Here is a stunning juxtaposition in the April 2 print edition of the New York Times. Take a close look. The top panel updates readers on the fact that the city and the region are enduring unimaginable suffering and stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with 63,300 victims and 2,624 deaths (as of April 4) — …
Social mobility disaggregated
There is a new exciting and valuable contribution from the research group around Raj Chetty, Nathan Hendren, and John Friedman, this time on the topic of neighborhood-level social mobility. (Earlier work highlighted measures of the impact on social mobility contributed by university education across the country. This work is presented on the Opportunity Insights website; …
Global inequality
image: scenes from Mumbai, April 2016 Inequalities of wealth and income throughout the world have generated a great deal of attention in the past several years, in both the media and the scholarly world. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century gave this set of debates a huge impetus when it appeared in 2013. Branko …
Youth service and America’s progress
Several hundred leaders from around the country convened this week in Washington, D.C. to participate in the 2015 City Year National Leadership Summit. City Year is a national youth service organization with a focused and ambitious mission: to harness the talents of young people in service towards the goal of solving the nation's dropout crisis. …
Was the Civil Rights movement a revolution?
photo: African-American newsman attacked by mob in Little Rock, 1957 (link) I think of the results of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States as the second American revolution, though a slow-moving one. And it is tempting to think of MLK as one of the founding fathers of this …
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Elitism?
There are a variety of ways of valorizing individuals and institutions in our society. We can value contribution and productivity; effectiveness; talent and merit; honesty and integrity; and "elite status". Just watch the credits for Masterpiece Theater, including the promotions for a luxury cruise line and a luxury fashion house, and you will get a …
Underinvesting in the public good
There are quite a few investments in social programs that would have spectacular return on investment, but that in fact remain unfunded or underfunded. I am thinking here of things like broadened preschool programs, enhanced dropout prevention programs, regional economic development efforts, and prison re-entry programs. Why are these spectacular opportunities so dramatically under-exploited in …
A sense of injustice in China?
Quite a few years ago Barrington Moore explored in his book Injustice the idea that a sense of justice sometimes plays an important role in history. Here is how he put his central question: This is a book about why people so often put up with being the victims of their societies and why at …
Tyler Cowen on global inequality
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 …
Saskia Sassen on austerity and social exclusion
The previous post summarized some of Kathleen Thelen's thinking about the prospects for a more egalitarian capitalism in our future. Saskia Sassen offers a more negative view of the direction of the development of European capitalism in her most recent book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Here is a post in Open Democracy in …
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Understanding Society 