Work-in-progress 

Why do societies so often fail to act in the interest of future generations — depleting natural resources, accumulating debt and toxic waste, and failing to invest in the institutions that would make tomorrow more secure? This book argues that the answer lies not in human nature or shortsightedness, but in the institutional arrangements that govern collective decision-making. Chief among these is the net present value framework, whose discounting logic has become so deeply embedded in modern cost-benefit reasoning that short-termism has effectively been normalized as a foundational principle — one that systematically ensures the future counts for less. 

To identify alternative institutional arrangements, the book turns to a diverse set of cases — both historical and contemporary — of what we call “posterity projects”: deliberate, institutionalized efforts to act for the benefit of future generations. These range from medieval Gothic cathedrals and early modern royal forestry to contemporary nuclear waste repositories, conservation easements, seed banks, and multi-generational family wealth management. Spanning eight centuries and multiple institutional domains, these cases allow the book to identify the conditions under which societies have actually succeeded in sustaining long-term commitments. The result is both a new analytical framework for studying intergenerational action and a set of practical design principles for building institutions capable of taking the future seriously — principles that are democratically legitimate, grounded in realistic rather than utopian visions, and capable of confronting the hard distributional question at the heart of all long-term projects: who bears the costs today so that others may benefit tomorrow. 

Fred Block (2008) argued that U.S. industrial policy operates as a “hidden developmental state” that is dispersed across fragmented federal programs. We extend this insight to a second, largely overlooked arena: state and local investment incentives. Drawing on a dataset of more than 600,000 incentive awards, we demonstrate that these policies have expanded dramatically and now constitute a central, if largely hidden, mechanism through which governments shape the structure and geography of economic activity in the United States. We show that subnational incentives encompass a diverse set of industrial policy goals and cannot be reduced to a single logic. To capture this variation, we adapt existing industrial policy typologies to identify four distinct policy logics at the subnational level: laissez-faire subsidies (horizontal, market-conforming), beggar-thy-neighbor subsidies (vertical, market-conforming), Pigouvian subsidies (horizontal, market-shaping), and developmental subsidies (vertical, market-shaping). Through case studies of South Dakota, Alabama, California, and Michigan, we link these strategies to distinct political coalitions and development models. Our findings reposition subnational incentives as a core component of American industrial policy and highlight how federalism structures both its diversity and its invisibility.

The return of inflation in 2021–2023 exposed what had long been obscured by the apparent dominance of the monetarist framework: that inflation is not a self-interpreting phenomenon but a site of persistent narrative contestation, in which competing accounts of its causes carry radically different implications for who is responsible and who should bear the costs of its remedy. A growing body of ideational scholarship has begun to take this contestation seriously, yet remains organized around a succession model of ideational change that obscures the continuous plurality of narrative conflict and leaves unanswered the question of which actors articulate which narratives, in which institutional arenas, and toward what political ends. This paper proposes an alternative framework, treating inflation narratives as a continuously contested repertoire of political instruments whose deployment is shaped by the institutional position of the actors deploying them. We argue that different institutional positions structurally predispose actors toward different narrative types, explaining why narrative plurality is not a transitional condition between periods of paradigmatic settlement but a permanent feature of capitalist political economies in which monetary governance operates simultaneously at multiple institutional scales. Three empirical cases — the antitrust debates of the 1970s United States, the history of American price-gouging legislation, and the inflation narrative conflicts within the Eurozone — illustrate the framework and identify the mechanisms through which alternative narratives persist beneath apparent ideational dominance.

States increasingly rely on private consultants to supply the expert knowledge underpinning regulatory and policy decisions, yet the political consequences of this shift remain undertheorised. Existing scholarship focuses predominantly on academic economists and technocrats, while the consultocracy literature attends chiefly to consultants working for public authorities — leaving consultants hired by private actors in legal and regulatory disputes largely unexamined. This paper addresses that gap by developing the concept of privatised regulatory expertise: a condition in which the knowledge infrastructure of market governance is systematically supplied by actors whose professional incentives are aligned with private clients rather than the public interest.

Drawing on the sociology of professions and the literature on transnational expert fields, the paper proposes a typology organised along two dimensions: the degree of external institutional permissibility and the degree of internal professional permissibility. Applied to lawyers, accountants, economic consultants, transnational advisors, ESG consultants, and location consultants, the typology identifies three mechanisms of ideational capture — paradigm arbitrage, greenwashing, and the conversion of industrial policy into corporate welfare. The analysis shows that the most dangerous conditions for capture arise where both external policy checks and internal professional checks are weak.