inequality

• 
• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  3/16/2023
  

  Don't Bother Looking for a Place to Rent in DC

  by Rebecca Gordon

  New congressman Maxwell Frost's struggles to find an apartment in the capital echoes the "Bourgeois Blues" Leadbelly sang in 1937. What does it say about democracy if representatives of the people can't live in Washington? 

• 
• SOURCE: Vox
  12/20/2022
  

  2022's Lesson? Billionaires Bad, Actually

  Tech historian Margaret O'Mara says Musk, like other tech moguls, has long been supported by a myth of the individual genius that is only now being overturned by his erratic decisionmaking, boosting of right-wing conspiracy theories, and incredibly thin-skinned reaction to criticism. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  12/20/2022
  

  Americans Have Always Imagined and Demanded Better Alternatives; Those Alternatives Have Been Hidden

  by Jamelle Bouie

  Thomas Skidmore's critique of inequality held that the inequality of private property consigned the majority of humanity to toil for the enjoyment of a minority, a situation irreconcilable with democracy. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  12/2/2022
  

  The Biggest Threat to America's Stability is the Class Divide

  by Kim Phillips-Fein

  We mistakenly bemoan "polarization" instead of reckoning with the economic power of radical right-wing elites, who have the resources to fund growing organizations, and the growing number of people disaffected from the social order who are susceptible to their messages. 

• 
• SOURCE: Yale Daily News
  11/27/2022
  

  Grad Workers: Choose Solidarity with New Haven

  by Adom Getachew and Sarah Haley

  Two former Yale PhD students argue that the university's graduate student union offers not just benefits and protection to graduate student workers, but the chance for them to work in solidarity with other university and New Haven workers across the vast racial and socioeconomic divides separating city and campus. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/27/2022
  

  The Robber Barons Had Nothing on Musk

  by David Nasaw

  Like the Gilded Age robber barons, Elon Musk's self-made mythos hides the government subsidies supporting his businesses. Unlike them, he has the werewhithal to move financial markets to his advantage through Twitter. 

• 
• SOURCE: Academe
  10/15/2022
  

  Higher Ed's Past is Gilded, Not Golden

  by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

  Despite unfavorable comparisons between today's college costs and labor conditions and those prevailing in the 1960s, public higher education was never based on a deep commitment to egalitarianism, and has long financed, rather than funded, college. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  10/12/2022
  

  The Selective Politics of the "Learning Loss" Debate

  by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  Discussions of the disruption to learning caused by COVID-related school closures often ignore the endemic inequalities in American education and exposure to harm from COVID, and sideline the voices of teachers who have been sounding the alarm about the dangerous state of their facilities for years. 

• 
• SOURCE: Dissent
  10/10/2022
  

  The Ongoing Problem of Segregation in America

  by Aziz Rana

  The thoroughness of racial segregation through the housing markets is a profound obstacle to the kind of interracial political organizing the left wants to accomplish. 

• 
• SOURCE: N+1
  9/9/2022
  

  Barbara Ehrenreich Challenged Readers to Examine Themselves

  by Gabriel Winant

  The journalist and social theorist wrote to force her readers to examine their own positions in society's hierarchies, not to encourage cynicism of futility, but to encourage them to see change as a long haul. 

• 
• 8/26/2022
  

  Historians Respond to Biden's Student Debt Relief Order

  How are historians responding to the Biden administration's order to forgive $10,000 of student debt for borrowers with incomes under $125,000?

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  8/19/2022
  

  The Dems' IRA Message Would Be More Effective If It Weren't Afraid of Touting Taxes

  by Molly Michelmore

  The last four decades of tax-cutting have crippled democracy. Democrats need to learn lessons from a time when paying taxes was popular and patriotic. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  8/1/2022
  

  Raymond Craib: Rich Tech Libertarians Have Fantasies of Escape, but a Desire for Power

  by Jacob Bruggeman

  The most striking lesson from the history of failed attempts to create societies without states is that the libertarian impulse to strip the state of its power to control capital has already profoundly reshaped every society on earth. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  5/23/2022
  

  Would We Be Better Off Without Philanthropists?

  Do the gifts of the super-wealthy cancel out the damage done by the unequal system that allows them to accumulate it? 

• 
• SOURCE: The Baffler
  5/4/2022
  

  The Rent is Too Damn High(ly Central to Modern Economies)

  by Trevor Jackson

  Historian Trevor Jackson reviews Brett Christophers's book on rent, which places the power of the rentier class at the center of the inequality and dysfunction of modern capital and brings Marx's original investigations into the 21st century.

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  4/20/2022
  

  Lily Geismer: The Clinton Legacy is Well-Intentioned Failure

  "I wanted to challenge the common view that the story of US politics after 1968 is solely about the rise of the right, and that the Democrats adopted the policies that they did as a way of playing electoral defense."

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  4/4/2022
  

  Your House Makes More Money than You Do

  Rising real estate values are bringing more wealth to Americans than wages and salaries are. This is a big problem for economic equality.

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2/7/2022
  

  The Economy is Good, Actually

  by Zachary D. Carter

  An economic historian says that the recovery from the pandemic is historically good in terms of the share of gains going to low-income workers, but the politics are not working in the Democrats' favor. 

• 
• SOURCE: Jacobin
  2/1/2022
  

  How the Left Lost the Constitution

  by Benjamin Morse

   Law professors Joseph Fiskin and William Forbath revisit the Reconstruction Amendments to argue that they represent a fusion of a "democracy-of-opportunity" tradition in the law that embraces an affirmative government duty to redistribute wealth. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  1/25/2022
  

  Abortion isn't a "Choice" without Racial Justice

  by Sara Matthiesen

  The recent failure of the broad social spending initiatives of Build Back Better and the impending judicial overthrow of Roe are connected, and signal the need for a movement for reproductive freedom that goes beyond "choice" to address systemic inequalities.