Tag: income
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Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Chicago Teachers’ Union Strike
I am one of those ideologically-impure liberals that worries a lot about public sector unions. On the one hand, I favor workplace democracy and collaboration; on the other hand, I worry about the fact that as union membership has declined, the majority of remaining union members haved tended to be at the top of the…
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There is no college bubble
Megan McArdle’s Newsweek cover story, “Is college a lousy investment?” is an odd beast. Parts of it are really great, and there are some very important observations throughout to which my colleagues and fellow progressives should pay attention. But the title, framing, graphics, and many of the arguments are just silly, which makes it a…
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Foucault on Education and Human Capital
From Foucault’s Collège de France lecture on March 14th, 1979 (in what the publisher has misnamed The Birth of Biopolitics despite the fact that that year’s lectures basically spelled the end of Foucault’s work on biopolitics and focused on the limitation of state control over the market): What does it mean to form human capital, and so…
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Season of Political Irrelevance Update
The Obama administration brews its own beer Weigel takes a stab at serious policy Weigel has predicated a lot on the conditional statement: “If you look at it right, then you’ll see serious policy.” But we don’t have any evidence for the antecedent, that the public or the media *will* “look at it right.” More to…
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The Season of Political Irrelevance
It is my considered opinion that the next three months will involve no serious deliberations regarding substantive public policy. Though readership and viewership for such matters will be at its highest, none of the things discussed will be discussed in a way that comports with public reason or with anything like the goal of exchanging…
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The Middle Class is Losing the Race for Second Place
I think about inequality a lot. But I also think about the middle class a lot, which isn’t quite the same thing. Generally, my sympathies lie with the “least advantaged” or “subaltern,” but I also feel the pull of the American cultural commitment to the middle class. There can be little doubt that we are…
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Does Basic Income + VAT “Solve” Immigration?
One of my favorite liberal policies is the basic income proposal. The idea is that all citizens have a basic guaranteed income, below which no one may fall. As the argument goes, this supplies more flexibility than basic provision of essential services, and renders recipients much more autonomous than they currently are, since the government…
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How Taxation Effects Income Share (Not Much)
Last week, Greg Mankiw posted this graph without comment: I thought there was something weird about the graph, and it’s been nagging at me. For one thing, it compares the bottom four quintiles to the top 5 percent of Americans. For another, it ignores non-federal taxation. (State and local taxes are more difficult to calculate,…
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The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
I’m watching this Elizabeth Warren video today: The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class. Synopsis after the jump.