Two weeks ago I ran a conference at Harvard called After Neoliberalism: From Left to Right, sponsored by my Harvard Kennedy School Lab for Democracy Renovation and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance. Across the political spectrum, a contest is underway over the future of political economy. From “inclusive abundance” and “power-sharing liberalism” to the “patriot economy,” scholars and policymakers are advancing competing paradigms that seek to respond to deep structural challenges in our economy, politics, and society. The purpose of the conference was to explore and debate these emerging visions. We planned to discuss their normative foundations, core economic assumptions, and practical implications for issues ranging from public goods to the governance of artificial intelligence.
On the first panel, we had the chief economist for the current Trump administration Council of Economic Advisers, as well as a member of the Biden Council, chair of the Obama Council, and an assistant professor from Harvard Business School. We had scholars from the Manhattan Institute, AEI, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Heritage Foundation alongside scholars from New America, Stanford, Princeton, and USC. Open expressions of faith and faith-based orientations toward core values and human flourishing were prominent. We had activists and civil rights leaders, as well as an evangelical leader working on compassionate immigration policy. In other words, it was not a run-of-the-mill consensus-oriented academic conference, and it was decidedly pluralistic.
It was fantastic—fast, fair, and fun—and we made real intellectual progress. The conference was also long in the making. A word about that before I share what we uncovered about principled disagreement and potential convergence.
Nearly ten years ago I was tapped by then Harvard President Drew Faust to co-chair a Harvard Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. The Boston Globe has recently published a series on the deep history behind the conflict between Harvard and the Trump administration, in which the Task Force figures prominently.
In that work, we sought to establish the University’s inclusion efforts on the footing of pluralism. We argued that political outlook and religion, as well as demographic identity, should be central. We recommended creating programs to support civil discourse across viewpoints. Yet after our report, the administration narrowed the lens, and what were then the University’s diversity office and chief diversity officer focused primarily on race, sex, gender, and disability.
Some of us continued working to bring more viewpoint diversity to campus. The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, which I directed at the time, launched the Civil Disagreement series and fellowship program, hosting events on immigration, guns, and abortion with speakers from National Review and AEI alongside those from the left. Former Task Force member John Manning, then newly appointed dean of the Law School, similarly launched moderated events on controversial issues to support civil disagreement. The Safra Center team attempted to take such programming university-wide—an uphill struggle against bureaucratic inertia—and then the pandemic hit.
Meanwhile, as a scholar I had been working on political economy. The day after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, an economist colleague observed that while he and others had long known globalization would take decades to work through the economic system, it was only in the fall of 2016 that he realized he had never fully considered what deindustrialization and globalization felt like for individuals living through it for decades in places like Ohio. His remark stayed with me because it confirmed an intuition.
By 2016 I had come to believe economic policy had gone wrong because policymakers assumed that protecting what political philosophers call negative liberties—freedom from interference with conscience, religion, and expression—while maximizing productivity and redistributing growth to mitigate inequality would suffice. They gave short shrift to positive liberties: people’s freedom and capacity to participate in shaping collective life, whether by voting, serving in office, or contributing to decision-making. Paternalism reigned.
That paternalism produced blind spots: failures to hear what ordinary people were communicating about unstable economic realities before the 2008 Great Recession, the toll of globalization, and the realities of immigration. These blind spots left technocratic elites surprised by the housing collapse, the 2016 Trump election, Brexit, and other shocks of the past decade.
I began developing an alternative view I call power-sharing liberalism. The idea is that protecting free societies requires safeguarding not only negative but also positive liberties. A free economy must provide the foundation for people to function as citizens—decision-makers about their communities as well as their private lives. George Marshall put it best when laying out the Marshall Plan after World War II, arguing that the goal was an economy that works—delivering growth, productivity, and stability—“so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”
I am committed to free institutions under conditions of pluralism, where freedom is available to people of all backgrounds, viewpoints, and faiths. The economy must therefore empower all segments of society as free, self-governing people. I have articulated what this requires in my book Justice by Means of Democracy (2023). Mal Salter, a Harvard Business School professor emeritus and Renovator columnist, has extended the argument in The Fading Light of Democratic Capitalism and What to Do About It (2024).
From 2016 onward, I worked with a network of scholars on these questions, including a collective volume, The Political Economy of Justice (2022). We developed shared ideas that broke with “neoliberalism,” a label that we understood as capturing policy strategies focused on maximizing growth through trade liberalization, relatively open borders, and market-based solutions. Though rooted in more sophisticated ideas from thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, neoliberalism had become a fairly stable policy package.
As my focus on citizenship sharpened, questions of power in the economy came into view, including the concentration of power in technology companies. We recognized that markets, the public sector, and civil society each offer tools for solving collective action problems. The debate should not be markets versus government or community, but when and where each form of cooperation is best used. Growth, we recognized, is not an end in itself but an instrument for human flourishing.
Human flourishing requires dignity, empowerment, connection, belonging, and care—goals that cannot be commodified. Growth cannot serve as a proxy for them. We need forms of productivity that support these values directly. This foregrounded the importance of good jobs and place-based policymaking, displacing redistribution as the primary lens for fairness and inclusion. Local and regional decisions matter as much as national or global ones.
Then politics accelerated beyond us. The Biden administration introduced major infrastructure investments and industrial policy long ruled out by neoliberalism. The second Trump administration upended trade liberalization through tariffs and dramatically reversed immigration policy, including by posing challenges to the H1B visa program. At that point, it mattered little what academics said neoliberalism was or might become. The “after” had arrived.
Also, world events were upending academic life. October 7, 2023, the Hamas assault on Israel, the ensuing war, the devastation of Palestinian society, and responses to all of the above brought to the surface universities’ long- building failure to support engagement across deep disagreement. These events were followed by attacks on universities by the Trump administration and internal debates on campuses, including Harvard, about necessary reforms.
For years, people on Harvard’s campus have talked about civil disagreement. I don’t believe in talking about it. I believe in doing it.
This was the backdrop for our conference.
The conference launched with several striking contrasts. The Trump and Biden CEA representatives were closer to one another on many dimensions than the Biden representative was to the Obama representative. For the Trump representative, economic sovereignty was front and center—the ability of an administration to maintain control of the economy for the people and territory under its jurisdiction. The Biden representative emphasized the importance of place-based policymaking. All were flummoxed by how precisely to integrate the perspectives of people on the street with the analyses of professional economists.
Across panels, from right and left, a strong focus emerged on the importance of supporting community and human connection. Many argued for fostering experiences of belonging to counter an era of isolation and alienation. There was also significant emphasis on care—childcare, eldercare, and mental healthcare.
From both right and left came concern that tech innovation has unfolded in ways that make technology and technologists masters of our social conditions, rather than ensuring that human beings remain masters of their tools. A countervailing view held that policymaking has skewed so aggressively toward protecting people from risk that it has suppressed opportunity. We may be reducing harm, but at the cost of limiting the upside of risk—real economic progress and personal wealth building for lower- and middle- class Americans.
The most aggressive rhetoric came from the left, directed at holders of wealth. The most compelling stories came from an evangelical leader who has taken evangelical women on tours of the border to deepen understanding of immigration; after encountering thirteen- and eleven-year-olds at the border—both without their mothers and with infants of their own—she found herself on a new journey to live out her commitment to protecting life.
The two biggest questions that emerged concerned crony capitalism and the right path forward on care—childcare, eldercare, and mental health care.
The idea that we now live not in a neoliberal economy but in a crony capitalist one received wide endorsement. The Wall Street Journal has recently traced the growth of the Trump family business empire, even as many Americans continue to struggle and businesses face uncertainty in a rapidly shifting policy environment. Neither neoliberals (some of whom self-identified at the conference) nor post-neoliberals view crony capitalism as an improvement.
Second, a political scientist observed that immigration policies of the past two decades have shaped the care economy, with many two-income families dependent on immigrant labor for childcare and eldercare. The affordability challenge of care is immense across the socioeconomic spectrum and will probably worsen as immigration changes. New Mexico has developed a universal childcare program funded by oil revenue, and New York City is promising universal childcare. Others favor directing resources to families providing care in the home. Different views about gender and women’s place in the workforce pull people toward different options.
Whether care in early and late life is delivered through public institutions, civil society organizations, or private homes, or some combination of all of the above, will have profound consequences for the kind of society we become. These choices will shape family structure and family health, as well as how much freedom we enjoy in private life and how we learn to govern ourselves together.
We are in the midst of reorganizing how government intersects with the fundamental unit of human society—the family. Perhaps this signals the most profound shift away from neoliberalism. At this conference, it was the family, not the individual, that took pride of place as the focus of discussion and concern.
PS— Here is a video of the Substack Live conversation I had after the conference with Gideon Lichfield, former editor of Wired and 2025-26 fellow in my lab.
This sounds like a highly valuable conference and a great example of deliberation across differences. I deeply appreciate Danielle's work and highly recommend watching the video of her debriefing conversation with Gideon Lichfield. It lays out the issues that were discussed, the areas of commonality, important differences and open threads.
A major contribution melding academic and practitioner approaches to, and real dialogue around, political/economic directions that will benefit all of society going forward. It also is a necessary step in thinking about how to avoid the election of someone like 45/47. The implication seems to be that since about half the voters felt he was listening better than the Dem nominee (this carried through down-ballot voting), our goal should be a political/economic system that offers everyone, simultaneously, a voice in governance and policy, economic opportunities, and a minimum standard of living and care. Right now society is pulled one way by neoliberals and another by democratic socialists. Why not see where there is overlap. After all, ten percent of Bernie voters switched to Trump in 2016 after he left the race - a huge message that many voters felt unheard when they said that the economy was not working for them.