Chapter 7 considers the implications of the book's analysis for the study of foreign aid effectiveness as well as policy-making. It establishes a link between political economies and the different kinds of outcomes that donor officials prioritize. Donor governments that outsource aid delivery in countries with bad governance may achieve greater success in providing immediate relief to the poor through easily implementable health interventions than donor governments that continue to engage in institution building in collaboration with the state. However, outsourcing in foreign aid delivery might hamper or even undermine donor efforts to build up a state capable of managing its own development – an objective that ranks high for donor governments who prefer a tactic of greater engagement with the government in the developing country. The book further suggests that the proliferation of neoliberal governance beliefs puts increasing pressure on statist regimes to change their metric, a process, which may come at the expense of efforts to strengthen the capacity of the state abroad. Finally, my book opens up future avenues for research.

The importance of labor market dynamics to the study of American political development has never been in question. The labor market is, at one and the same time, a point of distribution of economic production, an arena for political interest articulation, and – perhaps most interesting – an allocation of private political power. Of course, there are other markets with these properties (in particular housing and credit), but labor income still predominates the budgets of most of the population, time at work dominates the activity of most working-age adults, and political emotions such as status and dignity clearly owe a great deal to the distribution of power and autonomy at the gates of and inside the “hidden abode of production”

Chapter 4 offers the first empirical test of my theory. The evidence in Chapter 4 is quantitative and tests the argument at the donor–recipient country level, using a data set of 23 OECD donors and their aid-receiving countries between 2005 and 2015.The key explanatory variable is donor political economy type: whether national aid organizations are organized around neoliberal or traditional public sector principles. What I expect to find is that, after controlling for other factors that are associated with aid delivery decisions, donor governments whose bureaucratic structures and rules are of neoliberal character are more likely to bypass under conditions of poor recipient governance than donors whose political economies are organized around a traditional public sector logic. I find robust support for my argument.

A study of Boston’s racial wealth gap made headlines in late 2017 when it revealed that the median net worth of the city’s Black households was only $8, compared to $247,000 among white households (Hill 2017; Johnson 2017; Muñoz et al. 2015). The gap in Boston may have been starker than in the nation as a whole, but the latter was also striking. In 2016, the median net worth of Black and Hispanic households nationwide was $17,000 and $20,700, respectively, compared to $171,000 for whites (Dettling et al. 2017). The disparities amongst households with children were even more pronounced. In 2016, Black households with children held 1 percent of the wealth of non-Hispanic white households with children (Percheski and Gibson-Davis 2020: 1).

A striking feature of the American political economy is its fragmentation. The constitutionally protected role of the states and the localized quality of many crucial policies foster a political economy that is at once national – the rich world’s most extensive nation-spanning market – and sectional, with states or groups of states constituting distinct political economies that often have enormous scope of their own.

Perhaps the most extraordinary contribution of the United States since the late nineteenth century has been as driver of the three great successive waves of radical technological and techno-organizational innovation through the subsequent 120 or so years. Economic historians often refer to these three waves respectively as the Scientific Revolution (late nineteenth and early twentieth century);1 the Fordist Revolution (1920s to the 1970s); and the ICT Revolution (1980s on).2 (They were preceded by the first wave, the so-called Industrial Revolution, based on iron, steam, coal and textiles, and centered on the UK, which had taken place from the late eighteenth through the mid nineteenth century.) By driver of radical innovation is meant the carrier-through of these innovation waves across society, typically from research to the rapid scaling-up of giant companies. The USA has also been central to scientific inventions.

In the past decades, two features of the American political economy have been at the heart of policy and political debates – growing income inequality and growing regional inequality. The period since the 1980s witnessed a dramatic reversal in the postwar fall in inequality, with a rising of share of income earned by the wealthiest Americans (Piketty and Saez 2003). Before taxes and transfers, the incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans now constitute over 20 percent of total income, with close to half of all income earned by the top 10 percent of earners.

Chapter 3 elucidates the link between national structures and foreign aid delivery. To that end, the chapter traces how national aid organizations vary in their bureaucratic structures and practices and how this variation maps onto my binary donor typology of neoliberal and traditional public sector donors. By tracing the link between particular institutional environments and aid delivery decisions, the chapter shows how bureaucratic structures and practices influence priorities of aid officials and authorize, enable, and justify particular delivery tactics and donor–recipient interactions, while precluding others. That is, I lay out why and how institutions of different ideological orientation constrain donor officials differently, and how they influence aid officials' decision-making.

As this group met in Cambridge in late February 2020 to discuss revised chapters for this project, we did not know that a COVID-19 super-spreader event was unfolding less than three miles away – ironically, at the conference of a major bio-technology firm. By October, estimates suggested that the strains unleashed at that single event might have infected 300,000 Americans (Wines and Harmon 2020). Well before then, of course, it was clear that a world-historical calamity was unfolding before us.

How has America’s political economy changed from the long post-war “Fordist” era to the contemporary post-Fordist or knowledge economy? How has this shift affected economic growth and inequality of income and regions? Most analyses focus on specific aspects, like aggregate income inequality, or the rise of a shareholder value model for corporate governance, or increased trade competition (aka globalization), or the financial sector’s disproportionate power and profitability (aka financialization).