New Books In Public Policy

This is episode two Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. This episode looks at shifting landscape of economic thinking within the Democratic Party. First, historian Lily Geismer, author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, tells us the story of how the Democrats became captured by the Clintonian ‘Third Way.’ The Third Way argued that economic policy should move away from the sunset industries, like the unionized industrial labour that typically made the Democratic base, and move towards the sunrise industries of tech and finance. Then, the Biden team came to see this thinking as precipitating the rise of Trumpism. So free-wheeling trade and industrial policy is out, and the Clinton-era neoliberal consensus just is not a consensus anymore–some even claim ne