Harvard Economics Review, May 2016.  Masoud Movahed is a Researcher in development economics at New York University. He contributes to, among others, Harvard International Review, Foreign Affairs, Yale Journal of International Affairs, the World Economic Forum and Al Jazeera English. Over the past three decades, debate around the trade-off between democracy and development has acquired more visibility in academic circles. More so, in light of the spectacular economic growth rates that the authoritarian regimes in

When radical critics of capitalism become desperate for empirical models that embody their aspirations, wishful thinking can triumph over sober assessments. The complementary danger is cynicism; there is great cachet among intellectuals in debunking naïve enthusiasm. What is needed, then, are accounts of empirical cases that are neither gullible nor cynical, but try to fully recognize the complexity and dilemmas as well as the real potentials of practical efforts at social empowerment. – Erik Olin

Harvard Economics Review, August 2016 Over the past three decades, the American manufacturing has been characterized by a marked decline in employment rates. We hear much about deindustrialization and the outsourcing of production leading to an almost wholesale relocation of American labor-intensive industries to lower-wage areas in the developing world. By the end of 2012, the sector had lost approximately 8 million jobs since its 1979 peak, leaving manufacturing in a series of deep crisis

Compared to the robust growth rates of the boom decades in the years from the end of World War II until 1973, the U.S. economy has witnessed a stubborn stagnation. At the core of this stagnation lies a slowdown in the rates of productivity, which is the beating pulse of a dynamic economy and an output per hour of growth by workers in a country. Productivity is the stepping-stone to a great economic leap forward, it’s where Adam

Economists and analysts of the 2007-2009 financial meltdown usually take the domestic housing and securities markets as the point of departure in their prognoses of the crisis. While refusing to look beyond the apparent roots of the malaise, they continue to begrudge the decline in housing prices as the bedrock of the financial crunch. And, that, of course, makes perfect sense. With a housing bubble bursting by the end of 2006 that forced the prices