Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
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New York’s Clean Energy Standard: Can Renewable Energy Development Revitalize Upstate New York’s Dying Economy?
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The Implications of Inequality for Fiscal Federalism (or Why the Federal Government Should Pay for Local Public Schools)
Get PDFIn designing public policy, a question of first principle is the degree to which government services—and the mechanisms of collecting revenue to finance those services—should be centralized within and across political systems. To inform their assessments of where redistribution should properly occur, public finance researchers have, to date, worked backwards from different assumptions about the mobility of residents within the political community. Scholars have disagreed about the viability of local governments’ efforts to redistribute wealth—with traditionalists arguing that these efforts are made impossible by residential mobility, and recent reformists countering that limitations on mobility indeed allow for limited redistribution at the local level.
But these arguments have largely sidestepped questions about what level of centralization is theoretically optimal for redistributive programs. And by focusing on the empirical question of residential mobility, they have ignored a variable that—I seek to demonstrate—is at least as important. In this Essay, I argue that those two deficiencies in the literature are connected. I introduce a simple model to show that economic redistribution becomes more difficult—indeed, approaches impossibility—as economic inequality increases, regardless of one’s assumptions about levels of mobility (by the rich or poor). That is because economic inequality has an inherent spatial dimension: so long as citizens exhibit anything short of perfect mobility (and perfect responsiveness to redistributive policy), its rise will result in an increasing geographic concentration of fiscal resources available to governments. For this reason, higher levels of economic inequality strengthen the case for centralizing the financing of any public good or program with redistributive goals—including the great bulk of what contemporary governments aim to do.
I introduce the concept of a “fiscal unit” to refer to the geographic scope of public financing—which might be, depending on the program, a school district boundary, a county, a state, or the entire country. In order to achieve an equitable allocation of public goods, policymakers should respond to rising income inequality by shifting the site of revenue collection to occur at widely drawn “fiscal units”. This can take two forms. It can be done by expanding the scope of fiscal boundaries—for example, by funding locally-administered programs at the state or federal level. Alternatively, policymakers could respond to inequality by increasing fiscal transfers from higher levels of government (wider fiscal units) to lower, geographically smaller governments.
Rather than an afterthought, the existing level of economic inequality within a political community may be the single most important question for this aspect of policy design. Where wealth is unequally distributed, the primary responsibility of assessing the revenues used to finance public goods should be assumed by levels of government representing the greatest number of people. This paper thus suggests that policymakers should respond to rising income inequality by shifting not only the burden but also the site of redistributive taxation
Trustee Liability for Breach of Trust—Loss \u3cem\u3eor\u3c/em\u3e Profit, or Loss \u3cem\u3eand\u3c/em\u3e Profit?
Get PDFThe Venue Shuffle: Forum Selection Clauses & ERISA
Get PDFForum selection clauses are ubiquitous. Historically, the judiciary was hostile to contracts limiting a plaintiff’s venue options. The tide has since turned. Today, lower courts routinely enforce such clauses. This Article challenges this reflexive response in the special context of ERISA cases. It mines ERISA’s statutory text, rich legislative history, and historical context to supply an in-depth exploration of ERISA’s unique policy goal of providing employees “ready access to the Federal courts.” The Article then explains how forum selection clauses undermine this goal and thus should be invalid under controlling Supreme Court jurisprudence
Counterfeit Liberty
Get PDFUnlike some countries with stronger labor movements, labor law plays an outsized role in the regulation of labor relations in the United States. This legalistic regime tends to substitute state power for workers’ collective power, undermining processes of class formation. Going forward, a nascent labor movement should pursue worker freedoms and be wary of worker rights
The First Amendment in the Second Gilded Age
Get PDFHow do we pay for the digital public sphere? In the Second Gilded Age, the answer is primarily through digital surveillance and through finding ever new ways to make money out of personal data. Digital capitalism in the Second Gilded Age features an implicit bargain: a seemingly unlimited freedom to speak in exchange for the right to surveil and manipulate end users.To protect freedom of speech in the Second Gilded Age we must distinguish the values of free speech from the judicially created doctrines of the First Amendment. That is because the practical freedom to speak online depends on a privately owned and operated infrastructure of digital communication to which the First Amendment does not apply. As a result, the protection of digital free expression has increasingly begun to detach from the judicial doctrines of the First Amendment. This makes the First Amendment increasingly irrelevant to protecting digital speech. Indeed, in the Second Gilded Age, the judicially created doctrines of First Amendment law become most important as potential obstacles to reform. They create constitutional difficulties for attempts to regulate private infrastructure owners in order to protect free speech values and personal privacy.Protecting freedom of speech in the Second Gilded Age requires us to focus on the political economy of digital speech: how we pay for the digital public sphere, the dangers the digital political economy creates for end users, and the kinds of reforms that would best protect their interests in speech and privacy.This essay uses the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal of March 2018 to explain how the conditions that make free speech possible have changed from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries. That controversy is a characteristic scandal of the Second Gilded Age because it centers on how digital infrastructure companies make their money and how they affect the public sphere in the process. The scandal also highlights a central problem for freedom of speech in the Second Gilded Age: Digital privacy undergirds our freedom of expression, but the way we pay for freedom of expression perpetually threatens our digital privacy and subjects us to dangers of manipulation and overreaching.The great irony is that an era that promised unbounded opportunities for freedom of expression is also an era of increasing digital control and surveillance. The same technological advances allow both results. The essay concludes by briefly introducing a reform proposal advocated in my previous work: that we should consider digital media companies as information fiduciaries who have duties of care, confidentiality, and loyalty toward their end users
