Rana Foroohar in Washington Monthly:
Reading lists say lot about a person, or at least what they care to spend their time thinking about. Ben Harris, who served as chief economic adviser to President Joe Biden when Biden was still the VP, remembers prepping for his first day on the job in 2014. The vice president’s policy staff had sent Harris a large pile of documents designed to get him into Biden’s headspace. It was filled with esoteric papers on corporate governance, financial market short-termism, and labor policy. Still, Harris wanted to know more about the personality traits of his new boss. When he asked his predecessor, Sarah Bianchi, about Biden’s character, Bianchi said, “What can I tell you? This guy is the vice president of the United States, but he still gets up on a ladder and cleans his own gutters.”
He also stands in picket lines with UAW members. Biden is, of course, an excellent politician, and he’s long been a friend to labor. Still, few people would have expected, when he entered the White House, that his administration would herald the beginning of a sea change in America’s political economy, from trickle down to bottom up, or, as the president’s campaign slogan put it, to a core emphasis on “work, not wealth.”
The record on that score is unequivocal. His COVID-19 stimulus bailed out people, not banks. His domestic economic policy has been about curbing giant corporations and promoting income growth. His infrastructure bills invested in America in a way not seen since the Eisenhower administration. He has taken commerce back to an earlier era in which it was broadly understood that trade needed to serve domestic interests before those of international markets.
The contrast with the so-called neoliberal economics of recent decades, in which it was presumed that markets always know best, and particularly the Clintonian idea that “free” trade and globalization were inevitable, could not be starker.
More here.