Category: Class

I was struck by this passage from “Poverty Amid Plenty”, a report produced by a 1969 presidential commission: To go to school costs money — books, notebooks, pencils, gym shoes, and ice cream with the other kids. Without these the child begins to be an outcast. To go to church costs money — some Sunday… Continue reading Poverty isolates

Yesterday, I argued that poor kids do not get traditional media jobs because growing up poor puts them so far behind their non-poor peers that they get out-competed for the scarce media jobs. I think the following graph, which tracks likelihood of college attendance at age 19 by parental income, is very telling on this… Continue reading Social and cultural capital probably keep poor kids out of media jobs too

Jennifer Pan has a piece Jacobin about the labor of social media. I enjoyed the bits about the extent to which social media jobs are essentially gendered emotional labor jobs in which predominately women interface with the public for a given company while the power structure that runs the company remains male-dominated. I take exception… Continue reading Why poor kids do not get media jobs

Some people really loved the Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, which Marx never published. I call those people alienation Marxists or sometimes species-being Marxists. Those from high socioeconomic backgrounds seem especially prone to becoming species-being Marxists, presumably because all the stuff about exploiting the proletariat is of little use to them personally. Chris Maisano,… Continue reading This book about poor people is not basically about rich people

I want to shortly clarify one of my points from the prior post about what I called “liberal cultural space.” So the identitarian swing among liberals (and left of liberals) has been pretty successful in disciplining people from privileged identities from arguing against the seriousness of oppression that does not affect them. A man that… Continue reading Liberals and class