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U.S. prices increased moderately in June as the declining cost of goods tempered a rise in the cost of services, underscoring an improving inflation environment that could position the Federal Reserve to begin cutting interest rates in September.

The report from the Commerce Department on Friday also showed consumer spending slowed a bit last month. Signs of easing price pressures and a cooling labor market could boost the confidence of Fed officials that inflation is moving toward the U.S. central bank's 2% target. The Fed will hold its next policy meeting on July 30-31.

The Consumer Price Index climbed at a moderate pace in June compared with a year earlier and fell on a monthly basis, welcome news for Federal Reserve officials who are watching for further evidence that they have wrestled rapid inflation under control.

Overall inflation was 3 percent in June on a yearly basis, down from 3.3 percent in May, and softer than the 3.1 percent that economists had forecast in a Bloomberg survey.

The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure continued to gradually cool overall in June even as a “core” inflation measure held steady, likely enough evidence of progress to keep the central bank on track for a rate cut later this year but not enough to stoke speculation that it might reduce rates at its meeting next week.

The Personal Consumption Expenditures index was  in June than a year earlier, slower than May’s 2.6 percent and in line with economist expectations, fresh data released on Friday showed.

The U.S. economy grew faster than expected in the second quarter amid solid gains in consumer spending and business investment, but inflation pressures subsided, leaving intact expectations of a September interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve.

Growth last quarter also received a boost from inventory building as well as increased government spending, the Commerce Department's advance report on second-quarter gross domestic product on Thursday showed. The housing market recovery, however, regressed and was a small drag on the economy. The trade deficit widened further, subtracting from GDP growth.

Economic growth picked up more than expected in the spring, as cooling inflation and a strong labor market allowed consumers to keep spending even as high interest rates weighed on their finances.

Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, increased at a 2.8 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. That was faster than the 1.4 percent rate recorded in the first quarter, but shy of the unexpectedly strong growth in the second half of last year.

The job market is in the "yellow" zone as unemployment ticks higher, economist Claudia Sahm said.

Sahm is the creator of a highly accurate recession indicator that's close to being triggered.

I’ve long been in the “higher for longer” camp, insisting that the US Federal Reserve must hold short-term interest rates at the current level or higher to get inflation under control.

The facts have changed, so I’ve changed my mind. The Fed should cut, preferably at next week’s policy-making meeting.

(Haithe, As If Gender Mattered: Feminism and Change in Higher Education The Journal of Higher Education,Vol. 74, No. 3 pp. 321-336 )

The fact that Bensimon and Marshall (1997) bring their criticism to bear upon conventional academic practices, but also upon the work of other feminists, offers another clue about the place of feminist critique in higher education. If academic feminism is now characterized by internal conflicts over what it means to do work that is recognizably feminist, then this is a sign of its growth, maturity, and vitality. As Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) once observed, "when an institution-a university, say, ... is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be.... Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict" (p. 222). Feminism entered the university in opposition to the common life of men's studies but, because it is academic, it has been subject to the continuities of conflict that are definitive of all academic work. Whenever conflict over what constitutes an academic conversation ceases, that particular way of thinking withers away. Judging by contemporary conversations, academic feminism is still firmly in the game. Like other groups of academics, feminists have enunciated the norms and conventions that establish their distinctive boundaries, and these conventions, in turn, identify who is and is not an insider. Often as not, feminists do this by pointing to differences that mark others as outsiders. Bensimon and Marshall, for example, tell us that "there is a misperception among those who are not knowledgeable of feminist theories that any work that focuses on women or issues that concern women is feminist" (p. 8). What counts as feminist work in higher education? As they put it, "If the study's data were analyzed in connection to historically-embedded policy assumptions that structure universities around males, with a critique of assumptions of current policies and programs, and presented an activist/advocacy stance for remaking institutional practices to be responsive to women, then it would be feminist critical analysis" (italics in original, p. 9). While Bensimon and Marshall (1997) like to think that their acts of criticism are dismantling the master's house, to the pragmatist it looks like business as usual. As Richard Rorty (1989) says, pragmatists do not treat people "as anonymous channels for truth but as abbreviations for a certain final vocabulary and for the sorts of beliefs and desires typical of its users" (pp. 79-80). The work of academics, in part, is to try on different vocabularies, redescribe events from the perspectives they offer, and compare the results with those generated by alternative vocabularies. Academic feminists have introduced new vocabularies, and the redescriptions these vocabularies enable have been very productive. Bensimon and Marshall are trying to redefine the world of higher education policy by applying a feminist vocabulary, which they hope will make things better. Ironically, the challenges they offer would not make sense to other members of the profession-indeed, could not even be heardif Bensimon and Marshall had not mastered some of the academic protocols handed down to them by men. The inescapable fact, the truly fundamental principle that underlies academic work, is that to become a member of academia, is to be socialized into a community defined by rules that determine who is, and is not, a member in good standing. Membership rules are never fully secured, of course; instead they are historical and contextual and must, as a consequence, be continually worked for. Nonetheless rules of membership, however much they shift to accommodate new ways of thinking and being, are still rules. The dilemma that Lorde eloquently points to, despite her desire for a revolution (or perhaps because her desire is so strong), is that it is impossible to challenge membership rules without already being an insider of one sort or another. In Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove, Nadya Aisenberg and Mona Harrington (1988) characterized academic women as being "outsiders."A s "women of academey,"however, they are also insiders. Academic feminists in higher education are insiders of a particular kind, to be sure. They have used, and will no doubt continue to use, the uniqueness of their insights to challenge the rules that govern academia at large. I am sympathetic with their agenda for change, but I do wish to point out that the alternatives that feminists offer, like those offered by other groups of academics, are defined by rules of inclusion and exclusion that, in turn, point to their own specialized biases. As Bensimon and Marshall make plain, it takes more than womanhood to put one inside the circle of academic feminists. (325-6)

(Richard A, Management@Boston, and Herman T, Phil@Rivier, Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice )

In the case of peer-to-peer networks, intellectual property is too vulnerable if precedents such as Sony are strictly applied and users are allowed to share files on a massive scale. On the other hand, cyberpatents and arbitrary 20-year extensions of the copyright term have no justification, especially when objectively evaluated in light of the normative frameworks. In addition, the Microsoft case revealed some of the problems with the proprietary model for software development, which, for certain critics, threatens to enclose the Internet commons. Open source code and open access have been proposed as possible alternatives. As our discussion of the Microsoft case demonstrated, there are two basic property models in cyberspace. There are some content providers and software developers who seek almost absolute control (proprietary model) over intellectual objects. On the other hand, some legal scholars and cyberspace libertarians advocate a dissipation of property controls since the current system of rights is so disadvantageous to the robustness of the public domain (commons model). Those who embrace the commons model see an enclosure movement “fencing off” intellectual objects. They also worry about how the insistence on application of property rights in cyberspace will interfere with the evolution of the Internet and related technologies like peer-to-peer networks. What the commons model and its adherents downplay is the dynamic incentive effects of intellectual property rights. As the Supreme Court has observed, the “ultimate aim” of copyright and similar protections is “to stimulate [the creation of useful works] for the general public good” (Harper & Row Publishers v. Nation Enterterprises, 1985). Critics of intellectual property rights also fail to fully appreciate the concept of “incomplete capture,” that is, “an intellectual property owner cannot possibly appropriate all of the information (and thus social value) generated by her creation” (Wagner, 2003). Even if an intellectual object is copyrighted, there can never be complete control of that object. A protected intellectual object is not hermetically sealed off from public access. Rather, there is usually a positive spillover effect as this information is disseminated throughout society. Copyrighted works, once they are disclosed to the public, convey information, ideas, and suggestions to many others who can utilize those ideas or follow up on these suggestions without violating that copyright. Some of the information stimulated may be only indirectly or obliquely affiliated with the new creation. For example, a successful novel (and subsequent movie) like Cold Mountain engenders new investigations and discussions of the civil war. Thus, even “fully propertized intellectual goods” can contribute to the spiraling growth of information resources and thereby enhance in some limited way the public domain (Wagner, 2003). But while this fixation on control and enclosure may be exaggerated, flawed legislation such as the DMCA and particularly the CTEA remind us that policy makers are subject to capture. This leads to the unwarranted expansion of intellectual property rights that is not in the public interest. In their zeal to thwart piracy and to protect fragile digital content, there is also a threat that content providers will insist on greater control than the intellectual property system has tolerated in the past. Policy makers must find that elusive middle way that balances legitimate concerns about protecting intellectual objects with the need for a robust and renewable public domain. We admit that discerning and legislating the “right” or proportionate amount of intellectual property protection is a difficult process. A full exposition of what a moderate protection scheme would look like is beyond the scope of this chapter. But we have offered some recommendations in the course of this analysis: software platforms as a limited commons under certain conditions, shorter duration for copyright protection, more limited scope of patent coverage, thick patent protection for genuine inventions that are costly to commercialize, and so forth. Finally, as we have been at pains to insist here, while the normative frameworks may be indeterminate, they can still guide policy makers in making prudent choices that will reward creative labor and stimulate creativity while avoiding further erosion of the intellectual commons.

(Lorenzo, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenzomontanari/2018/04/26/how-ip-rights-empower-women/ , 4-26)

In many parts of the world, women are not treated equal to men under the law. From owning land to obtaining inheritance, women are at a disadvantage. Stronger intellectual property protections can help alleviate this discrepancy. When IP rights are strongly protected, the rights of women are protected as well. For example, the countries with the strongest protection of copyrights also tend to have the highest paid actresses and female artists. April 26 is commemorated as World IP Day by WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization. Celebrated internationally, the goal of World IP Day is to promote knowledge about intellectual property (patents, copyright, trademarks) and their role in promoting innovation and creativity. This year, World IP Day’s theme “Powering change: Women in innovation and creativity” will celebrate women and their role in shaping the future of society. The protection of intellectual property rights is vital for economic growth. Intellectual property rights are so important that they are enshrined in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which states “everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” Elena Panaritis, author of Prosperity Unbound, founder and CEO of Thought 4 Action, explains that practice shows that women become more civically involved in the politics of their community and country, as well as and powerful market players, leaders of innovation and middle class once they are given secure ownership of their property rights. Women's involvement increases over 53% in such countries. The protection of IP rights restores this financial incentive to create and innovate, by giving owners and content creators exclusive power over their creations. For women, this is of huge importance. Statistics have shown that countries with stronger IP rights tend to have stronger measures of gender equality. “Women in the economy are a powerful force for change and leadership. Intellectual property rights when used correctly can advance entrepreneurship by enabling women who develop innovative ideas and products to secure financing, signal their innovation, and negotiate access to the IPRs held by others. IP systems should recognize and protect creativity in all its forms, including contributions from traditional and indigenous knowledge developed by women,” said Prof. Walter G. Park, of American University and author of the Patent Index. The focus on the protection of intellectual property comes at a time when IP rights are both of their highest importance to the global economy and the most at risk. IP-intensive firms account for more than 38% of GDP and 45.5 million in the U.S., and 42% of GDP and 82 million jobs in the EU. These industries not only support jobs, but high-paying jobs. In the EU and U.S., workers earn 46% more in IP-intensive sectors than workers in other sectors. Without strong rights protections, innovation is stifled as content creators lose a large portion of their incentive to create – profit. In the absence of effective IP laws, creative works can be infringed upon, reproduced without needing the creator’s permission, and sold without compensating the creator.

(Mathew, https://devpolicy.org/defending-homo-economicus/ , 2-2)

Greed is Dead is unique, however, in linking Homo Economicus to an increase in selfishness more broadly. Whereas these other works tend to zero-in on the specifics of methodology or a particular policy, C&K’s work is more philosophical and far-reaching in nature. Though they might be right that we’ve all become more selfish, more insight into what they actually mean by the word would have been beneficial. More materialistic? More egoistic? More addicted to our phones? Distinguishing the definition from that of individualism would have made it more obvious how the arcane assumptions baked into economic models have actually led to such devastating consequences throughout society. Sure, it is the case that certain economists hold positions of power, but it is important to remember that Homo Economicus mostly lives in the obscure pages of academic journals. Another reason this would have been helpful is because C&K seem to equate self-interest with selfishness. Though these terms may be used interchangeably in common conversation, they’re different in an important way. Whereas both capture concern with one’s own well-being, selfishness includes the complete disregard for others which does not always describe Homo Economicus. In fact, many models integrate altruistic parents investing in their children’s educations, religiosity, or voting dynamics. More complex models even integrate cooperation between individuals, illustrating the flexibility of the neoclassical approach. The same can be said of the supposed link between Homo Economicus and market fundamentalism. The conclusions of many neoclassical models make a strong case for either more public education, education subsidies, taxes on automation, pensions, childcare subsidies, or a universal basic income. These are hardly policies associated with market fundamentalism and are instead a testament to the versatility of the neoclassical approach. Importantly, these results emerge from models where Homo Economicus is just as self-interested as he or she ever was. All this is not to say the neoclassical approach to economics is perfect. There are many models built on faulty assumptions that, in turn, can lead to faulty conclusions. Furthermore, the allure of mathematical rigor has often crowded out other valid economic approaches to issues. Nevertheless, this type of approach is better thought of as just another tool in the economists’ toolkit to be deployed as necessary, like a linear regression or a case study, rather than an ideology. Overall, Greed is Dead is a unique book in that it combines philosophy with economics and social commentary. C&K accurately identify many of the developed world’s most acute problems from political polarisation to inequality. They also introduce the reader to the ideas of many interesting communitarian thinkers which have only become more relevant. But when it comes to how we got here, their argument becomes much less convincing. Instead of seeing Homo Economicus as the antithesis of a world that values community, C&K should instead see it as part of the solution.

(Phil, PoliSci@Buffalo, https://www.duckofminerva.com/2013/03/in-defense-of-homo-economicus.html , 3-14)

It’s easy to criticize those who assume that human beings are ultra-materialistic, narrowly self-interested, willing to collect all available information (and perhaps in possession of information that isn’t available), and immune to mistakes. I have never met such a creature and hope that I never do. So why would anyone try to understand the world we live in by analyzing models where people are assumed to behave this way? I’ve discussed the role of assumptions before, but it’s a point that bears repeating — assumptions need not be true in order to be valuable. If the map metaphor doesn’t work for you, consider the example of disphan climate models, described so eloquently by Paul Krugman. With a dishpan, a turntable, and Bunsen Burner, one can reproduce dishpan many of the essential features of the planet Earth’s climate system, including trade winds, storm systems, and the Gulf Stream. This doesn’t tell us everything we want to know. Your local weather forecaster is relying on far more sophisticated models. But it’s a useful baseline. We’d all like to produce work that achieves a 10 out of 10 in terms of explanatory power. But, all else equal, we’d also like our analysis to score a 1 out of 10 in its level of complication. If you add the constraint that you want to be able to say with great confidence that your conclusions actually follow from your assumptions, you’re going to have to accept certain limits on the second scale. And if the only way to get to 10 on the first scale is to go to 1o on the second, we might think twice about attempting such — particularly if we can get to 6 on the first scale while only going up to a 2 or 3 on the second. Reasonable people can disagree about how heavily to weigh each concern, but the point is that we shouldn’t simply criticizing people for failing to achieve a 10 on the first scale. That’s an impossible standard to to meet. We should pay attention to how much bang for the buck we’re getting — how discrepant from reality the outputs of our models are, relative to the inputs. (And that’s true whether we’re working with empirical models or theoretical ones; mathematical or informal.) I don’t think human behavior is identical to that of Homo Economicus. Neither does anyone else. But one could argue that the degree of similarity between human behavior and that expected from Homo Economicus rates about a 6 out of 10. I won’t call that something it’s not — simple theoretical models based on unrealistic assumptions do not achieve perfect explanatory power.* But if your goal is to see how far you can get with a model simple enough to allow you to be very confident that your conclusions actually follow from your assumptions, you can do worse than we’ve done by focusing on Homo Economicus. What makes me say we’ve achieved a 6? Well, there’s obviously room for disagreement here. I wouldn’t argue too much with someone who thinks that 5 would be more accurate. But the only way to say that there is minimal similarity between human behavior and that expected from Homo Economicus is to ignore the available evidence. Consider, for example, one of the most influential papers demonstrating the failures of Homo Economicus. In no uncertain terms, the authors inform us that the predictions of the Ultimatum game are not born out any of the 15 small scale societies they studied. But how far removed from reality are the predictions of this model? When I first describe this game to my students, I ask them what they expect the results to be. A large number of them tell me that they expect most people to propose equitable divisions — to propose half of the money. And some people do just that. In some societies, such behavior is even typical, at least according to these experiments. But it’s not in most of the societies the authors studied. The following table gives the mean offers for each of the 15 societies the authors studied (click to enlarge). giving In almost every society, the person designated as the proposer offers less than half of the money, contrary to many people’s intuitions. And that’s with face to face experiments. One study of the closely related Dictator game (where the receiver doesn’t have to approve the division) found just under half the participants giving away least $3 of a $10 pie under normal experimental conditions, but only 15% under anonymity. Perhaps more striking, if you give people the choice between dividing $10 between themselves and another person or taking $9 without anyone ever getting designated as a potential recipient, a good number take the $9. That’s not what Homo Economicus would do, which would be to play the Dictator game and keep all $10. But it sure as heck ain’t altruism or a concern for fairness or anything like that. Moreover, if you but offer people the option to take instead of give, most will take. They don’t take everything, a Homo Economicus would, but the fact that they take at all is quite telling. As Levitt and List forcefully argue, much of the putatively pro-social behavior we’ve discovered through laboratory experiments appears to be an artifact of the laboratory setting. We haven’t learned that people aren’t selfish — we’ve learned that they don’t want people to think that they’re selfish. When people play the Trust Game, they usually transfer about half the pile of money, and receive about half of what becomes a larger pile back. This seems to indicate that people are happy to take advantage of opportunities for mutual gain by lending money to those who will use it productively because they trust that they will receive back more than they loaned out. Great! So why do we have banks, and why is it necessary for the federal government to backstop those banks through the FDIC? Where’s all the trust? The spontaneous cooperation with total strangers in the absence of legal institutions protecting them against exploitation? Again, no one is arguing that Homo Economicus is anything but a mythical creature. Real people are not so narrowly self-interested. But the behavior we observe in the real world bears more than a little resemblance to what we’d expect from Homo Economicus. Reasonable people can disagree about how much complication we should accept in pursuit of greater explanatory power. I myself choose different assumptions for different projects, sometimes accepting more complication and sometimes keeping things more simple. I’m not trying to say that we should always assume that human behavior is similar to that of Homo Economicus. What I’m saying is that it can be useful, at times, to do so. That it’s pretty amazing that we can reproduce trade winds, storm systems, and the Gulf Stream with a dishpan, a turntable, and a Bunsen Burner.**

(Drucilla K., Signs , Vol. 30, No. 4, New Feminist Approaches to Social Science MethodologiesSpecial Issue EditorsSandra Harding and Kathryn Norberg (Summer 2005), pp. 2189-2209

Feminist economists are embedded in a network of power relations by virtue of their connection to economics (Barker, forthcoming). The discursive power of economics is not to be underestimated. Economics, particularly neoclassical economics (the type of analyses taught in most undergraduate economics courses, extolled in publications such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and lauded by national and inter national politicians and policy makers), is widely considered to be objective, gender neutral, and value free. Its pronouncements are couched in the same terms as natural laws, and the “laws of supply and demand” are accorded the same status as the law of gravity. The scientific status of economics depends crucially on its methods of inquiry: methodological individualism, rational choice theory, and mathematical modeling. Feminist economists have had only limited success in challenging the hegemony and prestige of neoclassical economics. We are not alone here. Marxists, institutionalists, post-Keynesians, and economists of other heterodox schools have likewise had little success in this endeavor. It could be the case that no amountof “better” science and analysis will ever replace the pseudoscientism that characterizes neoclassical economics—because neoclassical economics does one thing very, very well: it articulates the ideology of contemporary capitalism in a manner that makes it seem natural, inevitable, and beneficent. It does not “speak truth to power” but, on the contrary, accommodates and naturalizes power.5 Interpretive approaches help us remember that the elite status and hegemonic influence of economics stem not from its superior fidelity to the real but rather from its connection to power.

(Brigitte, Emeritus Professor of International Political Economy at the Institute of Political Science at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster, Germany COVID-19 and the gender dilemma: blind spots in both macroeconomics and feminist economics in

Handbook on Critical Political Economy and Public Policy Edited by Scherrer, Garcia, and Wullweber)

(Haithe, As If Gender Mattered: Feminism and Change in Higher Education The Journal of Higher Education,Vol. 74, No. 3 pp. 321-336 )

Feminist Critical Policy Analysis (1997) was written by academic women and published by a mainstream press. What does that tell us about common principles? It suggests, from the onset, that women do have a place in academia, at least for the time being. This does not mean, of course, that gender relations on campuses are unproblematic. We can continue to call them Unsettling Relations (1991), as Himani Bannerji and her co-authors have, but they are relations nonetheless. Like all relationships they are tenuous and contingent. As David Noble (1992) has shown, institutions of higher learning have opened and then closed their doors to women, and this has been going on for hundreds of years. We have no reason to assume, therefore, that universities in the distant future will be friendly to women. Indeed, if the recent history of faculty retrenchment in higher education offers us a lesson, it is, as Sheila Slaughter (1993) has shown, that women may be disproportionately represented among those who will be cut from the ranks of the profession. All caveats aside, however, I think that it is fair to assert that the assumptions that guided early university life in the United States have gradually been replaced by ones that are friendlier to women. Moreover, if we examine academic libraries we will find that they are increasingly populated with texts that take gender as their central focus.1 In short, feminist criticism has engendered fresh insights across the disciplines, and the scope of this particular way of seeing has been widening, not narrowing. All of which is to say that something has changed. Moreover, without these changes-without newer principles that accept women as academics, if not always on the terms they want, and newer principles that acknowledge that gender matters-a book like Marshall's (1997) would not be publishable. This does not mean, as Dale Spender (1989) has pointed out, that women's writing is always judged in the same way that men's writing is. Nor does it mean that women's writing carries the same social value. Nonetheless, given the number of academic texts that claim feminism as a subject heading, I think it is fair to say that feminist writing, however judged, has secured a place in academe. The change signified by the growth of publications written by and about women has been slow, of course, and feminists are often dismayed by this fact. Bensimon and Marshall, for example, rely on Audre Lorde's (1984) metaphor to repeatedly express their impatience with gradual change. As they passionately assert, to bring about serious change in academia means that "the master's tools must be cast aside" (p. 112). Like Lorde, Bensimon and Marshall assume that using the master's tools "to temporarily beat him at his own game" (p. 112) will never bring about genuine institutional change. From the point of view adopted here, the juxtaposition offered by Bensimon and Marshall (1997)-between those who use the master's tools and those who eschew them-is confusing. What tools would they have their followers cast aside? They mention the methods of androcentric disciplines, but what makes those disciplines and their methods androcentric? Methods, after all, are nothing more than ways of apprehending the world, and nothing is more powerful for discerning, describing, and defining the world than the vocabularies we adopt. As Bensimon and Marshall themselves suggest, language is powerful, and what disturbs them about its power is that "male dominance of language and meaning has enabled them to construct reality-history, knowledge, and laws-from their vantage point and make it look as if theirs were the view from everywhere" (p. 5). Their alternative, however, of using a feminist vocabulary to redescribe our situations and our past, is nothing more or less than an attempt to assert the power of language from another vantage point. Moreover, to gain the attention of other social scientists Bensimon and Marshall necessarily follow linguistic rules that reveal their mastery of academic ways of making meaning. They review, for example, the assumptions that guide five different feminist theoriesliberal feminism, cultural feminism, power and politics feminisms, postpositivist feminisms, and critical theory-and lay out the diverse relationships these theories have to policy analysis. Like other social scientists, Bensimon and Marshall map various theoretical perspectives so that they can show their readers where they stand. As academics they want us to know that they oppose liberal feminism because it offers strategies for change that focus on assimilating women into established structures while leaving androcentric norms, values, and conventions in tact. They advocate, instead, an interventionist strategy aimed at transforming academia. They call their position "feminist critical policy analysis" because it reflects a "combination of power and politics and postpositivist feminism with critical theory" (p. 8). When Bensimon and Marshall (1997) show their readers the feminist theories they reject, along with those they accept, they are following established academic protocols; not casting them aside. As Lyn Yates (1993) puts it, in an anthology called Gender Matters in Educational Administration and Policy, academic practice requires its adherents to "formally attend to other people's arguments" (p. 181). Academics agree to disagree, in other words, and one of the ways we do this is by discussing the theories we find disagreeable. While Bensimon and Marshall are critical toward other feminists, they are unforgiving toward a form of academic practice they call "conventional policy analysis." What makes policy analysis conventional, in their way of thinking, is that it is organized around the idea of value-neutrality. The result in higher education policy is a set of ostensibly gender-neutral norms that, in their application to academic women, are biased. The only way to undo the bias inherent in conventional policy analysis, as Bensimon and Marshall assert, is to use "the tools of critique needed to dismantle the master's house." I am all for challenging androcentric norms-telling ourselves stories about how things might get better is important work but I would like to point out that Bensimon and Marshall did not invent "the tools of critique." Instead, the tools they urge upon their readers are synonymous with the master's tools, and they were put to productive use long before women entered the academy. Moreover, what constitutes this form of criticism, what makes it recognizably academic, is that it adheres to fundamental principles that guide how academics argue (322-5)

(Haithe, As If Gender Mattered: Feminism and Change in Higher Education The Journal of Higher Education,Vol. 74, No. 3 pp. 321-336 )

As Stanley Fish (1989) has observed: "When members of an institution debate, it may seem that they are arguing about fundamental principles, but it is more often the case that the truly fundamental principle is the one that makes possible the terms of the disagreement and is therefore not in dispute at all" (p. 163). Uncovering the common ground of our principled disagreements may be especially difficult in academia. We work, more often than not, by establishing our identity against the backdrop of the points of view we find disagreeable. Consider, for example, a recent book edited by Catherine Marshall (1997), Feminist Critical Policy Analysis: A Perspective from PostSecondary Education. In the introductory chapter she and her co-author, Estela Mara Bensimon, situate their work by telling us who they are not. "The premise of this book," as they put it, "is that the theories and methods of conventional policy analysis are biased and therefore incapable of understandingt he cases of the Heilbrun's,C onley's, and Dalton's and the other thousands of women professors, students and staff as resulting from structures, norms, practices, values and culture that are gendered" (p. 2). The three women referenced in this sentence stand as icons for thousands of women who presumably share their experiences of sexism in higher education, and together this group will oppose a "biased" villain called conventional policy analysis. Feminist critical analysts, who will lead this opposition, "view conventional policy studies methods as the products of disciplinary traditions that are androcentric and therefore reject them as the master's tools" (italics in original, p. 6). The lines of dispute in this debate are firmly drawn between a conventional world where "the maintenance of this patriarchal ideology is made possible by coalitions of men in positions of power" (p. 11), and a presumably unbiased, unconventional and desirable world defined by a woman-centered policy analysis. Bensimon and Marshall, in short, posit an academic world that is neatly and fundamentally divided between men and women. As I will show, there are a number of fundamental principles that feminist critic's share with the villains they reject. By pointing to these similarities, however, I am not accusing feminists of wrongful deeds. My goal, instead, is to situate the work of academic feminism and, in particular, to arrive at a fuller understanding of the principles that give rise to feminist criticism in higher education policy. Adopting what Frank Fischer and John Forester (1993) have called the argumentative turn in policy analysis, I am seeking to understand the practical processes of argumentation in feminist policy analysis. In particular, I am interested in "what policy analysts and planners do, how language and modes of representation both enable and constrain their work, how their practical rhetoric depicts and selects, describes and characterizes, includes and excludes, and more" (p. 2). I feel compelled to point out that the work of academic feminists, like that of their non-feminist counterparts, is bound by conventions, norms, and rules that govern academia not because I'm hostile to feminist criticism, but because I have learned so much from it. Nonetheless, as the unfolding of this essay will reveal, I am more inclined to think that feminists cannot reject the master's tools, and that it is a good thing too. As I will conclude, if the goal is to change the direction of higher education policy, than increasing one's sensitivity to the nuances of the master's tools is the only way to go. (321-2)

(Amy, Law@Yale, https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-intellectual-property-law/ , 11-6)

But then AIDS activists in London and New York and South Africa taught me about patents. HIV drugs were expensive, it turns out, not because they were costly to make, but because companies could set their prices at whatever they liked. And that, in turn, was because governments had granted these companies monopolies. (Patents are government-granted exclusive rights that allow an inventor to prevent anyone else from making, using, importing, or selling their invention for twenty years. For more on the nature and evolution of patent law, copyright law, and trademark law, see Terry Fisher’s wonderful history of the ownership of ideas in the US.) Copies of HIV medicines could be made far more cheaply – today at less than $100 per person per year – if countries developed legal strategies that could overcome the patent barriers. And this is exactly what the AIDS and access to medicines advocates that I was learning from were doing: finding avenues to use generic drugs that were legal, within the confines of domestic and international law. (The WTO plays a big role in this story, both past and present.) Along the way, the access to medicines movement profoundly changed the shape of the epidemic. While much remains to be done, today there are 19.5 million people around the world receiving anti-retroviral therapy. That number was 685,000 in 2000. It was this realization – that medicines could be cheap enough to provide life-saving care to millions of people, but only if you understood something about patent law – that drew me to work on IP. It was a few more years before I would think of the issues as broader in nature. Intellectual property isn’t interesting just because it affects the price of medicines. It is interesting because there are structural reasons that IP came to AIDS activists – and that it at the same time came to food and farming activists, to free culture activists, to artists, to disability rights activists, and to advocates for education. IP law, it turns out, has been expanding dramatically in recent years. This reflects underlying economic dynamics, but also ideational and political forces. As we have shifted from the industrial age to what Manuel Castells has influentially named the “informational age,” information processing has become more important to our economy. Where companies can claim monopoly rights to information, they can become extraordinarily profitable – this is the story of the drug industry, but also Hollywood, Monsanto, and the highly concentrated publishing industry. IP-based industries lobbied hard over the past few decades for expanded IP rights, and often obtained them. The TRIPS Agreement is the most powerful example. But the story is not a deterministic one, where economic changes led mechanically to expansions in law. There were lots of possible responses, and it is not obvious that the one we’ve chosen was the best one for industry, much less for the rest of us. Ideas mattered enormously to the expansion of IP as well. (Fisher is excellent on this. I’ve written about this too, in an article that describes the role of conceptual frames in both the expansion of IP and the recent counter-mobilization.) This is important. Mechanistic accounts that treat law as the natural outgrowth of market forces tend to suggest that there’s little that can be done to intervene. But law does not naturally follow from economic forces. Law is instead a place where we argue about how we should order our economy. And it was this realization that made me want not just to advocate for changes to IP law, but also to study how arguments in its favor had been constructed, and could be altered. In sum, it’s worth attending to IP law today for at least three reasons. First, it is emerging as a key influence on both our economy and our society. It sets the terms of access to (and development of) all kinds of things that matter to our politics, our society, and our individual life chances. It also defines – indeed, creates – one of the most important sources of capital in contemporary life. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks are the deeds to the property of the informational age. Second, IP also plays an important role in the shape of inequality around the world today. And because information is so profoundly sharable, it may also be an important place to go to redress inequality. (More on this later, but you can find some of my incipient thoughts here.) Third, the field is a terrific example of the overall problem that law and political economy scholars try to address. IP has for many years been dominated by efficiency talk – indeed, it is economics itself that allows us to talk about something called “IP.” A few decades ago, we would have instead talked about copyright, patent, and trademark law as distinct fields. They still are – entirely – but they’re often conjoined in courses on “IP.” They are all considered species of “exclusive rights in information,” created in response to public goods problems and the need for market-led innovation. IP is a great place, then, to get inside of concepts like efficiency, and to reveal their fundamentally political nature. It’s a great place to trace the contribution of ideas – for example, the neoliberal picture of the state – to the reification of immaterial property. (Like real property, but even more obviously so, this kind of property is clearly not a “thing,” although it is often treated as one.) To rebuild this area of law, we need accounts that can break down and find the seams in the dominant account of the field. But we also need to develop an account of the values beyond efficiency that should underpin this field. And we need to identify how changes in this area of law can help make our world more fair, equal, and democratic. Much of the academic work I do is in this vein. I look forward to sharing more about it in the coming weeks.

(J. Ann, You just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists , International Studies Quarterly 41)

Whereas feminist analysis of military security has focused on the gendered structures of state institutions, issues of economic security and insecurity have emphasized the interrelationship between activities in markets and households. Feminists claim that women’s particular economic insecurities can only be understood in the context of patriarchal structures, mediated through race, class, and ethnicity, which have the effect of consigning women to households or low-paying jobs. Public/private boundaries have the effect of naturalizing women’s unremunerated work in the home to the detriment of women’s autonomy and economic security. Women’s disproportionate numbers at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale cannot be explained by market conditions alone; they also require an understanding that certain types of work such as teaching, nursing, and other forms of care-giving are often considered “natural” for women to perform (Peterson and Runyan, 1993:37; Pettman, 1996:165-8). Moreover, the clustering of women in low-paying or non-waged work in subsistence or households cannot be understood by using rational choice models, because women may have internalized the ideas behind traditional systems of discrimination, and thus may themselves view their roles as natural (Nussbaum and Glover, 1995:91). In other words, social expectations having to do with gender roles can reinforce economic inequalities between women and men and exacerbate women’s insecurities. Such issues can only be explained by using gender as a category of analysis; since they take them as given, rational actor models miss the extent to which opportunities and choices are constrained by the social relations in which they are embedded. Many of these issues seem far removed from the concerns of international relations. But, employing bottom-up rather than top-down explanations, feminists claim that the operation of the global economy and states’ attempts to secure benefits from it are built on these unequal social relations between women and men which work to the detriment of women’s (and certain men’s) security. For example, states that successfully compete in attracting multinational corporations often do so by promising them a pool of docile cheap labor consisting of young unmarried women who are not seen as “breadwinners” and who are unlikely to organize to protest working conditions and low wages (Enloe, 1990:151-76). When states are forced to cut back on government spending in order to comply with structural adjustment programs, it is often the expectation that women, by virtue of their traditional role as care-givers, will perform the welfare tasks previously assumed by the state without remuneration. According to Caroline Moser (1991:105), structural adjustment programs dedicated to economic “efficiency” are built on the assumption of the elasticity of women’s unpaid labor. In presenting some feminist perspectives on security and some explanations for insecurity, I have demonstrated how feminists are challenging levels of analysis and boundaries between inside and outside which they see, not as discrete constructs delineating boundaries between anarchy and order, but as contested and mutually constitutive of one another. Through a reexamination of the state, feminists demonstrate how the unequal social relations on which most states are founded both influence their external security-seeking behavior and are influenced by it. Investigating states as gendered constructs is not irrelevant to understanding their securityseeking behaviors as well as whose interests are most served by these behaviors. Bringing to light social structures that support war and “naturalize” the gender inequalities manifested in markets and households is not irrelevant for understanding their causes. Feminists claim that the gendered foundations of states and markets must be exposed and challenged before adequate understandings of, and prescriptions for, women’s (and certain men’s) security broadly defined can be formulated. (627-8)

(Martha, Prof. Emerita@BufflaoLaw, Law and Economics Against Capitalism BUFFALO Legal Studies Research Paper Series Paper No. 2020 – 009 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3815158 )

By framing individual liberty as private power separated from collective morality, the law and economics binary positions legal feminism as a threat to liberty. The idea that equality threatens freedom is a central precept of neoliberalism, melding the purported moral detachment of economic libertarians with the moral fundamentalism of social conservatives.87 That view ignores how legal rules governing the seemingly free market are “permeated with coercive restrictions on individual liberty,” as legal realist Robert Hale famously explained, so that state power routinely and inherently produces market inequalities that are neither natural, consensual, nor necessarily productive.88 The legal division between rational self-interested choice and collective morality is steeped in conventional gender ideologies. The popular culture references to “political correctness” and the “feminist thought police” or even “feminazis” represent feminist moral governance as an especially suspect public intrusion into an imagined pre-existing realm of private individual freedom. Similarly, the term “Nanny State,”89 disparages systems of care and protection as illegitimate disruptions of a more normal, natural, and independent masculine (and racialized and classed) authority. 90 The moral assumptions and practical effects of feminist ideals and strategies should not be immune from careful scrutiny and critique. Yet criticisms of feminist aspirations for moral governance are suspect if assumed to represent tough-minded rationality freed from social and moral commitments. Feminist theorist Susan Fraiman links the stance of strenuous detachment from care and protection to a romantic vision of coolness and independence “epitomized by the modern adolescent boy in his anxious, self-conscious and theatricalized will to separate from the mother” imagined as controlling, moralistic, sentimental, and not sexy.91 Underneath its surface anti-moralism, the law and economics narrative of legal deference to individual self-interest maximizing promotes a moralistic message that people should be individually responsible for advancing their own interests without substantive protection and support from government and law. 92 This naturalizes and moralizes the substantive legal rights and privileges that empower existing market winners, justifying their success not merely as superior self-serving power, but also as productive contributions to a valuable societal “pie.” In that narrative, feminist challenges to harmful private practices, such as date rape or the failure to accommodate workers’ family responsibilities, represent unproductive evasion of the risks and costs of personal choices or even immoral domination of more productive and self-sufficient others. Recent Supreme Court doctrine embraces this vision of liberty as narrow self-interest. A new constitutional paradigm advances what Robin West terms the right to exit.93 Promoted by the Federalist Society, this paradigm grounds individual liberty in an idealized free market, where people are governed not by public values and democratic processes, but by individualized selfinterest in a competition for private control and consumption of scarce resources free from collective obligations. West identifies this paradigm as the basis for newly proposed or established fundamental rights to opt out of public obligations, such as the constitutional right to bear arms for individualized violent self-help, the right to opt out of public health insurance, both at the individual and state level, and workers’ right to opt out of contributing to their workplace union. 94 West explains that these new constitutional rights to individualized self-interest particularly undermine civil rights movements’ efforts to expand democracy and equality through what she terms “rights to enter” systems of public power and protection.95 In particular, First Amendment freedoms have been reconfigured as a constitutional right to refuse civil rights requirements such as employers’ statutory obligation to cover contraceptives in their workers’ health insurance policies.96 Feminism challenges the core law and economics premise of a value-neutral yet value perfecting formal sphere of individual freedom set against a social and political sphere of suspect substantive power. A feminist vision that integrates social and economic well-being can help resist the masculinized, anti-social ideas of freedom, rationality, and productivity that have fueled twenty-first century crises in finance, climate, democracy, public health, and inequality. Law and economics cuts against legal feminism not because gender justice is a non-economic goal, but because law and economics promotes a misleading economic ideology steeped in gender and tilted toward those most willing and able to disregard and discount others’ well-being

(Martha, Prof. Emerita@BufflaoLaw, Law and Economics Against Capitalism BUFFALO Legal Studies Research Paper Series Paper No. 2020 – 009 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3815158 )

II. Framing the Economy in an Anti-Feminist Double Bind Law and economics wields stealth ideological force through a master narrative that denies the economy is inherently comprised of social and political institutions. The many technical variations of this core law and economics orthodoxy share an overarching conceptual frame positing two distinct goals for law: efficiency and distribution, or in another common terminology, “economic welfare” and fairness. That division is often presented metaphorically as the choice between maximizing or dividing the “economic pie.”37 This binary frame emerged not from rigorous, uncontested theory or falsifiable evidence, but rather from historical and instrumental efforts to brand the neoclassical school of economics as distinctly scientific. 38 On its surface, this division appears to reflect common sense: producing more economic resources differs from giving someone a bigger slice of existing resources. But by staging law’s core tension between more total gain for all and more relative gain for some, this fundamental division obscures and skews the core questions of justice. What gain represents an overall increase, rather than a transfer to partial interests? The frame provides a circular answer: law can distinguish rules and procedures that advance overall net benefit by modeling its rules and procedures on a market defined by rules and processes that prioritize efficiency over distribution. A. Efficiency versus Equality as a Hierarchical Dualism The efficiency-equality dualism echoes and amplifies the equality-difference double bind that confronted feminist antidiscrimination law. As Catharine MacKinnon observed, that liberal