Research Expertise and Interest
Economy & Society, law, Healthcare, political economy, prisons
Research Description
Armando Lara-Millán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar. He studies political economy in sociology. For him that means studying changing markets and their enabling institutions, but in such a way that centers history, culture/knowledge, and power. Lara-Millán is an ethnographer of well-positioned organizations and a historian of the fields those organizations shape. He is the current chair-elect of the Sociology of Law Section of the ASA, a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and is currently a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Lara-Millán's first major project was a political economy of American public hospitals and county jails. Long story short, caseloads that are usually thought of as cost incurring in public agencies actually make a lot of money for otherwise dying institutions. The book won the 2022 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association. A series of articles associated with this project were published in the American Sociological Review, Criminology, and the American Journal of Sociology.
He is working on two larger projects. The first is an examination of runaway American healthcare spending. Having made his way into key organizations that set prices for medical advancements, he is arguing that while many believe higher prices are an inventible outcome in a skill-intensive sector, it is actually the institutions, knowledge cultures, and rent-seeking that do the trick. Some of this work has been published in Economy & Society. More is coming that takes on Baumol's Cost Disease. With some collaborators, he is also undertaking data collection on the rise of medical debt in California.
Lara-Millan's second major project is a book tentatively titled The Firm That Predicted the Future and the Birth of a New Global Economy. It argues that over the past forty years, five global political-economic dynamics were largely mistaken for the new, permanent rules of the globalized economy. Instead, they were one-time, historically contingent developments that are now rapidly changing. It pairs a qualitative study of a key investment firm with the natural language processing of decades of corporate quarterly reports, detailing the end of low-cost labor in China, the transition from high-growth to cyclical internet-beneficiary firms, the move from cheap energy to expensive raw materials, the inability to further lower corporate taxes and the cost of corporate borrowing, and the uncertain role of performative monetary policy. The book offers a way of making sense of our supposed “polycrisis” to understand better how a new order is struggling to be born in the present.
He also continues his work in urban studies with a recent article in Social Problems on the role of neighborhood digital platforms (e.g. Nextdoor, Citizen) in reconstructing the urban order.
Contact: armando@berkeley.edu.
