Matthew Downhour writes about liberal theory and the liberal tradition, and teaches history and economics.
If ever rival countries were to be united by a truly common enemy, infectious disease should be that threat. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the global economy and has killed tens of thousands of people worldwide; containing and treating it is truly a global priority. However,
Asked to place the headline “Prisons Illegally Sterilizing Female Inmates”, most Americans would assume it came from the Jim Crow South or the height of eugenics in the 1930s. Few, if they hadn’t been tracking the particular story, would guess that the women in question—148 of them—were
The use of education to secure more egalitarian economic outcomes without outright redistribution has been a cherished goal of liberals in the United States for centuries. The public education ideal, first nationally codified in the Northwest Ordinance that set aside land for public schools in the Old Northwest, has carried
The mythology, rather than the history, of homesteading, looms large in the American imagination. Included in this mythology is the idea of ‘valueless’ land made valuable in the process of homesteading, and the supposed egalitarian nature of land distribution; this is supposed by many Americans both to have made the
Since 2016, to hear the media tell it, the world’s democracies have been faced with a deluge of ‘populism’. The word seems most commonly applied to President Donald Trump, but electoral surprises in large democracies—Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Brexit, the Five Star Movement—have been blamed on the
Early liberals focused on dismantling de jure social hierarchies and mercantilist policies, but the onset of the Industrial Revolution presented a new set of challenges.. Though some hewed to the laissez faire doctrines of the 18th century and were suspicious of any industry regulation, the majority accepted that, given the
The president of the United States recently issued a statement – albeit via Twitter – where he “hereby ordered” that United States companies needed to move their manufacturing away from China. This was met with much derision and no small amount of mockery, but to a person unversed in the nuances of
This unvoiced question lies hidden at the center of many of the most pressing policy debates in economics today. From discussion in the US over whether ‘Every billionaire is a policy failure’, to those in Africa about the proper role of foreign, especially Chinese, investment in devising an effective development