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The Law and Political Economy Project
Symposium

When It Comes to the History of Economics, Don’t Think like an Economist

By

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.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 22, 2022

By LPE Editors

An LPE account of the global food crisis, two new entries in our symposium on Coerced, an amazing LPE job at HLS, a symposium on William Novak’s New Democracy, and some podcast episodes to help digest the Supreme Court’s most recent term.

Symposium

Status As Sword

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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.
Symposium

Labor Coercion and the Status/Economy Distinction

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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.
Symposium

Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment

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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.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 8, 2022

By LPE Editors

A call for courage in the wake of West Virginia v. EPA, a reckoning with the arc of the American rights tradition, and a discussion of what it would take to build worker and union power in the 21st century economy. Plus, an upcoming all-star Antimonopoly event and a recently released state-level antimonopoly reform guide.

Symposium

Collateral Cities

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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.
Essay

Bankruptcy as Social Safety Net

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By paying greater attention to who files bankruptcy, we can learn a great deal about the social and economic disparities that plague our society. By reforming and expanding access to bankruptcy, we can chip away at some of these disparities.