321 posts tagged with inequality.
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Is Cooking Classist? New video from Hoots
A solution that is only a solution for the people who can afford to be a part of the solution is not a solution A hour long video about cooking, food, race, gender, class and capitalism.
That inequality lies at the heart of what we call “data colonialism”
"The term might be unsettling, but we believe it is appropriate. Pick up any business textbook and you will never see the history of the past thirty years described this way. A title like Thomas Davenport’s Big Data at Work spends more than two hundred pages celebrating the continuous extraction of data from every aspect of the contemporary workplace, without once mentioning the implications for those workers. EdTech platforms and the tech giants like Microsoft that service them talk endlessly about the personalisation of the educational experience, without ever noting the huge informational power that accrues to them in the process." (Today’s colonial “data grab” is deepening global inequalities, LSE) [more inside]
We know what the problems are, so what about the solutions?
The God of the Exodus story took sides
In the United States today, organized Christianity is mostly associated with restrictions on reproductive autonomy, countermajoritarian and white nationalist agendas, and an embrace of free enterprise economics (even though it has also played a central role in civil rights and progressive movements throughout U.S. history). A Theology of Liberation, by contrast, represents a tradition that put religious reflection at the heart of the struggle of the global poor. By embodying ambition instead of compromise, it also offered an alternative to the schismatic tendencies of multicultural liberalism. from Salvation Now
A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
Is Finland the best place in the world to be a parent?
What the world can learn from childcare in Finland [yt] - "Finland is a world leader when it comes to early years education. Childcare is affordable and nursery places are universally available in a system that puts children's rights at the centre of decision-making. Now the country is applying the same child-first thinking to paternity-leave policies in an attempt to tackle gender inequality in parenting."[1,2,3] [more inside]
cooperation and resilience vital to survive climate collapse conditions
The new research, published in a peer-reviewed biological sciences journal from The Royal Society last month, suggests that resilience is an ability that societies can gain and lose over time. Researchers found that a stable society can withstand even a dramatic climate shock, whereas a small shock can lead to chaos in a vulnerable one.
"It makes me feel some type of way"
In previous years, Moore might have sent out a text to family and friends seeking donations for the uniform. She might have asked the school if she could pay in installments. But this year, for the first time, she can cover it all herself. That’s because she has an extra $500 a month coming in — not from a third job or a side hustle but from the City of Chicago, which gives her the money to spend or save as she chooses. It’s part of an audacious new philosophy of government aid, an experiment of sorts that seeks to find out whether infusions of no-strings-attached cash can begin to break the cycle of poverty. from What $500 Means to Zinida Moore
The Memory Bank*
A Hidden Currency of Incalculable Worth [ungated] - "We need to start thinking about policies aimed at freeing up time for impoverished families as a form of aid. We could begin by defining a healthy society as one in which everyone has a place to stay, food to eat and time to enjoy the fruits of their labor with those for whom they labor. A living wage should be one in which there is space for something beyond work." [link-heavy FPP! ;] [more inside]
The Cost of Living/Housing Crisis
Here's why Americans can't stop living paycheck to paycheck - "The typical worker takes home $3,308 per month after taxes and benefits, based on the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But when you take a look at the cost of some of the most essential expenses today, it's easy to see why consumers feel strained." [link-heavy FPP! :] [more inside]
Robert Reich's undergraduate course on Wealth And Inequality
Welcome to my [Robert Reich's] final UC Berkeley course on Wealth and Poverty. [YT playlist, 14 lectures, ~1h30m each] Drawing on my 40+ years in politics, including my time as secretary of labor, I offer a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s in the United States, and why this poses dangerous risks to our society. Class 1: “What’s Happened to Income & Wealth” [1h30m] Each class page has a link to a syllabus of notes and readings in the "more inside" of the description.
Humans are Biased, Generative AI is Even Worse
"Stable Diffusion generates images using artificial intelligence, in response to written prompts. Like many AI models, what it creates may seem plausible on its face but is actually a distortion of reality. An analysis of more than 5,000 images created with Stable Diffusion found that it takes racial and gender disparities to extremes — worse than those found in the real world." An analysis by Leonardo Nicoletti and Dina Bass for Bloomberg Technology + Equality, with striking visualizations. [more inside]
More on AI and the Future of Work
Thinking About AI - "So where do I think we are? At a place where for fields where language and/or two dimensional images let you build a good model, AI is rapidly performing at a level that exceeds that of many humans." [more inside]
Who Gets a Liver, Where and Why?
Where do livers come from, and where do they go? Life-saving liver transplants have plummeted in some Southern and Midwestern states with higher death rates from liver disease, while New York and California have made big gains. Not everyone is cool with this. Malena Carollo and Ben Tanen report for The Markup, co-reported with the Washington Post.
Builder's Remedy: San Fransokyo, Part Deux (Electric Boogaloo)
Bay Area Cities To Lose ALL Housing Zoning Powers [today; thread] - "Old law proposes to turn the Bay Area's zoning system into something like Japan's in just two days."[1,2,3,4,5] (previously) [more inside]
You got to vaccinate people against the hate.
Why Fascism's Returning to the World - "It was the great John Maynard Keynes who pieced it together best. Fascism, he discovered, was the result of sudden, sharp plunges into poverty, especially unexpected ones, ones where people's expectations of upward mobility collided with the grim reality of downward mobility."[1,2,3] (previously) [more inside]
To put the landlord in prison borders on the unconscionable- Stadtmuelle
Nearly a decade later a deadly house fire near Milwaukee gets a feature article with the depth and history of something you would see in The New Yorker on oranges. Why?
Because with this renter and landlord the outcomes of this deadly house fire demonstrate the two justice systems in the US. The landlord is Todd Brunner, a slum lord with a lengthy history of code violations and fires at his property. It's is not shocking that the the deadly fire at the property that a bank had recently foreclosed on results in no fines, nothing. It is still astonishing that the renter, a mum who loses 3 of her children in the fire, ends up serving back to back child neglect sentences. [more inside]
Because with this renter and landlord the outcomes of this deadly house fire demonstrate the two justice systems in the US. The landlord is Todd Brunner, a slum lord with a lengthy history of code violations and fires at his property. It's is not shocking that the the deadly fire at the property that a bank had recently foreclosed on results in no fines, nothing. It is still astonishing that the renter, a mum who loses 3 of her children in the fire, ends up serving back to back child neglect sentences. [more inside]
A carefully-researched comic about wealth inequality
A comic about wealth inequality in New Zealand, but applicable almost everywhere else as well. "Imagine you're invited to a dinner. There are 10 guests, 10 seats at the table, and 10 plates of food. But then you all sit down to eat and one person gets served nearly 6 meals. 5.8 meals to be precise..."
Pretend there's a point to wandering around a rock orbiting a dying star
Is There a Way Out of Hawaii's Housing Crisis? - "The Aloha State is drowning in a flood of the same factors creating a housing crisis all over America. It will either become a model for solutions or a cautionary tale." [more inside]
The Money is in All the Wrong Places
What this means is that the door a writer could step through to make a career 50 or even 20 years ago, the one opening onto a life where someone who works hard and does well could buy a house on the strength of that work alone, has been slammed shut. Defector's Kelsey McKinney writing about the uproar directed at Sydney Sweeney's interview with the Hollywood Reporter on how difficult it is to make a living as an actor (or musician, or model) without wealth, connections, or both. (DefectorFilter) [more inside]
your nan visiting Florida once a year is not what’s killing the planet
1% of people cause a stunning 50% of global aviation emissions. There is clear inequality in terms of emissions between nations, but also vast inequality within Western nations in terms of who’s causing the climate crisis. Take the United States – the biggest contributor to aviation pollution on the planet. Whereas commercial US flights remain 13% below pre-pandemic levels, private aviation traffic is actually higher – 15% higher, to be exact. This means that while ordinary people are actually flying less than before the pandemic, the richest are flying more. [more inside]
scientific enterprise is biased even if scientific method is impartial
Responses to 10 common criticisms of anti-racism action in science, technology, engineering, math and medicine.
Criticism #4: “I only hire/award/cite based on merit. I do not need to consider race." It should be noted that the concept of “meritocracy” was introduced as satire by novelist Michael Dunlop Young, who believed that a society structured as a meritocracy would appear equitable, but ultimately serve to reinforce and perpetuate preexisting inequality. [more inside]
Criticism #4: “I only hire/award/cite based on merit. I do not need to consider race." It should be noted that the concept of “meritocracy” was introduced as satire by novelist Michael Dunlop Young, who believed that a society structured as a meritocracy would appear equitable, but ultimately serve to reinforce and perpetuate preexisting inequality. [more inside]
The sublime science fiction of Ted Chiang
Twelve years on, Ted Chiang remains perhaps the finest author in contemporary science fiction -- and the most rarefied. A technical writer by trade and a graduate of the distinguished Clarion Writers Workshop, Chiang has published only eighteen short stories in the last thirty years, one and a half dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas -- intelligence, consciousness, the nature of God -- and thrusts them into a dazzling new light. His collected works, mostly available in the anthologies Stories of Your Life and Others (2010) and Exhalation: Stories (2019), have cemented his reputation as one of the greatest SF storytellers of all time (and inspired one of the best SF movies of all time). Click inside for a complete listing of Chiang's work, with links to online reprints or audio versions where available, as well as a collection of one-on-one interviews, links to his other writings, video essays, movie clips, and lots more. [more inside]
Why have epidemiological modelers ignored inequality?
A new paper in PLOS "came out of a lot of discussion between all of the authors about why the broad majority of infectious disease transmission models have not typically treated equity – the distribution of who gets infected as a function of wealth, race/ethnicity, gender, and on – as a first-class concern alongside population-level patterns of incidence and mortality." Conference talk.
This show would have been a masterpiece if it was narrated by Rick
Keeping tax low for the rich does not boost economy
On "meritocracy."
Turns out, Harvard students aren’t that smart after all. 43% of Harvard’s white students are either recruited athletes, legacy students, on the dean’s interest list (meaning their parents have donated to the school) or children of faculty and staff. The kicker? Roughly three-quarters of these applicants would have been rejected if it weren’t for having rich or Harvard-connected parents or being an athlete. This dynamic is inherently racialized, with almost 70% of all legacy applicants at Harvard being white. A white person’s chances of being admitted increased seven times if they had family who donated to Harvard. Meanwhile, African American, Asian American and Hispanic students make up less than 16% of students who are children of faculty and staff. (SL Grauniad) (archived link)
Cities and Cities
Why Tokyo Works - "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."[1,2,3] (via) [more inside]
Poison in the Air
ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. Using advanced data processing software and a modeling tool developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, we mapped the spread of cancer-causing chemicals from thousands of sources of hazardous air pollution across the country between 2014 and 2018. The result is an unparalleled view of how toxic air blooms around industrial facilities and spreads into nearby neighborhoods.[more inside]
Do Americans Know What a Massive Ripoff American Life Really Is?
It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile
Enough with the GDP — it's time to measure genuine progress - "Unlike GDP, the Genuine Progress Indicator is designed to measure economic performance from the perspective of ordinary American households, not corporations or Wall Street investors."[1,2] [more inside]
Constructed Worlds, Group Beliefs and Narrative Consciousness
Three Simple Policy Heuristics - "The most important thing to understand is this: Harm ripples, kindness ripples. People you hurt go on to hurt other people. People who are treated with kindness become better people, or more prosperous people, and go on to help others. Yes, there are exceptions (we'll deal with those people), but they are exceptions." (via) [more inside]
Covid Vaccine Production: If you build it, they might not come
Gates suggested that it could be unsafe to share the critical information that allows vaccines to be more widely produced “Typically in global health, it takes a decade between when a vaccine comes into the rich world and when it gets to the poor countries.”
Yet, in the past few months, the danger of not transferring the knowledge more quickly has become painfully clear, with deaths climbing in India, Brazil, and other parts of the world that have been unable to procure adequate supplies of vaccines while richer countries stockpile them. [more inside]
A Computer Scientist Who Tackles Inequality Through Algorithms
Rediet Abebe uses the tools of theoretical computer science to understand pressing social problems — and try to fix them. Today, Abebe uses the tools of theoretical computer science to help design algorithms and artificial intelligence systems that address real-world problems. She has modeled the role played by income shocks, like losing a job or government benefits, in leading people into poverty, and she’s looked at ways of optimizing the allocation of government financial assistance. She’s also working with the Ethiopian government to better account for the needs of a diverse population by improving the algorithm the country uses to match high school students with colleges. [more inside]
A Staggering $50 Trillion
Economics For People (w/ Ha-Joon CHANG)
Cambridge Economist Ha-Joon CHANG (author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism) is on a mission to demystify his discipline to the average person. Because Economics is for Everyone (RSA Animate)
[more inside]
Sensible Progressive Reform
Mr Medlock and the Classics - "It seems helpful to begin with an outline of what some social democratic goals might be. One description might be competitive egalitarianism. This has two components. Firstly, it recognises that people deserve equal worth, having been brought into this world by the arbitrary lottery of birth - as such, inequality can only be justified on the basis of the Rawlsian difference principle.[1] Secondly, it notes that markets do not exist ab ovo, but instead are moulded by the laws and norms of the land. As such, we can use those laws to produce markets which serve the public interest.[2]" (via) [more inside]
"The Modern Point of View and the New Order"
What comes after smartphones? - "We've spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we've only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them." [more inside]
Like, how much else is pretend, if the debt isn’t real?
The Trick of Orthodoxy
Economics truly is a disgrace - "This is very personal post. It is my story of the retaliation I suffered immediately after my 'economics is a disgrace' blog post went viral. The retaliation came from Heather Boushey–a recent Biden appointee to the Council of Economic Adviser and the President and CEO of Equitable Growth where I then worked. This is not the story I wanted to be telling (or living). Writing this post is painful. I am sorry." (via; previously) [more inside]
"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women."
Sociologist Jessica Calarco about her recent research on mothers grappling with parenting, partners, anxiety, work, and feelings of failure during the pandemic. [***Content Warning*** description of sexual assault and coerced pregnancy ]
The corona virus has illuminated the structural inequities that women face. Women are carrying the weight and dealing with the fall-out. Real help is needed...now.
(found via Kottke)
Age of Discord II
Welcome To The 'Turbulent Twenties' - "We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it's here and what we can do to temper it."[1,2] (via) [more inside]
The crisis of upper-crust sports for college
It was like Foucault’s panopticon, except for private-school kids in Dri-Fit. Ruth S. Barrett surveys the increasingly fraught world of niche sports for the college-bound kids of wealthy families, and how competition and COVID-19 have made things harder. (SLAtlantic) [more inside]
Essential biscuits
"Like many other Indians, Malik had less than four hours to make transformative decisions, ones that would have ramifications for himself, his family, his colleagues, and his employer, all without a road map. Yet his were more impactful than most: The product he makes is among the most universally consumed in India." Alia Allana wrote about Parle- G biscuits and the varied Indian experiences of the COVID-19 lockdown in June 2020 for the Atlantic. [more inside]
What we didn't get
Politics is an American industry - "Industries like technology, finance, health care, higher education, and media dominate our collective lives, and yet they are not regulated by anything recognizable as open competition for the custom of decentralized consumers. These industries share some things in common." [more inside]
The chickenization of everything
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (thread) - "Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem... because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo."[1,2,3] [more inside]
SuperDole (RIP?)
An ode to Pandemic UI (thread) - "The extra unemployment insurance benefits that were handed out by the U.S. government in the early months of the pandemic to people rendered jobless by Covid-19 represent one of the most extraordinary and successful programs in the nation's history. The $600-a-week in assistance, often referred to as 'pandemic UI', was so generous that it caused an unprecedented spike in Americans' disposable income."[1,2,3] [more inside]
Organization through sectoral bargaining
How Workers Can Achieve Real Power - "We can build a sectoral bargaining system—and strong, democratic, worker-driven unions—from the ground up." [more inside]
How philanthropy benefits the super-rich
Philanthropy, it is popularly supposed, transfers money from the rich to the poor. This is not the case. There are more philanthropists than ever before. Each year they give tens of billions to charitable causes. So how come inequality keeps rising? By Paul Vallely.
A blind and opaque reputelligent nosedive
Data isn't just being collected from your phone. It's being used to score you. - "Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you've likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret 'surveillance scores' — digital mug shots of millions of Americans — that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy. People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences."[1] [more inside]