At the Blog
In a pair of posts this week, Amy Kapczynski described two efforts to name and shape what comes after neoliberalism.
On Monday, she discussed a family of views – variously called “productivism,” “supply side liberalism,” and the “new industrial policy” – that seek to supplant neoliberalism by focusing on issues of investment and production. This new vision for the economy, she argues, seems neither particularly new, nor particularly transformative. As she writes, “If our political economy today is only – not also but only – a system of production, one based on an ostensible separation between market and politics, then industrial policy can claim (accurately or not) to fix what ails it. But if instead these systems are, as I and others have argued, historically embedded relations of extraction and expropriation that are deeply entangled with dynamics of racialization and engendering, then what we need is not just far more ambitious, but different in kind.”
And on Wednesday, she turned her attention to a competing program emerging on the right, which in law schools is calling itself “common good constitutionalism.” These thinkers, she notes, often offer critiques of the market that sound like they were ripped from the pages of this blog. Yet their positive vision couldn’t be any different. Committed theocrats, these thinkers hope to use the Court to force upon us an extreme right-wing version of Christian ethics. They are also enamored with social policies that “leverage state funding to support care, provided by women, presumably in the home – but only to those who are white enough, Christian enough, straight enough, to deserve it.” As Kapczynski puts it, they are not interested in overcoming neoliberal strictures so much as suspending them for a select few.
In LPE Land
A warm LPE welcome to Sanjay Jolly, who has recently been appointed to be the Executive Director of the Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard.
CFP: On March 31 to April 2, 2023 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the LPE Project and the Program on LPE at HLS will hold an in-person gathering for Emerging Scholars. Deadline to submit your proposal is January 16.
On Thursday, January 26 at 12:10p ET, Physician, sociologist, and postdoctoral fellow Victor Roy (Yale School of Medicine) will be discussing Capitalizing a Cure, his recently published book with University of California Press! This is both an in-person and zoom event.
In the NYT, Lina Khan defended the FTC’s recent proposal to ban noncompete agreements in employment contracts. Seems pretty convincing.
Today at 3p ET, Sanjukta Paul, Seth Harris, and Elizabeth Wilkins will be discussing the proposed rule on the Power at Work blogcast. Tune in!
On the Ezra Klein Show, Katharina Pistor discusses The Code of Capital.
