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:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Negotiating Privacy across Arenas – The EU-US ‘Safe Harbor’ Discussions,” in Common Goods: Reinventing European and International Governance – ed. Adrienne Hèritier

Much recent theoretical attention has been devoted to the provision of common goods across arenas. The normal problems of common good provision (Olson 1968; Hardin 1982) are exacerbated when these problems spill across arenas (there are usually no actors capable of imposing hierarchical solutions), but there are also new difficulties. Solutions in one particular arena ...
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Public WritingReview

Review by Paul Krugman, “The American Way of Economic War”

Suppose that a company in Peru wants to do business with a company in Malaysia. It should not be hard for the firms to make a deal. Sending money across national borders is generally straightforward, and so is the international transfer of large quantities of data. But there’s a catch: whether or not the companies ...
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