Market Ideology
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Watching Brazil
From "The Social Awakening in Brazil" in the NYT today: For all of Brazil’s achievements over the past few decades — a stronger economy, democratic elections, more money and attention directed toward the needs of the poor — there is still a huge gap between the promises of Brazil’s ruling leftist politicians and the harsh
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School Choice is Not a Solution
The Milwaukee voucher schools have never outperformed the public schools on state tests: See here and here. The only dispute about test scores is whether voucher students are doing the same or worse than their peers in public schools. Accountability? Read here about some very low-performing schools in Milwaukee that have never been held accountable. One of them opened in 2001. Over
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GOP Is Not the Party of Entrepreneurism
Patrick Ruffini, up-and-coming GOP strategist, attends RootsCamp, watches Democratic organizers share tactics and lessons learned from the 2012 campaign, and tells Draper that “the thing I was struck by at RootsCamp was that in many ways, the Democratic technology ecosystem has embraced the free market — whereas the Republican one sort of runs on socialism, with the
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Liberalism 5.0?
The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old
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Robert Kuttner on Albert Hirschman
Two of his finest books as economic philosopher are The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in 1991 when Hirschman was 76, and Rival Views of Market Society,published in 1987. In Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman goes back several hundred years and identifies three basic strands of conservative argument against social reform that keep recurring. He calls them Perversity, Futility and Jeopardy. These
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Growth Idolaltry
Just saw Douthat's Sunday column on the causes of inequality, so I thought I'd comment on it in the light of my last post. Here's his set up: The latest census figures show the gap between the wealthiest Americans and everybody else widening — rather than shrinking, as some economists expected — during the crash