Archive for the ‘Law and Inequality’ Category
Google Books and the Limits of Courts
posted by Frank Pasquale
The Google Books litigation has inspired a lot of commentary on the web. As an early October fairness hearing approaches, a consensus appears to be building: the proposed settlement is too important and complex for a court to approve in its current form. Agent Lynn Chu has complained that “No one elected the[] ‘class representatives’ to represent America’s tens of thousands of authors and publishers to convey their digital rights to Google.” Pamela Samuelson, by all accounts one of the leading academics in American intellectual property law, has this to say:
The Google Book Search settlement will be, if approved, the most significant book industry development in the modern era [emphasis added]. . . . The Authors Guild has about 8000 members. OCLC has estimated that there are 22 million authors of books published in the U.S. since 1923 (the year before which books can be presumed to be in the public domain). Jan Constantine, a lawyer for the Authors Guild, is optimistic that authors and publishers of out-of-print books will sign up with the Registry, but there are many reasons to question this.
For one thing, the proposed settlement agreement implicitly estimates that only about 750,000 copyright owners will sign up with the Registry, at least in the near term. Second, many books are “orphans,” that is, books whose rights holders cannot be located by a reasonably diligent search. Third, many easily findable rights holders, particularly academic authors, would much rather make their works available on an open access basis than to sign up with the Registry. Fourth, signing up with the Registry will not be a simple matter, since the Registry won’t just take your word for it that you are the rights holder. You are going to have to prove your ownership claim.
The non-representativeness of the class is one ground on which it is possible to object to the proposed Book Search settlement. Other reasons to object or express concerns will be explored in subsequent articles. Objections must be filed with the court by September 4, 2009.
A suitable platform for hosting public discussions of the deal only launched a few weeks ago, thanks to the diligent efforts of James Grimmelmann (who is also organizing an academic conference on the issue in October). The proposed settlement raises a number of issues, which may only be addressed by extensive regulation of the project — or a public alternative dedicated to serving those marginalized by the current proposal.
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August 11, 2009 at 9:39 am
Posted in: Antitrust, Economic Analysis of Law, Google & Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Law and Inequality, Privacy, Uncategorized
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Modern Day McCarthyism
posted by Frank Pasquale
I was recently listening to a program on the rise of “red-baiting” in some Vietnamese-American communities. It’s apparently becoming a common rhetorical strategy:
On April 16, 2009, the Thurston County Court ruled in favor of a Vietnamese man who sued for defamation. This case was the first of its kind in the state of Washington. . . . The court found the five defendants . . . guilty for wrongly accusing the plaintiff . . . of having communist sympathies.
[I]n this case, both the defendants and plaintiffs fought against communism during the Second Indochina War. All those interviewed invoked a word commonly used within the Vietnamese émigré community to describe the act of wrongly accusing someone of communist sympathies: chụp mũ. As this trial brought to light, chụp mũ is a widespread practice among Vietnamese community leaders. However, it is very rare for a person who has been chụp mũ to sue his/her accusers.
This might be an interesting precedent for those accused by shock jocks of being socialist, Marxist, Bolshevik, or in favor of concentration camps.
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June 25, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Posted in: Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, First Amendment, Law and Inequality
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Compensation Caps and Relative Deprivation
posted by Frank Pasquale
Former Fed Vice Chair Alan S. Blinder’s column “Crazy Compensation and the Crisis” offers a sensible perspective on some origins of the current economic crisis:
Take a typical trader at a bank, investment bank, hedge fund or whatever. . . .[W]hen they place financial bets [they face the following odds]: Heads, you become richer than Croesus; tails, you get no bonus, receive instead about four times the national average salary, and may (or may not) have to look for a new job. These bright young people are no dummies. Faced with such skewed incentives, they place lots of big bets. If tails come up, OPM [other people's money] will absorb almost all of the losses anyway.
[Now] let’s consider the incentives facing the CEO and other top executives of a large bank or investment bank (but, as I’ll explain, not a hedge fund). For them, it’s often: Heads, you become richer than Croesus ever imagined; tails, you receive a golden parachute that still leaves you richer than Croesus. So they want to flip those big coins, too.
After this flash of insight, Blinder retreats into quietism, counseling that “fixing compensation should be the responsibility of corporate boards of directors and, in particular, of their compensation committees.” I don’t know why he doesn’t consider the power of an income tax system that’s much more progressive at the very top income levels. As David Leonhardt observes,
Today . . . the very well off and the superwealthy are lumped together. The top bracket last year started at $357,700. Any income above that — whether it was the 400,000th dollar earned by a surgeon or the 40 millionth earned by a Wall Street titan — was taxed the same, at 35 percent. This change [from the past] is especially striking, because there is so much more income at the top of the distribution now than there was in the past.
Of course, we may need to be sensitive to the rising costs of living for the wealthy.
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May 29, 2009 at 7:33 am
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Tax
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Online Symposium: Citron’s Cyber Civil Rights
posted by Frank Pasquale
From tomorrow through Thursday, Concurring Opinions will be hosting a number of scholars invited to discuss Danielle Citron’s work Cyber Civil Rights. Responding to controversies over online attacks, Citron argues the following:
Social networking sites and blogs have increasingly become breeding grounds for anonymous online groups that attack women, people of color, and members of other traditionally disadvantaged groups. These destructive groups target individuals with defamation, threats of violence, and technology-based attacks that silence victims and concomitantly destroy their privacy. Victims go offline or assume pseudonyms to prevent future attacks, impoverishing online dialogue and depriving victims of the social and economic opportunities associated with a vibrant online presence. Attackers manipulate search engines to reproduce their lies and threats for employers and clients to see, creating digital “scarlet letters” that ruin reputations. . . .
Web 2.0 technologies accelerate mob behavior. With little reason to expect self-correction of this intimidation of vulnerable individuals, the law must respond. General criminal statutes and tort law proscribe much of the mobs’ destructive behavior, but the harm they inflict also ought to be understood and addressed as civil rights violations. Civil rights suits reach the societal harm that would otherwise go unaddressed and would play a crucial expressive role. Acting against these attacks does not offend First Amendment principles when they consist of defamation, true threats, intentional infliction of emotional distress, technological sabotage, and bias-motivated abuse aimed to interfere with a victim’s employment opportunities. To the contrary, it helps preserve vibrant online dialogue and promote a culture of political, social, and economic equality.
As I’ve noted before, I think this piece breaks new ground in applying venerable laws to the online environment. In this cyber-symposium, we propose to discuss the following issues:
What can the law do to respond to these threats?
How we deter harassment while promoting legitimate speech?
How do we balance the privacy rights of speakers and those they speak about in the new communicative landscape created by sites like AutoAdmit, Juicy Campus, Facebook, and anonymous message boards?
A list of scholars invited to discuss these issues appears below:
April 13, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Feminism and Gender, Google & Search Engines, Law and Inequality, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Technology
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Healing the Damage: Truth & Repudiation in the Agencies
posted by Frank Pasquale
I have tried to keep track of executive failures over the past eight years in financial, health, and safety regulation. But I have been overwhelmed. As James Galbraith argues in The Predator State, the past administration appointed the most extreme anti-regulatory voices it could find, across the board. Now the Center for Public Integrity has released a report on the results: the “eight-year tenure of the Bush administration was marked by more than 125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government.” As they note,
[T}he failures are rooted in recurring themes: agency appointees selected primarily for ideology and loyalty, rather than competence; agency heads who overruled staff experts and suppressed reports that did not coincide with administration philosophy; agency-industry collusion; a bedrock belief in the wisdom of deregulation; extensive private outsourcing of public functions; a general failure to exercise government’s oversight responsibilities; and severely slashed budgets at understaffed agencies that often left them unable to execute basic administrative functions.
The question now is, what to do about it? Responding to the administration’s torture policies and other human rights violations, Jack Balkin and Bruce Ackerman have suggested two approaches. Both of them are worth looking into with respect to some Bush-era holdovers who will be on independent agency boards for years to come.
January 15, 2009 at 10:09 am
Posted in: Administrative Law, Consumer Protection Law, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality
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Individualizing v. Generalizing
posted by Tristin Green
Thanks to Dan for inviting me to blog this month. I’m looking forward to it.
I’ll start with two pieces in the NY Times Sunday Magazine this week that raise interesting questions about individualization versus generalization and the struggle for equality for women and people with disabilities.
In Creature Comforts, Rebecca Skloot reports on the difficulty faced by people with disabilities seeking to use a variety of animals to assist them in day-to-day public life. In doing so, she identifies the inevitable tension between the individualized inquiry required by the ADA and the urge (and sometimes need) to generalize. The people maintaining public spaces, including those who use those spaces, want bright lines about which animals are permissible service animals, while the ADA requires that they accommodate individuals with disabilities and their individualized needs.
Similarly, in The Senator Track, Lisa Belkin comments on the difficulty that women (including Caroline Kennedy) face when they seek jobs after taking what she calls a “mom sabbatical.” Belkin claims that we need to redefine “experience” so that “what you do, and think, and produce, and change all count—even if none of your activities take place in an office, where you enjoy a title and a salary.” This call for individualized inquiry, however, butts up against the simplicity and utility of generalization; in short, working in an office with a particular title serves as a general proxy for a group of skills that Belkin would have employers examining on an individual basis (e.g., ability to run meetings, to arrive on time, to manage accounts, etc.).
The fight for individualization over generalization is a worthy one. In setting up the equality struggle in this way, however, both pieces miss an important component of the battle: longstanding and entrenched biases. In the disability context, our perceptions and judgments about the suitability of certain animals for public accommodation are undoubtedly intertwined with our biases regarding difference (and our definitions of “normalcy”). It will be much easier, I expect, to get people to accept, for example, horses as service animals for the blind than it will be to get people to accept a parrot as a service animal for a man prone to psychotic episodes. Similarly, the difficulty faced by women who take time out of the traditional work force to provide care for family members is as much one of stereotypes as it is of a more neutral inclination to generalize. I’m reminded here of research by sociologist Shelley Correll and colleagues at Cornell on the motherhood penalty (for a recent review of the research the work in this area, see Stephen Benard et al., Cognitive Bias and the Motherhood Penalty, 59 Hastings Law Journal 1359 (2008)). This research suggests that a woman seeking to reenter the traditional work market will have to overcome stereotypes that her male counterpart will not. Imagine a mother and a father who each picks up a child from your neighborhood school, Monday through Friday at 1:30 pm. You bump into each one and engage in conversation; which one do you expect will have an easier time convincing you (through subtle signals or otherwise) that he/she is engaged in workforce-related activities between 9:00 and 1:00?
January 5, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Feminism and Gender, Law and Inequality
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IBG: Foundation of American Finance Capitalism?
posted by Frank Pasquale
Thomas Friedman delivers today with a column that makes me proud he’s a fellow Marshall Scholar. My favorite paragraphs:
I have no sympathy for Madoff. But the fact is, his alleged Ponzi scheme was only slightly more outrageous than the “legal” scheme that Wall Street was running, fueled by cheap credit, low standards and high greed. What do you call giving a worker who makes only $14,000 a year a nothing-down and nothing-to-pay-for-two-years mortgage to buy a $750,000 home, and then bundling that mortgage with 100 others into bonds — which Moody’s or Standard & Poors rate AAA — and then selling them to banks and pension funds the world over? That is what our financial industry was doing. If that isn’t a pyramid scheme, what is?
[T]his legal Ponzi scheme was built on the mortgage brokers, bond bundlers, rating agencies, bond sellers and homeowners all working on the I.B.G. principle: “I’ll be gone” when the payments come due or the mortgage has to be renegotiated. . . . The Madoff affair is the cherry on top of a national breakdown in financial propriety, regulations and common sense.
Thank you, Mr. Friedman. Finally, respectable opinion is coming around to a view that the “man on the street” has intuited for some time: the recklessness of contemporary finance capitalism is systemic, not merely the product of a few bad apples. A passion for deregulation and budget cuts left an administration unable to detect even the grossest frauds. In that culture, virtually anything went. And as the Bush years come to a close, I expect many inspector generals across the administrative state will be detecting ever more wrongdoing.
December 17, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Posted in: Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Securities
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Who Hid All the Poor People?
posted by Frank Pasquale
Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan recently commented on a strange incongruity in the current economic downturn–everyone she sees seems to be doing all right:
One of the weirdest, most perceptually jarring things about the economic crisis is that everything looks the same. We are told every day and in every news venue that we are in Great Depression II, that we are in a crisis, a cataclysm, a meltdown, the credit crunch from hell, that we will lose millions of jobs, and that the great abundance is over and may never return. . . . And yet when you free yourself from media and go outside for a walk, everything looks . . . the same. . . . [For example,] [e]veryone’s still overweight.
Charlie Gibson of ABC may have the same problem. Perhaps we are just a “nation of whiners,” as Phil Gramm claimed. But Wonkette dissents:
November 29, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Posted in: Culture, Current Events, Law and Inequality, Politics
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Payday Lenders’ Creative Electoral Tactics
posted by Frank Pasquale
Who’d guess that my worries about the political power of the financial sector and Jaya’s concerns about misleading ballot initiative wording would converge? Easha Anard reports on the trend:
Payday lenders are spending millions of dollars to back ballot initiatives that challenge state restrictions on their cash-advance practices. . . . [In Arizona], Yes on 200 is financed by the local affiliate of the Community Financial Services Association, a national payday-lending group. . . . . [T]he wording of the ballot initiative suggests it would impose further regulation on payday lenders; in fact, it would roll back much tougher rules. Yes on 200 is promoting the initiative with a counterintuitive strategy: spending money on ads that depict payday lenders as unscrupulous. One ad says, “Arizonans agree: Payday lenders who rip off hard-working Americans need to be stopped,” and asks voters to support the ballot initiative.
Now those are people you can trust! No regulation needed for them.
I wonder if Bryan Caplan would consider those who want to regulate payday lending financial illiterates–and approve this “noble lie” as a way of promoting better policy?
October 28, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Posted in: Administrative Law, Consumer Protection Law, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality
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Parasitism, Inc.: A Deficient Markets Hypothesis
posted by Frank Pasquale
Accoring to an article by Jonathan Ford of Prospect, the finance sector gobbled up nearly 35% of total corporate profits in the US and Britain in 2005. As financier-turned-academic Paul Woolley observes in the piece, “There is no economic merit in a sector that makes exceptional profits and devours capital and labour, and then justifies it on the grounds that you can get some ‘cash back.’”
Woolley’s analysis animates the article and should wake up anyone still complacent about the validity of the “efficient markets hypothesis.” Ford points out a cozy revolving door relationship between academics, regulators, and tycoons in high finance. All were complicit in a parasitic reallocation of money from the real economy to speculative games designed to enhance cream-skimming at the top:
While the efficient market idea held sway, academics viewed the expansion of finance with equanimity. . . . Financial instruments always existed for a purpose—such as to pass on risk cheaply and efficiently to the investor best placed or most willing to bear it. If that were not the case these products simply would not exist. More trading was beneficial because it enhanced liquidity, and liquidity lowers costs and promotes efficient pricing.
But, according to Woolley, the scale of derivatives trading should be seen as symptomatic of distorted markets. . . . [M]omentum causes mispricing which in turn creates an insatiable demand for active management. This then spills into the derivatives markets in various ways. For instance, the investor responds to the volatility of the equity market by hedging his risk and buying a put option (giving the right to sell shares at a pre-determined price). The seller of the put protects his own exposure by selling equities. The investor has thus brought about, at a cost, the very event he was seeking to insure against.
Both Ford and Woolley still endorse “market solutions” to the crisis, such as “lengthening the period over which performance is assessed,” so that bonuses depend less on quarterly and annual results. Dilip Abreu has proposed similar realignment of incentives for ratings agencies. But I’d like to see more public involvement in investment decisions generally–a move featured in the stimulus plan Timothy Canova has suggested.
October 28, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Securities
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Evolutionary Pressures on Minds and Bodies
posted by Frank Pasquale
Corpus 2.0, a recent design project on potential human bodily evolution, has been spreading around the web. One model with a shoulder bump finds it much easier to keep her handbag steady. Other forms of “progress” include a “ridge in the nose developed for wearing glasses, ears moulded to accommodate earphones, a thumb with an extra joint for sending SMS messages more efficiently and a foot adapted to create the same posture as wearing high heels.” This work struck me as a less critical version of the “future farms” and other body modifications both proposed and ridiculed at the “Design and the Elastic Mind” show at MOMA earlier this year.
While many find these particular modifications to bodily form grotesque, opposition to unfortunate evolutionary pressures on attitudes and mental habits strikes me as much less developed. That’s one reason I cautioned against runaway “cognitive enhancements” in an article last year. The founder of Better Living Through Chemistry predicts that we should be happy to choose “average hedonic set point[s] of our children. . . . [so that] allelic combinations . . . .that leave their bearers predisposed to unpleasant states of consciousness . . . will be weeded out of the gene pool. . . [leading to] some form of paradise-engineering.” Following Walker Percy, I think such people are actually quite useful to a world too prone to “irrational exuberance”–even if introversion is maladaptive for the introvert himself.
October 27, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Posted in: Bioethics, Law and Inequality, Technology, Weird
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Rankings Abroad: Watch out for the Sin Bin
posted by Frank Pasquale
This piece in the CHE covered the increasing importance of international rankings systems to universities around the world (including the US).
Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s “Academic Ranking of World Universities,” assigns scores to institutions on the basis of four factors: quality of education, quality of faculty, research output, and per capita performance. . . .Quality of faculty counts the number of staff members who have won . . . awards as well as the number of “highly cited researchers” in 21 fields. . . . The “Times Higher Education-Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings” is more heavily focused on reviews by academics, which account for 40 percent of an institution’s score. A survey of employers contributes 10 percent. The rankings also consider the faculty-student ratio, the proportion of international faculty members and international students, and the number of citations per faculty member.
Germany reached a recent decision on dividing nearly two billion euros among designated universities largely on the basis of how strong they were in research. In France, a central goal of a new law intended to shake up the higher-education system is increased collaboration among institutions involved in scientific research.
Meanwhile, rankings appear to be shaping secondary schools abroad as well; Neal Lawson reports that in Britain, “private companies will run ’sin bin’ schools for excluded pupils and . . . more parents are using lawyers to secure school places.” Lawson worries that rankings-mania will make education “a positional good – one that is valued only because it gives one child a better education than another.”
October 27, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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Thinking Transcendentally
posted by Thomas Crocker
The mortgage crises follows a pattern of reasoning analogous to that sometimes followed in the national security context. When it comes to national security, we are warned that the Constitution is “not a suicide pact.” This catch-phrase is used for the argument that in times of national security threats, constitutionally protected civil liberties should not be used to constrain the necessary actions of executive officials. Why? Because security is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of civil liberties. Without security, so the argument goes, we can have no liberty. Thus, when times are tough, we should not allow constitutional commitments to get in the way of allowing officials to act as necessary to protect national security. (I critique a specific application of this argument here).
Similar reasoning seems to be at stake in the present financial crisis. In nearly as direct a catch-phrase, we are warned that leaving financial obligations untouched as they are would be an economic “suicide pact,” leading to unpredictable, though likely dire, consequences for the country as a whole. (Bernanke: action is “urgently required to stabilize the situation and avert what otherwise could be very serious consequences for our financial markets and our economy.”) In times of threat to the overall security of the economy, background beliefs in individual economic decisions and legal obligations (more or less, some version of laissez faire capitalism) should not be deployed to constrain the necessary actions of executive officials. Why? Because structural security of the economy is a necessary condition for the good of us all. Thus, when economic times are particularly tough, we should empower executive officials to act as necessary to protect economic security.
Both of these rationales depend on a form of transcendental argument: the necessary condition for the possibility of X (enjoying liberty), is Y (the provision for security). My central question is: Can We Think Transcendentally about Something Other Than Security?
September 24, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Posted in: Current Events, Law and Inequality, Politics
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Reds
posted by Neil Buchanan
One of the certainties of being a tax policy scholar who is not opposed to all taxes is that I am called names on a regular basis. The most common epithets are the standby favorites of the Cold War era: commie, pinko, commie-pinko, socialist, red, Marxist, Marxist/socialist . . . you get the idea. It pretty much does not matter what one says — again, unless one says that all taxes are theft — but the most surefire way to become subject to this kind of name-calling is to advocate any kind of income redistribution. Thus, while giving a talk last year, someone asked me if my argument might suggest that we should increase the estate tax. When I said yes, another academic (!) in the room said, “Oh, I see, so you believe in ‘from those who have the ability to those who have the need,’ right?”
I bring this up now because of the recent
September 19, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality, Politics, Tax
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The New Gilded Age
posted by Frank Pasquale
Larry Bartels’s new book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age helps explode some persistent myths about income inequality. We are frequently told that inequality–even the extreme growth in inequality witnessed over the past 30 years–is an inevitable concomitant of globalization, or is necessary for economic growth, or can’t be remedied by politics. Bartels’s work complements the growing consensus–led by people like David Cay Johnston, Jacob Hacker, Stephen Gosselin, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Robert Frank, among many others–that all these complacent contentions are not merely unsupported, but actually reverse the true causes and effects at work. Political change has accelerated US inequality–and only political change can address it.
This quote doesn’t do Bartels’s book justice, but it discloses one foundation of his argument:
[T]he real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans. These substantial partisan differences persist even after allowing for differences in economic circumstances and historical trends beyond the control of individual presidents. . . .
[E]scalating in equality is not simply an inevitable economic trend—. . .a great deal of economic in equality in the contemporary United States is specifically attributable to the policies and priorities of Republican presidents. . . . .Voters’ seemingly straightforward tendency to reward or punish the incumbent government at the polls for good or bad economic performance turns out to be warped in ways that are both fascinating and politically crucial.
Insights like this should not be news–one need only to look at how lopsidedly the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 helped the very wealthy in order to see real partisan differences in attitudes about inequality. But it turns out that the same political ignorance that libertarians like Ilya Somin and Bryan Caplan have been complaining about turns out to be quite helpful to their fiscal strategy:
August 27, 2008 at 10:59 am
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality
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Who Owes What to the Very Poor?
posted by Frank Pasquale
That’s the subtitle of a new book edited by Thomas Pogge (on a theme that I tried to tackle a few years ago). Bookforum brought two good reviews to my attention. James Sterba of Notre Dame admires the book, but thinks the authors should be more radical:
[Many contributors] seem particularly concerned to empirically demonstrate that social institutions, particularly global ones, have the effect of depriving the poor of the resources they need for a decent life. Pogge, for example, frequently compares current practices to the historical examples of Stalin’s disastrous economic plan of 1930–33 . . . But why is it not enough just to point out that the rich are interfering with the poor by keeping them from using the surplus resources that the rich possess?
The poor clearly are coercively restricted from using the surplus of the rich to meet their own basic needs; and if the poor have no other way to meet those needs, why are these obvious social facts not enough to show that the rich are harming the poor by interfering with them? Suggesting that some complicated empirical argument is needed here, when in fact none is required, may weaken the strong case that exists for a right to freedom from poverty based on a negative right of noninterference. . . .
I would think that recognizing a right to freedom from poverty applicable both to existing and future people requires us to use up no more resources than are necessary for meeting our own basic needs here and now, securing for ourselves a decent life but no more. To use up more resources than this, it would seem, would be to deprive at least some future generations of the resources they would require to meet their own basic needs.
Here’s an excerpt from a review by Brian Harward:
August 13, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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Tulip Magnates’ Banner Decade
posted by Frank Pasquale
Paul Caron brings news of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ report Income Concentration at Highest Level Since 1928. Meanwhile, workers facing Jungle-like conditions are getting tossed into jail. Well, at least we have the right poet laureate for our times, Kay Ryan, known for her dark humor. Here’s most of her pitch-perfect take on inequality, Dutch:
August 2, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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Taking Inequality Personally
posted by Frank Pasquale
The Washington Times has accused Barbara Ehrenreich of being a Marxist for her work exposing the effects of inequality in the US. (Maybe they bought into that scurrilous Facebook app “What German Philosopher is She“?) I wonder if intellectuals’ attitudes toward inequality are rooted in encounters like these:
In the first meeting of my first seminar of my first year, [real-estate developer Charles] Kushner’s son Jared entered my classroom and promptly took the seat across from mine, sharing the room, so to speak. I was drawing an annual salary of $15,500 and borrowing the remainder for survival in Cambridge, in order that he might be given the best possible education. [About 5 years later] Jared . . . purchased The New York Observer for $10 million, part of which he made buying and selling real estate while also attending my seminar. As publisher, one of his first moves was to reduce pay for the Observer’s stable of book reviewers. I had been writing reviews for the Observer in an effort to pay my debts.
I guess somebody isn’t going to be supporting estate tax repeal.
July 23, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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Faces in the Immigration Debate
posted by Frank Pasquale
States are passing more immigration laws, and the federal government has done some extraordinary raids recently:
[On May 12] [f]ederal immigration agents raided the Agriprocessors factory, arresting nearly 400 workers, most of them men, for being in the United States illegally. Within minutes of the raid, with surveillance helicopters buzzing above the leafy streets, the wives and children of Mexican and Guatemalan families began trickling into St. Bridget’s Church, the safest place they knew. . . .
Father Ouderkirk [of St. Bridget's] said in an interview . . . . “This has happened after 10 years of stable living. These people were in school. They were achieving. It has ripped the heart out of the community and out of the parish. Probably every child I baptized has been affected. To see them stunned is beyond belief.”
I have no idea what our general policy on immigration should be–suffice it to say that the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s emphatic support for nearly open borders leaves me leery of that kind of extremism. But I also agree with Father Ouderkirk that sudden interventions like the Iowa raid are in no one’s best interests. The dream of providing a better life for one’s family by working hard is the most genuine and pervasive form of heroism available today, as artist Dulce Pinzon writes:
The Mexican immigrant worker in New York is a perfect example of the hero who has gone unnoticed. It is common for a Mexican worker in New York to work extraordinary hours in extreme conditions for very low wages which are saved at great cost and sacrifice and sent to families and communities in Mexico who rely on them to survive.
The Mexican economy has quietly become dependent on the money sent from workers in the US. Conversely, the US economy has quietly become dependent on the labor of Mexican immigrants. Along with the depth of their sacrifice, it is the quietness of this dependence which makes Mexican immigrant workers a subject of interest.
The randomness of raids like that on Agriprocessors seems to make them less about realizing the rule of law than about striking fear into those at the bottom of America’s economic pyramid.
July 19, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Posted in: Immigration, Law and Inequality
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The Great Risk Shift Continues
posted by Frank Pasquale
Mentioned in these pages in May and fresh off a positive NYT review today, Peter Gosselin has a good editorial in the L.A. Times explaining how law can intensify market-based trends toward inequality:
“People who try to claim their employer-sponsored benefits are worse off than they were two or three decades ago,” said Judge William Acker Jr., who was appointed by President Reagan to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama in Birmingham and who has written extensively about ERISA. “The law that was supposed to protect them has been turned on its head.” . . .
[O]ver the last two decades — with relatively little notice and almost no awareness on the part of the buying public — the insurance industry has changed the nature of its policies in ways that leave homeowners on the hook for vastly more than they used to be on the hook for. . . Similar changes — with similar shifts of economic risk from business and government to families — have occurred in retirement, where the switch from traditional pensions to 401(k)s has left individuals largely on their own to provide for old age.
The current recession is less a discontinuity than an intensification of trends that have left more and more Americans feeling financially vulnerable.
July 6, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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