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LPE Originals

The Road to Free-Market Family Policy

There’s a widely accepted story that the US’s reliance on markets and paid work over direct government provision in supporting families derives from the country’s unique, longstanding economic ideology supporting free enterprise. A close attention to the historical record shows that this story is a myth.

LPE Originals

Basic Income, Care, and Wages for Housework

The question of whether basic income can resolve the problem of unpaid care work and the status of care work more generally requires addressing how a basic income is financed, because it is only as a redistributive program that basic income can have an emancipatory effect for those whose work is obscured by the structure of modern capitalist economies and undervalued by the market. It is only by broadening our perspective, for the moment, away from the details of basic income as a social policy, and to basic income as a revolutionary perspective on capitalism, that the emancipatory effect becomes clear.

LPE Originals

UBI and Immigrants: Lessons from the Pandemic

Surely advocates of such programs do not envision Qatar as their model society. And yet it is too easy to imagine a version of a Gulf state arising from a basic income initiative that provides cash support to citizens, who no longer need to take work that is unsatisfying, while denying it to noncitizens, who are brought in do the difficult and dangerous jobs that remain.

LPE Originals

Not an “Achievement Gap”, a Racial Capitalist Chasm

Throughout this pandemic, transnational corporations and white parents alike have been sounding the “achievement gap” alarm under the guise of concern for “voiceless” Black and Brown children, but in service of their own neoliberal agendas. The students they speak of, however, can speak for themselves — and as they struggle through this time, with a fierce resilience that no young person should be forced to cultivate, their realities and their words call for more radical solutions.

LPE Originals

On Justice Ginsburg and the Political Economy of the Family

The argument that gender stereotypes structured law, and therefore shaped social identities and practices, is relatively familiar to historians and legal scholars. Less widely discussed is how gender ideologies influenced the development in the United States of what sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen termed a liberal welfare state. How did Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s vision of feminism fit in with other movements at the time?

LPE Originals

A Nightmare of Work and Care

At least since welfare reform, then, we have coexisted with a particularly monstrous work-life imbalance for low-income parents in which economic security, much less economic mobility for their children, remains forever out of reach. Americans have learned to live with punitive workfare as their only form of safety net assistance (or without it, as is the case for too many poor people ineligible even for subsistence benefits). Far from removing the crisis in care and work from polarized public debate, however, the pandemic has shown all too clearly that workfare ideology will not remain confined to the ever-shrinking welfare context, but has a life of its own.

LPE Originals

An Abolitionist Horizon for Child Welfare

This post is part of a series on Black Lives Matters. The COVID-19 pandemic and police killings of George Floyd and other Black men and women have starkly revealed society’s race and class-based inequality and brought unprecedented attention to the excesses of the carceral state. One arm of punitive state regulation, however, has gone largely undiscussed:…

LPE Originals

Where Is the Care in the CARES Act?

Two pandemic policy stories have been coming to a head: (1) the push for another relief bill as a key CARES Act unemployment insurance benefit expires on July 31, and (2) the ongoing national child-care crisis as school closures for the fall are announced amidst the virus’ resurgence. What connects them is kids’ needs for care and families’ needs for economic support when they—predominantly mothers, of course—perform that caring labor. A little-noticed feature of the CARES Act supports care for children who must stay home due to school closures.

LPE Originals

The “New Normal” Privatization of the Workplace

As the COVID-19 crisis rages on, individuals around the world are now thrown into a work-from-home, digitally-enabled “new normal” of the workplace. For most white-collar workers, homes have become offices, and boundaries between work and domestic life are being reshuffled. This shift, however, is just an acceleration of prior developments well under way since the beginning…

LPE Originals

LPE on COVID (vol 2)

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to bring you the best LPE work on COVID-19, we’re reposting a letter from Professor Noah Zatz to his City Counsel regarding evictions during the pandemic.