Who Gets to Retire?
An excerpt from Work, Retire, Repeat
For the first time in modern American history, gains in retirement time are concentrated at the economic top. ...
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Notre Dame and the Controversy over Fundraising for Its Restoration
An excerpt from Amy Schiller’s new book The Price of Humanity
The fundraising for Notre Dame’s reconstruction was simultaneously a triumph and a fiasco for philanthropy. It showed philanthropy’s unique ability to build and sustain things of everlasting importance. At the same time, it also demonstrated how those very triumphs are undermined by preexisting conditions of economic inequality....
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Poetic Rage, Anti-colonial Avant-gardes
An excerpt of Interior Frontiers
This essay distills what I see as a fugitive, peripatetic set of counter-colonial avant-gardes, innovative and mobile to different degrees, challenging both what avant-gardes do and who are included among them. I do not treat them as a movement but as convergent spaces of work and thought, of “counter-conducts,” of ...
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Why Do Students Cheat?
ChatGPT and the myth of meritocracy
ChatGPT is just one symptom of a more severe disease in higher education, namely, the multiple forms of meritocratic thinking......
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You Can Never Be Too Rich—Or Too Thin
If you really want to go back to the origins of American fitness culture, it doesn’t start in a gym as we know it: it starts in circuses and world’s fairs, where these strong men and women are on stage, flexing their muscles, wearing different costumes. ...
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Why We Should Worry about Inequality
And why we should take seriously Plato and John Stuart Mill
Plato and Mill respectively propose a variety of measures to achieve their desired degree of economic equality (not precise equality in either case), though both agree (1) that inheritance taxes should play a significant role, and (2) that this equality should be achieved incrementally, rather than all at once, to ...
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Inflation, the Labor Market, and Inequality: Two Interviews
Unproductive Labor Podcast, Episode 16
This week a double episode, first a discussion about inflation and the labor market with Brian Callaci, chief economist at the Open Market Institute. Then an interview with political scientist David Lay Williams about inequality today and its place in the history of western political thought....
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What You Don’t Know Can’t TIF You
Pretend something isn’t a problem and it goes away, right?
TIFs date back to the 1950s, and every state except Arizona has them in one form or another. There are thousands upon thousands of TIF districts all across the country. Chances are decent you’ve heard about one in your local area....
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The Wall Street Journal Resurrects Mandeville
Do poor Americans have too much?
According to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Phil Gramm and John Early, the problem is not that the wealthiest Americans have seen their fortunes dramatically explode. It is rather that the poorest Americans have too much! ...
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Why Trump Could Win Again
Democrats must respond to rising inequality and the working class
A mere six weeks away from the 2020 election, the polls remain in flux. Some suggest that Biden is performing better than Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Kerry did, while other polls place Biden behind Clinton. Evidence of the race tightening with Hispanic and white working-class voters suggests an ...
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The Danger of Race Reductionism
Two prominent Black leftists warn that simplistic views about “white supremacy” will undermine the fight for social justice
At the end of May, prominent leftist political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. was slated to give an online talk cosponsored by the Philadelphia and New York City chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America. But even though Reed was a strong Bernie Sanders supporter, and happens to be Black, some ...
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Amy Cooper: The Paradox of the Shameless White Liberal
How pious white anti-racism can contribute to racist behavior
It is unclear what the appropriate consequences for something like this should be, given how dire the consequences of her actions could have been (as recent events in Minneapolis sadly confirm). However, Ms. Cooper has already paid a high price for her transgression: She has been publicly shamed and terminated ...
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