From lending to spending of last resort: the epistemology of book-keeping as infrastructural form

L. E. Steininger

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This article starts from the premise that IPE has, by and large, a blind spot for the contingency of public, monetary provisioning in support of full employment. Public employer-of-last-resort facilities are often treated as politically or economically unfeasible, or even dispensable. Yet, much like central banks’ lending of last resort facilities, they are among the most basic features of a well-functioning economy. The persistent failure to recognise and operationalise such labour-market public backstops thus constitutes one of the most consequential, if intangible, infrastructure failures of our time. To address the foundations of this blind spot, the article draws on critical infrastructure studies, which conceptualise infrastructural forms as lively, political, and contested. I argue that attention to infrastructural form foregrounds the individuated ontology structuring contemporary IPE. The article then draws a parallel between the historical hard-wiring of public backstops into financial markets and the contemporary hard-wiring of inequities into monetary infrastructure, sustained by epistemic assumptions about accounting, money, and price stability. The argument is developed through the case of public option employment.

Keywords: infrastructural form; blind spots; epistemology; lending of last resort; public option employment; theory of money (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 B41 E42 P51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2026-06-15
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in New Political Economy, 15, June, 2026. ISSN: 1356-3467

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/138943/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:138943

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().