Stay ConnectedWe investigate how capitalism is—or more often isn’t—working in our world today.
Hosted by economist Luigi Zingales and business journalist Bethany McLean, our podcast explains why capitalism can go wrong and what we can do to fix it.
Send us your questions or comments by emailing capitalisntpod@gmail.com
Cover photo attributions: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/stigler/about/capitalisnt.
Copyright: © 087667
Everyone blames Citizens United for super PACs. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig says they're blaming the wrong case, and he is actually taking his argument to court. The ruling that actually created super PACs, he argues, is SpeechNow.org v. FEC, a D.C. Circuit decision issued two months after Citizens United that the Supreme Court has never reviewed.
In 2024, nearly 75% of the Maine’s voters approved a $5,000 cap on contributions to super PACs. A federal judge blocked it, and the challenge now sits with the First Circuit. A ruling for Maine would break with every appeals court that has considered the question and could put it before the Supreme Court ahead of the 2028 election.
Lessig joins hosts Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on this episode to make his case ahead of the decision. They also get into why the corruption that matters most in American politics isn't bribery, how the fundraising treadmill fills Congress with sycophants, and why transparency alone can leave you with a transparently corrupt system.
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At the center of our market economy sits an institution that runs more like a dictatorship. The firm you work for writes the rules and enforces them. There is no vote, no appeal, and no constitution. The only real remedy is to leave.
University of Michigan philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, author of "Private Government" and "Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers," argues we spent centuries building limits on rulers who held this much power over people's daily lives, and built almost nothing for the place where most of that life is actually spent.
"Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back": https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/hijacked/E7E4A7D850C1E7289BA7AAF910455136
"Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives": https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/private-government?srsltid=AU7gw4XkqB24hl23B55i5Stpj4twB-lI8JX8SWqtj09h0AO22q1dBlGl
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For every member of the Forbes 400, there are more than 4,000 private business owners worth at least $10 million. You probably have never heard of any of them.
They own the beer distributorship in your town, the dental group with four offices, the HVAC trucks that passed your house this morning. A decade inside anonymized IRS data turned up three million of them, and the version of that story running in many outlets this month is the hopeful one: fortunes still being built in unglamorous industries, far from the coasts, by people with no degree and no connections. The American Dream, alive and hiding in plain sight.
That is one part of what the data says. The other part is that the largest fortunes are concentrated where the law limits who can compete at all, and the owners have the political weight to keep it there. Whether the first part redeems the second is the entire argument here. The economist who found the numbers doesn’t know for sure whether it’s a good or worrying story.
Eric Zwick is the Joel F. Gemunder Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and co-author, with Owen Zidar of Princeton University, of “The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There”: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250378507/theeverywheremillionaire/
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The drugs in your medicine cabinet were probably discovered on your dime, in a university lab, with NIH money. You don't hold the patent. You don't set the price. Same story with the touchscreen, the GPS and the voice assistant in your pocket.
The public often helps fund breakthroughs, while private companies claim all the profits. Economist Mariana Mazzucato thinks it’s time to renegotiate. In “The Common Good Economy: A New Compass”, she makes the case for reshaping markets around the common good.
Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean press the uncomfortable question: can a government captured by business really be trusted to change the rules?
You can find “The Common Good Economy: A New Compass” here: https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-common-good-economy/the-common-good-economy-us/
Mariana Mazzucato is a Professor at University College London, Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and author of “The Common Good Economy: A New Compass”.
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AI is coming for your job; AI isn't coming for your job. Economist Luis Garicano thinks both camps are asking the wrong question.
In Messy Jobs: The Work That AI Cannot Reach, Garicano and co-authors Jin Li and Yanhui Wu argue that all knowledge work varies along a dimension of “messiness”, and that the jobs which survive won't be the ones that are hardest, but the messiest. Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales press Garicano on where that framework holds and where it breaks.
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For most of the last century liberal democracies offered a simple deal: the economy grows and, if you work hard, you get a fair shot at the rewards. According to 2024 Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu, that deal is broken.
Acemoglu joins Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales to discuss his new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, and why the system that delivered unprecedented freedom and prosperity abandoned the working class in favor of the college-educated elite.
Acemoglu makes the case that things will only get worse as AI is being designed to replace human labor, driving wage stagnation and economic anxiety. But he thinks we can still turn things around, and he brought his solutions to our podcast.
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Amazon went public three years after it was founded. SpaceX stayed private for 24 years. What changed and why does it matter?
The standard story is that companies avoid an IPO because public markets carry too many government rules and too many lawyers looking to sue. Renee Jones, law professor, former SEC official, and author of the new book Untamed Unicorns: Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It, makes the opposite case.
Jones argues what changed was the deregulation of private markets, driven by decades of industry lobbying. Due to decisions in Washington, companies became able to raise billions privately and there was no reason to go public . You could get the capital and keep total control, without ever having to disclose anything to regulators.
If you've never bought a share of a startup, you might assume none of this touches you. But most of the money flowing into these private markets comes from pension funds and retirement accounts, meaning ordinary savers are already invested in companies whose books they'll never see.
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The Republican Party is often associated with free-market fundamentalism, deregulation, and tax cuts. But a new faction on the right is challenging that consensus.
In this episode, Bethany and Luigi sit down with Chris Griswold, the Policy Director at American Compass. Drawing on Catholic social teaching, Griswold argues that we need to stop viewing our economy as a force of nature or an end unto itself, but a tool meant to serve human flourishing and dignity.
The conversation explores if the traditional neoliberal regime has failed working-class Americans, and whether policy should step in to channel capital toward productive uses. To fix our current system, Griswold argues we need to go back to a first-principles question: What is capitalism, or any economy for that matter, actually for?
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Were the foundations of American governance engineered to protect the wealthy? Harvard Law professor Michael Klarman argues that the US Constitution was actually a counter-revolutionary coup to constrain democracy rather than protect it.
This episode explores how debt, taxes, and money influenced the drafting of America's founding document. And whether a wealthy elite bypassed democratic institutions to secure their own financial interests and reduce populist power.
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Is personal finance rigged against ordinary people? Economists John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai argue the system rewards the wealthy and financially savvy at the expense of everyone else.
Their book Fixed points to a troubling pattern: the fees you avoid by never overdrafting, or by refinancing on time, are paid for by people who don't, and they warn that the resulting resentment is fueling political discontent.
But there is a tension at the heart of their argument. They don't want the government running finance or setting prices, yet they call for far more muscular rules. So what exactly are they proposing, and why do they insist it would expand your choices rather than limit them?
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