U.S. childcare policy increasingly drives resources into large, formal centers under the banner of “quality assurance.” This trend has devastating impacts on home-based providers and the working families they serve.
By inviting their members to learn bureaucracies and hold them accountable, the Gray Panthers empowered elderly people to see themselves as experts capable of disentangling convoluted bureaucracies and reshaping them to better address local needs.
In Braddock, Pennsylvania – home to America’s first mill for the mass production of steel – more than a third of residents now live beneath the poverty line. How did Braddock go from a steel town to a hospital town to broke?
The public square is too often a place of surveillance, violence, hate, and subordination, with members of historically marginalized groups bearing the brunt of these harms. Privacy rights enable marginalized communities to enrich the public sphere while protecting themselves from violence and subordination.
The pernicious effects of the divided welfare state are well known. Yet its darkest legacy may be how private health care benefits transmuted ill and aging bodies into rich and predictable streams of revenue.
A system of employer-based health benefits created not only a fragmented health care financing structure but also an extremely powerful and consolidated industry that now resists changes to that structure.
Postwar steelworkers and contemporary healthcare workers inhabited strikingly different economic circumstances. Yet in both eras, courts allocated to companies various powers they could use to impose market discipline on workers, thereby facilitating the degradation of work.
What happens when the factory is gone and the working class has been rendered dispersed and invisible? In this post, Gabriel Winant kicks off a symposium on his recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America.
Given the human condition of inevitable uncertainty and fragility, societal prosperity depends on supporting diversely situated knowledge and inclusive power—not on maximizing rewards for a few seemingly superior winners.
The LPE Blog introduces a particularly effective way to begin ridding the law of neoliberalism: the vulnerability theory.
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. Like many other new shiny things, it ended with disappointment. Emmanuel Macron’s victory in 2017 was hailed as the advent of ‘le nouveau monde’ vis-à-vis the old political elites—a glimmer of hope in the…
Embracing the terms “economy” and “political economy,” as LPE has done, risks – unless we are careful – invoking just the kind of separate, reified realm that we are trying to critique. In our view, defining “the economy,” and studying how legal institutions have done so, should be central issues that LPE scholarship aims to address.
More so than blind faith in the market, U.S. family policy embraces the principle that government should not intrude into parents’ choices on whether and how to raise children.
Supporting families and ending poverty requires universalism. But, given the racialized nature of poverty, universalism is not enough.
What drives free-market family policy is a fundamentally wrongheaded view about the economy and the ends it should serve. US policymakers equate the economy with markets alone, and then treat rising GDP as the sum total of economic success. But the economic system, properly conceived, is, simply yet more broadly, the system for getting people the resources they need to flourish—material, caretaking, educational, and leisure—individually and collectively. (This is the first post in a symposium.)
