Category: Class

The Muddled Globalization Debate

Travel journalist Paul Theroux wrote a piece in the New York Times about some of the negative effects of globalization on US workers. Generally I advise never listening to travel journalists opine on political economic questions for the obvious reason that they are not well-equipped to do so (going somewhere to visit does not make you an… Continue reading The Muddled Globalization Debate

Want to Fight Poverty? Expand Welfare. Always Expand Welfare.

Catherine Rampell has a piece at the Washington Post titled “Want to fight poverty? Expand access to contraception.” As you can probably guess, the poverty solution here is to try to nudge women with low market incomes away from having families, a troubling strategy that rich folks have been eager to push in one form or another for… Continue reading Want to Fight Poverty? Expand Welfare. Always Expand Welfare.

Race and Class Part 2

In my last post, I broke down five social indicators — poverty, health coverage, employment, incarceration, and life expectancy — by race and class (using educational attainment to stand in for class). The point was to show that, while the disparities across classes are the biggest, there remains significant racial disparities within classes. This suggests… Continue reading Race and Class Part 2

Class and Race

There was a time a great while ago where leftists struggled over the question of whether race or class is the motive force of oppression and suffering in society. These days, with the intervention of intersectionality and considerable progress in sociology, this question has largely been answered by discarding its faulty premise. It needn’t be… Continue reading Class and Race