Private Power and Democracy's Decline: Book Talk with Mordecai Kurz
Private Power and Democracy's Decline: Book Talk with Mordecai Kurz
Wednesday, April 29, 20264:00 PM - 5:15 PM (Pacific)
William J. Perry Conference Room, 2nd Floor
Encina Hall (616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford)
This is an hybrid event; only invited guests and those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person, all others may join via Zoom. Registration required.
In Private Power and Democracy's Decline, a compelling, urgently important book, author Mordecai Kurz offers both a bold explanation of our democratic crisis and a major contribution to economic and political theory. The “second Gilded Age” of the last four decades has exposed democracy’s core contradiction. Democracy needs capitalism, but the unfettered, “free market” form of it generates extreme inequality and social and political polarization, which tear democracy apart. Moreover, the intrinsic tendency of unregulated capitalism toward monopoly power and wealth concentration has been turbocharged by the information and AI revolutions and globalization, which have been displacing workers, stagnating wages, and generating staggering new levels of private power. Public policy must contain monopoly power, reduce inequality, and broadly improve job prospects, skills, and economic security, or the surging system of “techno-winner-takes-all” will bring down democracy.
speakers
Mordecai Kurz is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University. He has worked in diverse fields of Economics. He is the author of Private Power and Democracy's Decline, which follows an earlier book, published in 2023, titled The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age. Together, they offer a unified view of the combined impact of policy, technology, and culture on income and political inequality, and on the functioning and dysfunction of democratic institutions.
Larry Diamond
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020.