Is the American tax code a fair engine for growth, or a "second estate" where the rich choose whether or not to pay?

We are often told that the top 1% of earners already pay 40% of all taxes, while nearly half of Americans pay nothing at all. Legal scholar Ray Madoff argues that this statistic is a deliberate "bait-and-switch" designed to confuse the public. The reality is that the truly rich often have little to no income to tax, living instead on borrowed gains and tax-free inheritances.

In this episode, Madoff joins Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean to discuss her new book "The Second Estate: How The Tax Code Made An American Aristocracy" covering how and why our current tax system allowed the ultra-wealthy to opt out altogether. She argues that to fix the system, we shouldn't just raise rates, we need to bring inheritances and investment gains directly into the income tax system and eliminate the "cover" provided by a broken estate tax.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is capitalism a force of nature, or a human-made order that we have the power to shape? In this episode, Luigi and Bethany sit down with Sven Beckert, a Harvard historian and author of the new book A Global History of Capitalism, to tackle a question that seems basic but remains surprisingly difficult to answer: what exactly is capitalism?

Beckert argues that capitalism is not defined simply by the existence of markets—which are found in all human societies—but rather by a specific economic logic of privately owned capital productively invested to produce more capital. He challenges the popular narrative that capitalism and the state are antithetical, suggesting instead that the state has been constitutive of capitalism throughout its history, from the colonization of the Americas to the industrial expansion of the 19th century.

Beckert also argues that capitalism is fundamentally "undogmatic", pointing out that it has thrived under radically different political systems from the British Empire and the slave plantations of the Caribbean to modern liberal democracies and authoritarian city-states. Rather than existing in opposition to the state, does capitalism actually rely on state power to construct markets and enforce the expansion of its logic?

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There’s a word that’s gained a lot of popularity in the last year: “ensh*ttification”. It refers to a trajectory many see with digital platforms: they initially offer immense value to users, only to systematically degrade that quality over time in order to extract maximum surplus for shareholders.

We invited the coiner of this term, science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow, on the podcast to discuss whether he thinks this decline is an inevitable feature of digital markets or a consequence of specific policy failures. And, most importantly, how he thinks it could be reversed.

For Doctorow, "ensh*ttification" is not simply a result of "revealed preferences", where users tolerate worse service because they value the platform, but rather the outcome of a regulatory environment that has permitted the creation of high switching costs and the elimination of competitors.

Doctorow also argues that historically, interoperability acted as an engine of dynamism, allowing new entrants to lower the barriers to entry. But current IP frameworks, such as anti-circumvention laws, have been "weaponized" to prevent this, effectively allowing firms to enforce cartels and engage in rent-seeking behavior.

Finally, Doctorow offers a critical assessment of the current AI boom, arguing that the sector is creating "reverse centaurs", where human labor is conscripted to correct algorithmic errors, and warns of a potential asset bubble driven by inflated revenue attribution.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A recent proposal by Lina Khan, co-chair of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral transition team, to cap the price of beer at stadiums in New York City sparked a debate on X last month. At the center of that debate was Matthew Yglesias, editor and author of the Slow Boring newsletter, who argued that the modern antitrust movement has become "slipshod" and is ignoring basic economic trade-offs in favor of political wins.

In this episode, Yglesias joins Luigi and Bethany to discuss his views on the theoretical and practical limitations of the "Neo-Brandeisian" approach to antitrust. He contends that proposals like price caps for complementary goods like stadium concessions reveals a lack of economic rigor, arguing that such measures often result in higher ticket prices rather than consumer savings . He suggests that the movement increasingly attempts to use antitrust law as a universal tool for societal grievances.

Bethany and Luigi debate Yglesias on the limits of this modern anti-monopoly movement, arguing that he sounds like a "Chicago economist circa 1970" who assumes markets are always efficient and rational. From the lobbying might of the banking industry to the extractive fees of Amazon, Luigi argues that economic concentration inevitably morphs into political power. He posits that even if consolidated industries remain price-efficient, their size allows for the capture of the regulatory process—citing the banking and tobacco industries as historical precedents.

Of course, antitrust enforcement isn't the only proposal on the table to address people's concerns about price levels, as the current excitement around the "affordability" and "abundance" movements demonstrate. But Yglesias argues neither abundance, affordability nor antitrust is going to drive down nominal prices. As he puts it: the only thing that could do that is “a catastrophic depression…but that's not going to make people happier".

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Did you know Amazon makes $37 billion a year—more than double the revenue of all the newspapers in the world combined—from its sponsored results alone? Yes, the same, spammy, sponsored results at the top of a search that bilk shoppers with fake or low-quality items and can starve legitimate businesses of traffic and revenue.

This is one of the many insights shared by our guest this week, Tim Wu, in his new book, “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.” He argues that the defining story of the modern internet isn’t openness or democratization, but rather wealth extraction: the ability of gatekeeping Big Tech platforms, such as Amazon, Facebook, or X, to take money from everyone else without actually providing net value in return. Platforms weaponize convenience, he writes, so switching to competitors or smaller platforms is designed to be exhausting. Add in AI technologies that foster emotional relationships with users, and our dependence on them may deepen even more.

An author and professor at Columbia Law School, Wu served in the Biden administration as Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy. He discusses with Bethany and Luigi why we should care about Big Tech value extraction and posits how Big Tech power arose in the first place: from centralized power to shareholder pressure, from poorly aligned corporate structures to nefarious intentions. Together, they also chart how we can make our way out of this era of extraction. They discuss the feasibility of treating Big Tech platforms like utilities, applying frameworks for structural separation between the platforms’ various services, decentralizing digital network infrastructures through interoperability to allow users to switch more easily between different platforms, and how economic populism influences the political messaging around these issues. Ultimately, Wu makes the case for embracing a philosophy of decentralized capitalism to achieve a fairer and beneficial balance between public and private power.

Read more from Tim Wu in ProMarket:
The Consumer Welfare Standard is Too Tainted
Over recent years, the antitrust law appears to be returning to its historical standard, the “competition and competitive process” standard, often referred to in the Supreme Court as the goal of “protecting competition.” In this post, Tim defends this trend for rule-of-law reasons and presents a realistic assessment of the legal system’s capabilities and its limits.

A Conversation with Tim Wu
A transcript of Tim Wu’s keynote in conversation with Binyamin Appelbaum of The New York Times from the Stigler Center’s annual Antitrust and Competition Conference archives.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Recently, Bethany and Luigi joined economist and wealth inequality expert Branko Milanovic in front of a live audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival to explore how capitalism, democracy, and income inequality interact. Together, the three discussed the pervasiveness of income inequality around the world, its connections with democracy and political stability, if the inequality that really matters is that between countries, and if capitalism and democracy aren't as intricately connected as we thought.

As a scholar of China’s economic system, Milanovic discussed how much of the country’s success can even be attributed to capitalism. In the process, the three unpacked if capitalist societies, particularly in the West, are able to address the very inequality they have produced. Are there free-market mechanisms to correct for inequality or does there need to be government intervention? If income inequality poses a dire threat to democracy, what should capitalists do to preserve the institutions that enabled their wealth in the first place?

Read a book review of Branko Milanovic's Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War and how his analysis of class and inequality applies to contemporary America, written by former ProMarket student editor Surya Gowda

Also mentioned: Revisit our episode with Thomas Piketty on creating a more equal society and with Martin Wolf: Is Capitalism Killing Democracy?
Also revisit our episodes with Sen. Phil Gramm and Matthew Desmond on Poverty in America: Terrible Scourge or a Measurement Error?

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Standard economic theory informs how we think about business strategy and the economy and presumes that people are selfish, have well-defined preferences, and consistently make welfare-maximizing choices. In other words, we are rational. But what if that is not the case?

Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler is out with an updated edition of his bestselling 1991 book, "The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life." In the new edition, he and his co-author Alex Imas (both professors at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business) reflect on the last thirty years of behavioral economics and how it makes sense of tensions between our psychological biases and impulses that make us less than fully rational in practice. Using a wealth of empirical evidence, the authors explore the behavioral anomalies that contradict the expectations of standard economic theory and explain a wide range of real-world examples from banking crises to social media addiction.

Earlier this month, Thaler joined Bethany and Luigi for a sold-out Capitalisn’t recording in front of a live audience in Chicago to walk through the anomalies of human behavior that have endured from biblical times to the age of Big Tech. Thaler reflects on how views and the adoption of behavioral economics have changed over the last thirty years, both within academia and beyond (wonder why you can’t put down your phone? Silicon Valley has read Thaler). He also shares how behavioral economics can influence public policy from canceling “junk fees” and dubious subscriptions to deciding which parts of the Affordable Care Act to keep and which are unlikely to produce their desired outcomes. Over conversation, light banter, and audience Q&A, Thaler shares his views on the state of capitalism and reveals how there is no grand unified theory of human behavior that incorporates all its irrationalities—only departures from the standard model.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Every major technological revolution has come with a bubble: railroads, electricity, dot-com. Is it AI’s turn? With investments skyrocketing and market valuations reaching the trillions, the stakes are enormous. But are we witnessing a genuine revolution—or the early stages of a spectacular crash?

Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan joins Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean to explain why he believes AI’s transformative impact is overstated. Drawing on his book AI Snake Oil, co-authored with Sayash Kapoor, Narayanan argues that capitalism’s incentives can distort technological progress, pushing hype faster than reality can deliver. They examine how deregulation, geopolitical competition, and private control over data shape the trajectory of AI’s development.

They also explore what could happen if the bubble bursts: massive market shocks, exposed structural weaknesses in the economy, and a wave of painful restructuring that could echo the dot-com crash—but on a far larger scale. It’s a conversation that cuts through the hype and asks what’s at stake when an entire economy bets on one technology.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.