Is plutocracy really the problem in the US?
Just because the public sphere is tainted and skewed by big-money influence does not mean that more rational policy-making is doomed
Why did the policy response tothe Great Recession only partly reflect the lessons learned from the Great Depression? Until recently, the smart money was on the answers given by the Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf and my Berkeley colleague Barry Eichengreen.
Each has argued that while enough was remembered to prevent the 1929-size shock of 2008 from producing another Great Depression, many lessons were ploughed under by a rightward ideological shift in the years following the crisis. Since then, the fact that the worst was avoided has served as an alibi fora sub-optimal status quo.
