Professor David Singh Grewal is a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he teaches in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy doctoral program. He holds a PhD in Political Science and a BA in Economics from Harvard University, as well as a JD from Yale Law School. His research and teaching focus on legal and political theory, the history of economic thought, international trade law, intellectual property and biotechnology, and the intersection of law and economics. A co-founder of the Law and Political Economy Blog, Professor Grewal has published widely in both legal and interdisciplinary journals, including the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal, and has contributed public writing to outlets such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. His first book, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, was published by Yale University Press, and his second, The Invention of the Economy, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. This interview took place in April 2025. Interviewed by Mariana Escobar and Fiona Kim.
Escobar: We are here with Professor David Grewal, who is currently teaching Classical Theories of Political Economy for undergraduates here at UC Berkeley!
I wanted to start with a personal question. Your lectures are amazing. You’re one of the only professors for whom we clap at the end of every class because we genuinely enjoy being there. You make it engaging, and we love the dad jokes. It’s great—we all appreciate it. So, what’s your philosophy on teaching? How do you design a class that doesn’t feel like just another heavy reading history course?
Grewal: I still feel like a student—a beginner. Maybe that energy comes through. If you think you’ve mastered something, it’s easy to get lazy and rest on your laurels. Before every lecture, I’m nervous—even after hundreds of them. If you care, you’re nervous.
Escobar: That makes sense. You stay close to that original enthusiasm, and it really comes through. Your energy shows. You don’t have a RateMyProfessor yet, but the reviews will be amazing once it’s up.
Also, in the first class, you said you studied political theory, law, and economics—the big three. What drew you to all three? How did you arrive at the research questions that continue to guide your work? I noticed a lot of your earlier work was on globalization.
Grewal: Yes, I’ve written a lot on globalization, but more recently I’ve focused on the history of economics—I’ll send you some of that. I started as an economics major at Harvard in the mid-90s. At the time, economics felt like a way to understand society. It was right after the Cold War, when economists had a lot of confidence that they’d figured society out, and globalization seemed like the natural next step. I was drawn in by those ideas, but I was also critical of them. As I studied economics, I became more interested in institutions—or rather, how little they figured in mainstream economic theory. That led me to law school. I saw capitalism as a legal regime, and I wanted to understand what structured it. In law school, I encountered law and economics, a way of analyzing legal questions using economic tools. However, it felt shallow when applied to deeper jurisprudential questions like the justification of coercion. It didn’t illuminate much, and that critique shaped my path going forward.
Escobar: That’s so interesting. It sounds like every step in your journey was driven by a sense of “why?”
Grewal: Yes, you start with economics as a set of abstract regularities. But once you ask what supports them, you get to institutions. Then, naturally, you start wondering: what ideas shaped those institutions? How have they changed? That last step led me to study political theory and intellectual history—the “why” of politics and ideas interacting with institutions.
Escobar: In class, I think you briefly mentioned one of your books that’s coming out, which relates to this process?
Grewal: It’s that one behind you. That’s my dissertation from 2010. I’ve been revising it for the last 15 years. I hope it’ll be published in the next couple of years. It’s about the history of economic thought, asking how the concept of “the economy” came into being. The argument is that “the economy” is an abstraction built on a specific theory of value, something like exchange value. The book explores how that idea emerged and became so dominant in the modern world.
Escobar: Amazing, I’ll be sure to stay up to date when it comes out! As for the thematic questions, Fiona will start us off.
Kim: Earlier this week, we were looking at your broader research. In your view, how do current laws and institutions continue to reproduce global inequality? Are there any philosophers who shape how you see this?
Grewal: My first book was Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization. It explores how global coordination pushes countries to adopt shared norms, standards, laws, and rules, even if, all things considered, they’d prefer alternatives. I argue that this happens through a kind of power I call Network Power—a social dynamic of coordination that draws countries into cooperative systems, but necessarily on certain terms rather than others. Much of twentieth-century globalization depended on norms that carried over from the colonial era. That continuity plays a big role in global inequality.
The challenge is that one country usually can’t change these norms unilaterally. You’d need new kinds of international convention-setting, but that’s incredibly hard. In the 1990s, after the Cold War, there was a lot of talk about new global governance. However, the U.S. doubled down on free-market policies, which reinforced many of the inequalities we see now. With growing geopolitical tensions, plus domestic political issues here and abroad, I don’t know if there’s enough political will to change course. That’s concerning.
Kim: When we think about global poverty, it’s hard to reconcile international norms with the specific needs of local contexts. How do we balance both?
Grewal: It’s a very complex problem. In Network Power, I touched on how global norms and local coordination can interact. But to do that well, we need a clear understanding of what poverty or development is. That’s where I’ve found Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach essential. His book Development as Freedom was influential for me. His framework encourages looking at what people are actually able to do and be, which lends itself to localized approaches while still supporting broader standards. Some progress has been made—like the Human Development Index or the work of the UNDP—but the international system that supported these efforts is under stress. I think the next 20 years will bring major changes, for better or worse.
Escobar: That transitions beautifully because I wanted to ask about Sen. Having studied under him at Harvard, what’s something memorable he taught you—something you pass on to your students?
Grewal: Yes, I studied with Amartya as an undergraduate and later knew him as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Beyond his insights on development and freedom, the biggest thing I took from him is his insistence that economics, or political economy, is really a branch of the moral sciences. He emphasized that evaluation and analysis are inseparable. As he puts it, there’s no measurement without prior evaluation. The very concepts we use to understand the world carry ethical dimensions. That means economics and ethics aren’t separate—they’re deeply connected. Once you see that, your whole understanding of economics shifts.
His example also inspired me to pursue interdisciplinary work. He never confined himself to one field. He worked across economics, moral philosophy, development, measurement theory, history, and politics. He resisted the boundaries others tried to place on him, and that openness was incredibly inspiring.
Escobar: Exactly, that’s so profound. That’s what I loved—starting the class with Aristotle and Hobbes. I wasn’t expecting to read them first. Seeing how those ideas about values and morality connect to what we read last week and this week, regarding modern wealth inequality, is so eye-opening.
Kim: You discussed how Sen argues that economics can’t be separated from ethics. When global institutions claim to be neutral or technical, do you think that masks deeper moral choices?
Grewal: Absolutely, that’s Sen’s point. It’s that whenever we’re making policy choices, we’re always making them from a non-neutral standpoint. But that’s not a failure. It’s not like we should be aspiring to some kind of neutrality, as if we’re putting on a mask. It also doesn’t mean that you can’t aim to be as fair or as objective as possible.
Sen, in bringing ethics and economics together, always insists on the value of public reasoning and reasonableness as a standard. However, reasonableness is not the same thing as a certain kind of technocratic neutrality. Reasonableness means that you’re responsive to and can respond to arguments in public, that you can be transparent about motivations, and that you can absorb and adapt to criticism. It doesn’t mean that you’ve achieved a scientific perspective beyond controversy. The idea that economics or institutions of economic governance that have a technocratic mission can achieve a standpoint that’s beyond controversy is hard to credit. But that’s what’s doing the work of this aspiration to “neutrality.”
The standard of value that twentieth-century economics put forward, for example, in Pareto optimality, assumes that you can get something uncontroversial like that. That there’s something uncontroversial about the market or about just measuring exchange value as the barometer of the social good. What Sen’s work suggests is that there may be nothing wrong with those concepts or metrics for some kinds of questions. The question you’re asking, though, is always going to be concerned with value from some standpoint. There’s nothing outside that. So, there may be some kinds of policies for which having more aggregate wealth is a good thing, but in many other cases, money-metrics and related evaluative concepts may prove misleading.
Escobar: Who was it we talked about—being fair or in the middle of extremes? That was Aristotle, right?
Grewal: Aristotle on the mean, yes.
Escobar: Would that be placing fairness on a scale, or is that different?
Grewal: It’s related, but not an exact midpoint. The mean requires judgment. There can be many right answers, not just one. There will be a debate about what’s right. It’s not a precise measurement like in science. It’s about moral balance.
Kim: That’s really fascinating. I keep thinking about how we measure the common good. I remember learning about Pareto efficiency and being surprised that it’s a binary: yes or no, no debate.
Grewal: Well, I think that’s the aspiration to neutrality. If you could have measurements that were uncontroversial, then you could make undisputed progress on different fronts. That was the hope behind various positivist measures or measures that pretended to represent a consensus view, like Pareto optimality. However, when we lift the lid on Pareto optimality, the difficulty is that there could be many changes that we have reason to value that are not Pareto optimal.
If you had a situation where there are a small number of very wealthy people and a large number of very deprived people in a society, redistribution from the wealthy few to the poor would not be Pareto optimal so long as the wealthy few object. Redistribution might nevertheless be justifiable in such instances. That’s why Sen wanted to shift the debate from preferences, which is what optimality is ultimately concerned with, to a concept like capabilities.
Escobar: I see. Was that the shift away from the marginalists we read about as well?
Grewal: Absolutely, marginalism depends on a preference theory of the good. Basically, the social good is achieved when you have more preference-satisfaction of an ordinal and an intrapersonal kind. Again, that’s not to say that for many kinds of questions, that might not be a good framework, but not for all the questions you might want to ask. There’s also this big puzzle: in any modern state, law and policy are almost always Pareto inefficient in the sense that any policy that you want to put forward will always have some winners and losers. If you oppose that decision and adopt a consensus rule that means everyone has to agree, such that you then can’t have any losers, society comes to a standstill.
Now, the response to this complaint is the idea that the winners could somehow compensate the losers to make them all winners, a further tack on the idea of Pareto optimality. This is “potential Pareto efficiency” or “Kaldor- Hicks.” This was the standard of wealth maximization that became very popular in the law schools and certain policy schools in the late twentieth-century United States.
I’ve written elsewhere against this view because I think it still misses too much. It stays in a realm of preference as the theory of the social good and tries to rearrange things so that more people get more of their preferences satisfied. When you actually do the redistribution, though, you need some medium that enables the redistribution. Usually, it’s something like money. But that itself assumes you can understand each person’s marginal utility of money—that’s to say, money means the same thing for everyone, or else we know what it means, utility-wise, for each person, and can compare those utilities. Well, if you’re assuming that, you’re violating the idea that was central to Pareto optimality, which grew out of classical utilitarianism once it was assumed that you can’t make cardinal, interpersonal comparisons of utility. But as soon as you accept that you can make an interpersonal comparison utility, if only in order to do the redistribution in terms of money, then there’s no reason to stop with interpersonal utility comparisons of money. You have already broadened the “informational basis” of social choice, as Sen puts it. So why not do interpersonal comparisons of utility in some other respect, or even shift to interpersonal assessments of health outcomes or other measures of well-being that we have reason to value? That’s in some ways the thin end of the wedge that Sen and other critics of welfarism have pushed on.
Kim: This really gets me thinking about the models Mariana and I have been studying all semester in intermediate microeconomics.
Escobar: That’s exactly why I love seeing the great connection between Professor Grewal’s class and Professor Jim Campbell’s microeconomics. Every single philosopher that we have read about goes back to a model, which is fascinating. It’s so cool seeing the “why,” exactly as you brought up at the beginning of this interview. It’s the background of where the theory we take as a given came from, or why we are graphing all these lines in the first place.
Grewal: It’s great to oscillate back and forth between seeing what the conventional view is and then trying to understand its history. It’s very useful.
Kim: I find it interesting because a lot of, especially lower division, economics is focused on these models, these calculations, and these basic principles. Do you think that economics, perhaps at the college level, is too focused on models?
Grewal: The models end up being useful as a heuristic for learning and reflection. I don’t think economics education is too focused on the models. However, it may not be focused enough on understanding the assumptions and the history of the assumptions underlying the models. I don’t think you shouldn’t teach the models, but I think it’s a question of teaching them in sync with the history we’ve been reading. Then, students can understand more easily what they’re trying to capture and what they don’t capture.
Escobar: A class like this would be an important requirement for the economics major because, otherwise, you wouldn’t know what goes on behind the models.
Grewal: I mean, the history of economic thought used to be a standard part of the economics curriculum even well into the mid-twentieth century. It fell out only in more recent decades. Many of the most important economists in earlier generations also did some work on the history of economics, or at least everyone knew something about the history of economics.
Kim: Do you have any book recommendations for our viewers who would want to delve into this? I’m sure there are many.
Grewal: I hope to have my book, The Invention of the Economy, out in a couple of years. Meanwhile, a lot of people associated with the Political Economy Program and the Economics Department here at Cal are doing amazing work. I’ve been, myself, very excited by the work on inequality that Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have been doing. I think that brings politics back into economics in a way that’s really helpful as a policy matter. James Bradford DeLong has just written Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century as well.
I’ve also been really excited by the return of industrial policy to policy debates. Steven Vogel in the Political Economy Program has been a major contributor to debates over industrial policy, which is, again, one of those areas where you have to think in political and economic terms simultaneously. I recommend his book, Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work. I’m hopeful about the future of political economy as a discipline.
Kim: What I really appreciated from last semester’s Introduction to Economics with Professor Saez was that he devoted a couple of weeks simply going over metrics like the Gini coefficient and reviewing inequality. That’s not what I expected to review in an introductory class. I thought we were just going to go over models.
Grewal: A lot of people wouldn’t have done that. I think that’s because Emmanuel is very interested in those distributive and normative questions that are at the heart of political economy. If there’s a complaint about economics, it’s that the distributive and normative implications of models are sometimes not brought to the forefront as much as they should be.
Kim: Exactly. Those are important questions to pose, especially for people going straight into the field.
Grewal: On some level, you can’t avoid these questions. They are going to come up if you are serious and reflect on what you are doing.
Kim: Back to the intermediate microeconomics class Mariana and I are in, I appreciate that the midterms are very quantitative—supply, demand, and all that—but the final exam is a bunch of normative questions that you answer in essay style.
Escobar: Yes, exactly, like the ethics behind what we’re learning. Again, it is special because, so far, Professor Campbell’s class has been the only economics class I’ve been in that touches on the “why” as well.
Grewal: Oh, fantastic. This is really the question that Sen put on the table in such a forceful way over fifty years ago, so it’s good that it’s finally getting traction.
Escobar: It’s perfect, truly. I’ll be able to tie him into the final exam essays, especially thanks to your class. This was amazing. Thank you!
Kim: Thank you so much for your time!
Grewal: Thank you both for your time and interest!
