Inequality
Story Stream
The Ancient Curse of Inequality November 01, 2024
Six years ago, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now was a runaway bestseller. Though stuffed with references to figures like David Hume and Immanuel Kant, it was sold in airport bookstores along with the latest offerings from Bob Woodward and Stephen Ki...
Everyone Deserves Grandeur April 07, 2023
A new performing arts center in New York’s Financial District demonstrates the problem with the city’s beautiful, expensive buildings.The only time I visited Milan, I emerged from a narrow street onto the Piazza del Duomo. As soon as I saw the ornate...
You Can’t Even Tell Who’s Rich Anymore March 28, 2023
One of the great disappointments of contemporary life is that in times of hopelessly vast income inequality, society’s arch-capitalists—and many very rich people in general—are boring. The zenith of their boringness? How they dress. Look, for example...
Searching for Character in Identity March 27, 2023
The following is a condensed version of "Searching for Character in Identity" by Robert C. Thornett, published at Law & Liberty.A few years ago, during lunch at our school’s all-day DEI training, teachers were asked to fill in sheets with words about...
Back, Scoundrels: Eating the Rich on Film March 08, 2023
Class conflict is certainly a complicated enough subject to demand different movies. The Menu is a horror film, and Triangle of Sadness is a comedy; Triangle premiered at a 75-year-old festival, and, save for a vanishingly brief theatrical window, Gl...
"Saving Time" by Jenny Odell March 06, 2023
We are living on the wrong clock, and it is destroying us. The New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing offers us different ways to experience time in this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book.In her first book, How to Do Nothi...
Why We Need Inequality January 12, 2023
We might hear “What do we want? Equality? When do we want it? Now!” in the streets at times but, if pressed, few people making such demands want only equality. They want equality because it will make possible something else, maybe justice or liberty....
False Narratives of Inequality January 02, 2023
For decades, there’s been no surer route to success within academic social science and history departments, or on the left side of the partisan divide, than to lament the persistence and rise of economic inequality in the United States. Some even mai...
A Pandemic of Experts May 04, 2021
It is an article of faith among America’s educated elite that the United States is uniquely bad at solving big problems. Urban sprawl, economic inequality, nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation, whatever—the American intelligentsia can be ...
How Inequality Is Experienced by the Very, Very Rich May 04, 2021
If you have ever wondered how the ultra-rich live, it turns out — are you ready for it? — they live pretty well. Even in the early, chaotic days of the pandemic, they managed as a class to thrive: hunkered down in the Hamptons while the values of the...
How Monopolies Have Taken Over Our Everyday Lives December 03, 2020
In the morning, I shower right after I wake up. I choose from a number of products to clean myself, yet they are made by just two companies: Unilever and Johnson & Johnson. I brush my teeth with a toothbrush and toothpaste made by Procter & Gamble bu...
How Did American Cities Become So Unequal? November 13, 2020
As the coronavirus ricocheted through New York City this spring, among its many casualties was a certain image of life in the Big Apple. The foodie destinations, posh galleries, and pricey cocktail lounges sat deserted while city hospitals long scorn...
“We Hold These Truths…” November 11, 2020
Why does the Declaration of Independence proclaim “We hold these truths to be self-evident” instead of simply stating that “We believe it is true”? This is actually a good question. Answering it can teach us a lot about the Founding.When we recall w...
Why, and How, to Live October 23, 2020
Leading a Worthy Life is in large part the intellectual and spiritual autobiography of one of America’s leading bioethicists. From his childhood in a secular family of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to his education at the University of Chicago and his ...
How Did American Cities Become So Unequal? October 23, 2020
As the coronavirus ricocheted through New York City this spring, among its many casualties was a certain image of life in the Big Apple. The foodie destinations, posh galleries, and pricey cocktail lounges sat deserted while city hospitals long scorn...
Be Afraid, Very Afraid: Part III October 21, 2020
AmazonWhile California prefers to extort, humiliate, and harass its actual citizens—especially the law-abiding, tax-paying, productive ones—it rolls out a bright red carpet for everyone else. That passage in the U.S. Constitution where it says that...
The Cost of a Global Revolution October 16, 2020
Many, I’d imagine, would be intimidated by a 960-page book on the Napoleonic era. Or perhaps they’d be uninterested, thinking the topic increasingly irrelevant to a twenty-first century whose political, social, and military realities seem so distant ...
The Oligarch's Revenge October 13, 2020
The average person may be forgiven for thinking that the South actually won the Civil War. Despite a brief experiment in interracial democracy during the Reconstruction years, for much of its history the region has upheld a regime of brutal racial su...
How Meritocracy Veils Mediocrity October 07, 2020
Itappears that it is time for another round of attacks on the concept of the meritocracy. The term was itself invented by one of its critics, Michael Young, in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy. Every now and then someone will aim a dart at it, li...
The Insufferable Hubris of the Well-Credentialed October 07, 2020
The Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel’s 10th book, The Tyranny of Merit, out this month from FSG, covers a lot of ground for a short text — especially in its sweeping second chapter, “A Brief Moral History of Merit,” which, following Max W...
Be Afraid, Very Afraid October 02, 2020
Chapter OneA hoary—but not therefore inaccurate—cliché holds that as goes California, so goes the nation. That is to say, social and political trends that first appear in the Golden State eventually—and inevitably—take hold throughout America. Exampl...
The American Ideology That Props Up Inequality May 27, 2020
The Democratic Party is the most important political party in the world today. It is the only organization in a position to defend what was once the world’s flagship democracy and economic power from a president who has re-engineered his own party to...
The Strange Pursuit of Immortality in Russia May 27, 2020
“I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” venture capitalist Peter Thiel declared in his 2009 essay “The Education of a Libertarian.” His opposition to taxe...
To Be Studied, or Pitied? May 23, 2020
It is easy to get lost in the frustration of navigating a demanding career as a well-educated professional. The absurd cost of college, the low-paying internships and adjunct positions that have to be navigated, and the out-of-reach real estate price...
What Makes Piketty So Sure He Can Save the World? March 30, 2020
The French economist, statistician and polymath Thomas Piketty sprang to fame in 2013 with a daunting tome, Capital in the Twenty- First Century. In it he documented a ‘fundamental force of divergence’ in the capitalist system, which he represented b...
