The pernicious effects of the divided welfare state are well known. Yet its darkest legacy may be how private health care benefits transmuted ill and aging bodies into rich and predictable streams of revenue.
A system of employer-based health benefits created not only a fragmented health care financing structure but also an extremely powerful and consolidated industry that now resists changes to that structure.
Postwar steelworkers and contemporary healthcare workers inhabited strikingly different economic circumstances. Yet in both eras, courts allocated to companies various powers they could use to impose market discipline on workers, thereby facilitating the degradation of work.
What happens when the factory is gone and the working class has been rendered dispersed and invisible? In this post, Gabriel Winant kicks off a symposium on his recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America.
The quest for “non-extractive finance” is filled with legal hurdles. This post examines how lawyers can support organizers working to imagine and build a better financial system.
In developing countries, inflation is often driven by the failure of the food supply chain. While economists are well-aware of this, they do not adequately value policies other than monetary policy for responding to inflation. It is time to discard this short-sighted approach.
To explain soaring energy prices, we must look beyond supply shortfalls and bottlenecks to the choices that governments have made about how to price energy.
Raúl Carrillo interviews Darrick Hamilton about the Fed’s approach to unemployment, the racialized harms of shifting the burden of price stability onto workers, and the long struggle for fair and full employment.
How inflation affects a country depends on how its currency is situated within the global monetary order. Peripheral states with subordinate currencies are both vulnerable to, and constrained by, monetary policy decisions at the core, an arrangement that penalizes the global periphery in ways that parallel historical patterns of uneven exchange.
The Fed was not designed to fight inflation, nor is it well equipped to do so. It is time for legislators to expand the macroeconomic policy toolkit.
Introducing a symposium on the hottest topic in macroeconomics.
Industrial agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, as well as a source of exploitation across the globe. Any just transition from fossil fuels must radically rethink current systems of food production and work towards reaching food sovereignty.
In theory, REDD+ is designed to be a win-win: it brings capital to economically struggling communities while ensuring that forests worldwide are protected for the good of the global community. Yet as theory of the Stranger King makes apparent, some colonialist approaches are softer and gentler than others — colonizing as invitees, rather than by force.
A just transition for probation officers will never appeal to everyone. Nevertheless, it provides a potentially powerful framework for people who have experienced the dehumanizing mental and physical toll of working in the carceral state.
During the past decade the concept of a “just transition” has expanded far beyond its roots in the labor movement’s concern for protecting displaced fossil fuel workers. Should we welcome this expansion of the concept? Or will this generic use of ‘just transition’ undermine its usefulness as a framing device to guide policy and discourse?
