Standard cost-benefit analysis exacerbates inequality by assigning greater weight to benefits that accrue to the rich. But it need not. Here are three strategies for bringing concerns about distribution within the CBA framework.
Elite white capital created housing for middle-class whites built by working-class whites. Nowhere in this process, nor in the profit of lending, the employment of housing construction, or the long-term appreciation of white homeownership, was there a meaningful place for African Americans to bridge racial economic inequality.
Two entrenched features of cost-benefit analysis ensure that the benefits of regulatory measures addressing climate change and racial injustice will be diminished and deformed in the process of valuing them: discounting and monetary valuation.
Introducing an LPE symposium on the promise, the perils, and the possible future of cost-benefit analysis.
Every year, governments and public entities wrestle with tough decisions about how they will fund their communities, and every year we absolve Wall Street of its role in siphoning money away from our public budgets. Enough is enough.
Dependence on public debt is a hallmark of democratic capitalist governance. How, then, can we ensure that the interests of private investors do not overtake the needs of the people that debt is meant to serve?
Replacing the liberal subject with the vulnerable one, and the responsive state with the restrained one, exposes the ways in which current corporate jurisprudence is blind to the allocation of resilience in society. Introducing vulnerability theory to corporate law may therefore help to ensure that all stakeholders have equal access to the corporation’s resources and assets.
The laws that apply to market activities have long catered to the interests of seasoned market actors. Who, then, is to watch out for us lay market users?
American cities’ reliance on municipal debt must be understood as part of a larger structural reliance on concentrated, mobile capital.
Given the human condition of inevitable uncertainty and fragility, societal prosperity depends on supporting diversely situated knowledge and inclusive power—not on maximizing rewards for a few seemingly superior winners.
The LPE Blog introduces a particularly effective way to begin ridding the law of neoliberalism: the vulnerability theory.
Municipal bond finance is an important technology, but is it more like a hammer or an automobile?
By documenting how public debt produced our present nightmare, Destin Jenkins allows us to dream about using public money to mend the ills of our era.
Los Angeles’s King-Drew Medical Center, a public hospital originally intended to provide Black residents with quality healthcare, is a cautionary tale about using bond financing to advance racial equality.
I thank the Law and Political Economy Project for inviting me to participate in this blog symposium on capitalism and the courts. I begin by stating the obvious: that we live in a capitalist economic system and a political system that aspires to being democratic. There is clearly considerable tension between these systems. Most capitalists…
