At the Blog
On Monday, Quinn Slobodian continued our symposium on Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution by reflecting on three questions posed by the book: How did Virginia School neoliberals turn the tax-collecting state on its head? How complete was their victory? And are they still winning? On the first, he writes, “What Cooper shows us is how, through arcane transformations of the tax code, the American public came to think of the fiscal state as an unjust burden, even as its redesign perpetuated a new genre of redistribution. The new state created by Reagan and cemented by his successors conjures a powerful illusion: that wealth accumulation happens without—or even in spite of—any mediation through the state. Thus, even as depreciation allowances, pass-throughs, mortgage interest deductions, and countless other policies helped to funnel wealth to those who already had assets and left in the cold those without them, the neoconservative state hid from view and the individual appeared to walk on air.”
On Tuesday, Shaina Potts described how the concept of “judicial territory” can help us can help us better understand recent transformations in jurisdictional practices and assess recent claims about “de-globalization.” To most observers, the fact that American courts regularly exercise authority beyond U.S. borders, including over foreign governments, is simply a consequence of increasing economic globalization and legal modernization, which untethered jurisdiction from territory. Potts, however, sees this is a mistake. In her view, law has not become divorced from territory but instead actively remapped it. As she explains, in the post-WWII era, U.S. courts increasingly extended their authority over the economic decisions of foreign governments in order to counter those interventionist economic practices of Communist and especially postcolonial states that were seen as threats to U.S. capital and “free” markets.
And on Thursday, Christopher Ali explained how, with tens of billions of dollars in federal funding earmarked for high-speed internet, American financiers have quickly recognized that there’s a windfall of profit to be made as internet service providers. As a result, private equity is quickly moving into the the broadband ecosystem—a development that presents an existential threat to local provision and the goal of universal, affordable broadband. As Ali writes, “The not-so-distant economic downfall of journalism captures the dangers of a private equity takeover. When the newspaper industry collapsed during and following the Great Recession, private equity and hedge funds swooped in like vultures to suck every last bit of equity from struggling local papers…. The fear is that they will replicate their short-term, profit-prioritizing strategy on ISPs: gutting local services, firing local staff, and forgoing local upgrades. The result could be devastating for underserved communities, especially once federal funding dries up.”
In LPE Land
Anna Chadwick, Marco Goldoni, Ioannis Kampourakis, and our own Amy Kapczynski are thrilled to announce the launch of a new book series dedicated to Law & Political Economy scholarship by Cambridge University Press. More info about the series here, including how to submit a proposal!
Reminder: On Wednesday September 18th at 12:10pm ET (at Yale and online), Aziz Rana and Amy Kapczynski will be discussing Rana’s recent book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them. For a brief overview of the book, make sure to check out Rana’s blog post on it from this spring.
Pour yourself a large cup of coffee and put on your favorite reading slippers: The Journal of Political Economy released its latest issue.
In the NYT, Jed Britton-Purdy argues that when it comes to her message on the economy, Harris needs to embrace a vision of economic freedom.
More Perfect Union released a video about their investigation into Uber using algorithms to pay workers less. For more on the subject, see Veena Dubal’s post on algorithmic wage discrimination, Zephyr Teachout’s post on Surveillance Wages, and Marshall Steinbaum’s post on the antitrust case against gig economy labor platforms.
Over on his blog, Henry Farrell has been on a heater recently, with entries on The intellectual blind spots of anti-anti-neoliberalism and Why Democrats should be reading Danielle Allen, not Deneen.
In the Harvard Business Review, Sandeep Vaheesan and Brian Callaci argue that The Market Alone Can’t Fix the U.S. Housing Crisis.
Cool new book alert: Lenore Palladino’s Good Company: Economic Policy after Shareholder Primacy hits shelves this December, just in time for the holidays!
On Tuesday, September 16, join Connecticut’s #Insulin4All Chapter, T1International, and the Yale’s Global Health Justice Partnership (at Yale and online) for a community conversation about public pharma in Connecticut.
For those in the Boston area, on Monday, September 16, Alex Gourevitch will be debating Tyler Cowen on the question of “Is Capitalism Defensible.”
In the Nation, Wendy Brown discusses The Enduring Influence of Marx’s Masterpiece.
Also in the Nation, for the insatiable Coopheads among us, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and former LPE Blog editor Kate Yoon interviewed Melinda Cooper about Counterrevolution.
Finally, the National Consumer Law Center has a petition for a rulemaking to Protect Renters. They are asking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to define rental leases as “credit” under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in order (1) to apply the ECOA adverse action notice, requiring landlords to give a statement of reasons when rejecting rental applicants and (2) to extend the CFPB’s proposed ban against medical debt on credit reports to those used for tenant screening. There’s an open comment period on the petition, ending on October 11. NCLC has also provided a template for comments.
