Woke Capital?
Anti-monopolists are right to worry about the concentrated power of institutional investors, but they are wrong to treat them as all bad. Common ownership presents an opportunity for the left to divide the interests of capitalists.
Pricing Power: Market Governance and the Texas Blackouts
What the “deregulation” of electricity provision–and the ideology of marginal cost pricing that buttressed it–has to do with the catastrophic failures of electricity provision in Texas.
Reconstructing the Algebra of Race and Rights
I follow Patricia Williams, Angela Harris & Aysha Pamukcu, in arguing universal rights, to basic income and other resources, are insufficient but necessary ingredients for justice. Indeed, I argue for permanent, non-discretionary funding of these rights. No one truly knows how much money the U.S. government spends encoding and encasing private property rights, much less private capital’s rights to coordinate or contract. In many ways, these costs are “baked into” society. So, ultimately, should it be for rights to income, healthcare, housing, education, employment for all.
Universal Basic Income, Racial Justice, Climate Justice
UBI as part of the project of building collaborative security for all.
Climate Change and Racial Capitalism
Despite the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable populations who have been largely ignored due to their racialization, legal scholarship on climate displacement has often adopted a doctrinal approach that fails to analyze the underlying systemic causes of the climate crisis and its relationship to race and racism.
An Environmentalism for LPE: Jed Purdy’s This Land is Our Land
Law and political economy is on a roll. The Law & Political Economy Project is about to host its inaugural conference. The Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law has launched a journal dedicated to LPE scholarship. LPE student organizations at law schools across the country have sprouted. After two years, this…
Human Waste Management
In a previous post, I gave two cheers for “reproduction” as a useful verb to think with when trying to understand the relationship between “political economy” and the social-ecological world within LPE. I held back that third cheer out of a rhetorical concern. As I put it then, “‘Social reproduction’” might imply that there is…
The Failure of Market Solutions and the Green New Deal – Pt 2
As I argued in Part I of this post, we need to rethink not only the scope of state intervention in the economy, but what exactly the economy is. Instead of focusing on the industrial manufacturing “inside” the economy and trying to clean up the externalities that inevitably spill out, we need an economic policy…
The Failure of Market Solutions and the Green New Deal – Pt 1
For the three decades that climate change has been a political issue, it has been understood primarily as an instance of severe “market failure”: as the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change explains, “greenhouse gas emissions are externalities and represent the biggest market failure the world has seen.” In other words, carbon…
The Green New Deal: What’s Green? What’s New? What’s the Deal?
During their first weeks in the new U.S. Congress, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues already have done something no other American political figure has managed for decades. They have got the whole country, and indeed much of the world, talking about massively transformative public investment as a real prospect. The ‘Green New Deal’ exceeds…
The App and the Operating System: Neoliberalism and “Social Reproduction”
In the LPE community, issues of race, class, sexuality, and environment are sometimes referred to collectively as “social and ecological reproduction.” In this post and others to follow, I want to think about the place of the social and the ecological in “law and political economy.” As others have written on this blog, one of…
Environmental Trumpism at Bears Ears
The enormities keep coming. The Trump Administration is especially busy in environmental and natural resources law, where the executive branch can get a lot done without Congress. There’s the elimination of the Clean Power Plan, the revival of offshore drilling, withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, repeal of rules to protect streams from…
Just Transitions?
“Either Way the Outlook is Dire, Especially for the Poor.” So concludes a journalist after reviewing a draft report by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the environmental justice and human rights consequences of climate change. The 800-plus page report, which is not yet publicly available, details the effects of a 1.5 degree…