Category: uncategorized

With a hat tip to one of the first feminist economics conferences, (“Out of the Margin” in 1993), I’m inaugurating a mini-series on  miscellaneous outrages,  Beyond the Margins. Topic of the day is plutocracy, /plo?o?täkr?s?/, government by the wealthy– prompted by a Washington Post article suggesting that Michael Bloomberg is the top choice for a Democratic presidential candidate because he… Read more →

The Winter 2020 issue of Daedalus, with the theme “Women and Equality,” is now live on the website of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with open access. The introductory essay by Nannerl Keohane and Frances  McCall Rosenbluth puts the theme in historical context and sets the stage for a rich and diverse set of contributions–cutting edge in their… Read more →

I just started watching Humans, a British television series distributed by AMC in the U.S. and Real Humans, the Swedish series on which it is approximately based. Both start out on the same theme, the use of intelligent (and, in some cases, fully conscious and emotionally adept) androids to help provide family care. I am behind the curve for serious TV… Read more →

  Because many countries don’t allow the purchase of human blood for plasma extraction, U.S. businesses find a ready market: According to The Economist,  plasma accounts for 1.6% of the value of U.S. exports. A recent New York Times article explores what life is like for the “plassers” who routinely sell their plasma on the cheap, often in order to… Read more →

I have been playing around for some time with visual images to convey the concept of intersecting, overlapping hierarchies based on dimensions of group identity such as gender, race/ethnicity, class, and citizenship. For a while I liked fractal pyramids because sometimes inequalities do seem nested inside one another. But I turned against them because a) they seem too regular, too… Read more →

Check out a recent  New York Times article on an experiment with Zora the carebot in French nursing homes.  If she were my nurse I would ask her how she got her name, and she would probably explain it was generated by her friend Algorithm. Likewise her design–innocently small and androgynously lovable. You can kiss her! The epicenter of carebots for… Read more →

The World Development Report 2019 purports to explore the changing nature of work in the global economy. Yet as its striking cover–dominated by Diego Rivera’s images of Men as Producers–indicates, it gives unpaid care work short shrift. Shahra Razavi and Silke Staab detail their disappointment in a fascinating Oxfam post, also noting lack of attention to the paid care sector of… Read more →

The Great Transition Network recently hosted a great discussion of Guy Standing’s arguments for a universal basic income (UBI) as a way of protecting The Precariat–the many workers of the global economy without access to secure employment. As I indicated in my very short contribution, I would be more enthusiastic about UBI if its advocates would get more specific about… Read more →

Traffic-related air pollution has particularly adverse health effects on young children, including greater vulnerability to asthma. In a recent podcast, my UMass colleague Sylvia Brandt explains the psychological and economic burden of family care for children with asthma–a striking example of the nexus between environmental degradation and care costs. One way to estimate costs is ask how much parents would be willing… Read more →

This new book by Jerry Z. Muller (Princeton University Press, 2018) does a great job explaining what happens when policy makers rely too heavily on simplistic measures of performance.  He  offers compelling examples from diverse domains, ranging from schools to hospitals to police departments, the military, and foreign aid.  His opening riff on the 2002-2008 television series, The Wire, is… Read more →