Supporting families and ending poverty requires universalism. But, given the racialized nature of poverty, universalism is not enough.
What drives free-market family policy is a fundamentally wrongheaded view about the economy and the ends it should serve. US policymakers equate the economy with markets alone, and then treat rising GDP as the sum total of economic success. But the economic system, properly conceived, is, simply yet more broadly, the system for getting people the resources they need to flourish—material, caretaking, educational, and leisure—individually and collectively. (This is the first post in a symposium.)
The progressive antitrust narrative is based on profoundly flawed analysis of the farm economy. The break ’em up approach may distribute property rights in human and animal misery more evenly, but it does not address the exploitation at the heart of the system.
As markets began to usurp other forms of social regulation throughout the 20th century, metrics became increasingly central to the coordination of new spheres of market-mediated relations. More recently, digital metrics have been operationalized to facilitate the platformization of those domains. Platforms use automated scoring systems to rank content and actors across the markets they mediate. Search engines, e-commerce sites, and social media feeds all have ways to rank material and deliver it to users according to their calculation of “relevance.” This post explores metrics and gatekeeper power through the Google Scholar platform and its intermediation of the “scholarly economy”—the domain in which research is produced, consumed, bought and sold.
As law and political economy scholars take aim at the deficiencies of dominant modes of legal thought and chart a path for law to promote a more just and egalitarian society, they must also attend to the role of algorithmic systems and algorithmic thought in shaping political imaginations. By the same token, computer and information scientists interested in computation’s role in social reforms would do well to learn from the critiques and proposals of the LPE community.
As critiques of the centrality of neoliberal economic logic gain traction, we must take care that such work does not simply clear the path for an emerging hegemony of neoliberal computational logic. Instead, we must be attentive to proponents of the epistemic and political dominance of computational mechanisms, and we must critique them on similar grounds and with similar urgency.
In part two of this series, Susan Dianne Brophy interviews Anastasia Tataryn. Continuing their discussion on how law and markets intersect to produce subjects, and ways to rethink subjectivity in scholarship.
In part one of this series, Anastasia Tataryn interviews Susan Brophy regarding the importance of rethinking productivity, subjectivity, and value.
Whether or not an information fiduciary model would be the best way to regulate data governance, it is not guilty of many of the accusations that Lina Khan and David Pozen lob at it.
The threat of precarious work does not come exclusively from marketization swamping a shrinking welfare and regulatory state. It comes as well from a metastasizing and thoroughly racialized carceral state, one that simultaneously speaks the language of public violence and sings in the liberal key of choice. Even critical accounts of the criminal legal system fail to fully capture the relevance of this dynamic, focusing only on how it produces economic exclusion, not also incorporation on subordinated terms.
The relevance of LPE for Europe might not be instantly obvious. LPE in the U.S. gets part of its conceptual thrust from its opposition to the dominance of Law and Economics, a framework that never achieved the same kind of intellectual hegemony in Europe. But there is a European parallel that could ground critique: the guiding role that ordoliberalism has played in the structuring of the supranational economy. But to get a grip on what LPE has to offer in a critique of ordoliberalism, we must first explore how left legal thought in Europe has engaged with ordoliberalism so far.
The received narrative of free-market Hong Kong was indeed too good to be true, but it remains a necessary fantasy for advocates of neoliberal transformation.
There’s a widely accepted story that the US’s reliance on markets and paid work over direct government provision in supporting families derives from the country’s unique, longstanding economic ideology supporting free enterprise. A close attention to the historical record shows that this story is a myth.
The surge in US economic inequality since the 1970s was powerfully driven by politics and policy. Firms and individuals actively shaped market governance – from corporate governance to labor regulation – in their own favor and then took advantage of that favorable governance in the marketplace. This “inequality snowball” was particularly pronounced in the United States because firms were more aggressive in their business and political strategies and because the political system delivered more winner-take-all policy outcomes than the more consensual political systems of continental Europe and Japan.
The incorporation of empirical analysis via statistical methods into interpretive and normative legal frameworks calls for scrutiny into the nature of the role this input plays in the law. We can take lessons from disputes in statistical methodology and their use in the legal reasoning to better illuminate the more general relationship between “fact”-finding and normative judging. Let’s examine the sense in which racial discrimination can “cause” differential outcomes in police interactions, for example
