Tag
Economics
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The “Emotional Economy” of Parenting: A Conversation with Nina Bandelj
“I am an observer of how intellectual ideas travel and enter into everyday life, or how they come to be performed by families in ways that give those ideas a reality of their own.”
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The Student Debt Crisis and Its Deniers
The year 2016 seemed to begin with the promise of actual reform to federal student loan policy, with meaningful consequences for the industry. Bernie Sanders thrilled …
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The Mortal Marx
In the mid-1860s, as an anxious and ailing Karl Marx worked on the 30-page essay that would billow into Das Kapital, his daughter Eleanor—“Tussy”—would play under his desk. With her dolls, kittens, and puppies, Tussy turned the sage’s study into her playroom. Occasionally, Marx would take a break from his “fat book” (as the family…
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The Holocene Hangover
As a child growing up in the early 1980s, I often daydreamed of space exploration and interstellar frontiers. The leap into outer space seemed tantalizingly close. In the science fiction stories I read, the chronology of the future was also the potential biography of adulthood. One story projected a settlement on Mars in 1995; another…
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Cuba’s Next Chapter
In April 2016, Cuba’s Communist Party (PCC) convened its Seventh Party Congress. Sprinkled throughout the published proceedings were a few attempts at levity by the otherwise laconic Raúl Castro. One joke went as follows: when US politicians critize Cuba for having a single-party system, Raúl responds, “Yes, just like you.” The gullible Americans correct him,…
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On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom.
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The New Working Class
Tamara Draut is a policy expert and social critic based at Demos, a progressive think tank. Her latest book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, calls attention to the …
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Graphic Novels for MBAs
Over the course of the two-year program at Harvard Business School, an MBA student will read over five hundred case studies. They range in length from a single page to over 50, but their format is typically the same: a description of an ambiguous scenario that forces students to read actively and decide for themselves…
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Cheese in Your Bones: The Sheep and Shepherds of Pag
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The island of Pag, which protrudes into the Adriatic like an accusing finger, has more sheep than people. A thin bridge perched across a stretch of sea connects it to the Croatian mainland: when one crosses it, the northern…
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A Laborless Eden?
A utopian fantasy has always served as an engine for scientific progress—the fantasy that, one day, we might harness enough fossil fuel, enough computing power, and enough mined mineral wealth to create an army of machines that could finally deliver us from work and back to a laborless Eden. Paul Lafargue promised this to us…
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To Laugh, So as Not to Weep: Paul Murray’s Modern Banking Satire
Paul Murray’s novel The Mark and the Void is set in the bleak landscape of 21st-century banking. It’s a story about the relationship between an idealistic banker named Claude and a jaded writer named Paul. It’s a story that is very aware of itself as a story, and within which two seemingly incommensurable narratives—totalizing financial…
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Diversity Doublespeak
Goldman Sachs values many things—money most of all—but you might be glad to hear that it also values diversity. “We strive for excellence,” they tell their clients and potential employees. “To achieve it, we must have the best people, and the best people are drawn from the broadest pool of applicants.” Goldman is not alone.…
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A Global Neuromancer
Neuromancer is now more than 30 years old, a considerable time to remain a classic. Its publication in the Orwellian year will seem ironic and laden with symbolism only for those who think Orwell has …
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The Piketty Effect: Part 2
Back in November, we began our first collaboration with the French online journal La Vie des Idées, to examine what we call “The Piketty Effect.” Our first pair of essays, by American sociologist Erik Olin Wright and French economist Nicolas Frémeaux, address the questions of class that remain inchoate in Piketty’s work and detail how…
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Showdown at the University of Texas
In June 2014 there was a showdown in Texas. The University of Texas Board of Regents and its chancellor, who runs the system, had been trying to fire the president of the university system’s flagship campus in Austin for more than five years. They were tired of waiting. President Bill Powers was popular because he…
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The Piketty Effect: Part 1
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English to instant best-seller status and wide acclaim and debate. In the United States, his author appearances drew enormous audiences…
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Complicity and Critique
In a posh Delhi neighborhood, in a walled estate with glass chandeliers and bathrooms of Italian marble, a 25-year-old heir to his family’s business and real estate fortune dreams of transforming the world with his money. “Have you seen what the Rockefellers did,” he asks. “Every person in [the United States] is somehow touched by…
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The Politics of For-Profit Higher Education
Back in June, David Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, defeated then House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. It was a remarkable achievement for Brat, a political unknown. He rode to victory on a surge of local pro–Tea Party sentiment, arguing that Cantor was an establishment…
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Our Mis-Leading Indicators
Spring 1932: former Ford Motor Company workers protest at the company’s River Rouge Complex, where police and private security kill five and injure more than 60; unemployed World War I veterans camp out on the steps of the Capitol, demanding “adjusted compensation” for their service; more than three quarters of a million New Yorkers are…
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Alternative Economies of Art and Politics: An Interview with Gabriel Rockhill and Nato Thompson
Writing about art and politics often falls into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who espouse “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art is a restricted and autonomous domain, concerned solely with aesthetic quality, the imagination, enjoyment, and so forth. On the other are the partisans of “political art,” for…
