Law Commons^™

Models Of Other-Regarding Preferences And Redistribution, Matthew Dimick, David Rueda, Daniel Stegmueller

Journal Articles

Despite the increasing popularity of comparative work on other-regarding preferences, the implications of different models of altruism are not always fully understood. This article analyzes different theoretical approaches to altruism and explores what empirical conclusions we should draw from them, paying particular attention to models of redistribution preferences where inequality explicitly triggers other-regarding motives for redistribution. While the main contribution of this article is to clarify the conclusions of these models, we also illustrate the importance of their distinct implications by analyzing Western European data to compare among them. We draw on individual-level data from the European Social Survey fielded …

Prolegomenon To A Defense Of The City Of Gold, David A. Westbrook

Journal Articles

In recent political contests, economics has been used as a subjective language of disputation and identification, contradicting the field's traditional aspirations to objectivity, even science. In both partisan politics and the related but not identical bifurcation between "populist" and "establishment" or "elite" discourse, positions have become routinized into antagonistic tropes. This poses a serious problem for the United States, which uses political discourse not only for politics, but to create social cohesion among disparate groups. More generally, elites bereft of Marx no longer have a grammar with which to conceptualize, critique, and ultimately defend the global liberal order that they …

Personal Responsibility For Systemic Inequality, Martha T. Mccluskey

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 15 in Research Handbook on Political Economy and Law, Ugo Mattei & John D. Haskell, eds.

Equality has faded as a guiding ideal for legal theory and policy. An updated message of personal responsibility has helped rationalize economic policies fostering increased inequality and insecurity. In this revised message, economic “losers” should take personal responsibility not only for the harmful effects of their individual economic decisions, but also for the harmful effects of systemic failures beyond their individual control or action. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, this re-tooled message of personal responsibility promoted mass austerity in …

Dinner Parties During "Lost Decades": On The Difficulties Of Rethinking Financial Markets, Fostering Elite Consensus, And Renewing Political Economy, David A. Westbrook

Journal Articles

Two groups of problems that ought to be understood in relation to one another: economic trends in the North Atlantic societies, and the capacity to collectively thinking, discussing, and even decide on what to do about our economy. Part One argues that economic policy and economic life are not only intertwined, but compromise one another. Part Two uses the World Economics Association's recent virtual conference, Rethinking Financial Markets to discuss some possibilities for fostering collective thought. Part Three briefly discusses the nature of the economy at the present time, i.e., the tasks confronting contemporary economic policy elites.

The Culture Of Financial Institutions: The Institution Of Political Economy, David A. Westbrook

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 1 in Integrity, Risk and Accountability in Capital Markets: Regulating Culture, Justin O'Brien & George Gilligan, eds.

The 19th century legal historian Henry Maine famously defined progress, and by extension, liberal modernity, as the substitution of relations based on status (especially family and title), to relations based on contract, especially trade and employment. The article suggests that Maine's assertion, however comforting as a political matter, simply does not hold with regard to the credit relations central to contemporary society. Credit transactions, even retail transactions, are based on trust and interlocking webs of obligation across agents (until recently …