1. @ewarren has just released her plan on global corruption - . As @esaravalle notes, it builds on a body of academic/think tank work on foreign economic policy - also this by @GaneshSitaraman, who has advised Warren in the past - prospect.org/world/ten-thes…
2. (and for my summary of the academic lit, see here - crookedtimber.org/2019/02/11/dem… ). Also, I've a new piece in @ForeignPolicy that talks about Warren's general approach to economics, and argues that it is based in a kind of left public choice - foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/12/eli… (paywalled).
3. The argument is straightforward - we know that Warren was deeply influenced in her early career by public choice, as manifested in law and economics. That is generally regarded as a rightwing approach to markets (and has become the focus of some left conspiracy-theorizing)
4. But what we have forgotten is that there was a liberal-left version of public choice too, most notably in the work of Mancur Olson. There is a lot of similarity between what Olson thought and what Warren argues now, likely because they are starting from similar premises.
5. Olson worried - as other public choice people do - about the threat of regulatory capture - that government would be captured by narrow interests, who would then use its regulatory power for their own private benefit. This was obviously bad.
6. But what distinguished Olson from many of his colleagues was that he also worried about market capture. He castigated libertarian public choicers for their "monodiabolistic" attack on the state, and their "almost utopian lack of concern about other problems" than state power.
7. He argued that over time, political _and market_ systems would be corrupted by increasingly powerful special interests, requiring major upheavals (like war, or revolution) to dislodge them. However, countries could mitigate problems, where they had "encompassing interests"
8. For example, if unions were sufficiently big and representative, they would not really be special interests any more - instead they would have to represent the broad interests of most workers. Olson's version of public choice said that broad unionization could be good.
9. Warren, like Olson, sees economies as liable to capture by special interests. She too is worried about the state-market nexus - but she is also worried about markets being captured. She wants to create countervailing power to make them competitive again.
10. This distinguishes her from socialists in some important ways (nb - I would disagree with FP's title - I think socialists understand Warren quite well. They just don't think she goes far enough. And they have a point - global warming e.g. may require greater radicalism).
11. Warren is also different from Olson, who in general was enthusiastic about the promise of globalization back when he wrote in the 1980s, and believed that free trade would have enormous benefits not simply because of comparative advantage but because it disrupted cartels.
12. Warren's analysis has more in common with that of @rodrikdani and @gabriel_zucman who point to how the institutions of globalization too are vulnerable to capture, and indeed have been captured. Dani writes about how producer interests have often dominated trade negotiations
13. while Gabriel, with Saez and others, highlights the ways in which free flows of money have enabled a quite corrupt system of tax evasion and exploitation. This provides the background to her current proposals, which aim to use US power to push back against global corruption.
14. NB though that it isn't only Warren who is making these arguments. Sanders wrote a 2018 piece for the Guardian, which deserves much more attention than it received, outlining a global project to strengthen democracy, by pushing back against oligarchs theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
15. and the financial networks that enable them. It is perfectly possible in principle to imagine a centrist version of these arguments too (although it would likely discomfit many of the people funding centrists in the Democratic primaries).
16. That said, the candidate who is most likely to find this debate awkward is Biden, who has spent decades representing the interests of Delaware's financial industry, and lackadaisical approach to corporate governance (Delaware and Wyoming are home to shell corporations galore)
17. When Warren says "in some states, creating a shell company to hide your identity is easier than getting a library card," she is laying out a marker. One of Biden's most serious political weaknesses is his engagement on behalf of the sketchier elements of finance. Expect more.
