9 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
    1. why does it in a sense if we think of money as a voting tool why is it that a billionaire has a 00:32:31 billion times more power to decide what society should be like than i do
      • for: voting, power - money, money - voting, inequality, voting - money, equity, voting power - rich
      • paraphrase
      • question
        • if we think of money as a voting tool
          • why does a billionaire have a billion times more power to decide what society should be like than i do?
  2. Mar 2023
  3. Sep 2021
    1. Developing this argument, Bauman (2000) talks of the super-rich as the 'new cosmopolitans', suggesting that the fundamental consumption cleavage in contemporary society is between these 'fast subjects' who dwell in transnational space and those 'slow subjects' whose lives remain localised and parochial. The fast world is one consisting of airports, top level business districts, top of the line hotels and restaurants, chic boutiques, art galleries and exclusive gyms - in brief, a sort of glamour zone that is fundamentally disconnected from the life worlds of the vast majority of the world's population. Bauman thus equates power with mobility, echoing Massey's notion of unequal 'power-geometries'

      Formal, sharply defined terminology to describe this class for academic writing.

  4. Jun 2021
    1. This leads us to Markovits’s second critique of the aspirational view: The cycle that produces meritocratic inequality severely harms not only the middle class but the very elite who seem to benefit most from it.

      What if we look at meritocracy from a game theoretic viewpoint?

      Certainly there's an issue that there isn't a cap on meritocratic outputs, so if one wants more wealth, then one needs to "simply" work harder. As a result, in a "keeping up with the Jones'" society that (incorrectly) measures happiness in wealth, everyone is driven to work harder and faster for their piece of the pie.

      (How might we create a sort of "set point" to limit the unbounded meritocratic cap? Might this create a happier set point/saddle point on the larger universal graph?)

      This effect in combination with the general drive to have "power over" people instead of "power with", etc. in combination with racist policies can create some really horrific effects.

      What other compounding effects might there be? This is definitely a larger complexity-based issue.

  5. Mar 2021
    1. Preliminary results from the first year are tantalizing for anyone interested in solutions to address rising inequality in the United States, especially as they manifest along racial and gender lines. Within the first year, the study’s participants obtained jobs at twice the rate of the control group. At the beginning of the study, 28 percent of the participants had full-time employment, and after the first year, that number rose to 40 percent.

      This is what happened when 125 participants were given $500/month over two years to see what would happen.

  6. Dec 2020
    1. The effort of confronting that machine, day in and day out, compounded over a lifetime, leads to stress so corrosive that it physically changes bodies

      How does this highlight questions of power? Is it hard or soft power in evidence?

  7. Sep 2017
    1. nequality

      We will discuss how networks can produce and reproduce inequality. It is called the power law.

    1. clustering effect.

      This is also the power law; it takes links to get links. Power law is how inequality produced and reproduced in networks. Check it out!