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America's New Deal

America's New Deal

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 Welcome to another episode of Ideas Untrapped podcast. My guest on this episode is Raymond Fisman, who is the Slater Family Professor in Behavioural Economics at Boston University. He is one of the foremost researchers on corruption and institutional behaviour in the last three decades, and I have been looking forward to talking to him. The main theme of our conversation was the re-election of Donald Trump as the new U.S president and his swift embrace of corporate oligarchs as his new inner circle and power proxies. We also discussed why corporate America is rushing to fall in line and "kiss the ring". This was an enlightening conversation for me, and I do hope you find it useful as well. I also hope to have Raymond back on the podcast for a more global exploration of the topics he covered.TranscriptTobi: Hi, everybody. This is Ideas Untrapped Podcast. My guest today is Professor Raymond Fisman. He's the Slater Family Professor in Behavioral Economics at Boston University. He's a brilliant, brilliant economist that I've been looking forward to talking to for a while. It's a pleasure to have you, Raymond.Raymond Fisman: It's a pleasure to be here. I'll tell my children that someone said I was brilliant. They'll find that very funny.Tobi: I think the interesting place I would say to start is what was your reaction to the inauguration two days ago? [This conversation was recorded on January 22, 2025 two days after Donald Trump was inauguarated for a second time as the President of the United States of America] I mean, in some kind of mildly amusing horror, like, I would say I was at the open blatant embrace of the core of American government of oligarchy and downstream of that, corruption. What were your thoughts?Raymond Fisman: Yeah, I think it's a little hard to know where to begin because there is so much to say and literally relevant news and so far as self-dealing is concerned, as well as obsequiousness of business elites in the U.S. is coming so quickly that if we had this conversation six hours from now, there'd probably be yet more to say about it.On the one hand, I would say that it was horror, not mildly amused, except that it does almost transcend satire, what's going on, like, you can't make it up sort of thing. But something that I want to be very careful to emphasise throughout is that I really don't want to pin this on a particular party or make this about partisanship, as opposed to we have an individual who has been elected to the highest office in the land, that I think is doing a lot that runs counter to good government. And those are the issues I want to emphasise.And I do think that we've seen a lot of troubling signs. I did not watch the inauguration. I'm following the advice of my friend, Marianne, who said that to stay sane, she just reads the news in a physical newspaper. Otherwise, it just comes at you too often and too fast.But some of the things that have emerged in recent days that are really quite troubling are signals that the U.S. is moving towards a much more, if you like, personalistic approach to policymaking. And there's always been a role for connections in the way the U.S. is governed. But it does feel like it's just going to a different scale.The most recent and high profile example is that of TikTok, where Trump had been in favour of a ban of the app, he met with the CEO and before that, a billionaire Republican mega donor, and he flipped his position on it. Now he is going to be TikTok's saviour. So that's on the one side. On the other side, you see TikTok entirely aware that they need to engage in flattery. So, you know, they personally thanked Trump for his intervention Monday morning after it was brought back from a very brief ban and now has a 90 day extension. But again, Trump has sworn to save it.So it's this kind of very personalised, very public favour trading is clearly sending a message to business that they need to fall in line in order to remain profitable in Trump's America. And you can easily, or I shouldn't say easily, you can imagine sliding into a system in which we have something closer to what's termed competitive authoritarianism, where you do hold elections, but the media, as well as the levers of government, are so commanded by the party in power that oppositions are playing from such a disadvantage. We've seen this emerge to some degree in India. We've seen it emerge in Hungary. We've seen it with X. We've seen it with other sites. We've seen it, to some extent, with Facebook very recently. You can see it potentially emerging in the U.S.So I do see a lot of troubling signs, and it is certainly a collective project to push back against these trends.Tobi: One thing that I was surprised, you might not be, given that do work in this area is how quickly people fell in line once Trump won or it looked like he was going to be the next president and you know you had this scrambling for people to get face time in Mar-a-lago to book hotels and to ...
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