This article examines the intellectual and interventionist trajectory of American popular writer and commentator Robert Reich from his early 1980s advocacy of “industrial policy” to his time as US Secretary of Labor in the 1990s. It argues that Reich is an interesting figure to consider through the lens of “interventionist knowledges” because, although he draws selectively on social scientific data and knowledge, his syntheses of these things are more rooted in mythic thinking than in disciplined analysis. This article recounts the history of a failed bill, the Reemployment Act of 1994, to examine how Reich and those around him drew on and interpreted existing social scientific data to construct an idea of “the New Economy” and what, they claimed, it meant for national human capital policy. This article suggests that mythic visions of society and economy possibly play a large role in policy-making and issues advocacy.

We build a model of endogenous destruction with credit and labor marketimperfections, represented by a matching process between financiers andentrepreneurs on one hand, and entrepreneurs and workers on the other hand.Business creation, credit opening and job destruction represent three activemargins of the model. Financial imperfections lead to financial fragility.This implies the existence of a forth latent margin whichmay be activated in the case of repudiation of financial contracts. Thisparadigm is applied to the recent development of the U.S. economy. Anempirical test in panel of OECD countries further suggests the importance ofventure capital for macroeconomic variables.

This paper explores the relationship between employment protectionlegislation (EPL) and the share of employment in the IT sector. Evidencefrom several OECD countries suggests that the importance of the IT sector issmaller in economies with high levels of EPL than in economies with lowlevels. This shows up in the amount of resources dedicated to research on ITas well as in the share of employment in the sector. A simple model isprovided to explain these facts. EPL affects both labor supply and labordemand in the same way resulting in lower employment equilibrium levels.