Tyranny takes many forms. In Tyranny, Inc., Sohrab Ahmari indicts American corporations for abuse of power, against their workers, their customers and the public interest. “Culturally conservative, economically leftist, politically democratic,” a founding editor of Compact, Ahmari's writing credits have have appeared across the spectrum from DISSENT to The American Conservative. He will speak at the LBJ School on Tuesday, November 7, 2023. He will be joined by Hell to Pay author Michael Lind and UT Law professor William Forbath. LBJ Professor James Galbraith will moderate.
Speakers
Sohrab Ahmari, author of Tyranny, Inc.
Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact and a contributing writer for The New Statesman. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at News Corp., as op-ed editor of the New York Post and as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London. In addition to those publications, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Spectator, Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Literary Supplement, Commentary, Dissent, and The American Conservative, for which he is a contributing editor.
Moderator: Dr. James Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations, LBJ School of Public Affairs
James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and a professorship in Government at The University of Texas at Austin. He was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress in the early 1980s, and before that, an economist for the House Banking Committee. He chaired the board of Economists for Peace and Security from 1996 to 2016 and directs The University of Texas Inequality Project. He is a managing editor of Structural Change and Economic Dynamics.
Michael Lind, author of Hell to Pay
Michael Lind is the author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, including Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States, The New Class War and Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America. He is a columnist at Tablet, a contributor to Compact, and a fellow at New America. He has been an editor or writer for The National Interest, Harper's, The New Republic, and The New Yorker, and has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
William Forbath, UT School of Law
Willy Forbath holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair at UT Austin School of Law where he teaches constitutional law and legal and constitutional history. Forbath is also Associate Dean of Research and a professor of history. He is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (with Joseph Fishkin), and dozens of articles, book chapters, and essays on legal and constitutional history and theory and comparative constitutional law. He is completing a trans-national history of Jewish lawyers and Jewish politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He occasionally writes on legal and constitutional issues for the New York Times, Atlantic, the Nation and other outlets, and has served on the boards of Texas organizations devoted to social movements and advocacy for affordable housing and workers’ rights. In addition to UT, he has taught at UCLA, Sciences Po, Tel Aviv, Columbia, and Harvard law schools.