News

Recorded at BESI on March 4, 2026, this talk with Princeton sociologist of science and technology Janet Vertesi summarizes her "Opt Out" experiments and the lessons for fighting back against surveillance capitalism.

Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy research director Brian Judge joined Garth Bray on The New Zealand Herald's "HNOW: Business" to discuss how diminishing investor confidence in private credit funds signals broader risks for the global financial market.

Set against the backdrop of recent proposals by states to tax their wealthiest residents, this conversation explores how the “grand bargains” between the rich and the rest of us became embedded in law and civic culture, how they have broken down over time, and how a renewed interest in taxation might inform a political and regulatory agenda for the future.

As high-profile private credit fund managers face a surge in withdrawals stemming from jitters over the economy, BESI's Brian Judge observes echoes of the months leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Jones joined the DE during her third year as a graduate student. We caught up with her to learn more about her research and how her involvement in the DE contributed to her award-winning scholarship.

BESI senior researcher Samuel Trachtman shares his top three takeaways from a recent panel discussion featuring California political scholars and practitioners.

Motivated by recent major governance problems and policy implementation failures in California, BESI assembled an expert panel of scholars and practitioners to explore the underlying causes of the disfunction and examine potential remedies.

In this talk, recorded at BESI on October 30, 2025, economist Cecilia Rikap explore possibilities and strategies for expanding digital sovereignty and putting technology at the service of people and the planet.

On October 27, 2025, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Edward Alden visited BESI to share insights from his latest book, "When the World Closed Its Doors: The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Borders."

BESI senior researcher Samuel Trachtman spoke to journalist Steve Morris, editor of The Long Run newsletter, about rising energy costs for a recent post on the political risks to Democratic governors of a collapsing economy.

In this talk recorded at BESI on October 21, sociologist Philipp Brandt shows how data scientists in the 2010s not only transformed familiar ideas into a new professional, but — for better or for worse — also devised the technical machinery for seeing the world through datasets.

On November 13, BESI convened 26 experts on California politics and policy to discuss how to make California more affordable.