For decades, Americans viewed the Supreme Court as an impartial referee standing above the political fray. However, public trust in this vital institution has recently plummeted to historic lows. Many observers blame a surge in ideological rulings that align with the party of the President who appointed each justice. If the referee is suddenly wearing a team jersey, the fundamental systems of democracy and capitalism begin to break down.

Georgetown University Law Professor Steve Vladeck joins Luigi and Bethany to argue that the real culprit isn't just partisan justices, but a complete abdication of responsibility by Congress. Rather than viewing judicial reform as a zero-sum game of packing the court, he proposes that lawmakers must reclaim their constitutional authority to check judicial overreach. He explains how special interest groups have successfully manipulated this power vacuum to reshape American regulations. This perspective completely reframes the crisis from a partisan dispute into a structural collapse of institutional power.

This episode explores the hidden mechanisms that allow unaccountable judges to unilaterally rewrite the rules of our economic system, why decades of political complacency allowed this shift and what actionable steps can actually fix it. Vladeck answers whether the business community will ultimately regret enabling a system that erodes the reliable rule of law and why saving our markets may require Congress to finally stand up and do its job.

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As we approach the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's “Wealth of Nations" this March, his theories on competition and the invisible hand remain part of the bedrock of modern economics. But, have we undermined those theories in our economy today?

Widespread public anger suggests there is a growing belief that our current economic system is fundamentally rigged by those at the top. In many instances, backroom access and elite networking appear to be driving who becomes wealthy and successful instead of meritocratic competition. What would the father of economics think about today's crony capitalism, and what would he make of the so-called "Epstein class"?

In this episode, we are joined by British Member of Parliament and author of “Adam Smith: Father of Economics” Jesse Norman. He argues that people often forget Smith deeply distrusted concentrated power, highlighting that Smith was heavily critical of wealth generated from insider knowledge or collusion. Smith condemned these practices precisely because they destroy the genuine competition required for free markets to actually benefit society.

Applying this historical lens to current events, co-host Luigi Zingales provocatively asks if the so-called “Epstein Class” embody Adam Smith’s worst fears, coordinating favors to bypass free market competition. Co-host Bethany McLeans debates whether we should call it a class, or if fixating on Epstein is a distraction from the broader systemic corruption threatening capitalism today.

This episode offers a fresh look at the father of economics, and it is the first in a series of episode we’re doing that strip away the caricatures of Adam Smith to ask what he’d really make of today’s capitalism.

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If we want to understand why capitalism feels broken, do we need to stop looking at the economy and start looking at the legal code that underpins it?

In our system, capital is often described as money, machinery, or raw materials. But Columbia Law School professor Katharina Pistor argues that capital is actually a legal invention. An asset, whether it's a plot of land, an idea, or a promise of future pay, only becomes capital when it is given the right legal coding. 

Pistor suggests that lawyers are the true coders of capitalism. They use the law to "enclose" assets, from land to user data, giving owners the power to exclude others and monetize that value. She argues for injecting principles of "fairness and reciprocity" back into private law, ensuring that contracts aren't just tools for the powerful to extract value from the weak. Luigi Zingales suggests that large corporations have become so powerful we may need a new branch of "quasi-public law" to govern the asymmetry between an individual consumer and a corporate giant.

This episode explores the deep, often invisible architecture of our economic system and asks whether we can ever truly tame corporate power without rewriting the rules of the game.

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If a sports betting app has the data to know exactly when a user is struggling financially, should it have a legal duty to cut that person off?

On this episode of Capitalisn't, we dive into the murky waters of the American sports betting explosion. We are often told that legalization simply moves an existing black market into the light, but guest Jonathan Cohen argues that the issue isn’t that we legalized the industry—it’s that we did it "recklessly."

Cohen, the Policy Lead at the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling, joins Bethany and Luigi to outline the serious costs of this rapid liberalization. His data shows that legalized online sports betting is associated with a 25% to 30% increase in personal bankruptcies, a notable rise in auto loan defaults and credit card delinquencies, and increased cases of childhood neglect.

Is there a way to fix this market so that it is fair for consumers without imposing such a high degree of societal cost? Host Luigi Zingales suggests a broader solution: a "fiduciary duty" for data collectors. When you give sensitive information to a doctor, accountant, or lawyer, they are bound to use that data only in your interest. If a betting app sees a user's credit card deposits being declined or identifies a pattern of "loss chasing," should they be legally required to act in your interest instead of targeting you with VIP offers?

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Is the era of manufacturing-led growth officially over? For decades, the path to a stable middle class was paved through industrialization, but today, even manufacturing giants like China are losing millions of factory jobs to automation.

In this episode, Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales sit down with Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard and author of Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World. Rodrik argues that we have "no other choice" but to look toward the service sector to anchor our future economy.

But there’s a problem: we still treat these essential roles as "bottom rung" jobs in terms of pay and respect. Is it possible to elevate a job’s status and pay simply because society needs it to be better? As Rodrik argues, it’s a future we must learn to navigate if we want to preserve a stable society.

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Is the Federal Reserve’s independence a pillar of democracy or a convenient shield that allows elected officials to duck their responsibilities? This week on Capitalisn’t, we confront a shift in Washington after the Justice Department served subpoenas on the Fed. 

Joining the conversation is Former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Paul Tucker, who complicates the definition of central bank autonomy. If monetary policy is a "latent instrument of taxation," should it be shielded from the King—the executive branch—and reclaimed by the legislature? We explore the provocative argument that the Fed has become dangerously wary of its relationship with Congress, acting as a self-governing entity rather than a delegated authority. Does the U.S. model, where the Fed defines its own version of price stability, explain the accountability gap we see when supervisory failures like the SVB collapse result in zero consequences for leadership?

Finally, we address an unsettling mystery regarding the global financial system. If Fed independence is truly degrading, why are the markets so strangely sanguine? Are global investors simply anesthetized by the AI boom, or does the dollar’s global monopoly allow the U.S. to decay without paying an immediate price? We debate whether the market has ceased to be a barometer for institutional health and instead become a tool for protecting shareholder rents—failing to interpret a "catastrophic forecast" until it is already too late.

Tucker is also the author of "Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State" & "Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order".

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Is the American tax code a fair engine for growth, or a "second estate" where the rich choose whether or not to pay? 

We are often told that the top 1% of earners already pay 40% of all taxes, while nearly half of Americans pay nothing at all. Legal scholar Ray Madoff argues that this statistic is a deliberate "bait-and-switch" designed to confuse the public. The reality is that the truly rich often have little to no income to tax, living instead on borrowed gains and tax-free inheritances.

In this episode, Madoff joins Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean to discuss her new book "The Second Estate: How The Tax Code Made An American Aristocracy" covering how and why our current tax system allowed the ultra-wealthy to opt out altogether. She argues that to fix the system, we shouldn't just raise rates, we need to bring inheritances and investment gains directly into the income tax system and eliminate the "cover" provided by a broken estate tax.

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Is capitalism a force of nature, or a human-made order that we have the power to shape? In this episode, Luigi and Bethany sit down with Sven Beckert, a Harvard historian and author of the new book A Global History of Capitalism, to tackle a question that seems basic but remains surprisingly difficult to answer: what exactly is capitalism?

Beckert argues that capitalism is not defined simply by the existence of markets—which are found in all human societies—but rather by a specific economic logic of privately owned capital productively invested to produce more capital. He challenges the popular narrative that capitalism and the state are antithetical, suggesting instead that the state has been constitutive of capitalism throughout its history, from the colonization of the Americas to the industrial expansion of the 19th century.

Beckert also argues that capitalism is fundamentally "undogmatic", pointing out that it has thrived under radically different political systems from the British Empire and the slave plantations of the Caribbean to modern liberal democracies and authoritarian city-states. Rather than existing in opposition to the state, does capitalism actually rely on state power to construct markets and enforce the expansion of its logic? 

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There’s a word that’s gained a lot of popularity in the last year: “ensh*ttification”. It refers to a trajectory many see with digital platforms: they initially offer immense value to users, only to systematically degrade that quality over time in order to extract maximum surplus for shareholders. 

We invited the coiner of this term, science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow, on the podcast to discuss whether he thinks this decline is an inevitable feature of digital markets or a consequence of specific policy failures. And, most importantly, how he thinks it could be reversed.

For Doctorow, "ensh*ttification" is not simply a result of "revealed preferences", where users tolerate worse service because they value the platform, but rather the outcome of a regulatory environment that has permitted the creation of high switching costs and the elimination of competitors. 

Doctorow also argues that historically, interoperability acted as an engine of dynamism, allowing new entrants to lower the barriers to entry. But current IP frameworks, such as anti-circumvention laws, have been "weaponized" to prevent this, effectively allowing firms to enforce cartels and engage in rent-seeking behavior.

Finally, Doctorow offers a critical assessment of the current AI boom, arguing that the sector is creating "reverse centaurs", where human labor is conscripted to correct algorithmic errors, and warns of a potential asset bubble driven by inflated revenue attribution.

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A recent proposal by Lina Khan, co-chair of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral transition team, to cap the price of beer at stadiums in New York City sparked a debate on X last month. At the center of that debate was Matthew Yglesias, editor and author of the Slow Boring newsletter, who argued that the modern antitrust movement has become "slipshod" and is ignoring basic economic trade-offs in favor of political wins.

In this episode, Yglesias joins Luigi and Bethany to discuss his views on the theoretical and practical limitations of the "Neo-Brandeisian" approach to antitrust. He contends that proposals like price caps for complementary goods like stadium concessions reveals a lack of economic rigor, arguing that such measures often result in higher ticket prices rather than consumer savings . He suggests that the movement increasingly attempts to use antitrust law as a universal tool for societal grievances.

Bethany and Luigi debate Yglesias on the limits of this modern anti-monopoly movement, arguing that he sounds like a "Chicago economist circa 1970" who assumes markets are always efficient and rational. From the lobbying might of the banking industry to the extractive fees of Amazon, Luigi argues that economic concentration inevitably morphs into political power. He posits that even if consolidated industries remain price-efficient, their size allows for the capture of the regulatory process—citing the banking and tobacco industries as historical precedents.

Of course, antitrust enforcement isn't the only proposal on the table to address people's concerns about price levels, as the current excitement around the "affordability" and "abundance" movements demonstrate. But Yglesias argues neither abundance, affordability nor antitrust is going to drive down nominal prices. As he puts it: the only thing that could do that is “a catastrophic depression…but that's not going to make people happier".

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