“The financial system we now have is not a product of nature. It has been engineered, over decades, by powerful bankers, for their own benefit and for that of their posterity.”

…Who is not in on the game? Auto workers, for example. Caregivers. Retail workers. Furniture makers. Food workers.

The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy by Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic, June 2018

Towards the year 2018

The only real doomsayer was the demographer Philip M. Hauser […] [who predicted] that the distance between the rich and the poor, and between wealthy nations and poor nations, would widen. “Given the present outlook, only the faithful who believe in miracles from heaven, the optimistic who anticipate superwonders from science, the parochial fortunate who think they can continue to exist on islands of affluence in a sea of world poverty, and the naïve who anticipate nothing can look to the future with equanimity,” Hauser concluded.

What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago, by Jill Lapore, The New Yorker, 7 January 2018. The article reviews Toward the Year 2018, a group of essays about the future published by the Foreign Policy Association in 1968.

A great challenge to society

Netflix does seem to be pushing cultural boundaries and sparking new conversations all over the world. After it plastered Bangkok with billboards advertising “Sex Education” last month, a conservative Thai political party filed a complaint against the company for airing the racy British comedy, which the party called “a great challenge to Thai society.” The young, progressive Thai internet responded in fury, and in the outrage, people started talking about actual problems in Thai society, like the lack of sex education and the high rates of teenage pregnancy.

Netflix Is the Most Intoxicating Portal to Planet Earth by Farhad Manjoo, New York Times, 22 February 2019

Sparse prose (a sociology of love)

Pager wrote in sparse prose and fought with co-authors who wanted to bog down papers with jargon and technical details. “Devah had this rare ability,” says the Princeton sociologist Mitchell Duneier, “to both do the most rigorous social science, and then to translate those findings so that they would be discussed by people of different political persuasions.”

It was this kind of grounding that led Pager’s work to have such a profound impact on public policy … It was research compelled by moral commitments — racism is evil, poverty steals our gifts — and Pager’s ability to see the best in us, including those among us who have been convicted and caged. Hers was a sociology in the service of the dispossessed, a sociology of love.

Devah Pager: Her Work As A Sociologist Highlighted Racial Injustice In The United States, by Matthew Desmond, New York Times Magazine, 27 December 2018