LPE Methods – LPE Project

Law, Liberation, and Causal Inference

Luke Herrine — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the Methods of Political Economy. Struggles over the “right” interpretation of key ethical notions are perpetual, indissoluble conditions of the law. But this burden of normativity is so onerous that efforts at alleviating any of it are always being offered up, and taken up, in legal analysis. Frameworks that can side-step moral and political dispute with an...

Source

Promises All the Way Down: A Primer on the Money View

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 09:27:58 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the Methods of Political Economy. It has long been tempting for economists to imagine “the economy” as a giant machine for producing and distributing “value.” Finance, on this view, is just the part of the device that takes the output that is not consumed by end-users (the “savings”) and redirects it back to the productive parts of the machine (as “investment”).

Source

In Praise of Blindspots

Kate Redburn — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 06:30:39 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the Methods of Political Economy. The introductory essay to this symposium repeats several standard views about neoclassical economics that I think are some combination of dated, inaccurate, or irrelevant. I think what legal scholars (including those who do “economic analysis of the law”) perceive as economics is a tragic caricature of what currently happens...

Source

Tracking Extraction

Kate Redburn — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 06:30:56 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the Methods of Political Economy. In a recent book, Raj Patel and Jason Moore argue that the genius of capitalism lies in its “violent extractions of extraeconomic life,” and that these extractions require not only technical innovations and market institutions, but also state power, culture, and ideology. If “law and political economy” examines the role of law...

Source

The Constitutional Theory of the Business Enterprise: Toward a Monetary Theory of Production

Kate Redburn — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 09:00:06 +0000

This post is part of a series on the Methods of Political Economy. Neoclassical economists see-saw between the twin poles of perfect markets and “market failure” in either advocating laissez faire or state intervention. And yet this dichotomy rests on a fundamental mischaracterization of the business enterprise, its role in society, and markets more generally. This essay draws out a heterodox...

Source

The Sociology of Markets: an Alternative Political Economy

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 14:00:50 +0000

This post is part of a series on the Methods of Political Economy. For the past 35 years (and certainly before that), scholars across disciplines have offered critiques of neoclassical theory and its variants of political economy. As a result, there is a great deal of theoretical work done on issues of the linkages between states and markets, the comparative study of capitalism across countries...

Source

Privatizing Sovereignty, Socializing Property: What Economics Doesn’t Teach You About the Corporation

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 14:00:10 +0000

This post is part of a series on the Methods of Political Economy. We imagine we live in a bourgeois capitalist economy, in which the means of production are owned by natural persons, the “capitalists” of capitalism. On this, the Marxist economist, the liberal economist, and the neoliberal economist agree. But we do not. Ours is a corporate economy. Overwhelmingly, the means of production are...

Source

Stocking the Toolshed: A Symposium on Methods of Political Economy

Kate Redburn — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 11:30:51 +0000

This is the introductory post in a series on the Methods of Political Economy. In their Law & Economics textbook, Robert Cooter and Thomas Ulen ask: “Why has the economic analysis of law succeeded?” Their answer: “Economics provide[s] a scientific theory to predict the effects of legal sanctions on behavior….This theory surpasses intuition, just as science surpasses common sense.” Moreover...

Source