Posts tagged Neoliberalism
The Last Working-Class Professor

A colleague recently posted about the role that student debt plays in perpetuating class inequalities in education, which essentially creates an insurmountable obstacle preventing almost all people from attending the type of elite institutions from which our ruling class emerges. In other words, student debt is a mechanism for preserving elite rule. Brett Kavanaugh isn't the sharpest tool in the box (not to mention that other Yale alum, George W. Bush), but the high cost and prohibitive debt load ensure that they can continue to monopolize the resources and benefits of these institutions, while claiming them to be meritocratic. As Kavanaugh mentioned, he "earned" his seat on the Supreme Court, even though the fact that there will soon be two Supreme Court justices from his prep school seems to indicate a different story.

But this point aside, it prompted me to respond that we're now seeing the last generation of working-class faculty members die off.

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Jamie AroosiBrett Kavanaugh, Academia, Walter Benn Michaels, Inequality, Neoliberalism, Working-Class, Faculty Comment
Oh, to be Illiterate!

I generally try to avoid reading whatever the latest "must-read" article happens to be because they generally seem part of the pageant of hand-wringing that every week forgets the article from last week in favor of the must-read du jour. But for some reason, I bit the bullet and read Anne Applebaum's much-too-long article in The Atlantic, "A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come." And boy I wish I hadn't.

Anne Applebaum, a "winner" under the former neo-liberal regime, is slowly waking to the fact that many people weren't winners, and that these "losers" are kind of mad about it. Worse yet, she's now even losing some faith in the fairness of neo-liberal meritocracy.

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Jamie AroosiAnne Applebaum, The Atlantic, Neoliberalism, LiteratureComment
Healthcare and Extra Legroom

The healthcare debate is a good example of the way that neoliberalism uses "choice" to hide its absence. The choice that's always offered is a choice between different insurance plans, where having more choice is somehow meant to be a good in itself. And this is an argument often deployed against a single payer/universal systems, i.e., that it eliminates choice. However, in Canada, I have no choice about my insurance plan, but I have unlimited choice in the doctors I get to see, i.e., I can go to any doctor without any out-of-pocket expense. That's the choice that matters. But this type of choice is antithetical to the other type of choice.

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Jamie AroosiHealthcare, Neoliberalism, Airlines, ChoiceComment