Departments

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inequality

  • 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: 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. 

  • 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 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.