Daniel Little
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) …
African-American citizens and a host of supporters made some of this country's most important history fifty years ago in the mobilization that resulted in the March on Washington in August, 1963. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his most famous speech on the occasion, and many of us are remembering Dr. King's legacy today on …
It is interesting to re-read Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom some fifty years after its original publication. There are many aspects of the book that are likely to catch a contemporary reader's attention, but mine was drawn to Friedman's analysis of racial discrimination. In general, Friedman believes that capitalism is fundamentally good for promoting categorical equality. It …
Loïc Wacquant offers a fascinating piece of urban ethnography in Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. It is his account of his three-year experience while a sociology graduate student at the University of Chicago of participating in the Woodlawn Boys and Girls Club, a boxing club for young men who are serious about …
Understanding Society 