In covering the first year of the Biden administration, I have witnessed triumph and frustration in equal measure. But my interests have always taken me to the hidden corners of policy, economics, and business. Heres a sampling of what I particularly appreciated in 2021.
We spent a lot of 2020 talking about what the next president could do without congressional approval; we spent a lot of 2021 monitoring whether President Biden took our advice. The Executive Action Tracker, available here, is the most comprehensive source for this.
Twenty years ago, when I was still working in television, I was assigned to cover the Future of Music Conference, which looked at the impact of technology on artists and the industry. (The keynote speaker was a songwriter and also senator named Orrin Hatch.) I feel like I chronicled the next two decades after that in this story, which demonstrates how artists are beset on all sides by predatory music monopolies.
One of the obscure, but important, topics over Bidens first term is the dichotomy of his personnel choices. Hes appointed many aggressive reformers, but below that, at the staff level, many of the appointees are coming from the more circumspect regulators at the Federal Reserve. I tried to capture that in this piece.
Why are congressional hearings so terrible? How can they be better? I had a lot of fun delving into the archives and retelling the history of when Congress actually functioned as a policymaking body.
One of my big themes of the year was policy design: how government invariably creates programs that put a tax on peoples time, and turn them into little bureaucrats who have to endure enormous hassle to receive benefits for which they qualify. The $46 billion in rental assistance approved by Congress, which barely dribbled out during the year, is a good case study.
Our Infrastructure Summer series is still going (its now called Infrastructure Endless Summer), as negotiations on the Build Back Better Act drag on. And I think these two representative pieces from it explain why its still going on. First, an artificial spending cap was placed on the process; next, nobody prioritized what should stay or leave, instead slicing all of BBBs programs to the point of unrecognizability.
Inflation has become the overwhelming circumstance of the Biden presidency, but it didnt happen due to this presidents policies, but rather four decades of outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics. Well have much more on this in the coming year.
I read four books on unicorn founder CEOs, coming to the conclusion that theres no real difference between a successful and a failed corporate titan. Their biographers value judgments hinge entirely on whether the business managed to thrive, not whether theyve hurt everyone close to them and ravaged society.
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Im wary of big political mission statements that promise the way to win. But in this piece, I just wanted to point out that you cannot promise popular initiatives over and over again without delivering them and expect your political brand to remain intact.
This story about a medical device company whose products keep getting listed as sex toys on Amazon exemplifies a lot of my work on corporate power, which focuses on the control large companies hold over their customers, workers, partners, and society.
If there is one enduring change in our lives coming out of the pandemic, it just might be how it sparked this era of labor militancy, where low-wage workers who have been humiliated and exploited for decades simply decided that theyve had enough. I really enjoyed talking to dozens of workers who quit their jobs, centering the narrative around everyday people reckoning with what to value after the trauma of COVID.
