Although it has hardly broken through the parochialism of the US news cycle, India is currently experiencing what is perhaps the largest strike wave in world history. In this post, Veena Dubal interviews Navyug Gill about the strikes, the agricultural reforms that led to them, what those outside India can learn from them, and what the future might portend.
American negotiation theory started as, and for a long time remained, an engagement with labor and class relations. When early scholars developed their theories of negotiation in the context of workplace conflict, they did so in a moment when many workers were familiar enough with Marxist theories of class struggle to readily believe that some differences—for example, between management and labor—were not reconcilable, no matter how one performed in a negotiation. In this context, negotiation theorists aimed to open a space for potentially harmonious group relationships by introducing the concept of “integration”— the idea that labor and management could reorient their interests by creating new common values together.
Automated hiring systems are paradoxical. Although often the stated reason for adopting them is to curtail human bias, they frequently end up exacerbating the biases they’re meant to correct. Even as employment discrimination continues to morph with the introduction of new technologies, so, too, should the law change to meet it head to head.
Sandeep Vaheesan interviews Frank Pasquale about his forthcoming book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI.
Two pandemic policy stories have been coming to a head: (1) the push for another relief bill as a key CARES Act unemployment insurance benefit expires on July 31, and (2) the ongoing national child-care crisis as school closures for the fall are announced amidst the virus’ resurgence. What connects them is kids’ needs for care and families’ needs for economic support when they—predominantly mothers, of course—perform that caring labor. A little-noticed feature of the CARES Act supports care for children who must stay home due to school closures.
As the COVID-19 crisis rages on, individuals around the world are now thrown into a work-from-home, digitally-enabled “new normal” of the workplace. For most white-collar workers, homes have become offices, and boundaries between work and domestic life are being reshuffled. This shift, however, is just an acceleration of prior developments well under way since the beginning…
This post, an exchange between Andrew Hart, Marshall Steinbaum, and Daniel Markovits, continues their debate from our March 2020 series discussing The Meritocracy Trap.
The Meritocracy Trap’s account of the relationships among elite education, skill-biased technical change, and rising economic inequality is, in my mind, one of the book’s most important arguments, even as it is undoubtedly one of the least discussed. I’m therefore delighted and grateful that Gordon chose to focus his attention on these matters.
This is the third post in our series discussing The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits. Click here to read all posts in the series. I am grateful to the LPE Blog for hosting this exchange about The Meritocracy Trap. Today’s post will take up Hart’s and Steinbaum’s post and focus on facts, and tomorrow’s will turn to Gordon’s post…
This post turns our attention to The Meritocracy Trap’s argument that industrial policy contributed to the technological innovations that over-reward elite workers at the expense of the poor and working class, and that industrial policy will be essential to build a fairer economy.
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.
Taking up Anne Alstott & Ganesh Sitaraman’s arguments in favor of the public option, this post makes a case for universal labor and employment rights.
Inspired by Anne Alstott & Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Public Option, this post suggests that it is time to tell new stories about the nature and purpose of economic institutions, and that infrastructural investments should be put to work to ensure there is a world we can retire into.
If “law and political economy” examines the role of law in constituting and regulating marketcraft and statecraft, one way of “doing” LPE is to look for the role of law in managing the processes by which capitalists extract value from activity putatively outside “the economy.”
This post comes out of the early career workshop ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, which took place at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford, on the 7th of October 2019. Plenty of leftists continue to make the case for limiting migration and enforcing border restrictions. For example, in the UK, union…
