At the Blog
On Monday, Nicholas Handler made the legal and political case for defending civil servant labor unions. These unions, he explains, play a double role in our democratic life: they serve as a check on presidential abuses of power, while also expanding state capacity and thus enabling presidents to turn campaign promises into reality.
On Wednesday, Ava Liu argued that Universal Basic Income proposals often serve a deceptive function in labor automation discourse. By portraying technological unemployment as inevitable rather than socially determined, UBI proposals obscure the critical role that power structures and market dynamics play in shaping technological innovation and deployment.
In LPE Land
Last call for new Spring Scholarship: did you or a scholar whose work you love have an article accepted this submission season? If so, let us know! Later this month, we’ll be highlighting some of the hottest LPE and LPE-adjacent forthcoming work from this cycle. Send nominations to managingeditor@lpeblog.org with a short description of the piece, where it will be forthcoming, and if available, a link to SSRN. Self-nominations are highly encouraged.
On Tuesday, May 13 at 12:30 ET, LPE@HLS will be hosting a conversation between Vijayashri Sripati and Aziz Rana on Professor Sripati’s recent book, Making Globalization Happen: The Untold Story of Power, Profits, Privilege. The event will take place virtually on Zoom (webinar link here), and all are welcome!
Over at The Ideas Letter, Bernard Harcourt argues that the second Trump presidency is best understood as the demolition phase of a new offensive in a decades-long counterrevolution.
In Democracy, Alex Hertel-Fernandez explains why Democrats need to move Beyond Deliverism and focus on policymaking as power-building.
At the American Economic Liberties Project, Helaine Olen and Laurel Kilgour released model legislation aimed at tackling rising pet care prices by addressing the corporate consolidation of vet practices.
In the Boston Review, Alex Gourevitch argues that to defend the right to protest on campus, we need to build a broad and unwavering consensus about the speciousness of the rationales being offered for today’s draconian crackdowns.
