Category: Society & Citizenship

Economists believe in full employment. Americans think that work builds character. But what if jobs aren’t working anymore?

Source: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? | Aeon Essays, by James Livingston, professor of history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, author of many books including Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (2011) and No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea (2016)

These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labour market by advocating ‘full employment’ … Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face.

what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character … imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.

what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies?

Can we let people get something for nothing and still treat them as our brothers and sisters – as members of a beloved community?

In a new book, a Brookings scholar argues that the upper-middle class has enriched itself and harmed economic mobility.

Source: The Hoarding of the American Dream – The Atlantic

“I am not suggesting that the top one percent should be left alone. They need to pay more tax, perhaps much more,” Reeves writes. “But if we are serious about narrowing the gap between ‘the rich’ and everybody else, we need a broader conception of what it means to be rich.”

the 20 percent are so much bigger than the one percent … dinging the top one percent won’t cut it: They are a lot richer, but a lot fewer in number. And if you are going to provide more opportunities in good neighborhoods, public schools, colleges, internship programs, and labor markets to lower-income families, it is the 20 percent that are going to have to give something up.

I do not place America First, but rather place humanity first. I know that all nations and borders are temporary, and I do not care what side of an imaginary line someone was born on. Our greatest obligation is to leave the world a better place for everyone living here.

Source: Debatably Political : Comments for Senator Dan Sullivan

Source: Neil Postman, Revisited: Are We Having Too Much Fun? – The Atlantic by Megan Garber

In 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.

I thought of Neil Postman, the professor and the critic and the man who, via his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued preemptively against all this change-via-chuckle. Postman wasn’t, as his book’s title might suggest, a humorless scold in the classic way—Amusing Ourselves to Death is, as polemics go, darkly funny—but he was deeply suspicious of jokes themselves, especially when they come with an agenda.

He might whisper that, in politics, the line between engagement and apathy is thinner than we want to believe.

It wasn’t Nineteen Eighty-Four that had the most to say about the America of the 1980s, but rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “In Huxley’s vision,” Postman noted, “no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history.” Instead: “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us

a condition, Postman put it, in which “facts push other facts into and out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.”

“In a print culture,” he argued, “writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don’t notice, or even worse, don’t care.” In a television culture, he argued, the opposite is true.

Source: Neil Postman, Revisited: Are We Having Too Much Fun? – The Atlantic by Megan Garber

A new book argues that the giving patterns of today’s wealthy may present challenges to the democratic process.

The gifts come at a time when government is shrinking, and when, in some cases, philanthropic dollars replace or supplant government functions. That can mean that it’s philanthropists who decide what scientific issues are researched, what types of schools exist in communities, and what initiatives get on ballots. “It’s great to have these new donors appearing on the scene at a time when government is being cut,” Callahan told me, in a phone interview. “On the other hand, there’s no question that with money comes power and influence.” … “We face a future in which private donors—who are accountable to no one—may often wield more influence than elected public officials, who (in theory, anyway) are accountable to all of us,”

Callahan isn’t sure where he stands on this debate. As he points out, it’s hard to argue against individuals providing nets to prevent the spread of malaria, or giving away all their money before they die. But he makes a convincing argument that philanthropists are more aggressive than ever, and that this is cause for concern.

part of the benefit of having so much money to give away is doing what you want with it without listening to anybody else. But in a society where the haves are increasingly separated from the have-nots, some wise philanthropists may begin to understand that there’s a problem when having money means not just improving your own life, but deciding what happens in other people’s lives too.

Source: Philanthropy and Democratic Society – The Atlantic

More: The Givers: Money, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age by David Callahan, founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy