LPE Blog

Essay

When Labor Law Protects Corporate Interests Better than Corporate Law Does

By Alvin Velazquez

The prevailing joint employer standard requires a showing of greater control than state-based corporate law requires when applying traditional concepts of agency law to parent-subsidiary and franchisor-franchisee relationships. As a result, the current standard leaves millions of workers without meaningful collective bargaining rights because companies that. . .

Symposium

The ‘Economic Style’ as Red Scare Legacy

By Landon Storrs

The rise of the “economic style of reasoning” in the 1960s cannot be properly understood without attending to the political fallout of earlier decades. Institutional economists and social Keynesians did not just fall out of academic fashion or become irrelevant to the problems at hand. Instead, many were forced out of government or toward the political center. . .

Symposium

What Could Replace the Economic Style?

By Frank Pasquale

The simple supply and demand curves that today’s policymakers learned in Ec 10 in the 1990s are guiding the highest levels of policymaking in various agencies and Congressional offices today. Given this troubling reality, should we seek to reform the economic style, so that it more accurately reflects the true benefits of government action, or should we. . .

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: September 9, 2022

By LPE Editors

The week in review: Beth Popp Berman kicked off a symposium on Thinking like an Economist, Marshall Steinbaum argued that Berman’s account overlooks the alternative economic theories that were displaced by the economic style, and Kate Redburn analyzed the political-economic vision undergirding Supreme Court’s recent theocratic turn.. . .

Essay

The Law and Political Economy of Religious Freedom

By Kate Redburn

As recent Supreme Court cases make clear, the libertarian and Christian wings of the conservative legal movement have orchestrated a two-step process to shift the allocation of public resources to private religious power. First, privatize public goods and services. Second, eliminate the distinction between religious and secular in the newly empowered private. . .

Symposium

When It Comes to the History of Economics, Don’t Think like an Economist

By Marshall Steinbaum

In charting economists’ pernicious influence on public policy, Beth Popp Berman contrasts an “economic style,” which focuses on efficiency, choice, and competition, with an alternative approach that favors equality, stability, and democratic participation. But that framing is not faithful to the actual debates that took place, out of which. . .

Symposium

The Limits of “Thinking like an Economist”

By Elizabeth Popp Berman

Why have Democrats remained committed to an incrementalist, modestly ambitious vision of governance, even as the country has faced unprecedented challenges? One critical yet underappreciated piece of the explanation is the rise of a distinctive “economic style of reasoning” that has become prevalent in Washington.

Announcement

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School, 2023-2025

By LPE Editors

Get paid to think about LPE? This could be your future.

Announcement

August Hiatus

By LPE Editors

The blog goes on August hiatus, a new primer on climate change, our top ten posts of the past year, and two new editors join the team.

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 29, 2022

By LPE Editors

A clarion call for public ownership, the varieties of antimonopolism in the progressive movement, and human trafficking through the lens of status coercion.

Symposium

Status Coercion in the Context of Human Trafficking and Forced Labor

By Kathleen C. Kim

Anti-trafficking laws and policies in the United States — in particular, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) — define certain types of coerced work as unlawful forced labor. Paradoxically, the TVPA’s operation also enables status coercion by casting trafficked workers as either “victims” or “criminals” once they are removed from. . .

Essay

Recovering Contingency within American Antimonopoly and Democracy

By Laura Phillips Sawyer

William Novak’s New Democracy demonstrates that the long progressive era was devoted to a reconfiguration of the very nature of modern American capitalism. Yet we must not lose sight of the different visions of state, economy, and democracy that comprised the progressive project.

Essay

Who’s Afraid of Public Ownership?

By Jay Clayton

Despite growing interest in public ownership at the municipal and even national level, LPE scholars have expressed relatively little interest in the topic. This is a mistake: proposals for public ownership can unite the left by achieving multiple policy goals at once and provide an alternative vision of what society should look like.

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 22, 2022

By LPE Editors

An LPE account of the global food crisis, two new entries in our symposium on Coerced, an amazing LPE job at HLS, a symposium on William Novak’s New Democracy, and some podcast episodes to help digest the Supreme Court’s most recent term.

Symposium

Just Do It: Sport, the Culture of Punishment, and Status Coercion

By Billy Hawkins

Playing through pain or while injured is a common practice in college athletics, as players fear losing access to the social mobility that their position makes available. Players are coerced to “just do it,” surrendering their agency to practices that border on deviant, both physically and psychologically.

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