Good analysis of May 1 in the Times:
Originally billed as a nationwide economic boycott under the banner “Day Without an Immigrant,” the day evolved into a sweeping round of protests intended to influence the debate in Congress over granting legal status to all or most of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country…
The economic impact […]
Like Mr. Yglesias, I’ve been living in a news bubble the past couple of days and only discovered belatedly (i.e. this morning, via a flyer posted at my street corner) that a general strike has been called on behalf of all immigrant workers in the country.
I’m all for people flexing their collective economic muscle, […]
Sorry for the cagey post yesterday, but I’ve been mulling a pet hypothesis: that the major political parties in the US are due for — or at least may likely see — a major realignment of their base coalitions. I first really got thinking about this when I read a Mark Schmitt post last year: […]
Brad Delong probes Paul Krugman’s piece on the technocratic myth comes up with his own list of what’s driving economic inequality:
The rise of a very powerful, successful, exploitative upper class.
Further increases in inequality as the tax and transfer system becomes less progressive.
Increases in risk that threaten to move middle-class families sharply downward in […]
The strike may be over, but the conflict at stake still remain. I pretty much agree with Bob at Blue Mass, but also wonder if something bigger is being left out of the picture. People on the left side of the blogosphere are huffing that we need to stick up for unions, but isn’t the […]
Cross-posted at TPMCafe
Yes, it’s something of a moot point to fret about the success of liberal policymaking when a) liberals are so resolutely out of power at the moment and b) the current administration barely tries to pretend it cares about policy actually designed to solve problems. Still, for anyone who cares about how to […]
Matt Yglesias on the ideal of universal college education:
Take any given poor kid, and you could give that kid a real boost in life by putting him through college. But he gets that boost precisely because a large number of people don’t go to college, so he winds up having a competitive advantage in the […]
Social capital means one thing among economists and policy types, but in the work of Pierre Bourdieu it is the umbrella concept for connections and social networks that can be “cashed in” for economic or cultural capital. Unlike economic capital (self-explanatory) and cultural capital (inherited or acquired cultural dispositions of class distinction), social capital doesn’t […]
Wow, David Brooks goes lefty on us today. I fielded some disagreement before when I mentioned that there might be progressive, nonracist reasons for the concept of a black underclass. Certainly the rise of black middle-class and the existence of rural, largely white poor and the working poor immigrants challenge Great Society-era conceptions of racial […]
So… what did I think of the book? First, I should say that this is one book so widely cited and so talked about that I came to it already thinking I knew exactly what the argument would be. Fortunately, I was pleased to find a different book than I expected. Thomas Frank is a […]
Maybe because the third chapter of the diss is on middlebrow culture, I found the David Brooks piece today a worthy read. His argument: that a pervasive middlebrow culture has vanished. Whereas popular press magazines used to wrestle with abstract painters, existentialist philosophers and theatrical movements, today. As he describes the shift:
Middlebrow culture was […]
Slate summarizes today a fascinating study on the effect that racially-readable names have on social and economic life chances. The authors remind us once again that correlation does not equal causation and have the California data to prove it. It’s a useful companion to the study of black names in resume success, though in debunking […]
It’s not often that I link approvingly to Oxblog (we must be on opposite ends of Bourdieusian social space in addition to having different politics), but I really liked David Adesnik’s review of Spurlock’s documentary Supersize Me. First caveat is that I haven’t seen the film - in any case, Adesnik’s post isn’t about the […]
On Newbury Street today, I passed by the MaxMara/BCBG store, and wondered how “BCBG,” which is after all the French acronym equivalent of “yuppie,” came to seem like an appealing name for an upscale boutique.
Then I got to wonder how “yuppie” came to become a generalized aspersion against suburban people, lifestyles, etc., even to the […]
Ezra over at Pandagon takes on Barbara Ehrenreich’s lampooning of the Bush administration’s marriage education initiative:
While she’s right to note the absurdity of promoting marriage for the poor while attacking it for poor gays, she’s wrong to take aim at the idea of marriage education in lower income areas. Children born to single-mothers — or […]