Gabriel Kahan

NYC’s Lander Recommends Dropping $42 Billion BlackRock Mandate New York City Comptroller Brad Lander is urging three of the city’s pension funds to drop BlackRock Inc. because of “inadequate” climate plans, the latest move to penalize investment firms for failing...

Landmark move: New York City's comptroller @bradlander.bsky.social, with hundreds of billions under his control, recommends dropping investment giant Blackrock because they won't reckon with climate change.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Thinking back to this excellent concluding paragraph from @lioneltrolling.bsky.social's Substack post after Zohran Mamdani's initial primary victory:

according to the liberation newspaper, documents dating back to a 2014 inspection by the French National Agency for the Security of Computer Systems reported a staggering detail: "the password of the louvre's video surveillance server was simply " louvre. "

the password to the louvre surveillance server was "louvre"

www.thesocialpost.it/2025/11/02/f...

Image featuring a classical architecture building with columns, overlaid with a text quote from Elizabeth Wilkins of the Roosevelt Institute, "In Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration, former Biden-Harris senior officials Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph draw from the insights, recommendations, and candor of more than 45 former public servants and tell a broader story we can’t forget: The problems with these institutions did not start with Donald Trump or Elon Musk, worse as they now are. These problems are, in part, what results from decades of bipartisan neglect, disinvestment, and deference to markets."

NEW 📰: Building a more effective government that moves beyond the status quo requires honest reflection.

Drawing on interviews with more than 45 former senior Biden officials, our latest report offers 161 practical recommendations for better governance.
https://bit.ly/4312Zid

Everyone wants to streamline bureaucracy, but maybe we'd get better results by making it *harder* for university admins to chase fads. Imagine the money we'd save with a mandatory cooling-off period before launching a "Center for Blockchain Studies" or dumping millions into the latest edtech toy.

🌍 New in @nature.com: The geoeconomic turn in decarbonization, with data from Simon Evenett et al. and @industrialpolicy.bsky.social @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social @natureatcal.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵

In a world riven by inequality and devastated by climate + ecological crisis, what would it take for "green industrial policy" to empower the working class in Global North + South, and be truly green?

New @cplusc.bsky.social report by me and Isabel Estevez (1/3) t.co/78sQQe4d1g

CFP: Inaugural Association of Law and Political Economy Conference A forthcoming conference will launch The Association of Law and Political Economy (ALPE): a membership organization with a regular annual conference, elected leadership, and an architecture for open…

Ten days left to submit proposals for the inaugural ALPE conference in Richmond. Come join us for this exciting launch! lpeproject.org/blog/cfp-ina...

For Europe, the lesson is sobering: we talk “sovereignty funds,” but GGFs already operate as a parallel financial infrastructure on a scale we haven’t matched. This is how China turns finance into an industrial weapon.

the next question must be democratization. what does it mean to politicize these funds and their sectoral targets? which countries will iterate on this model by further incorporating collective deliberation and decision-making?

it’s articles like these that give new meaning to Arrighi’s argument that organizational innovations help reconsolidate hegemonic orders. if the American century was powered by vertical integration, the Chinese century will be powered by competitive high-tech sectoral planning

Organizing this workshop with @solveigdegen.bsky.social and @cominsitu.bsky.social, in case you'd like to join via zoom:

hu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/6969547647...
Meeting ID: 696 9547 6478
Passcode: 800441

registration here: criticaltheoryinberlin.de/event/democr...

Very good @brusselermel.bsky.social - and what timing to publish this call for planning the American economy.
Wonder what the Fed does in that progressive future :)

📣 New article w/ @iliasalami.bsky.social & @tomchodor.bsky.social on the return of industrial policy globally @globalpolicy.bsky.social. Does this signal a 'New Washington Consensus'? And does the return of industrial policy 'rebuild the ladder' of economic development? 🔗➡️ tinyurl.com/yk2wvttc 1/12

Fabulous lede from @jemima.bsky.social

www.ft.com/content/0e24...

“This moment need not be seen as a crisis. Rather, it presents a pivotal opportunity for Brazil to assert itself as a sovereign economic power – less reliant on Washington and more engaged with an emerging multipolar global order.” -Pedro Rossi
www.aljazeera.com/opinions/202...

Changing China in Sociological Eyes The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China. By Ya-Wen Lei. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. Pp. 368. $120.00 (cloth); $...

Glad to share my review essay “Changing China in Sociological Eyes” (AJS, July 2025). It reviews three recent books, while urging historicizing China’s reform and discussing the relationship between area studies and sociology. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Is the New York Times trying to wreck Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid? | Margaret Sullivan With their made-up scandal, combined with the pre-election editorial, the Times looks like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani

I love that former NYT public editor @sulliview.bsky.social is public-editing from the outside.

"With this made-up scandal, combined with the pre-election editorial, the Times looks like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani.

"And no lofty explanation about the mission can disguise it."

New policy brief that I co-authored with @akentikelenis.bsky.social for @plataformacipo.bsky.social, entitled "BRICS and the Green Industrialization of the Future."

plataformacipo.org/en/publicati...

Meet the new NYT city editor, Joseph McCarthy

The editorial board took numerous shots at you and your tenure as mayor. What’s your response? It felt like the New York Times didn’t understand New York City. It was this strangely conservative law-and-order, traditionalist view that totally missed the reality of the city today. My view is people are hurting and affordability is the issue and the Times just does not understand what everyday people are going through. They’ve disconnected from New York City more and more with every passing year. Obviously, they decided they didn’t care enough about New York City to make an editorial endorsement and then they show up with this wimpy, disingenuous editorial basically justifying why people should vote for someone corrupt in Andrew Cuomo, and not even recognizing that other new leaders had worthy ideas. I mean, the whole thing was like, “Let’s invalidate new young leaders,” right? It was unbelievably ageist and out of touch. I was immediately transported back to 2013 when they said in their editorial when I was running for mayor that my ideas, like Pre-K for All, were impossible. They were absolutely dismissive, and their whole attitude was, Big bold ideas can’t happen, so why vote for someone who wants to change things? And I feel what they have become is sort of a parody of the status quo. They, in their own curmudgeonly way, just tell people to swallow hard and accept the unacceptable. If you talk to everyday New Yorkers, as I do all the time, you know that people really, really can’t stand the status quo in the city. But it’s not because they want to go back to some good old days of strongman leaders. It’s that they think their leaders don’t care about them, aren’t helping address the extraordinary pain they’re going through and the challenge of making ends meet.

Jesus Christ, Bill de Blasio is cooking here.

nymag.com/intelligence...

The Real Path to Abundance - Boston Review To deliver plentiful housing and clean energy, we have to get the story right about what’s standing in the way.

“Politics is not just about the problems we have,” the authors rightly observe. “It’s about the problems we see.” Unfortunately, Abundance itself suffers from a severe case of myopia.

Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director of @openmarkets.bsky.social, reviews ABUNDANCE:

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

Got public luxury on my mind at the moment... See this wonderful, concise post from Phil Jones.

It’s not all bad news.

The Democrats Could Learn a Lot From Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum The wildly popular president of Mexico is advancing industrial policies that resemble Joe Biden’s, but they’re premised on a totally different theory of politics.

I wrote about the Sheinbaum government’s industrial policy, and what it might have to teach aspiring post-neoliberals in the U.S. newrepublic.com/article/1948...

Abstract for article

I have a new article out on wage-earner funds, a famous attempt at economic democracy in Sweden in the 70s & 80s. It explores the funds' defeat, emphasising the issue's stronger resonance with businesses compared to workers & the Social Democratic Party
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

This is very good and anticipates some of my own thoughts on the geopolitics of this moment. I have much more to say, but this is an excellent starting point.

Al Gore citing Theodor Adorno