Class & Inequality

Succeeding While Black

Michelle Obama’s memoir reduces racial inequality to a matter of psychological impairment.

Economics After Neoliberalism

Contemporary economics is finally breaking free from its market fetishism, offering plenty of tools we can use to make society more inclusive.

Teachers with Guns

What happens when a school district votes to arm teachers? A Rust Belt educator on the grim realities of training to kill one of his own students.

Teaching Citizenship

Education’s most important job is to teach students to take an active role in their democracy, starting in their own communities.

Puerto Rico’s War on Its Poor

In the 1990s, Puerto Rico showed Washington how militarized policing and privatization can extract profits from poor people of color.

Is Philanthropy Anti-Democratic?

Most charitable foundations are endowed in perpetuity. But John Stuart Mill argued eternal rights make for bad governance.

The Last Man to Know Everything

The Marxist-environmental historian Mike Davis has produced a rich corpus critical of capitalism.

Think Different

Apple—now worth a trillion dollars—redistributes more wealth upward than any country or corporation on the planet.

The Democrats’ Yawning Silence on Trade

The party has not articulated an alternative trade agenda that supports all the world’s workers in a global economy.

Public Benefit, Incorporated

Three simple changes to corporate law could radically remake our economy.

The Market Police

Neoliberals need state power to enforce market relations. To protect it from democratic control, the site of that power must be hidden from politics.

Free the Beach

American beaches used to be common property. Now access to many of them is controlled by wealthy whites.

Left Behind by Korea’s Success

Hwang Sok-yong’s novel Familiar Things sounds a warning about the pitfalls of Korean reunification.

The Slow and Fast Assault on Public Education

Striking teachers and student activists have a common enemy.

We Don’t Need No Education?

A controversial new book highlights the dire straits of the U.S. education system, but offers misguided and irresponsible ideas for fixing it.

Marx’s New Deal

On Marx’s two-hundredth birthday, capitalism’s ideology looks shakier than it has in a while.

The Limits of Antitrust Enforcement

The problem of employer power runs much deeper than monopsony.

The Erotics of Mentorship

The best teaching is always intimate. Today’s universities make it difficult to talk about that.

Elon Musk’s Fall from Grace

The public has paid for Musk’s vision. So why is the green economy still not here?

Who Is Watching Wall Street?

Stock buybacks are on the rise, and they are shortchanging workers and undermining our economy like never before.

Mark Lilla and the Crisis of Liberalism

The critique of identity politics ignores the role that neoliberalism and neoconservatism have played in creating our present situation.

The Almost Inevitable Failure of Justice

The persistence of black poverty has become a permanent feature of U.S. democracy. We need an expanded political imagination to dismantle it.

Cities on a Hill?

Cities are increasingly being viewed as bastions of progressivism. But can they live up to the promise?

Globalization Survived Populism Once Before—and It Can Again

Forget retraining and compensation programs. History offers a better way forward. 

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