Posts filed under “Uncategorized”
He’s a good man
Men see an uprising against sexual violence and ask, first, who they are supposed to be — rather than what they might have done. So many of the knee-jerk defenses of men who have done violent things, celebrities and ordinary guys alike, start on the premise that they are “not that sort of person.” But […]
Workers are at an extreme wage disadvantage, especially outside of cities.
The basic idea of monopsony is that if employers don’t have to compete with one another for workers, they can pay less, and workers will be stuck without the outside job offers that would enable them to claim higher wages. The monopsony story is consistent with a wide range of observed labor market phenomena: wage […]
All for one, and one for all
This systemic focus, crucially, does not inflate “racism” to make it explain all racial disparities, but understands that such inequalities are outcomes of many phenomena that interact with racism, yet cannot be reduced to only racism. These include technology, political economy, and cultural patterns. As early as 1964, for example, King presciently warned in Why […]
Being chronically ill doesn’t make me a better person, but it does help me identify jerks
I assume people think surviving illness changes you because there’s something inherently character-building about pain. But what happened wasn’t a struggle, in the sense that through perseverance I overcame something difficult. For a fairly brief but unexpected period of my life, I lost my capacity to work, to advocate for myself, to navigate life and […]
Voting with your dollars has some serious problems
Who needs city housing regulators when AirBnB can use data-driven methods to effectively regulate room-letting, then house-letting, and eventually urban planning generally? Why not let Amazon have its own jurisdiction or charter city, or establish special judicial procedures for Foxconn? Some vanguardists of functional sovereignty believe online rating systems could replace state occupational licensure—so rather […]
Can we smash that mirror now?
Most anti-neoliberalism fails to deal with the macro-problems of endless compound growth — ecological, political, and economic problems. So I would rather be talking about anticapitalism than anti-neoliberalism. via Neoliberalism Is a Political Project
Staking a claim
In Laurie Penny’s most excellent review of Ivanka Trump’s book, she includes the following excerpt: Simply put, staking your claim means declaring something your own. Early in our country’s history, as new territories were acquired or opened—particularly during the gold rush—a citizen could literally put a stake in the ground and call the land theirs. […]