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
Author: Matt Bruenig
Women’s labor force participation across different countries
The New York Times had a very good Sunday piece from Stephanie Coontz called Why Gender Equality Stalled. Much of the piece is dedicated to highlighting the ways in which our economic institutions force women to make hard choices about labor force attachment. Throughout the piece, Coontz makes comparisons between the United States and other… Continue reading Women’s labor force participation across different countries
A flowchart of Rawls’ theory of distributive justice
This flowchart is basically how I think about putting part two of John Rawls’ difference principle into practice as part of a political project.
That time when we fought poverty and won
The standard conservative response to poverty is to shrug. The standard liberal response to poverty is to talk about education, education, and then after that some more about education. The range from shrugging to rambling about education is apparently the Overton window for talking about poverty. Anything outside that range is totally shut out of… Continue reading That time when we fought poverty and won
What Dance Moms teaches us about cultural hegemony
In simple terms, cultural hegemony refers to the way in which the powerful shape a society’s norms, values, and other institutions, and how that particular shaping becomes accepted as default, natural, perpetual, and inevitable. That is, people tend to regard the way we currently run things in society as the only way to run things… Continue reading What Dance Moms teaches us about cultural hegemony