Tim Barker studies the history of political economy at Harvard.
When Donald Trump nominated Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, as secretary of state, Robert McNally found the choice unremarkable. ‘The closest thing we have to a secretary of state outside government is the CEO of Exxon,’ he said. McNally is an energy consultant, a former adviser to George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, and a member of the National Petroleum Council.
Commenting on Occupy Wall Street in late 2011, Barney Frank, then a Democratic congressman for Massachusetts, voiced a common complaint: ‘I don’t understand why people think that simply being in a physical place does much.’ Nearly five years later, it isn’t easy to decide whether Frank was right. Part of the puzzle is that the Occupy movement had a strange double...
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