Phenomenal World’s Andrew Elrod in New York Magazine

Sam Adler-Bell’s valediction to Biden cites an essay in Phenomenal World by editor Andrew Elrod.

Certain aspects of the Build Back Better agenda reflected this gentle, reparative impulse in policy terms: concern for the sick, the worst off, for poor families and children. As Andrew Yamakawa Elrod brilliantly documented in Phenomenal World, Biden’s economic team aimed, at first, to revise the terms of business in the care economy; the White House would solve the problems of inequality and wage stagnation through corporate taxation, heavy investments in public education, and price caps on elder and child care. Unsurprisingly, conservatives and business interests (preferring poverty wages for service workers) mobilized to thwart this agenda. Unable to navigate razor-thin margins in the Senate, most of BBB was scrapped. The pandemic was declared over; the disabled were left to fend for themselves. And Bidenomics emerged as something quite different: a more muscular (and masculine) politics of nationalist assertion, premised on reshoring manufacturing, tax incentives for semiconductors and clean energy, and belligerence with China. Tenderness fell out of favor.

Read the full piece in New York Magazine.