LPE Originals
Six Reactions to the Silicon Valley Bank Debacle
Six money and banking experts offer their initial reactions to the Silicon Valley Bank debacle.
LPE Originals
Putting Rural Communities on the (Broadband) Map
Broadband access in rural areas in the United States is not only a market failure, but a market disaster, as private providers have little interest in serving expensive, hard-to-reach places. In its most recent attempt to bridge the rural-urban digital divide, Congress allocated $42.5 billion for broadband deployment, the distribution of which is to be determined by the FCC’s national broadband maps. Yet these maps, which themselves have been outsourced to private actors, have consistently exaggerated broadband availability, depriving many rural communities of much-needed funding and a voice in this critical infrastructural issue.
LPE Originals
The Merger of Government and Religion
An alliance between religious and economic conservatives is playing a central yet overlooked role in the resurgence of concentrated economic power in America, resulting in the transfer of public funds, services, and decision-making away from more democratic institutions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of “government-religious hospitals”: these hospitals are state owned, yet religion permeates their halls, and faith dictates the care they offer. To mitigate the risk that these arrangements pose, we must make innovative use of LPE’s tools, including antitrust, public utility regulation, and public options.
LPE Originals
Regulation’s Role in Geographic Inequality
For decades now, we have been in an era of geographic divergence, with “superstar” cities and certain regions capturing growth, while others fall behind. Dominant explanations for this phenomenon focus largely on inexorable economic forces, such as globalization or the benefits of concentrating talent. Yet these explanations leave out a critical factor: the effects of specific regulatory choices on economic geography. From the Progressive and New Deal Eras through roughly the 1970s, the United States had a system of structural regulation in transportation, energy, communications, and banking that was designed to disperse economic activity. Deregulation naturally had the opposite effect: it concentrated economic activity and growth.
LPE Originals
The Law and Political Economy of Rural America
If you read the New York Times or listen to certain economists, you’ve probably heard the following story: rural regions in America are economically unsustainable, irrationally resentful, and increasingly obsolete. An LPE lens can help us see why this narrative is mistaken. If we want to understand the story of rural America, we need to begin by examining the governing choices — the laws and institutions — that have disadvantaged rural communities. By revealing the human agency that shapes our collective fates, we can see that new and better possibilities remain within our collective control.
LPE Originals
Can Consumer Law Protect Workers?
A growing number of employers are relying on Training Repayment Agreement Provisions to discourage workers from quitting. Courts, meanwhile, have routinely rejected legal challenges that claim these agreements violate employment laws, such as wage-and-hour laws and non-compete limitations. There is, however, another legal mechanism to stop this harmful and mobility-restricting practice: consumer law. When firms treat workers as their consumers by selling them services and credit products, the workers become worker-consumers and consumer law becomes work law.
LPE Originals
“What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?” Dismantling Neoliberal Pieties One Sector at a Time
Electricity, trucking, telephones, and banking: each of these sectors represents an exception to the mainstream model of efficient markets. They are typified by network effects, positive spillovers, high startup costs, and highly variable load rates. They have also experienced severe degradation from the privatization and deregulation that pervade life in the past half century. Networks, Platforms & Utilities promises a new approach to these sectors and others, one that makes the book an important pedagogical pathway for the emerging Law and Political Economy movement.
LPE Originals
The Political Economy of NPU Law
What happens when we stop generalizing about the economy from the starting point of the grain market, as neoclassical models all seem to, and start generalizing from the post office, or the operating system? That’s the kind of question that Networks, Platforms, and Utilities puts on the table, and it is a major accomplishment. From an LPE perspective, however, one might worry that the book’s current approach is insufficiently attuned to the “political” part of political economy.
LPE Originals
Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy
This week at the blog, we’re sharing a few of our favorite posts from Notice & Comment’s recent symposium on Networks, Platforms, and Utilities, a new casebook by Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton, and Lev Menand. First up: the authors explain why it’s time to revive the field of “regulated industries” and to recover the idea that public interest demands a substantial measure of public control over society’s infrastructural resources.
LPE Originals
Eight Reactions to the FTC’s Proposed Ban on Non-competes
Eight friends of the blog offer their initial reactions to the FTC’s proposed rule to ban non-compete agreements.
LPE Originals
What the Telegraph Can Teach Us About the Moral Economy
As we grapple with the law’s ability to address today’s most powerful corporations, one interesting yet largely forgotten set of cases can help us find our bearing: the “death telegram” cases. These suits involved claims for emotional distress against telegraph corporations for failing to deliver telegrams involving the death or illness of a family member. Astonishingly, nearly half the state courts that encountered these claims allowed them, in spite of the long-established common law rule that absent physical injury, mental anguish alone could not be recognized in law. This exception was justified, in part, because the companies were seen as “public service corporations” – a monopolistic business entity that controlled access to a vital public resource and had special emotional duties to its customers. What would it mean to revive such a conception of the corporation today?
LPE Originals
Your Boss Doesn’t Care About You
Through redistribution, or perhaps a scheme cooperative ownership, we can mitigate inequality while still harnessing the power of markets. This is, at least, the promise of market socialism. Yet all markets, even socialist markets, require its participants to act with a certain set of motives if they are to produce efficient outcomes. And it is these motives that inhibit us from caring about one another in our productive activities. To avoid such alienation, we must decommodify the means of production and reallocate control of capital from private corporations to local workers and municipalities.
LPE Originals
Saving Industrial Policy from Shareholder Primacy
Renewed attention to industrial policy has the potential to accelerate decarbonization and expand our productive capacities. If we are to realize this promise, however, we must guard against the diversion of public investment to private coffers. In this post, Lenore Palladino, Reed Shaw, and Will Dobbs-Allsopp explain how the Biden Administration can limit the negative effects of shareholder primacy on industrial policy.
LPE Originals
Corporate Personhood & Corporate Purpose: A Response to Carly Knight
By
Dan Rohde
In a recent post, Carly Knight argues that resuscitating the vision of the corporation as a “creation of the state” is an important part of reclaiming the progressive argument for increased corporate accountability. In this response, Dan Rohde suggests that, rather than subscribe to one unified theory of “the corporation,” progressives would be better served by attending to the roles and purposes that the huge variety of legal entities play in our society, and determining their rights, protections, and powers accordingly.
LPE Originals
Energy Price Shocks and the Failures of Neoliberalism
By
William Boyd
The global energy price shocks of the past two years have made it painfully clear that energy cannot be treated as an ordinary commodity. They also offer an opportunity to rethink the push to liberalize energy markets over the past forty years, and particularly the use of markets for electricity provisioning.