We are rethinking the conditions for genuine, widespread, and sustainable prosperity.

The Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative forges collaborations across fields to reframe the study of political and economic life. Hard questions are our starting point.

The Latest at BESI

Events Hosted by BESI

Upcoming Events

Making Sense of the Elections of 2024

November 21, 2024

4pm – 5:30pm

8th floor, Social Sciences Building

The American election will close out a year of momentous elections around the world. Almost two decades on from the financial crisis of 2007 that helped unleash a wave of authoritarian, populist, and nativist movements in democracies around the world, our panel of UC Berkeley faculty will consider what new social and political forces have […]

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Marion Fourcade | The Ordinal Society

December 5, 2024

4-5:30pm

8th floor, Social Sciences Building

BESI is excited to host a talk by Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology at Berkeley, celebrating the publication of her book, The Ordinal Society, co-authored with Kieran Healy. Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Fourcade and Healy argue that technologies of information management, […]

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Brian Judge | Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America

December 10, 2024

4-5:30pm

8th floor, Social Sciences Building

Join us as Brian Judge (Policy Fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible AI, UC Berkeley) discusses his new book and its bold reappraisal of financialization and the origins of neoliberalism. Judge argues that neoliberalism springs from the product of a crisis in liberalism itself. Liberalism disavows the problem of distributive conflict, leaving it vulnerable when conflicts […]

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Designated
Emphasis (DE) in
Political Economy