anotherpanacea

Tag: US

  • Trump, Trust, and Civic Renewal

    Trump, Trust, and Civic Renewal

    More than anything else, the current political climate shifts the kinds of solutions for which our fellow citizens will reach. Rather than hoping to make change at the national level, we must organize our political lives around more local efforts. Rather than seeking assistance from state institutions we must organize and act ourselves. I have…

  • What do Cuba and China tell us about Communism and Infant Mortality Reductions?

    What do Cuba and China tell us about Communism and Infant Mortality Reductions?

    I started out to write a neoliberal theo-politics; rough and ready and trying to show where matters of relatively unchallenged beliefs about the world have led me. Challenges and data now force me to revise those beliefs. What could be more neoliberal and technocratic than that?

  • What are the ruling ideas today? Is “College For All” among them? (Doubts-that-don’t-change-our-practices edition)

    What are the ruling ideas today? Is “College For All” among them? (Doubts-that-don’t-change-our-practices edition)

    I’ve just finished an article on higher education and the liberal arts, and it’s full of hope and comes to some definite conclusions about particular ways that an education in the liberal arts is valuable. It’s out for peer review right now, which means that if the reviewer is googling phrases maybe she’ll find this,…

  • Varieties of Inequality

    Varieties of Inequality

    I can think of at least six kinds of inequality: Inequality of income: different people receive different wages, either for different jobs or for the same job, as profits from capital investments, or as government subsidies, transfer payments, or private charity. Inequality of consumption: different people consume different products (i.e. the generic widget) in differing…

  • Public-sector unions as Public Work: The Case for Teachers

    (This post is a continuation of Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Chicago Teachers’ Strike.) Another way of thinking about public sector unionization is as an effort to force democratic public institutions to remain accountable to the professional standards and know-how of those who work within them. Citizens want better, more accountable teachers, yet they don’t know how…

  • 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…

  • Status Emotions and Punishment

    I haven’t written much about status emotions, recently, but I came across one of my favorite Facebook memes and remembered again how central it seems. I don’t endorse the misogyny here, but it perfectly describes the way that fundamental attribution bias transforms resentment into contempt, and thus leads, in my view, to both epistemic and…

  • 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…

  • Transitioning to BIG+VAT

    John Quiggin raises some interesting questions about the BIG+VAT in the comments to the last post: I’m unconvinced by your transition strategy, though of course the nature of a transition strategy depends on the starting point. I don’t see how a ‘small’ [UBI*], say $3000/person/r or $1 trillion per year in the US context let’s…

  • 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…