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LPE Originals

The Political Economy of NPU Law

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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

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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

What the Telegraph Can Teach Us About the Moral Economy

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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

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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

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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

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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.

France illuminated at night
LPE Originals

Energy Price Shocks and the Failures of Neoliberalism

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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.
LPE Originals

How the Corporation Lost Its Image as a “Creature of State”

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Previously recognized as quasi-public institutions whose shareholders received corporate privileges in exchange for the fulfillment of public goods, corporations are today primarily understood to be private economic actors. This conceptual shift is in some ways quite puzzling. Despite the changing nature of the relationship between states and corporations throughout the 19th century, corporate business entities always, in practice, remained embedded in state and political institutions. How, then, did the image of the corporation as a “creature” or a “creation” of the state come to be replaced with an understanding of the corporation as a “pure creature of the market”?
LPE Originals

Who’s Afraid of Public Ownership?

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Despite growing interest in public ownership at the municipal and even national level, LPE scholars have expressed relatively little interest in the topic. This is a mistake: proposals for public ownership can unite the left by achieving multiple policy goals at once and provide an alternative vision of what society should look like.
LPE Originals

Economic Democracy at Work

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Workers should have enough representation on corporate boards to influence major decision making. Questions of institutional design should not stand in the way of this common sense reform.