This is the third post in our series discussing The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits. Click here to read all posts in the series. I am grateful to the LPE Blog for hosting this exchange about The Meritocracy Trap. Today’s post will take up Hart’s and Steinbaum’s post and focus on facts, and tomorrow’s will turn to Gordon’s post…
This post turns our attention to The Meritocracy Trap’s argument that industrial policy contributed to the technological innovations that over-reward elite workers at the expense of the poor and working class, and that industrial policy will be essential to build a fairer economy.
Marshall Steinbaum and Andrew Hart argue that Professor Markovits’ The Meritocracy Trap omits capitalists from the story in part by relying too heavily on the flawed theory of human capital.
This post explores the “money view,” which demystifies financial economies by conceptualizing money as the way in which humans manage ongoing promissory relations in a world of uncertainty.
Economic models produce blindspots, compressing qualitative differences into quantitative measures. Yet, this vice is also the source of their power.
If “law and political economy” examines the role of law in constituting and regulating marketcraft and statecraft, one way of “doing” LPE is to look for the role of law in managing the processes by which capitalists extract value from activity putatively outside “the economy.”
Eschewing the chimerical twin poles of perfect competition and market failure, this post advances an LPE-grounded constitutional theory of the business enterprise, informed a Legal Realist reading of the economics literature.
The co-constitution of states and markets reflects the historical distribution of power in society. As social structures, markets are subject to the dynamics of all forms of organized social life.
Despite mainstream economists’ fixation on relations among natural persons, ours is a world teeming with abstract legal entities—corporations—chartered by the public authority, managed by corporate fiduciaries. Such public-private hybrids illustrate the “political” in “political economy.”
This post introduces a symposium on heterodox methodologies in the study of political economy.
Ending money bail will not itself produce justice because we have been using money bail, and the detention it produces, to meet a host of social needs. Forsaking it will require us to find better ways to meet them.
Critical race theory can supply a framework for interpreting bail reform, as it renders legible the carceral reproduction of racial hierarchies as well as the law’s normalization of anti-Black criminalization.
Four organizers with the National Bail Fund Network explore how community bail funds can serve as tools to advance abolitionist movement building.
Four organizers with the National Bail Fund Network provide a critique of dominant “bail reform” agendas, arguing for a more ambitious vision of pretrial freedom.
In this post, Survived & Punished NY presents an abolitionist critique of New York’s bail reform statute, calling for a bolder vision of freedom and a broader scope of change.
