Henry Farrell: prediction

Transcript context

…It is 2:22 p.m. Okay, 2:22 p.m. Or whether the month has an R in it. This is something that I’ve actually been struggling with and thinking about because there’s another interesting aspect to this as well, which is, if one thinks, for example, about a possible Warren administration — which is quite plausible at the moment, as the most plausible candidate perhaps at the moment on the Democratic side, although who the hell knows — then I think that what we’re going to see is, we’re going to see the Warren administration trying to pursue a much more energetic foreign policy agenda, especially on economic policy, than we have seen for a number of years. And I think that this is especially going to be true in places like tax evasion. The Warren administration is going to begin to leverage some of these powers that have been used for other purposes, primarily for security purposes. It is going to leverage these against Swiss banks, against other countries which are not willing to jump up to the need to try and push back against international financial flows and so on. And from my perspective, that will be awesome. That said, I also think that the problem . . . and this is getting away from the question of corporate power to the question of unipolarity, which is perhaps the question I’d be more interested in and I’ve been more trying to think about. The other side of that, of course, is that unipolarity and the US willingness to use its power in order to crush all opposition has been used in a variety of problematic ways over the last few years. Sometimes I see myself . . . I’m interested in trying to provide advice to businesses about how to push back against this. So Abe and I have a piece that is under editing at the moment for the Harvard Business Review, where we are providing a sense for businesses as to what the landscape is that they’re going to face. Sometimes I think that will be very good, to see a big, powerful government beginning to pursue the wholesale reform of the international financial system, which has become problematic for democracy in a variety of ways. And quite frankly, which side of that debate I’m going to end up on over the longer term is going to depend on who the particular actors are on the two sides, and which seems to me to be most compatible with a broad, small-l-liberal understanding of the good life and the good society. Facebook’s proposed Supreme Court — how is that going to work out? Are you optimistic, pessimistic? Will it happen?…

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