MIC Book Talk: Democracy in Power by Sandeep Vaheesan

Join the Media, Inequality & Change Center, the Penn Program on Regulation, and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy for this talk from Sandeep Vaheesan on his new book "Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States."

About the Book

Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America.

Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Purchase the book online here!

About the Speaker

Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He leads Open Markets’ legal advocacy and research work, including its amicus program.

Vaheesan works on a range of anti-monopoly topics, including antitrust law’s role in structuring labor markets and promoting fair competition. From 2015 to 2018, he served as a regulations counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he helped develop rules on payday and title lending and debt collection practices. Before that, he worked at the American Antitrust Institute.

Vaheesan’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harvard Law & Policy Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yale Law Journal Forum. He has a forthcoming book titled Democracy in Power with the University of Chicago Press on the history of public and cooperative power in the United States and the lessons it offers for building a clean, publicly accountable electric industry today.

Vaheesan will be introduced by moderators Victor Pickard, Co-Director of the MIC Center and C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy, and Shelley Welton, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Law and Energy Policy with the Kleinman Center and Penn Carey Law.