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LPE Originals

Age and the Lure of Class Reductionism

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Gerontocracy in America has elicited a common refrain from critics: that class, not age, is the real problem. Yet this kind of class reductionism has largely been rejected when it comes to gender and race, and age should be no exception. To understand oligarchic power on a mass scale in America, we must attend to the extensive network of formal and structural advantages that age-based policies confer on tens of millions of people.
LPE Originals

You Didn’t Earn That

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When defending income inequality, high-earners often appeal to an old left-wing idea: that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labor and should be paid the value of their productive contribution. In complex economies, however, the size of any worker’s productive contribution depends on collective labor that the market systematically fails to credit.
LPE Originals

Law & Political Economy, or Legal Theory & Capitalism?

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What is this thing called capitalism? What, if anything, is the use of legal theory in understanding capitalist society? Is anything gained, or anything lost, if we replace the phrase “Law and Political Economy” with “Legal Theory and Capitalism”? Answers to these questions (and more!) in a hot new double issue of Law & Contemporary Problems.
LPE Originals

Taking Legislative Primacy Seriously

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As we work toward a durable democratic future, a commitment to legislative primacy can serve as an orienting north star. Reaching that goal, however, will require using both legislative and executive tools, especially while we are working with an imperfect, hobbled, and significantly co-opted legislature.
LPE Originals

Muskism as Fordism

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Coined by a German economist in 1926, Fordism came to describe the dominant political-economic order of the mid-twentieth century. Could “Muskism” play a similar role in the twenty-first? How should we understand its distinctive regime of accumulation, and what kind of social contract does it propose?
LPE Originals

How Corporations Hijacked Identity Politics

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Over the past fifty years, corporate advocates have co-opted the language and tactics of modern social movements to graft identity-based attributes onto the corporate entity. These new, personalized dimensions are deployed to weaken corporate regulations and, unlike more traditional forms of lobbying, endure beyond any single campaign. Taken together, they represent a reinvention of the modern corporation.
LPE Originals

Of LPE and Legislative Supremacy

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Beau Baumann’s case for legislative supremacy offers a compelling vision for the left. However, branding it as a form of “constitutional politics” risks obscuring its deeper claim: that nothing, not even the Constitution, should stand above democratic lawmaking. His vision will also face significant opposition from liberals and progressives, many of whom remain tempted by courts and presidential power.
LPE Originals

Regulating Hours, Dismantling Work

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In recent decades, work hours have sharply diverged: high-wage workers are logging more time on the job, while low-wage workers face shrinking hours. Rather than trying to fix this imbalance by creating more work, policymakers should redistribute work through stronger overtime protections and a shorter workweek. Yet for this approach to succeed, highly paid white-collar workers will have to confront their own attachment to a work-based social order.
LPE Originals

The American Media Polycrisis: Cascading Layers of Capture

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In countries facing democratic backsliding, attention often centers on state capture of the press. Recent U.S. media failures, however, demand a wider lens. Authoritarian encroachment here rests on deeper layers of capitalist and oligarchic capture. Understanding how these different layers interact and reinforce one another is a necessary first step toward building a more democratic media system.