, no, that's not how that works".
Executive director of the Geneva Trade Platform and founder of ExplainTrade, Grozoubinski was once an Australian diplomat who negotiated trade agreements in Geneva at the World Trade Organization. Before joining the Australian civil service, he taught at the Monash Graduate School of Business, where he took his Masters in Diplomacy and Trade.
*The author's book recommendations are The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin (Harvard University Press, 2019) and The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence by Ros Atkins (Wildfire, 2023).
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.
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How can we restore America's frontier spirit, foster innovation, and stave off decay? Chris Buskirk sits down to discuss his new book America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay. Along the way, he delves into the history of innovation from Augustan Rome to the Scottish Enlightenment to Silicon Valley, whether America is an oligarchy or an aristocracy, how our education system can better support American needs, and more.
Chris Buskirk is the founder, editor, publisher of the magazine American Greatness, as well as a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. A serial entrepreneur, he is also the Founder & Chief Investment Officer of 1789 Capital.
Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.
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The paradox of poverty amidst plenty has plagued the United States throughout the 21st century--why should the wealthiest country in the world also have the highest rates of poverty among the industrialized nations? Based on his decades-long research and scholarship, one of the nation's leading authorities provides the answer. In The Poverty Paradox: Understanding Economic Hardship Amid American Prosperity (Oxford UP, 2023), Mark Robert Rank develops his unique perspective for understanding this puzzle.
The approach is what he has defined over the years as structural vulnerability. Central to this new way of thinking is the distinction between those who lose out at the economic game versus why the game produces losers in the first place. Americans experiencing poverty tend to have certain characteristics placing them at a greater risk of impoverishment. Yet poverty results not from these factors, but rather from a lack of sufficient opportunities in society. In particular, the shortage of decent paying jobs and a strong safety net are paramount.
Based upon this understanding, Rank goes on to detail a variety of strategies and programs to effectively alleviate poverty in the future. Implementing these policies has the added benefit of reinforcing several of the nation's most important values and principles. The Poverty Paradox represents a game changing examination of poverty and inequality. It provides the essential blueprint for finally combatting this economic injustice in the years ahead.
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In his latest book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (W. W. Norton, 2024), Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz rethinks the nature of freedom and its relationship to capitalism.
While many agree that freedom is good and we want more of it, we don’t agree about what it is, whose freedom we’re talking about, or what outcomes we desire.
Stiglitz asks the question: whose freedom are we talking about, and what happens when one person’s freedom means a loss of freedom for someone else?
Narratives of neoliberalism have been accepted as gospel despite decades of research showing that less regulation and more trust in the 'hidden hand' of free market economics do not produce greater prosperity or freedom for most individuals.
Stiglitz examines how unregulated markets reduce economic opportunities for majorities by prioritizing the freedom of corporations and wealthy individuals over that of individuals, resulting in the siphoning wealth from the many to ensure the freedom of the few, from property and intellectual rights to education and opportunity.
The Road to Freedom re-evaluates of what constitutes a good society and provides a roadmap to achieve it.
Recommended reading: The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy
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The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, last-minute, and round-the-clock availability, as well as limited to no eligibility for sick and parental leaves, all of which impact workers’ ability to care for themselves and their dependents.
Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice (NYU Press, 2024) examines the experiences of pregnant service sector workers in New York City as they try to navigate the time conflicts between precarious low-wage service labor and safety net prenatal care. Through interviews and fieldwork in a prenatal clinic of a public hospital, Elise Andaya vividly describes workers’ struggles to maintain expected tempos of labor as their pregnancies progress as well as their efforts to schedule and attend prenatal care, where waiting is a constant factor—a reflection of the pervasive belief that poor people’s time is less valuable than that of other people.
Pregnant at Work is a compelling examination of the ways in which power and inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration status are produced and reproduced in the US, including in individual pregnant bodies. The stories of the pregnant workers featured in this book underscore the urgency of movements towards temporal justice and a new politics of care in the twenty-first century.
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Indonesia is the world's second largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke, and clove-laced tobacco cigarettes called kretek make up 95 percent of the market. To account for the staggering success of this lethal industry, Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia (University of California Press, 2024) moves beyond a focus on the addictive hold of nicotine to examine how kretek manufacturers have adopted global tobacco technologies and enlisted Indonesians to labor on their behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. The book charts how Sampoerna, a Philip Morris International subsidiary, uses contracts, competitions, and gender, class, and age hierarchies to extract overtime, shift, seasonal, gig, and unpaid labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers. Critically engaging nationalist claims about the commodity's cultural heritage and the jobs it supports, Marina Welker shows how global capitalism has transformed both kretek and the labor required to make and promote it.
Marina Welker is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University and author of Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia.
Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
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Development is political but what does that mean for how we solve some of the biggest challenges facing the world today? A pathbreaking new book, The Politics of Development (Sage, 2024), sets out to answer this question and many more. Why is it so hard to reduce corruption, deliver good quality healthcare, and create more equal societies? And what can be done to remove these blockages, so that politics goes from being the problem to the solution? Join three of the editors – Claire Mcloughlin, David Hudson and People, Power, Politics host Nic Cheeseman – as they talk about the novel approach of their volume (co-edited with Sameen Ali and Kailing Xie) and the many lessons it reveals about why getting it right can be so hard. Listen now to find out why The Politics of Development is “destined to become essential reading” (Duncan Greene)!
Claire Mcloughlin is Associate Professor at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, and the lead editor of The Politics of Development.
David Hudson is Professor of Politics and Development, also at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, and an editor of The Politics of Development.
Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR, and was also an editor of The Politics of Development.
The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on X (Twitter) at @CEDAR_Bham!
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India’s stock markets are booming. One calculation from Bloomberg puts India as the world’s fourth-largest equity market, overtaking Hong Kong, as domestic and foreign investors pile into the Indian stock exchange.
But getting to the point where India’s stock markets—and its financial system more broadly—could work effectively took a long time. As Rajrishi Singhal tells it in Slip, Stitch and Stumble: The Untold Story of Financial Reforms in India (Viking, 2024), India’s financial system suffered from antiquated procedures, cartels and a confused paper trail that left the door for abuse wide open.
In this interview, Rajrishi and I talk about India’s financial sector, its earlier dysfunction, how it was fixed—and scammers like Harshad Mehta, “The Big Bull.”
Rajrishi Singhal has been a senior journalist, banker and public policy analyst. He was executive editor at the Economic Times, consulting editor with Mint, research and strategy head at a private sector bank and senior fellow for geoeconomic studies at a Mumbai-based think tank.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.
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In The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kunal M. Parker explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking between 1870 and 1970. Over this period, American conceptions of law, democracy, and markets went from being oriented around truths, ends, and foundations to being oriented around methods, processes, and techniques. No longer viewed as founded in justice and morality, law became a way of doing things centered around legal procedure. Shedding its foundations in the 'people,' democracy became a technique of governance consisting of an endless process of interacting groups. Liberating themselves from the truths of labor, markets and market actors became intellectual and political techniques without necessary grounding in the reality of human behavior. Contrasting nineteenth and twentieth century legal, political, and economic thought, this book situates this transformation in the philosophical crisis of modernism and the rise of the administrative state.
Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami.
Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.
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For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. In Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press, 2024) Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism.
Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganisation was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians.
Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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In 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits and tests for a two-dimensional relationship between the delivery of a staple food and public acquiescence to authoritarian rule. Far from it! To explain these politics, José Ciro Martínez goes to work baking, and taking the reader through kitchens, byways and marketplaces. Via descriptions of bakers and regulators, and interviews with consumers and policymakers, he offers a sophisticated account of how the state meets the stomach in Jordan, and how both citizens and bureaucracy are changed through this intra-action.
States of Subsistence was the winner of the 2023 Roger Owen Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association, and singled out for an honourable mention by the 2023 Charles Taylor Book Award committee of the American Political Science Association’s Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Group.
If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in Mona El Ghobashy on Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, or Gerard McCarthy on Outsourcing the Polity: Non-state Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar.
José’s book recommendations are:
Teo Ballvé, The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia
Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
Hisham Matar, My Friends
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The whole world has a stake in India's future, and that future hinges on whether India can develop its economy and deliver for its population--now the world's largest--while staying democratic. India's economy has overtaken the United Kingdom's to become the fifth-largest in the world, but it is still only one-fifth the size of China's, and India's economic growth is too slow to provide jobs for millions of its ambitious youth. Blocking India's current path are intense global competition in low-skilled manufacturing, increasing protectionism and automation, and the country's majoritarian streak in politics. In Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity (Princeton UP, 2024), Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba show why and how India needs to blaze a new path if it's to succeed.
India diverged long ago from the standard development model, the one followed by China--from agriculture to low-skilled manufacturing, then high-skilled manufacturing and, finally, services--by leapfrogging intermediate steps. India must not turn back now. Rajan and Lamba explain how India can accelerate growth by prioritizing human capital, expanding opportunities in high-skilled services, encouraging entrepreneurship, and strengthening rather than weakening its democratic traditions. It can chart a path based on ideas and creativity even at its early stage of development.
Filled with vivid examples and written with incisive candor, Breaking the Mold shows how India can break free of the stumbling blocks of the past and embrace the enormous possibilities of the future.
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Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.
Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Dr. Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalisation of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Amy Schiller's The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It (Melville House, 2023) makes an attempt to rescue philanthropy from its progressive decline into vanity projects that drive wealth inequality, so that it may support human flourishing as originally intended. The word “philanthropy” today makes people think big money—Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, and Andrew Carnegie come to mind. The scope of suffering in the world seems to demand an industry of giving, and yet for all the billions that are dispensed, the wealthy never seem to lose any of their money and nothing seems to change.
Journalist, academic and consultant Schiller shows how we get out of this stalemate by evaluating the history of philanthropy from the ideas of St. Augustine to the work of Lebron James. She argues philanthropy’s contemporary tendency to maintain obscene inequality and reduce every cause to dehumanizing technocratic terms is unacceptable, while maintaining an optimism about the soul and potential of philanthropy in principle. For philanthropy to get back to its literal roots—the love of humanity—Schiller argues that philanthropy can no longer be premised around basic survival. Public institutions must assume that burden so that philanthropy can shift its focus to initiatives that allow us to flourish into happier, more fulfilled human beings. Philanthropy has to get out of the business of saving lives if we are to save humanity.
Amy Schiller is a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College in the Society of Fellows. Twitter. Website.
Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Anna Dyjach is a senior at Deerfield.
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America's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don't advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their White counterparts, hitting a "Black ceiling."
Sociologist and law professor Kevin Woodson knows firsthand what life at a top law firm feels like as a Black man. Examining the experiences of more than one hundred Black professionals at prestigious firms, Woodson discovers that their biggest obstacle in the workplace isn't explicit bias but racial discomfort, or the unease Black employees feel in workplaces that are steeped in Whiteness. He identifies two types of racial discomfort: social alienation, the isolation stemming from the cultural exclusion Black professionals experience in White spaces, and stigma anxiety, the trepidation they feel over the risk of discriminatory treatment. While racial discomfort is caused by America's segregated social structures, it can exist even in the absence of racial discrimination, which highlights the inadequacy of the unconscious bias training now prevalent in corporate workplaces. Firms must do more than prevent discrimination, Woodson explains, outlining the steps that firms and Black professionals can take to ease racial discomfort.
Offering a new perspective on a pressing social issue, The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a vital resource for leaders at preeminent firms, Black professionals and students, managers within mostly White organizations, and anyone committed to cultivating diverse workplaces.
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