Will the Coronavirus End Globalization as We Know It? – with Abraham Newman

The new coronavirus is shaping up to be an enormous stress test for globalization. As critical supply chains break down, and nations hoard medical supplies and rush to limit travel, the crisis is forcing a major reevaluation of the interconnected global economy. Not only has globalization allowed for the rapid spread of contagious disease but it has fostered deep interdependence between firms and nations that makes them more vulnerable to unexpected shocks. Now, firms and nations alike are discovering just how vulnerable they are.

But the lesson of the new coronavirus is not that globalization failed. The lesson is that

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “Will the Coronavirus End Globalization as We Know It?,” Foreign Affairs (online), March 16, 2020.

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Other Writing:

Essay

Tornado Cash Is Not Free Speech. It’s a Golem – with Bruce Schneier

In August, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the cryptocurrency platform Tornado Cash, a virtual currency “mixer” designed to make it harder to trace cryptocurrency transactions—and a worldwide favorite money-laundering platform. Americans are now forbidden from using it. According to the U.S. government, Tornado Cash was sanctioned because it allegedly laundered ...
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Academic Article

The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism – with Marion Fourcade

This short piece compares 21st century machine learning to 19th and 20th century bureaucracy – we hope to write more. While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we ...
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