Rafi Kam from over at ohword.com and Dallas Penn of dallaspenn.com (a.k.a. the Internets Celebrities) seek to answer some questions about the ubiquity of check cashing spots in the working, poor, and minority neighborhoods of American cities.
The video is now featured on youtube and as of now has over 130,000 views:
Hilarious video that takes on a real social issue in an accessible way, what more could you ask for? I highly recommend you check out their youtube channel for some of their other great short video essays. Hopefully there is more to come.
Filed under: Chloe, Class | Tags: economics, opportunity, wall street journal
I’m a business economics student, and at some point, I came to view the standard pedagogy of economics as somewhat disconcerting—why, I have wondered, do our professors spend so much time explaining outcomes under “ideal” market conditions that never actually occur in the real world? Why are we so hesitant to fully scrutinize so many signs that these hypothetical models are materially different from the real-world market structures in which we daily operate?
Perfect competition & Pareto optimality: This rarely ACTUALLY exists in real life. So why are we taught otherwise?
Neoliberal economics preaches the sanctity of free markets, and operates on the assumption that everyone competes on equal footing, and that markets function efficiently and fairly when left to their own devices. We are obsessed with the divine gift of capitalism—a forever-burgeoning “middle class” with bourgeois sensibilities—thus, it is no accident that standard economics ignores the fates of the marginalized, and instead focuses on the “average” individual.
Maybe I’ll call the author of my textbooks and let them know that we are not all educated white males; ergo, shit isn’t as simple as they make it seem.
Filed under: Class, Election 2008, Eric, Religion | Tags: Bitter, Marx, Obama, Religion
“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” -Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” -Barack Obama at a San Fransisco fundraiser, April 6, 2008
Can’t you see the resemblance?
By now, you would have to be living under a rock not to have heard the media backlash over Obama’s recent comments at a San Fransisco fundraising rally in which he ascribed the embrace of religion, guns, and bigotry among small town whites to their “bitterness” over being screwed by American capitalism over the last 25 years. While the media, HRC, and Old Man McCain have blasted him for being ‘elitist’ and ‘condescending’, as a self described Marxist I was more struck by the eery similarity between Obama’s statements and Karl Marx’s now (in)famous materialist analysis of religion. Of course, Obama added the nuance that people turn to guns, too, out of bitterness – though I can think of reasons other than bitterness that people might own guns.
“Although there are often forces in the community which can counteract the negative influences, by far the most powerful being a strong, loving, “decent”…family committed to middle-class values, the despair is pervasive enough to have spawned an oppositional culture, that of “the streets,” whose norms are often consciously opposed to those of mainstream society.” — Elijah Anderson, “The Code of the Streets,” The Atlantic (May 1994)
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I hate reading about “welfare queens.” I hate reading about black men with more bullets in their bodies than years in their lives. I hate reading about pregnant 14-year olds—I hate reading about what we (all the way over here) think of the “ghetto” (all the way over there). Commentary on the “ghetto” is so often laced with political or moral agendas that are dangerously reductive and all but preclude the possibility of meaningful exploration and analysis. And what is worse, there exists a multidimensional (moral, cultural, geographical) distance that paralyzes us as observers or actors. Unless the consequences of this distance are recognized, we will continue to limit the validity of our observations, and our depictions will be muddled in faulty translation.
Really, Dr. Anderson? You did not find that dichotomy– “decent” vs. “the streets”– problematic? He repeatedly emphasizes that the “residents themselves” use this term– as if he can preemptively shield himself from an imminent swarm of denunciations. As if readers would not recognize the problem of extrapolating use of the term “decent” to the Black poor at large.
So many “studies” of the ghetto immediately locate it as separate and different. I suppose it is impossible to view an entity as heterogeneous when we judge from afar, or toe the boundary to take a quick ethnographic “peek” to substantiate our claims. We arm ourselves with statistics and our handy-dandy notions of morality to judge ‘their’ behavior—but this is where science and morality fail. Drug addicts, murderers, and Bloods are not numbers and statistics. And analyses that seek to compare and reconcile two entities at odds (one good, one evil) often do so prematurely.
To the first point, “the ghetto” that people often speak of is simply a homogenizing appellation (like “the Orient”), and our quantitative analyses are often useful but reductive. To truly understand something, we cannot just observe the structural conditions in which its inhabitants are immersed, analyze statistics taken from random samples to represent the mean disposition of the aggregate, and then impose our understanding of how “society” or an “economy” functions as a bottom line to which their “marginal” universe must adapt and adjust. To the second point, people’s intent on “fixing” something of which they have no extended firsthand knowledge seems silly. So often, analysts fail to acknowledge their distance from their subjects—or perhaps, they simply fail to recognize that this distance must be traversed! Thus, the implicit claims to authenticity in many ethnographic studies are rendered invalid.
Another problem is the tendency to “study” the ghetto with the intention of comparing it to how “normal” American society works, thus reinscribing its location as marginal. What if a Venn diagram representation of the “mainstream” and the “marginal” prevailed?
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