Culture & Society

The following is a transcript of Tom Ginsburg's keynote address at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference—Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas.

The new Trump administration has thrust antitrust’s role in protecting free speech into the spotlight. Jan Polański discusses how this development should inform the European Union’s own debates about antitrust and free speech.

Luigi Zingales invites guest contributors to the Washington Post’s op-ed pages to boycott the opinion section in response to the recent decision by the...

Sarah Haan writes that to understand American authoritarianism, it’s less useful to analyze the strategies of elected dictators around the globe than to look at how corporate leaders in the United States have rigged corporate democracy.

Media pluralism is a core democratic value in Europe. Upholding it requires that media concentration is scrutinized beyond its impact on competition in the traditional economic formulation. By addressing the challenges posed by dominant media players and fostering a diverse information ecosystem, Europe aims to uphold media plurality as a democratic value and ensure that citizens can engage in informed decision-making. From this angle, the European approach to protecting media pluralism might offer an interesting comparative  perspective for the United States debate, write Maciej Bernatt and Marta Sznajder.

New research by Sam Peltzman finds that married individuals consistently report significantly higher happiness levels than unmarried individuals across all demographics. Using five decades...

Polarization has sundered American politics and the crucial exchange of ideas and opinions underpinning its democracy. Karthik Ramanna writes that on this inauguration day,...

Stigler Center Assistant Director of Programs Matthew Lucky traces the history of ideas about population growth and its relation to welfare from Malthusian concerns of a population bomb to contemporary studies correlating declining birth rates in developed countries with increased investments in human capital and GDP per capita. Scholars now debate what it means for a society to have populations that do not simply stop growing, but rapidly shrink.

The following is an excerpt from Karthik Ramanna’s new book, “The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World,” now out at Harvard Business Review Press. Ramanna will discuss his new book tomorrow, October 31, 2024, at an event cohosted by the Stigler Center and the Rustandy Center. You can register here to attend the event in-person or on the livestream.

Eric Posner examines how businesses exploit cultural expectations to frame certain activities as non-work, creating a form of monopsony power that allows them to extract labor without compensation in areas ranging from college athletics to digital content creation. He argues that properly classifying these "invisible" forms of work as compensable labor would benefit society, challenging anti-commodification concerns and highlighting the law's struggle to define work in these blurred contexts.