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 →
The Blood Business
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 →
How I Learned to Love Macro
I have despised macroeconomics–even relatively innovative, post-Keynesian, gender-infused versions—for many years, for two big reasons. First, macro remains largely focused on an output variable, Gross Domestic Product, that systematically mismeasures the total value of material goods and services produced, Second, it treats the quantity of one of its most important inputs, labor, as exogenously given and/or relatively unimportant. This is… Read more →
How to Make Nice
I had every reason to obey this sign, posted in the cafe where I sought refuge while my car underwent safety-recall repairs. I did not want to go away. While putting on my best smile, I started thinking about a session I attended at the Allied Social Science Meetings earlier in the month, where Erin Giffin gave a terrific presentation on… Read more →
The Child Care Payoff
The history of economic research demonstrating the payoff to public investments in early childhood education in the U.S. is rich and deep, even if it hasn’t (yet) mobilized support for a federal initiative in the U.S Timothy Bartik put it all together in his aptly titled book, From Preschool to Prosperity, which emphasized the payoff in child outcomes. Less attention has been… Read more →
Intersecting, Overlapping Hierarchies
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 →
The Walls of 2019
A brief reflection for Martin Luther King day. In the U.S., an ugly steel wall with a price tag over $5 billion led to a political standoff that shut the U.S. government down. In the Indian state of Kerala, a human wall made of 5 million women (and some men) in support of women’s rights to enter a Hindu… Read more →
Professional Climate Change
Things have been heating up, gender-wise, in the economics profession. Last year, a UC Berkeley undergraduate named Alice Wu applied tools of text mining and machine learning to develop an econometric analysis of the language used on a website known as Economic Job Market Rumors. The results offered striking evidence of some very unpleasant–and highly sexualized–gender stereotyping. Explicit complaints of sexual harassment… Read more →
Medicare for All: Do the Numbers!
We want it, we can afford it, and its cost-effective. A Reuters-Ipsos survey in August found that 85% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans support the single-payer health care system dubbed “Medicare for All. Partly as a result, the market for naysayers and skeptics is booming. A study by the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University pronounced the concept economically impractical.… Read more →
Care Work, Animated
Invited by Professor Smita Ramnarain, once a student of mine here at UMass, I agreed to participate in an Honors Colloquium at the University of Rhode Island last October. I really enjoyed my visit, and had great exchanges with everyone I came in contact with there. The students taking Smita’s course on Race, Class, and Gender were, not surprisingly, especially engaged,… Read more →