What, if anything, can the United States do to reverse the upward trend in inequality and the danger that it will lead to populist despotism or a corrupt oligarchy with laws made for the few, not for the many?

I propose two sets of policies. The first requires reforms in labor laws and regulations to better enable workers to organize and bargain collectively with employers. The second requires tax and procurement policies to encourage firms to develop employment ownership programs so that workers own some of the capital that employs them and additional policies that increase worker investments in capital more broadly. By operating on ownership of both labor and capital, the policies can modernize American economic institutions to fit the coming world of artificial intelligence (AI) robotics and avoid Madison’s Scylla and Charybdis choice between anarchy and corruption.

This paper examines international and domestic collaborations using data from an original survey of corresponding authors and Web of Science data of articles that had at least one US coauthor in the fields of Particle and Field Physics, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology. The data allow us to investigate the connections among coauthors and the views of corresponding authors about the collaboration.  We have four main findings. First, we find that US collaborations have increased across US cities as well as across international borders, with the nature of collaborations across cities resembling that across countries.  Second, face-to-face meetings are important in collaborations: most collaborators first met working in the same institution and communicate often through meetings with coauthors from distant locations. Third, the main reason for most collaborations is to combine the specialized knowledge and skills of coauthors, but there are substantial differences in the mode of collaborations between small lab-based science and big science, where international collaborations are more prevalent. Fourth, for biotech, we find that citations to international papers are higher compared to papers with domestic collaborators only, but not for the other two fields. Moreover, in all three fields, papers with the same number of coauthors had lower citations if they were international collaborations. Overall, our findings suggest that all collaborations are best viewed from a framework of collaborations across space broadly, rather than in terms of international as opposed to domestic collaborative activity.