What is neoliberalism? | Boing Boing | April 2016 Neoliberalism is the ideology of Hayek, Friedman, Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet, Mulroney and the other business-lionizing, union-bashing, greed-is-good politicians who effectively took over the world in the early 1980s, when Thatcher famously declared “There is no alternative.” Though the early adherents of neoliberalism used the term proudly to describe themselves, as neoliberalism
Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up | New York Times | January 2015 The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century. Also check out the interactive graphic: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/25/upshot/shrinking-middle-class.html
Democratizing education? Examining access and usage patterns in massive open online courses | Science | December 2015 Abstract: Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are often characterized as remedies to educational disparities related to social class. Using data from 68 MOOCs offered by Harvard and MIT between 2012 and 2014, we found that course participants from the United States tended to
Goodbye Middle Class: 51 Percent Of All American Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars A Year | Washington’s Blog | October 2015 38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year. 51 percent of all American workers made less than $30,000 last year. 62 percent of all American workers made less than $40,000 last year. 71 percent
In a Hell, but in It Together: The Social Split Between TV and Movie Dystopias | New York Times | October 2014 Dystopian parables like “The Walking Dead,” where zombies rule the earth, are an increasingly fashionable genre of entertainment, but the degree of apocalyptic pessimism is very different depending on the size of the screen. The dividing line between
The Walmart Heirs Are Worth More Than Everyone in Your City Combined | Mother Jones | October 2014 Back in the ‘80s, their wealth was the equivalent of a small town. Now it’s a major metropolis. In 1983, the Walton family’s net worth was $2.15 billion, equivalent to the net worth of 61,992 average American families, about the population of