Despite mainstream economists’ fixation on relations among natural persons, ours is a world teeming with abstract legal entities—corporations—chartered by the public authority, managed by corporate fiduciaries. Such public-private hybrids illustrate the “political” in “political economy.”
This post introduces a symposium on heterodox methodologies in the study of political economy.
Yesterday, we posted the beginning of Duncan Kennedy’s testimony before the Massachusetts State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Housing. Below is the second half of the testimony. Claim 3: State provision of more section 8 certificates and subsidized affordable projects can resolve the housing crisis. More section 8s and more rent-restricted affordable subsidized units could in…
The Massachusetts State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Housing is currently considering two bills that would revive rent control in the state. The first bill caps rent increases for not-owner-occupied residential housing at the CPI not to exceed 5%, with an income eligibility proviso. The second much more ambitious bill authorizes localities to choose among a…
The central fallacy of the arguments against the Loan Shark Prevention Act, including Professor Fleming’s, is the limitation of regulation to merely attempting to steer the market. I argue here the purpose of regulation should instead be to carry out a democratic vision of how our society, including the economy, functions. The Loan Shark Prevention Act is an ideal start to pushing back against the decades of economic control by a select, mostly white and male, few.
In May 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled the Loan Shark Prevention Act, a bill that would cap the cost of consumer credit nationwide. Under the bill, the total cost of a loan, calculated as an annualized percentage rate (APR), could not exceed 15%. If fees and interest are capped at 15% APR, lenders cannot recoup the costs of making and servicing small-dollar, short-term loans. Only charitable or government-subsidized institutions could lend at that low rate.
Here we discuss a type of organizing that has followed in the wake of mass commenting efforts, focused on analyzing the content of comments and ensuring their due consideration. Our central example comes from the Department of Education’s recent notice of a proposed rulemaking (NPRM) regarding the meaning of Title IX for complaints of sexual harassment (an umbrella legal term that includes sexual violence). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the activism around the ED’s interpretation of Title IX in the Obama years, the agency recorded over 124,000 comments—and spurred the creative cataloging initiative we spotlight here. By analyzing comments themselves, participants in this initiative seek to support public engagement with administrative law and vindicate the democratic values at the heart of notice-and-comment mandates.
In this anti-regulatory moment, notice-and-comment might seem a quaint artifact from a bygone age: with such meager regulatory output, especially aimed at industry, what is left to comment on? Instead, however, notice-and-comment has become a key tool of opponents of the current administration—a vehicle for mobilizing “grassroots experts” and enabling marginalized voices to speak against dehumanizing agency action.
Medicare would serve as the first real test of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned the allocation of any federal funds to entities that discriminated on the basis of race. The success of Title VI would depend on forging a strong relationship between officials administering the program and the civil rights movement. The change that ultimately resulted from this collaboration offers a concrete example of how democratic movements can leverage grassroots pressure, public enforcement and government spending power to transform sectors of the economy.
While the Medicare for America bill is arranged with great promise and enormous care, its real significance lies not in this snapshot description but in the distributional and politico-historical dynamics that its opt-out structure unleashes over time.
Legal scholars who care about how law creates wealth and power cannot afford to disregard the trust. As Katharina Pistor mentions in her recent book, The Code of Capital, the trust stands out as one of Anglo-American law’s “most ingenious modules for coding capital.” Trusts are a longstanding component of the “feudal calculus” that Pistor…
Since the 1970s, Congress and federal agencies have replaced regulator-established rates with market-derived pricing in many sectors of the U.S. economy. Electricity and natural gas are two such industries. Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) have abolished regulated rates and instituted market-based pricing in a part of the electricity and gas supply chains.…
Successful ideological entrepreneurs change policy-makers’ focus and their presumptions. Those on the right, in particular, have been very effective at shifting attention from core confrontations of capital and labor to peripheral conflicts among laborers. We see this repeatedly in inequality policy, where fundamental tensions between capital and labor are ignored, obfuscated, or trivialized by a…
Obama-era technocrats and Trump cronies may not agree on much, but they have made common cause against occupational licensing. That focus undermines important social objectives while obscuring far more important problems in the labor market. In this post, we cover the basics of licensing, and then reframe current attacks on it. In our next post,…
Focusing on antitrust, this post explores how a modern law and economics might look, and highlights the diverse normative implications of state-of-the-art economics. As this post demonstrates, taking economics seriously is consistent with many different policy positions.
