Daniel Little
It is recognized by ethnographers that place and history mean a great deal in the everyday experience that people have in their neighborhoods — villages, industrial towns, universities. The ways that we perceive the world and the patterns of action and reaction that we bring to it are profoundly shaped by the histories and practices …
Continue reading "Shaping of inner-city African-American youth"
Source: The Wire It is becoming increasingly clear that the criminal justice system is an important component of the system of race in the United States today. Michelle Alexander's important book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness makes the case that the war on drugs and the war on crime …
Tyler Cowen sounds a bit like Voltaire's Pangloss when he argues, as the New York Times headline puts it, that we are living "all in all, [in] a more egalitarian world" (link). Cowen acknowledges what most people concerned about inequalities believe: "the problem [of inequality] has become more acute within most individual nations"; but he shrugs this off …
Several recent posts have raised the question, what would be needed to move US public policy towards a more equitable treatment of the bottom 75% of American society? Conditions for much of this super-majority of society have gradually declined in the past several decades, and public programs designed to ameliorate conditions of health, education, nutrition, …
Continue reading "Public attitudes towards market fundamentalism"
Karl Polanyi is underrated as a theorist of capitalist modernity. Margaret Somers and Fred Block's latest book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique aims to correct this failure and to work out in some detail the analysis and critique that Polanyi provided between the wars. The book is an important contribution to the …
Continue reading "Polanyi’s substantive theory of a decent society"
The City Year national leadership conference is taking place in Boston this week, celebrating the 25th anniversary of City Year. CY is a strong example of a social-change organization that is in the process of actually making an impact on a key social problem. CY's goal is specific and audacious: to improve the high school …
A quick review of Peter Edelman's So Rich, So Poor: Why it’s So Hard to End Poverty in America posted on svbtle.com ... http://dlittle30.svbtle.com/entrenched-poverty
Elizabeth Anderson is John Dewey Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author most recently of The Imperative of Integration. This contribution extends a question posed in a recent post on the conservative war on poor people (link). Thanks for contributing, Liz! American Conservative Politics and the …
Continue reading "Guest post by Elizabeth Anderson on race in American politics"
American conservatives for the past several decades have shown a remarkable hostility to poor people in our country. The recent effort to slash the SNAP food stamp program in the House (link); the astounding refusal of 26 Republican governors to expand Medicaid coverage in their states -- depriving millions of poor people from access to …
source: Lane Kenworthy, Consider the Evidence blog (link) Thirty years ago Sam Bowles, David Gordon and Tom Weisskopf published a book with a provocative title, Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline (1983). (Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (1984) …
Understanding Society 