Extractive Institutions in the US?

The Twitter exchange with Simon Johnson and James Kwak, @baselinescene, touches upon many central issues. Some of these are discussed in a short article, written for a forthcoming book edited by Janet Byrne on the Occupy Movement. A link to the book is here. Originally we posted a link to that article, but we were informed that we were not supposed to post that article on our webpages… Fortunately, we have a related article and you can access that here.

So there is much agreement between us and @baselinescene, but we are clearly more optimistic about the resilience of US institutions.

But since that article was written in early January, there have been even more worrying developments on the civil liberties front (see, for example, here and here)