There is a lot of interesting stuff here, and I tend to not be a big picture thinker, but I want to point out one quote to animate where I come from:
"Well, I am reminded of my teacher Shannon Stimson's lectures on early Victorian political economy. She noted that to the Victorians private charity should be ample (because that was what Jesus taught, and to keep the poor from starving in masses the streets) but never comprehensive, so that there would always be a few of the poor visibly starving in the streets, so that the poor would know that charity was not something they could count on, so that the poor had the proper incentive to work, to save, to stay married, to have children and bring them up properly. She tries hard to recover this mode of thought, in which the purpose of the economy is to create morally prudent servants who live in the Fear of the Lord. And her students--hedonists living in the California sun early in the 21st century--find it very strange: the purpose of the economy is obviously to enable people to realize their human potential and to satisfy their needs, wants, and dreams."
Brad Delong
I tend to discount the idea that conservatives (blanket USA term) want capitalism because it invokes security/stability/safety - it always struck me that that is more of a center-left line. The payoff for the right strikes me as a balance between individualism and the visible rewards/punishments for the quality of one's life/decisions.
The notion of capitalism acting as a self-goverence care-of-the-self mechanism is well-founded upon the early marriage of markets and conservativism. You can still hear it; people not rooting for its failure per se on the right, but nodding their heads at the unemployment numbers as if God's judgement has finally come down upon us (I'm looking at crunchy con survivalist types).
Now it seems like the bull has gotten out of the cage and is wrecking havoc among even those who were leading virtuous lives.
My favorite part of the Andrew "Scratch Beginnings" experiment is that he quit the experiment 10 months into the year-long tourist trip because someone in his family got sick. I like that idea: "I was loving this vacation, but with health care costs and access and all, I need to quit being poor now." Fantastic!
It should not surprise us that younger, healthier people like Andrew would be fine at Wal-mart, because it is their strategy to replace older and middle aged workers with youngers ones.
Freddie I know it is your gut reaction to phrase the challenges faced here by hyperghetto residents, but I think it's more useful to realize that the health care issue would block access from many otherwise well-integrated members of society. Walmart, from their stated goals above, would rather take a 19 year old stoner than a 55-year old laid-off factory worker with a questionable ticker.
I think the exit question is challenged by what Conley refers to as "price culture" in the above, or what I'd refer to (since this is tagged postmodernity, I'll bring up Foucault and W. Brown) a neoliberal governmentality. It's difficult to read the word "value" without heavy airquotes; as Conley points out, Elsewhere Man looks at himself in the mirror and asks "What was my value added?"
Value goes from a verb ("what do I value?") to a noun ("What is my value?"); from an expression to a product, and the product is profitability. Self-governance runs deep, so it does not surprise me that our Elsewhere Man looks to his lovers, citizenship, education, family and ideals as simply matters of self-corporate governance decision making.
The relationships you describe are akin to that - they strike me as at-will employment - we can quit "for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all."
Recapturing the idea of value itself would be step one for you.
Spiegelman is awesome to see lecture live - he has such a command of the medium. Was he smoking? I have heard that it is in his contract to allow him to smoke during any public engagement - some college had to put him in a special room when he gave a talk so he could smoke there.
I understand it must be very hard to face the cultural hostility that many of these kids face every day at school. But that’s part of the culture war. And it’s part of being a kid in school
Collateral damage! I thought the culture war was about a lack of Grand Narratives and thoughts about Power/Knowledge, not whether or not a kid who likes D&D gets shoved into a locker every other day.
As for part of being a kid, not to engage the culture wars, but I'm not willing to take the existence and daily life of US high schools as an a priori fact, one we can't improve on.
Chicago school board plan to build a “gay-friendly” public school...seems to be advocating a sort of gay segregation, a purposeful seperation of gays and straights (or at least “outed” gays) from one another. This is a legal appraoch to a cultural problem that will no doubt backfire.
Chicago did a terrible job selling this program, but essentially what they want to do is create an arts high school. A perfect place for nerds, miscreants, prodigies and gays. The freaks-and-geeks. These things exist all over the country, especially in the private market, though they aren't sold as such. The people who go to them are quite happy with them, for the most part. (Wesley Yang wrote about them when discussing the Virigina Tech killer.)
If you are a working-class single mom in the Humboldt Park area of Chicago, and your nerdy and/or gay son is beaten up at school to the point where he doesn't want to go, isn't having a segregated school pareto-optimal? (Indeed, the kids at the school there don't want him there either, and would be happier with him gone.) You could argue, and I think you do, that this student should take a civil-rights approach, and ...... what? Work to be assimilated in? Hold sit-ins at the cool table? That seems to be working away from what we want.
These things often self-segregate on their own optimally. At Illinois, public, I lived in the freak dorm, which was filled with artists, nerds and gays. Word got around that this is what this dorm was, and students self-selected where to live, and that was that. I was a lot happier than living in the frat dorms, where gays and nerds were ostracized at best, beaten at worst. Chicago school kids can't self-select that way.
How long did civil rights activists have to work to end black/white segregation of schools?
I may be wrong on this, but black/white school segregation right now is more or less at the same level as it was in 1955. At least it is not much better. (Especially in Chicago!)
1 - I think #1 is a great summary. By dividends, I just meant the more overall idea that an increase of the financialization of the economy and a deference to financial markets both in rhetoric and in policy, tax and otherwise, hasn't seemed to pay out for the working and middle class - it would be one thing if 2001-2008 were champagne years for the median earner, but the data doesn't play that out.
As opposed to, say, inequality, market collapse is hardly an issue for just the Left to get in arms about. But it's important to be rigorous with why self-regulation breaks down - Eugene Fama would agree with you about traders "act[ing] in their self-interest with little regard for others" but he thinks markets are always perfect, for lack of a better word. Is it just a few bad apples, or is it in the very nature of a financialized economy?
2 - Ha! I wish I was that original of a thinker. Krugman is great, but my argument is cribbed from Elizabeth Warren's work moreso. Speaking of, I wondered recently if, given it's large correlation with bankruptcy and money troubles, the most appropriate response to an "austere age" would be having less kids. I wonder if there are a lot of second and third children that won't be born cause of the credit crunch - something that should worry people concerned about demographics issues, and perhaps not just social conservative ones.
Nationalization is a bad word, especially when it is best read as "orderly bankruptcy" in usage.
I am very interested in the long-term hay the left, myself included, can make out of this crisis. Two points, and I hope Freddie takes them in his response:
1) I don't think there is room for a "free-marketdom was far from" for liberals. Dividends were cut and financial institutions given free rein, there was an increased financialization of capitalism, with profits going less to workers and more to stock buybacks and executive salaries - and the whole thing collapse.
I don't think arguing for a more purer market is a good move for the left - a good liberal line is that markets are great, but need a strong referee to keep the whole thing from turning into a madhouse.
2) More importantly for the left, we need to frame the 2001-2008 bad credit period as Americans racing to stand still while trying to get access to health care and education and stability under a period of intense inequality.
There's a natural tendency to think of all this bad debt as a Wall*E critique of lazy Americans buying too large TVs or immigrants and payday loan sharks swindling each other. I don't think that is the (whole) case - I think it is far more that much of what has worked for middle Americans is being unwound, and can use the crisis to put a more liberal agenda of shared prosperity (cynical maybe, but I actually do believe this cause->effect).
But I've already written too much.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “A Top Ten List!”
Pro-shame and pro-smoking? If anyone deserves to be shamed...
On “Opportunity, Society, and the Role of the State”
There is a lot of interesting stuff here, and I tend to not be a big picture thinker, but I want to point out one quote to animate where I come from:
"Well, I am reminded of my teacher Shannon Stimson's lectures on early Victorian political economy. She noted that to the Victorians private charity should be ample (because that was what Jesus taught, and to keep the poor from starving in masses the streets) but never comprehensive, so that there would always be a few of the poor visibly starving in the streets, so that the poor would know that charity was not something they could count on, so that the poor had the proper incentive to work, to save, to stay married, to have children and bring them up properly. She tries hard to recover this mode of thought, in which the purpose of the economy is to create morally prudent servants who live in the Fear of the Lord. And her students--hedonists living in the California sun early in the 21st century--find it very strange: the purpose of the economy is obviously to enable people to realize their human potential and to satisfy their needs, wants, and dreams."
Brad Delong
I tend to discount the idea that conservatives (blanket USA term) want capitalism because it invokes security/stability/safety - it always struck me that that is more of a center-left line. The payoff for the right strikes me as a balance between individualism and the visible rewards/punishments for the quality of one's life/decisions.
The notion of capitalism acting as a self-goverence care-of-the-self mechanism is well-founded upon the early marriage of markets and conservativism. You can still hear it; people not rooting for its failure per se on the right, but nodding their heads at the unemployment numbers as if God's judgement has finally come down upon us (I'm looking at crunchy con survivalist types).
Now it seems like the bull has gotten out of the cage and is wrecking havoc among even those who were leading virtuous lives.
On “calling bullshit on bullshit”
My favorite part of the Andrew "Scratch Beginnings" experiment is that he quit the experiment 10 months into the year-long tourist trip because someone in his family got sick. I like that idea: "I was loving this vacation, but with health care costs and access and all, I need to quit being poor now." Fantastic!
It should not surprise us that younger, healthier people like Andrew would be fine at Wal-mart, because it is their strategy to replace older and middle aged workers with youngers ones.
Freddie I know it is your gut reaction to phrase the challenges faced here by hyperghetto residents, but I think it's more useful to realize that the health care issue would block access from many otherwise well-integrated members of society. Walmart, from their stated goals above, would rather take a 19 year old stoner than a 55-year old laid-off factory worker with a questionable ticker.
On “Stand Up Sociology”
I think the exit question is challenged by what Conley refers to as "price culture" in the above, or what I'd refer to (since this is tagged postmodernity, I'll bring up Foucault and W. Brown) a neoliberal governmentality. It's difficult to read the word "value" without heavy airquotes; as Conley points out, Elsewhere Man looks at himself in the mirror and asks "What was my value added?"
Value goes from a verb ("what do I value?") to a noun ("What is my value?"); from an expression to a product, and the product is profitability. Self-governance runs deep, so it does not surprise me that our Elsewhere Man looks to his lovers, citizenship, education, family and ideals as simply matters of self-corporate governance decision making.
The relationships you describe are akin to that - they strike me as at-will employment - we can quit "for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all."
Recapturing the idea of value itself would be step one for you.
On “Of Maus and Men”
Spiegelman is awesome to see lecture live - he has such a command of the medium. Was he smoking? I have heard that it is in his contract to allow him to smoke during any public engagement - some college had to put him in a special room when he gave a talk so he could smoke there.
On “Schools, segregation, and gay rights”
I understand it must be very hard to face the cultural hostility that many of these kids face every day at school. But that’s part of the culture war. And it’s part of being a kid in school
Collateral damage! I thought the culture war was about a lack of Grand Narratives and thoughts about Power/Knowledge, not whether or not a kid who likes D&D gets shoved into a locker every other day.
As for part of being a kid, not to engage the culture wars, but I'm not willing to take the existence and daily life of US high schools as an a priori fact, one we can't improve on.
"
Chicago school board plan to build a “gay-friendly” public school...seems to be advocating a sort of gay segregation, a purposeful seperation of gays and straights (or at least “outed” gays) from one another. This is a legal appraoch to a cultural problem that will no doubt backfire.
Chicago did a terrible job selling this program, but essentially what they want to do is create an arts high school. A perfect place for nerds, miscreants, prodigies and gays. The freaks-and-geeks. These things exist all over the country, especially in the private market, though they aren't sold as such. The people who go to them are quite happy with them, for the most part. (Wesley Yang wrote about them when discussing the Virigina Tech killer.)
If you are a working-class single mom in the Humboldt Park area of Chicago, and your nerdy and/or gay son is beaten up at school to the point where he doesn't want to go, isn't having a segregated school pareto-optimal? (Indeed, the kids at the school there don't want him there either, and would be happier with him gone.) You could argue, and I think you do, that this student should take a civil-rights approach, and ...... what? Work to be assimilated in? Hold sit-ins at the cool table? That seems to be working away from what we want.
These things often self-segregate on their own optimally. At Illinois, public, I lived in the freak dorm, which was filled with artists, nerds and gays. Word got around that this is what this dorm was, and students self-selected where to live, and that was that. I was a lot happier than living in the frat dorms, where gays and nerds were ostracized at best, beaten at worst. Chicago school kids can't self-select that way.
How long did civil rights activists have to work to end black/white segregation of schools?
I may be wrong on this, but black/white school segregation right now is more or less at the same level as it was in 1955. At least it is not much better. (Especially in Chicago!)
On “Economic Crisis”
I look forward to reading that post.
1 - I think #1 is a great summary. By dividends, I just meant the more overall idea that an increase of the financialization of the economy and a deference to financial markets both in rhetoric and in policy, tax and otherwise, hasn't seemed to pay out for the working and middle class - it would be one thing if 2001-2008 were champagne years for the median earner, but the data doesn't play that out.
As opposed to, say, inequality, market collapse is hardly an issue for just the Left to get in arms about. But it's important to be rigorous with why self-regulation breaks down - Eugene Fama would agree with you about traders "act[ing] in their self-interest with little regard for others" but he thinks markets are always perfect, for lack of a better word. Is it just a few bad apples, or is it in the very nature of a financialized economy?
2 - Ha! I wish I was that original of a thinker. Krugman is great, but my argument is cribbed from Elizabeth Warren's work moreso. Speaking of, I wondered recently if, given it's large correlation with bankruptcy and money troubles, the most appropriate response to an "austere age" would be having less kids. I wonder if there are a lot of second and third children that won't be born cause of the credit crunch - something that should worry people concerned about demographics issues, and perhaps not just social conservative ones.
"
Nationalization is a bad word, especially when it is best read as "orderly bankruptcy" in usage.
I am very interested in the long-term hay the left, myself included, can make out of this crisis. Two points, and I hope Freddie takes them in his response:
1) I don't think there is room for a "free-marketdom was far from" for liberals. Dividends were cut and financial institutions given free rein, there was an increased financialization of capitalism, with profits going less to workers and more to stock buybacks and executive salaries - and the whole thing collapse.
I don't think arguing for a more purer market is a good move for the left - a good liberal line is that markets are great, but need a strong referee to keep the whole thing from turning into a madhouse.
2) More importantly for the left, we need to frame the 2001-2008 bad credit period as Americans racing to stand still while trying to get access to health care and education and stability under a period of intense inequality.
There's a natural tendency to think of all this bad debt as a Wall*E critique of lazy Americans buying too large TVs or immigrants and payday loan sharks swindling each other. I don't think that is the (whole) case - I think it is far more that much of what has worked for middle Americans is being unwound, and can use the crisis to put a more liberal agenda of shared prosperity (cynical maybe, but I actually do believe this cause->effect).
But I've already written too much.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.