Globalized Green Lanternism

American political commentators have frequently called for the U.S. president to take effective action to improve world economic growth. Such calls are a form of what Matthew Yglesias has dubbed “Green Lanternism”—the unspoken theory that the U.S. president’s ability to affect outcomes is primarily affected by his willpower. In this article, I examine the opposite—and more plausible causal relationship—that the power of the U.S. president is shaped by the underlying secular determinant of world economic growth. I go on to examine how we might expect U.S. power and interests in building up a multilateral trading order could largely wither away under conditions of enduring weak economic growth, which some economists have argued is in fact the most plausible long-run growth path for the world economy.

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Other Writing:

Essay

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Last month, Ellie Geranmayeh and Manuel Lafont Rapnouil wrote a report for the European Council on Foreign Relations, arguing that Europe needed to hit back hard against U.S. secondary sanctions targeting Iran. They recommended that Europe consider measures such as creating new financial channels outside U.S. control, investigating European companies that comply too readily with ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume

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Scholarship on institutions across the social sciences faces a set of fundamental dilemmas. On the one hand, it needs to explain how institutions change. Yet explanations of change which point to external factors run the risk of reducing institutions to a mere transmission belt for other, more fundamental causes. On the other, it needs to ...
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