LPE Blog

Weekly Roundup

Slumlord Capitalism v. Global Pandemic: LPE on Covid (vol 3)

By John Whitlow

As part of our ongoing effort to bring you the best LPE work on COVID-19, today we bring you this piece from John Whitlow, followed by a roundup of LPE COVID writing published elsewhere.  The poet Langston Hughes once wrote, “I wish the rent was heaven sent.” With a record 10 million Americans filing for…

Essay

Gideon and the Promise of Right to Counsel

By John Sadek, Sam Natale

This week, we’re sharing two discussions on John Whitlow’s recently published article reflecting on New York’s right to counsel in evictions proceedings. Our contributors share visions of right to counsel that move beyond due process rights. The contributors show that right to counsel campaigns are part of broader movements that seek. . .

Essay

Moving Beyond Liberal Legal Rights: An Expansive Vision of Right to Counsel

By John Whitlow

This week, we’re sharing two discussions on John Whitlow’s recently published article reflecting on New York’s right to counsel in evictions proceedings. Our contributors share visions of right to counsel that move beyond due process rights. The contributors show that right to counsel campaigns are part of broader movements that. . .

Essay

The Truth about Buybacks

By Jeff Gordon

People claim to be worried about stock buybacks. In fact, the buybacks are a stand-in for what we can all see: business in this country works for wealthy shareholders, not workers, customers, or communities.

Essay

LPE on COVID (vol 2)

By Noah Zatz

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to bring you the best LPE work on COVID-19, we’re reposting a letter from Professor Noah Zatz to his City Counsel regarding evictions during the pandemic.

Weekly Roundup

LPE on COVID 19

By Editors

We’re living in strange times. As we try to make sense of the moment, LPE Blog wants to offer some COVID 19 coverage from our regular contributors. We’re starting today with some work that Amy Kapczynski has done with various colleagues.

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup, March 12, 2020

By LPE Editors

…on Thursday! Because time is just a social construct, man. Plenty of action on the blog since we last rounded up. We hosted symposia on money bail reform, on interdisciplinary methods in political economy, on Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne Alstott’s book on public options, and on Daniel Markovits’s book on meritocracy and inequality. Amy. . .

Symposium

Guiding Innovation’s Hand: Industrial Policy Against Inequality

By Jeff Gordon

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.

Symposium

Liberate the Meritocrats—From Their Bosses

By Andrew Hart, Marshall Steinbaum

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.

Essay

The Case for Universal Labor and Employment Rights

By Amanda Jaret, Sandeep Vaheesan

Taking up Anne Alstott & Ganesh Sitaraman’s arguments in favor of the public option, this post makes a case for universal labor and employment rights.

Essay

Enriching the Narrative Economics of Public Options

By Frank Pasquale

Inspired by Anne Alstott & Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Public Option, this post suggests that it is time to tell new stories about the nature and purpose of economic institutions, and that infrastructural investments should be put to work to ensure there is a world we can retire into.

Essay

Coronavirus and the Politics of Care

By Amy Kapczynski

It is now clear that we are entering a new phase of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The virus appears in new countries around the world each day. New cases are now regularly reported in the United States, and as testing is scaled up, that number will increase, probably substantially. It is clear now that the…

Symposium

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

By Elham Saeidinezhad

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.

Symposium

In Praise of Blindspots

By Suresh Naidu

Economic models produce blindspots, compressing qualitative differences into quantitative measures. Yet, this vice is also the source of their power.

Symposium

Tracking Extraction

By Angela P. Harris

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.”