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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.
LPE Originals

Government Failures and Private Options

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Increasingly progressives are championing “public options” as a response to various market failures. Public options in the all-important health care space stand in for old-school regulation of private providers and old-school redistribution (to better support those struggling to pay for private insurance and medical services). Public options in banking, likewise championed by leading progressives, work substantially…
LPE Originals

Woke Capital?

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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.
LPE Originals

The Politics of Price Making: Why LPE Needs to Engage with Market Design

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Once we recognize (yet again) that price making cannot be understood in neutral, functionalist terms, efforts to design new markets become impossible to separate from politics and political economy. Viewed in this way, prices are not simply signals or pieces of information that emerge from markets, but also objects of struggle—an insight that one can find in Max Weber’s understanding of markets and prices, in Joan Robinson’s vigorous mid-century critique of mainstream economics, as well as in the work of institutional economists and legal realists, such as John Commons and Robert Lee Hale who viewed prices and price relationships in the context of a broader economy of mutual coercion structured by shifting sets of background entitlements.