Liberate the Meritocrats—From Their Bosses
Marshall Steinbaum and Andrew Hart argue that Professor Markovits’ The Meritocracy Trap omits capitalists from the story in part by relying too heavily on the flawed theory of human capital.
Searching: social reproduction
The Law and Political Economy Project
Service Workers or Servile Workers? Migrant Reproductive Labor and Contemporary Global Racial Capitalism
This post is part of a series on Care Work. Read the rest of the series here. Grassroots migrant worker activists, particularly those working as domestic workers or care workers, have characterized their labor experiences as “servitude,” “modern-day slavery,” and “bondage.” They use these terms to describe both their workplace conditions and the power dynamics…
Inaugural LPE Project Conference – Call for Papers!
By
LPE Editors
Call for Papers: “Law and Political Economy: Democracy After Neoliberalism” Over the past several years, a growing group of legal scholars have begun to center questions of “law and political economy” as part of a deliberate effort to enable a critical transformation in legal thought. Joined by the insight that the “the economy” cannot be…
Human Waste Management
This post explores “extraction” as a keyword for analyzing the social and ecological world. Like “reproduction,” “extraction” has a Marxist pedigree, but it also carries at least four connotations that “reproduction” doesn’t. The first is non-renewability; the second is corruption; the third is waste; and the fourth is violence.
The Failure of Market Solutions and the Green New Deal – Pt 2
Economic policy must take seriously the social and ecological functions that have been treated as external to the economy altogether
“A Place to Die”: LPE in the 1970s
By
Karen Tani
As a historian working in a law school, I think often about what history adds to the study of law and the training of future lawyers. Rarely does history provide an obvious road map to solving new legal problems, but it does at least two other things well: (1) it helps explain why the legal…
Neoliberalism and Higher Education Finance: Breaking out of the Ideology
By
Luke Herrine
My earlier post on for-profit colleges discussed a special instance the limits that a neoliberal lens places on a progressive vision for higher education. In this post I discuss the more general phenomenon and an alternative approach to thinking about higher education. In doing so, I draw from a nascent project that Frank Pasquale and…
A Neoliberal Masterpiece?
In our market supremacist era, is anyone allowed to bring their full self to the marketplace and the workplace? Or must we all be “everywhere and only homo oeconomicus,” as Wendy Brown put it? One of the more arresting aspects of the Supreme Court’s recent Masterpiece Cakeshop case is how neoliberal it isn’t. If neoliberalism casts us…
Partisan Warriors and Political Courts
Thursday’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing was a stomach churning, nauseating affair. Christine Blasey Ford laid her life on the tracks, knowing full well that trains delivering important men can rarely be stopped. That was enough, but then came the turn: Brett Kavanaugh, partisan warrior. He tore into Democrats for a process almost entirely dictated by…
Law and Political Economy: Toward a Manifesto
This is a time of crises. Inequality is accelerating, with gains concentrated at the top of the income and wealth distributions. This trend – interacting with deep racialized and gendered injustice – has had profound implications for our politics, and for the sense of agency, opportunity, and security of all but the narrowest sliver of…
How Should Democrats Respond to the “Migrant Crisis”?
In the wake of their recent defeat, Democrats’ natural tendency will be to concede the issue of immigration to Republicans and embrace cruelty-lite versions of their opponents’ positions — a strategy that is bound to fail. Instead, Democrats need to offer their own agenda for immigration and internal migration. To do so, they should look to institutional experiments from a forgotten past.
(Some of) the Best Recent Global LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship
By
Editors
The LPE Blog goes worldwide, bringing you some of our favorite global LPE and LPE-adjacent scholarship from 2024.
The Unlikely Victors
The intellectuals of the neoliberal movement are best understood as the losers of societal change — rearguard protectionists who decided that rather than concede to democracy, they would subvert and delegitimize it.
The Political Economy of Trad Dad Populism
By
Kate Redburn
A new tendency within American conservatism is borrowing leftwing critiques of the rightwing status quo. What is the Trad Dad Populist and what kind of political economy does he hope to construct?
The Rise of Neoliberal Public Finance
How did the American state come to be so extravagant in its recourse to public debt issuance, yet so selectively austere in its public spending choices? To answer this question, we need to understand how two rival schools of thought — Virginia school public choice and supply side economics — converged around the imperative to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending.