There is a vast literature on access to justice in the United States. In what Sameer Asher has diagnosed as a broadly neoliberal discourse, the legal profession itself stars as the key barrier to access to justice: It is slow to adopt technology, restricts entry with excessive licensure requirements, and bogs down in technicalities. Let’s…

Mainstream economists tend to frame employment policy as a series of tragic trade-offs. If policymakers raise the minimum wage, they are told, employment will inevitably fall, perhaps precipitously. Requirements for vacations, too, might crash the job market. (Never mind that dozens of other prosperous countries mandate paid vacation time.) Technocrats of the center left complain…

In her fascinating new book Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks recounts that the first “big data” set in the United States “was the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor. It was the public arm of the eugenics movement.” While the systematic collection of data has underpinned many important initiatives, it also has a dark side.…

A magazine owned by billionaire Michael Bloomberg recently reported on workers’ declining share of national income. “Why don’t workers get the full benefit of rising productivity? No one has good answers,” it stated, to the merriment of left Twitter. A raft of memes reminded Bloomberg Businessweek of the lessons of Piketty, Marx, and political economy…

Economists tend to characterize the scope of regulation as a simple matter of expanding or contracting state power. But a political economy perspective emphasizes that social relations abhor a power vacuum. When state authority contracts, private parties fill the gap. That power can feel just as oppressive, and have effects just as pervasive, as garden…

Back in June, I attended the annual conference of health law professors held by the ASLME. This conference is a real intellectual feast for anyone interested in political economy. National experts describe the latest developments in the Affordable Care Act’s exchange marketplaces. Antitrust scholars consider the proper balance between delivery system integration and competition in…