Economics
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David Bentley Hart: Defining Socialism
I just came across this NY Times op-ed written by Hart in 2019. It’s a useful retort to Hazony’s anti Neo-Marxism, and worth the read because, if nothing else, it shows why Neoplatonists like Hart (and me) are naturally drawn to a ‘genuine’ Left politics. Here’s a shortened version— … It may be amusing to
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Edsall on White Unhappiness
Graham and Pinto measured poll respondents’ sense of purpose, sense of community and their financial and social well-being and found that “blacks and Hispanics typically score higher than whites,” noting that “these findings highlight the remarkable levels of resilience among blacks living in precarious circumstances compared to their white counterparts.” Graham and Pinto write: The
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A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity, Part I
[This is the 1st installment in a series. Links to the other installments are found at the end of this post] “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and
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Milton Friedman: Proto-Sociopath
But while economists still argue over Friedman’s theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists — the Friedman doctrine — turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life —
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Making Meaning vs. Making Money
Must there be an inverse correlation? In this Sunday's Tom Frank piece at Salon, he interviews David Graeber, one of the "organizers" [those are ironic air quotes] of Occupy Wall street, author of Debt: The First 5000 Years and a piece last summer entitled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs." I think the interview raises
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Lapham and Frank
A must read article, crackling with interesting ideas–too much to excerpt for a quote here, but I'll put this one up since it relates to something that came up here last week. A questioner in the audience asks: A Russian scholar drew a map of the United States where it sort of dissolved into four
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Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage
From the NYT (I boycott quoting from the Seattle Times): Mayor Ed Murray presented on Thursday what he described as an imperfect but workable plan to increase the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage and one of the highest anywhere in the nation, through a series of complex and
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Rising Inequality and Rising Temperatures
Interesting article by Paul Rosenberg this monring at Salon talking about Thomas Piketty and Elizabeth Warren. The question that's in the back of my head as I read this, though, is what difference does it make if even a three quarters of the country understands what's happening if there isn't the will to overcome the