As Sam Moyn has recently argued, “class reductionism” fails to explain differentiation along the generational gradient — a pattern clearly visible in economics, politics, and ideology. Yet a clear picture of how age mediates class would reveal not gerontocracy, but capitalism and the fractionated class system it produces.
Employment discrimination law is primarily concerned with exclusion from good jobs. Yet this leaves unaddressed a corresponding problem: employers seeking out marginalized workers in order to reduce worker pay, degrade working conditions, and minimize the chance of unionization.
The rise of AI demands legislative action to mitigate its many risks. But rather than follow the same old regulatory playbook, Congress should instead embrace creative tax policy.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Between 1917 and 1921, twenty-one states passed criminal syndicalism laws. These laws, which were intended to help eliminate the Industrial Workers of the World, have largely faded from public memory. Looking back, however, we can see a formula for anti-left repression that has proven durable and widely appealing: the limitation of political speech and organizing in the name of property protection.
On this blog and elsewhere, Congress has recently been cast as a cure for our decrepit democracy. This push for legislative primacy is a mistake: it valorizes a deeply undemocratic institution, relies on a selective reading of the past, and distracts us from vital debates about the policies we should be pursuing and persuading others to support.
Industrial policy will often require picking winners: if there were already many domestic firms capable of producing the desired output, there would be no compelling reason for subsidy or special treatment. Yet in doing so, the government risks locking in dominant firms and foreclosing the competition it ultimately needs. How might policymakers avoid this trap?
A renewed focus on the cost of living crisis is a welcome and potentially unifying frame for the political left. Yet unless we confront the Trump administration’s consolidated economic, cultural, and bureaucratic power, any attempt to deliver an affordability agenda is bound to fail.
Gerontocracy in America has elicited a common refrain from critics: that class, not age, is the real problem. Yet this kind of class reductionism has largely been rejected when it comes to gender and race, and age should be no exception.
Is LPE scholarship anti-empirical? Has contemporary law and economics become a neutral social science? Don’t believe everything you hear in Chicago.
This past February, hundreds of scholars converged in downtown Richmond for the inaugural Association of Law and Political Economy conference. As interest in the field grows, a larger question looms: can a loose coalition on the academic left turn shared critiques of the status quo into a durable movement?
Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas offers a vision of AI guided by peace, dignity, and moral renewal. It stands in stark contrast to an American administration governing by meme, chaos, and willful self-destruction.
When defending income inequality, high-earners often appeal to an old left-wing idea: that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labor and should be paid the value of their productive contribution. But does this idea make sense in a complex, interdependent economy?
As policymakers pursue supply-side reforms to address rising housing costs, they must also confront a legal regime that affords tenants second-class status. Without confronting this anti-tenancy bias, abundance reforms risk producing more housing within the same inequitable framework.
The most pressing AI-driven crisis is the overestimation of AI’s capabilities and impacts, which has produced a historically large speculative AI bubble. To safeguard against this economic catastrophe, policymakers must confront and resist AI industry hype.
