Divestment campaigns almost never work. Sometimes a campaign might actually get a fund to sell off and refuse to buy certain stocks, but rarely will it ever get enough funds to do so simultaneously, which is what’s necessary to actually exert any pressure. I suspect these kinds of campaigns are pursued in part because people… Continue reading Getting serious about using investment for social change
Author: Matt Bruenig
Student debt blogging at its absolute worst
Bob Hildreth has a howler of a piece at the Huffington Post about the amount of student debt professional degree holders graduate with. Generally, when folks talk about student debt, they stay away from talking about medical school, law school, and business school. Those professions are way more lucrative than almost anything else, and so… Continue reading Student debt blogging at its absolute worst
Socialize finance to reduce inequality
I’ve been going on and on and on about socializing finance ever since Seth Ackerman’s pulled the idea out of relative obscurity by writing a piece about it in Jacobin. Without going into the particulars of how it is done, the basic idea is to have the government buy up some (or perhaps all) financial… Continue reading Socialize finance to reduce inequality
US poverty rates broken down finer than ever before
The Census has a neat report out today using American Community Survey data to detail poverty rates by race, metropolitan area, and so on. The most interesting part of the report is the breakdown of poverty rates within given races. Asians, for instance, are often treated as a monolith population with high incomes and low… Continue reading US poverty rates broken down finer than ever before
Thoughts on degree inflation
Catherine Rampell had a piece about degree inflation in the New York Times yesterday. What follows are some scattered thoughts about the piece and degree inflation more generally. First, the piece manages to run down someone with an undergraduate degree that has over $100,000 in student loan debt. The New York Times is really talented… Continue reading Thoughts on degree inflation