inequality

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  12/29/2020
  

  The Life in "The Simpsons" Is No Longer Attainable

  In the 1990s, "The Simpsons" drew humor by putting bizarre dysfunction in the context of middle class suburban banality. Today it's the idea of homeownership paid for by a stable single income that seems outlandish.

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  12/21/2020
  

  A More Perfect Meritocracy

  by Agnes Callard

  Two new books take aim at the moral failures of meritocracy. But we can advocate for a more just society without giving up on merit.

• 
• 12/20/2020
  

  Can Biden Broaden Our American Dream?

  by Walter G. Moss

  Can a program of national service create pathways to individual opportunity while also building the social cohesion America needs to recover? 

• 
• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  12/13/2020
  

  Pandemic Lessons for the Rest of Us, Or: Vaccine Thinking Applied to All of American Life

  by Liz Theoharis

  The quick and much-welcomed development of a coronavirus vaccine is highlighting what Martin Luther King, Jr. observed in 1967: that American abandonment amid abundance is a question of political choice, not the society's capacity to create humane solutions to large problems. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  11/19/2020
  

  Against Returning to Normal

  by David Walsh

  Liberal pleas to return to a "normal" defined by bipartisan consensus ignore the long legacy of ideological conflict and the pursuit of division as a political strategy by the conservative movement. 

• 
• SOURCE: Aeon
  10/2/2020
  

  This Vanishing Moment and Our Vanishing Future: John Hersey, Hiroshima, and the End of World

  Postwar prosperity depended on a truce between capitalist growth and democratic fairness. Is it possible to get it back?

• 
• SOURCE: TPM
  9/28/2020
  

  The Democrats Now Face A Historic Opportunity For Structural Change

  by Gregory P. Downs

  Democrats have seen the consequences of their caution in 2009. In 2021, they may have the opportunity to learn from the boldness of the 1880s.

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  9/29/2020
  

  When the Privileged Don’t Pay their Fair Share in Taxes, it Can Spark Revolution

  by Christine Adams

  The unfairness of the tax system, especially as the French government faced bankruptcy in the late 1780s, was one of the factors that triggered revolution in 1789. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/27/2020
  

  Is Amy Coney Barrett Joining a Supreme Court Built for the Wealthy?

  by Kim Phillips-Fein

  Amy Coney Barrett's judicial record indicates she would help the court move back to the Lochner era by crippling regulation and ruling against labor unions. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  9/24/2020
  

  Why Supermarkets Are Powerful Flash Points In Racial Politics

  by Tracey Deutsch and James McElroy

  In addition to selling food, grocery stores have also preserved a social order that treats shoppers of different races differently, dispensing hierarchy along with food — and, in fact, creating it.

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  9/9/2020
  

  Neoliberal Hong Kong Is Our Future, Too

  by Macabe Keliher

  While orthodox economists like to point to Hong Kong as an ideal free market, the social consequences have been disastrous. Inequality is rising, wages are declining and working hours increasing, overall economic opportunity is dwindling, and housing is so unaffordable that office workers sleep in McDonalds. Is it any wonder that the streets are now burning?

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  8/7/2020
  

  Isabel Wilkerson’s World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste

  Wilkerson's book contends that what we know as racism must be understood as a system of social domination, not as a matter of group conflict or prejudice.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  8/4/2020
  

  Fight for Economic Equality is as Old as America Itself

  by Daniel Mandell

  As Americans debate the future, it’s worth remembering that the Founders believed that the republic depended upon a rough equality of wealth.

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  8/5/2020
  

  The Undemocratic History of School ‘Pandemic Pods’

  by Mark Boonshoft

  The Coronavirus pandemic threatens to entrench the undemocratic practice of exclusive education for children of the rich. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  8/3/2020
  

  Economic Reforms Might Be The Best Health-Care Reforms

  by Evelynn M. Hammonds and Susan M. Reverby

  Only by understanding and confronting this entangled web of racism and public health can we actually solve a problem that has been centuries in the making.

• 
• SOURCE: CNBC
  7/21/2020
  

  The Fed Has a ‘Responsibility’ to Help Reduce High Unemployment in the Black Community

  by Ayanna Pressley and David Stein

  A historian of the relationship between economic policy and racial inequality and a member of the House of Representatives argue that the Federal Reserve needs to end its historic neglect of its mandate to promote full employment.

• 
• 7/19/2020
  

  Thinking About Racism Beyond Statues and Symbols

  by Dolores Janiewski

  In his life and his death Floyd experienced the coercive structures that constrain, punish and eventually kill altogether too many Americans. More than Confederate statues, these need to be torn down.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/15/2020
  

  Equal Opportunity is Not Enough

  by Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor

  The myth of America as an equal opportunity society has historically allowed white Americans to hold out equality as a promise redeemable in the future but rarely available in the present.

• 
• 7/12/2020
  

  Re-stabilizing the Middle Class and the Poor: Lessons from the 1930s

  by David Stebenne

  For a long time it seemed as though the 1930s era of high unemployment was a kind of “great exception” in American history, but now it has appeared again, suddenly and unexpectedly, just as it did in the early 1930s. 

• 
• 7/3/2020
  

  Will Capitalist Consumer Culture Absorb Another Generation of Protest?

  by Walter G. Moss

  Do recent protests against the symbols of racism--monuments and statues--reflect a political movement that can easily be absorbed by today's multicultural corporations, or will that energy sustain a push to fundamentally reform American capitalism too?