Research

My book manuscript, State of Development: Preserving the American Century in an Era of Anxious Capitalism, examines the overlapping industrial and financial crises of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It shows the limited appeal of free market and free trade ideas amid this period of profound turbulence. At the same time, it reveals the important — but largely overlooked — role that state played in creating and shaping markets, restricting trade, and preventing corporate and municipal failures during a period of ascendant economic and racial nationalism. Though it was often cloaked by the era’s market talk, beneath the surface a patchwork and limited US developmental state was constructed. in the 1970s and 1980s. This piecemeal developmental state exerted a powerful pull, and transformed American capitalism.