Institute for New Economic Thinking

08/19/2026

Microsoft spent $506 billion on buybacks and dividends from 2006 to 2025, 71% of its profits, while laying off thousands. Why would AI pay off any differently in a system built like this? Lynn Parramore on AI and the shareholder-value machine. New from INET:

Silicon Valley promises abundance, but corporate America is built for extraction. The underlying operating system is stuck on making big shareholders rich the expense of everyone else. It’s time for a reboot. *From the “AI and the Future of the American Worker,” a series on how artificial inte...

08/10/2026

Something happened to the American economy long before AI arrived. Almost nobody sees it.

It changed the way companies thought about growth, productivity -- and who should benefit from it. AI is landing right in the middle of that system. The connection is easy to miss, but once you see it, you’ll realize how powerful — and perilous — it is.

Lynn Parramore pulls back the curtain on the system hiding in plain sight.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/the-ai-boom-runs-on-an-even-more-dangerous-machine-part-1

08/06/2026

You can't fix American health care by regulating insurers alone. Hospitals and the conglomerates that own them are where enormous amounts of money goes, Phillip Alvelda and Thomas Ferguson argue, in a new memo to the Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee. New from INET:

Senate Finance Committee Democrats are seeking evidence and proposals to shape health-care legislation. Their critique of insurers has merit, but reforms confined to insurance risk leaving hospitals, conglomerates, and much of the system’s extraction untouched, sets the stage for further disappoin...

07/28/2026

The economy isn't delivering for most people. The question is why, and whether economics as a field is even asking the right questions.

INET was founded after the 2008 financial crisis, when the crash exposed huge blind spots in mainstream economic thinking. The models and predictions failed. Much of the field carried on with business as usual. We were built to do something different.

That means funding researchers who study what actually shapes the economy most people live in: inequality, corporate power, financial instability, and the long-run forces mainstream economics tends to treat as someone else's problem. Our scholars draw on history, political science, sociology, and other disciplines that conventional economics too often leaves out. They've influenced debates in Congress, shaped coverage in the FT, the NYT, and the BBC, and built a global community of 25,000 young economists in 120 countries through our Young Scholars Initiative.

If the official explanations for how the economy works have never quite satisfied you, you're in the right place. New research, sharp analysis, and ideas that take the hard questions seriously. All at https://www.ineteconomics.org/

07/27/2026

In 1983, 90% of US wages fell under the Social Security tax cap. By 2020 it was 83%. As top incomes pull away and more wealth arrives as capital, a tax on paychecks reaches less of the economy every year. Pia Malaney for INET:

Social Security runs on the paycheck. But a growing share of American wealth now comes from profits, assets, and ownership. The program that ended old-age poverty was never built for an economy that pays people this way.

07/20/2026

Columbia Professor Andrew Gelman has taken a close look at recent coverage of the Maine Senate race's money, and flagged something worth understanding: campaign finance graphics that only count direct contributions to a campaign leave out the Super PAC and outside-group spending that increasingly decides these races.

Andrew Gelman's Statistical Modeling blog cites the FEC-based analysis Thomas Ferguson and his INET colleagues have been building, which counts Super PAC and outside spending alongside direct contributions. The difference in the resulting picture, especially for Susan Collins, is substantial.

The upheaval in Maine's Senate race has focused attention on candidates and party leaders. Less noticed is what the campaign finance data reveal about the state's Democratic Party and its structural dependence on national organizations and large out-of-state donors.

07/17/2026

If Americans had really gotten as much richer since 2000 as the official statistics claim, would the country's politics look anything like they do right now?

A new INET piece by James K. Galbraith responds to Paul Krugman's recent essay comparing US and European economic performance. Krugman noted that two standard metrics point in different directions and asked which story is true. Galbraith's answer is that the honest response may be neither, because the measures themselves have stopped describing the economy most people actually live in.

His argument runs through the technical machinery of how growth gets counted: aggressive price adjustments in the tech sector, the index-number problem, and the near-impossibility of making meaningful quality-adjusted comparisons across countries. But the payoff is a common-sense one. If Americans had really seen their living standards rise as much as the official numbers claim, the country's politics would probably look very different than they do. When the numbers and lived experience diverge this sharply, Galbraith argues, it is worth asking whether the numbers are measuring the right thing.

He extends the same skepticism to Europe, and to the widespread assumption that both are thriving relative to a rising China. Worth reading in full.

A response to Paul Krugman's recent essay on U.S. and European productivity opens onto a broader question. If the standard metrics point in conflicting directions, perhaps the problem lies less with the economies than with the measures themselves.

07/16/2026

We have a new Instagram homepage at .

Expect short, visual digests of our newest research, original explainers that make complex ideas clear, updates for INET events and insight from our scholars driving new economic thinking. It's a growing community, and the best time to join is now. Follow along and share it with anyone who thinks the conventional economic wisdom deserves a second look.

https://www.instagram.com/ineteconomics/

07/15/2026

Maine Democrats have made it clear they want to pick their next Senate nominee without interference from national party leaders like Chuck Schumer. The campaign finance data complicate that story.

In a follow-up to their earlier analysis of the Maine Senate race, Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen turn their attention from the candidates to the Maine Democratic Party itself. Using their method of aggregating contributions from the same donors to reveal the true shape of a donor base, they find that the party's two largest sources of money are organizations affiliated with the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The entire tier of donations above $100,000 consists of just those two national committees, together yielding nearly half a million dollars.

Geography reinforces the point. Of the itemized money above $200, roughly two-thirds comes from out of state, and every dollar in the largest tier originates in Washington rather than Maine.

The authors are careful to note a genuine cluster of small-donor support that distinguishes the Maine party from the establishments of both parties. But they conclude that talk of the state party charting an independent course from the national Democratic establishment should be taken with buckets, not grains, of salt. The dependence on outside money is structural. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/big-money-and-the-maine-election-round-2

07/02/2026

Most campaign finance coverage focuses on total spending, poll numbers, and the occasional bombshell about a single large donor. Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues at INET employ an entirely different approach to analyze the Maine Senate race.

Their method maps the full size distribution of political contributions, combining gifts from the same donors that individually look small into a picture of where a candidate's money actually comes from. The result is an X-ray of how political money actually flows.

Their findings are striking. Platner's donor profile closely resembles Bernie Sanders': virtually no large donors, essentially all small contributions. Collins' profile more closely resembles the old guard of both parties, with heavy dependence on very large donors including prominent figures in private equity and hedge funds. Nearly 100 billionaires and their spouses have contributed to her campaign. Fewer than 3% of her disclosed money comes from Maine itself. For Platner, the figure is around 20%.


The piece offers a rare, data-driven window into the structural patterns that shape American elections long before ballots are counted.

What can one Senate race reveal about the hidden machinery of American politics? In Maine, donor patterns expose how campaign finance can shape party competition, political narratives, and the choices voters are asked to make long before ballots are counted.