Skip to content
LPE Originals

The Rise of Neoliberal Public Finance

By

How did the American state come to be so extravagant in its recourse to public debt issuance, yet so selectively austere in its public spending choices? To answer this question, we need to understand how two rival schools of thought — Virginia school public choice and supply side economics — converged around the imperative to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending.
LPE Originals

The Re-Risking State: The Limits of Property Insurance in Florida

By

In Florida, insurers increasingly rely on external capital to prepare for the possibility of high loss climate events. Sophisticated financial tools such as insurance-linked securities provide a temporary solution to growing climate risk in coastal regions, but in the long run, they do not address the fundamental causes of the insurability crisis.
LPE Originals

Recovering the Left-Wing Free Trade Tradition

By

Since the late 20th century, free trade has been defended primarily by neoliberals who cared little about social justice or democracy. However, a longer examination of free trade’s relationship to left-wing politics paints a very different picture. Recovering the history of those who defended free trade from the left may help us envision an alternative to the escalating economic nationalism we see today.
LPE Originals

The Political Effects of Neoliberalism

By , ,

Why have less-educated Americans, long the base of the Democratic Party, flocked to Republicans in recent decades? New research shows that much of this change can be explained by the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy, as the party gradually moved away from its traditional emphasis on “predistribution policies” (favored by less-educated Americans), instead embracing redistributive tax-and-transfer policies (favored by more-educated Americans).
LPE Originals

The Vicious Spiral of Political and Economic Inequality

By ,

Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act, which slashed the highest marginal tax rate from 50 to 28 percent, was one of the largest and most regressive tax cuts in the history of the United States. New research shows that it also caused an increase in campaign contributions among the wealthy – demonstrating how rising economic and political inequality reinforce one another through public policy.
LPE Originals

Taking Media Out of the Market

By

The recent spate of job losses in journalism make evident the need for systemic alternatives to commercial media. Tweaking market mechanisms and scrambling for new business models is futile when the market itself is a core part of the problem. Our democracy requires that we disentangle news and information from capitalism — we need a horizon for journalism beyond the market.
LPE Originals

The Real Lessons We Should Draw from Claudine Gay’s Resignation

By

Free speech at universities hangs in the balance. But defending it will require much more than just resisting the assaults coming from billionaires and right-wing influencers. It will require reconnecting with the purposes and highest aims of the academy and building a political economy of higher education that can begin to truly deliver on them.
LPE Originals

Why Is Biden Endorsing Corporate Colonialism in Honduras?

By ,

A US-based, VC-backed company is suing the Honduran Government for shutting down the firm’s private, libertarian city-state. The lawsuit highlights how Investor-State Dispute Settlement provisions, written into US trade agreements across the world, allow corporations to extract billions of dollars from governments in the developing world for passing any regulation that might impinge on their profit margins.
LPE Originals

The Role of Law in Capitalism

By

Within the LPE movement, there is a broad consensus that “law is central to the creation and maintenance of structural inequalities in the state and the market” and that “class power is inextricably connected to the development of racial and gender hierarchies.” These claims, while often articulated in response to neoliberalism, go to the very origins of capitalism and its particular patterns of inequality.
LPE Originals

Climate Change and the Neoliberal Imagination

By

Neoliberal welfare economics has constrained our moral and political imagination and, in so doing, limited our ability to realistically advance climate justice. This can be seen by considering two policy proposals that appear to fit comfortably within the standard climate economic paradigm, but that offer a wider scope of possibility than conventionally allowed.
LPE Originals

The Opacity of Economic Coercion

By

At a time when human rights NGOs rigorously count civilian deaths in armed conflicts, no equivalent accounting is available to victims of a war waged via exchange rates, inflation, and interest rates. The opaque mechanisms through which economic coercion inflicts harm have made it difficult to identify causation, let alone to prosecute its agents under international law, while the rise of neoliberalism and an individualized human rights politics have led to a turn away from the concerns with economic coercion that animated post-colonial legal activism in the 1960s and 1970s.
LPE Originals

Damage Functions (Or Why I Am Mad at Economists)

By

Since the 1990s, mainstream economists have used past weather data to forecast the future costs of climate change. This mode of econometric prediction ignores the alarming tipping points and pervasive uncertainty that characterize our warming world.