From stakeholder capitalism to state-capacity capitalism

There are longstanding debates about the role of the state in capitalist democracies, particularly around the need for, and amount of, state intervention in markets. Polarization and gridlock have amplified problems related to 50 years of state retrenchment, with growing frustration over perceived failures of governance in the United States. Neoliberal orthodoxies are therefore giving way to a renewed intellectual ferment regarding the role of government in American life. On the one hand, there has been a renaissance in thinking about the state as a tool of economic policy, discarding minimalist approaches to regulation and redistribution in order to improve the lives of a public clearly dissatisfied with the status quo. President Biden has embraced industrial policy, and conservatives such as Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio have advocated social policies like tax credits and transfers. These new policy ideas, however, have yet to translate into meaningful partisan alignments. And in a dar

There are longstanding debates about the role of the state in capitalist democracies, particularly around the need for, and amount of, state intervention in markets. Polarization and gridlock have amplified problems related to 50 years of state retrenchment, with growing frustration over perceived failures of governance in the United States. Neoliberal orthodoxies are therefore giving way to a renewed intellectual ferment regarding the role of government in American life. On the one hand, there has been a renaissance in thinking about the state as a tool of economic policy, discarding minimali