Unleashing a Monster? Causes and Consequences of the Knowledge Economy in Advanced Capitalist Democracies

The rise of economic inequality and right-wing populism in the last three decades has produced a lively debate about the relationship between democracy and advanced capitalism. A prominent view is that the troubles are rooted in the growing power of global capital and the rich, first reflected in the broad sweep of neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and ’90s. This view is a story about capitalism subverting democracy. This piece instead argues that it was democracy that transformed capitalism, and that this transformation laid the foundation for unprecedented prosperity. Yet it also unleashed inequalizing economic and political dynamics that are now proving difficult to reverse.