The rise of the “economic style of reasoning” in the 1960s cannot be properly understood without attending to the political fallout of earlier decades. Institutional economists and social Keynesians did not just fall out of academic fashion or become irrelevant to the problems at hand. Instead, many were forced out of government or toward the political center by charges of disloyalty to the U.S. government.
The simple supply and demand curves that today’s policymakers learned in Ec 10 in the 1990s are guiding the highest levels of policymaking in various agencies and Congressional offices today. Given this troubling reality, should we seek to reform the economic style, so that it more accurately reflects the true benefits of government action, or should we attempt to side-step it entirely in favor of a “deontological style”?
In charting economists’ pernicious influence on public policy, Beth Popp Berman contrasts an “economic style,” which focuses on efficiency, choice, and competition, with an alternative approach that favors equality, stability, and democratic participation. But that framing is not faithful to the actual debates that took place, out of which the economic style achieved its dominance, because it gives no account of the alternative economic views and theories that were displaced.
Why have Democrats remained committed to an incrementalist, modestly ambitious vision of governance, even as the country has faced unprecedented challenges? One critical yet underappreciated piece of the explanation is the rise of a distinctive “economic style of reasoning” that has become prevalent in Washington.
Anti-trafficking laws and policies in the United States — in particular, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) — define certain types of coerced work as unlawful forced labor. Paradoxically, the TVPA’s operation also enables status coercion by casting trafficked workers as either “victims” or “criminals” once they are removed from involuntary servitude. The prevailing anti-trafficking legal regime subjects these workers, especially immigrant workers of color, to coercive conditions that persist in the criminal and immigration enforcement systems.
Playing through pain or while injured is a common practice in college athletics, as players fear losing access to the social mobility that their position makes available. Players are coerced to “just do it,” surrendering their agency to practices that border on deviant, both physically and psychologically.
While employers have long conflated status with vulnerability, workers are starting to show how status itself can also be as a source of power — one that the courts, co-workers, and the public increasingly see as justification for broad-based change.
Workers from the Sustainable Economies Law Center share some memorable moments with clients that have transformed how they approach radical real estate law.
Employers wield power over workers by virtue of control over their institutional status and not solely, or even principally, by virtue of the power to cut off wages. Yet, in attempting to distinguish “status” and “economic” coercion, we must avoid the idea that status is implicitly non-economic and the economy operates apart from the social.
Economic coercion is not the only power dynamic that shapes labor relations. In a range of cases – including prison laborers, welfare workers, college athletes, and graduate students – employers exercise power over workers by controlling their “status” and all of the rights, privileges, and opportunities that such status confers.
Building worker and union power across the various sectors of the 21st century economy requires both scaling up from our dysfunctional firm-based system of collective bargaining, as well as scaling down to the community level to enable greater self-determination over persistent assaults to decent daily conditions of living.
To understand this precarious constitutional moment, we must look back not only to our forgotten anti-oligarchic tradition, but also to the strategies, practices, and ideas that led to earlier moments of retrenchment.
Hyper-commodified property – imbued with value by public infrastructure, developed at its “highest and best use” from an income generation perspective, and then taxed – is in theory a boon for municipal governments. In reality, urban fiscal and land use policies become caught up in cycles of price appreciation and rent-seeking. To reverse this spiral, municipal leaders must both reform currently regressive property taxation regimes and implement tax policies that expressly curb rent-seeking and speculation.
Under financialized capitalism, corporate investors value homes not solely or primarily for rental income, or even as assets that can be bought and sold—but rather because they serve as collateral. Three episodes of institutional change in housing markets underscore the importance of not only decommodifying land and housing, but decollateralizing it.
In the housing context, a law to facilitate countervailing power must be geared toward encouraging tenant participation at the grassroots, building-by-building level, and it must be sufficiently robust so as to check the enormous power of corporate, financialized real estate.
