Opinion: Latest Reports from The Washington Posts ‘In Theory’

Here are the latest reports from The Washington Posts ‘ In Theory‘.

Stop worrying. The finance sector isn’t destroying the economy.
Martin Neil Baily holds the Bernard L. Schwartz Chair at Brookings. He was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers 1999-2001.

A major oil spill will result in cleanup spending that boosts GDP, but no one thinks oil spills are good. Oil spills and other forms of pollution are examples of negative externalities — harm caused to others by the economic activity of a firm or industry. These externalities represent a failure of the market, and unless there is corrective action, their presence means that there is too much production of something that causes negative spillovers.

That criticism can be applied to the financial services industry. Many say that it grew too large, triggered a financial crisis and damaged the rest of the economy. Is that still the case, and is financialization spoiling the economy? Despite the alarmist rhetoric around today’s finance sector, the answer is generally “no” because of changes made to financial regulation.

What both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump get wrong about finance
Gautam Mukunda is an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter

The American financial sector is incredibly unpopular. Even Donald Trump describes hedge funds as “getting away with murder,” while Bernie Sanders has made attacking Wall Street the core of his campaign. Sanders focuses on corruption, making veiled (and often not so veiled) arguments that Wall Street donations and Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches explain the failure to hold bankers responsible for the financial crisis.

This profoundly misunderstands the financial sector’s comprehensive – and corrosive – influence. Bribing politicians is for amateurs. Wall Street doesn’t have to. It has power, and real power doesn’t just give you the ability to pay or force other people to do what is in your interest – it reshapes the way people think so that they want to do what is in your interest. That’s the sort of power that the American financial sector wields in today’s financialized economy.

Are we repeating history by letting our financial sector grow too large?
Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about financialization. Need a primer? Catch up here. James Lardner is a writer and former Washington Post reporter and is communications director of Americans for Financial Reform. “You are dangerously big.” That […]

We can’t save the economy unless we fix our debt addiction
Michael Hudson is distinguished research professor of economics at University of Missouri-Kansas City. His most recent book is “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy.”

Our economy has increasingly been financialized, and the result is a sluggish economy with stagnant wages. We need to decide whether to stop the cycle and save the economy at large or to stay in thrall to our banks and bondholders. Without clearing our debt, the economy will continue to languish in debt deflation and polarization between creditors and debtors.

The government isn’t to blame for the rise of Wall Street
Costas Lapavitsas is professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and author of “Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All.” During 2015, he was a member of the Greek Parliament collaborating with the governing Syriza party.

Financialization is an awkward word, but it captures a prominent aspect of contemporary capitalism: During the last several decades, the financial sector has grown in extraordinary ways, even to the point of dominating economies.

Some consider the ascendancy of finance to be the result of government policy. There is no doubt that in the U.S., the country that best exemplifies financialization, deregulation by the government has benefitted Wall Street. However, the phenomenon of financialization is so widely observed across the world that it calls for a fuller explanation. Indeed, it is more plausible that government policy has favored finance because deeper trends in economy and society have already made financialization an underlying reality.

Has our economy become too ‘financialized’?
Last week, Goldman Sachs agreed to a $5 billion settlement with the Justice Department, admitting to having led buyers of mortgage-backed securities astray in the period leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. But though the fine might seem steep at first glance, it’s merely a fraction of the bank’s yearly earnings. Critics worry that it’s […]

How Singapore is fixing its meritocracy

Kenneth Paul Tan is an Associate Professor and Acting Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His forthcoming book is titled Governing Global-City Singapore: Legacies and Futures After Lee Kuan Yew.

In Singapore, a liberalizing middle-class society, the once-revered idea of “meritocracy” has recently acquired negative overtones due to its association with elitism. However, meritocracy can – and probably did – provide a successful way of combining rewards, incentives and competitiveness with equality of opportunity. The question for Singapore today is whether this meritocratic balance can be achieved again in a competitive global city obsessed with a war for talent.

How powerful should our juries be?
In 1986, Leroy Reed faced criminal charges he didn’t understand. A mentally disabled ex-convict from Milwaukee, Reed was charged with illegally possessing a firearm after his parole office discovered that he had purchased a .22-caliber pistol to go with a mail-order private detective course. While it was obvious to everyone on the jury that he […]

Why the ‘one person, one vote’ case was so important
The Supreme Court issued a decision Monday on the widely anticipated “one person, one vote” case, unanimously ruling that states can draw their voting districts based on total population as opposed to just the number of people who can vote. The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, featured arguments on a pair of state Senate districts in the Dallas area. Because Texas draws its districts […]

Jurors need to take the law into their own hands
Paul Butler is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and a former trial attorney with the Justice Department. His book “Chokehold: Policing Black Men” will be published in February 2017.

I learned about jury nullification while serving as a prosecutor in the District in the 1990s. As a rookie, I was warned that in nonviolent drug cases, it would be tough to get a conviction, no matter how strong my evidence was. The experienced prosecutors explained that the African American jurors “didn’t want to send another black man to jail.”

As I tried cases, I gained enormous respect for the seriousness with which jurors approached their work. The jurors were often elderly African Americans who had moved to D.C. to escape the Jim Crow South, and they were honored to serve on a jury because they came from places where blacks didn’t have that privilege. These jurors had no problem convicting anyone of a violent offense, if the government proved its case.

Prosecutors have too much power. Juries should rein them in.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

If there’s strong evidence that you’ve committed a crime, there’s still hope. Despite the evidence, those responsible for convicting you may choose to let you go, if they think that sending you to jail would result in an injustice.

That can happen through what’s called “prosecutorial discretion,” where a prosecutor decides not to bring or pursue charges against you because doing so would be unfair, even though the evidence is strong. Or it can happen through “jury nullification,” where a jury thinks that the evidence supports conviction but then decides to issue a “not guilty” verdict because it feels that a conviction would be unjust.

The uncomfortable link between jury empowerment and bigotry

David Neiwert is the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the author of several books, including And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border.

Do ordinary people serving on juries have an inalienable, God-given right to throw out the law if they think its outcome is “unjust”? Or is this legal concept — known as “jury nullification” — really just an assault on the rule of law itself?

History is clear: Juries were supposed to be able to overturn laws
Clay S. Conrad is a partner in the firm of Looney & Conrad, P.C., where he is in charge of appellate litigation. He is the author of “Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine” and numerous articles on jury-related issues.

The law is unclear on exactly what a jury is. Juries can range from four to 12 members, depending on the state and case. In two states, criminal juries need not reach unanimous judgments. In some states, jurors can question witnesses. There have even been arguments for so-called professional jurors.

Still, the right to a “trial by jury” — a right guaranteed by the constitutions of the United States and of all 50 states — must mean something. What powers does a jury have? How does it serve as the “palladium of justice” and “conscience of the community”? History, common law and the founders’ writings offer some guidance, but the stories they tell do not comport with current practice.

The Founding Fathers’ mistake: They didn’t give us a monarchy.
Three years ago, I was giving tours of the nation’s Capitol. It was a fantastic job that allowed me to become immersed in the nation’s history. But there was one part of the tour that always struck me as odd: the fresco painting on the ceiling of the Capitol dome. “The Apotheosis of Washington,” by […]

Is success in America really based on merit?
College admissions season has arrived, with all its attendant stresses. Harvard accepted only 5.2 percent of its applicants for the graduating class of 2020, and the New York teen who was accepted into all eight Ivy League schools is now on a bona-fide press tour. Our fascination with educational placement reflects both celebration of and increasing concerns around the meritocratic ideals we still profess.

The unsettling truth about the tech sector’s meritocracy myth
,Tracey Ross is an associate director of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress and co-host of TalkPoverty Radio.

It is no secret that the tech sector has a diversity problem. According to Google’s most recent employment data, just 1 percent of the company’s tech staff is black, 2 percent are Hispanic, and 82 percent of its tech workers worldwide are male. Over the past few years, companies like Google have faced pressure to confront their lack of diversity, but the myth that the sector is a true meritocracy — where hard work and the best ideas are rewarded — seems to endure.

Why self-creation matters more than merit.
Bill Bishop is the co-author, with Robert Cushing, of The Big Sort: How the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Julie Ardery is author of The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-Century Folk Art.

Primed with ambition, John Kennedy and Barack Obama wrote books to introduce themselves to the nation. Both books sold well, and both men became president. But the two works, published 40 years apart, bespoke entirely different notions of merit — of what it took to be a leader.