Bhaskar Sunkara has a lovely piece in the Guardian on why the ideas of Karl Marx resonate in today’s society. As robots, automation, and outsourcing prevail, labor is being stripped away while capital metastasizes wildly.

Marxism in America needs to be more than an intellectual tool for mainstream commentators befuddled by our changing world. It needs to be a political tool to change that world. Spoken, not just written, for mass consumption, peddling a vision of leisure, abundance, and democracy even more real than what the capitalism’s prophets offered in 1939. A socialist Disneyland: inspiration after the “end of history.”

In the New York Times Opinion Pages: China’s Brutal One-Child Policy:

It is not surprising that China has the highest rate of female suicide in the world. The one-child policy has reduced women to numbers, objects, a means of production; it has denied them control of their bodies and the basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.

Rising incomes and urbanization generally lead to falling birthrates. If the one-child policy were scrapped tomorrow, most Chinese wouldn’t rush to produce as many offspring as Zhang Yimou. And despite recent signals that the Party might be considering gradually relaxing birth restrictions, there is still considerable resistance.

The talented New York Magazine journalist Jennifer Senior had a masterly written feature in the magazine’s late March issue. She reports on how the nature of childhood has changed in New York City. 

At a time when the murder rate is on track to be the lowest in a century and when violence is on a sharp decline in the world, one study found that only six percent of kids play outside on their own in a typical week. A child’s volition of play and antics that marked generations prior has largely disappeared. 

Senior explains it well: 

Today, we think of New York City children as fragile, vulnerable creatures, sensitive to sunlight and best stored in Styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap. But perhaps the greatest irony about childhood in New York is that parents are protecting their kids from a metropolis that’s never been safer or more prosperous. For most of this city’s history, kids were an independent, adventurous, and far tougher species, and regarded by their parents with much less sentimentality, even when the city was more treacherous.

All the insulation in the world can’t protect New York children from life’s most difficult realities—failure, rejection, illness. This city no longer tests children as it once did, and it demands far less resilience. “First, ideally, we are made to feel special,” writes the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his most recent book, Missing Out. “Then we are expected to enjoy a world in which we are not.”

The New York of old may have been harsh in many ways. But it probably prepared children far better for the world’s ultimate indifference. 

Ken Ilgunas lived in a van for two years in a parking lot at Duke University while he was a graduate student in the liberal studies program. After graduating from the University at Buffalo with $32,000 of student loan debt and an unmarketable, fairly useless liberal arts degree, he was at a crossroads. Ilgunas could continue working as a cart-pusher at Home Depot or start living what he calls a free life: “hopping trains, hitching rides, climbing mountains, traveling, wandering.” Choosing the latter, he went on to toil in low-wage jobs, spending a year between undergraduate and graduate school in Coldfoot, Alaska and the Park Service. 

“My debt, I decided, would be the next mountain I’d try to climb,” Ilgunas writes in his newly released memoir Walden on Wheels. “It would be my Blue Cloud. It would be an adventure.” Finally, his debt was paid off and he had an additional $3,500 in the bank. 

A mediocre student, he was blessed with an acceptance letter to a graduate program at Duke University. His goal was to graduate debt-free and living in a van without no major expenses was how he was going to achieve it. Two years living in the van and a semester living on a small farm went by. He graduated with just over $1,000 in the bank.

On a final note, the infamous Duke Vandweller remarks in his graduation speech: 

“So began two different educations. The first was an education in vandwelling, in loneliness, in frugality, in figuring out how to wash my pots and pans without running water. The second was an education in liberal studies, in Diogenes, in Rousseau, in writing, speaking, and thinking. Yet it wasn’t long before these educations came together, like two rivers meeting at a confluence and flowing together as one.

“Today, I leave Duke much the same way I came. I have exactly $ 1,156, no job, and a degree that is— let’s face it— not going to have me, or most of us, rolling on a mattress covered in twenty-dollar bills. And to keep out of debt, I’ve recently put the van up for sale.

Goldman Sachs? The oil and gas industry?! What the hell was going on? What’s the point of schools like Duke if they’re merely funneling grads into careers that—excuse the colloquialism—fuck shit up? 

—Ken Ilgunas in Walden on Wheels

Boston Magazine has a great feature this month on why Americans are questioning the tenet of owning something.

After defining ourselves for generations by our possessions—cars, houses, books, music—a dramatic cultural shift is under way. In the wake of a collapsed economy and a warming planet, what matters to a growing number of Americans is not so much ownership as access. And that has made Boston ground zero for a powerful new force in modern life: The sharing economy. 

NYPD Officer Pedro Serrano is a hero in my books for deciding to stand as a witness in the trial of Floyd v. City of New York. He surreptitiously recorded his superiors demanding that he hand out summons for petty offenses in order to meet the quotas. Officers are deliberately stopping-and-frisking men of certain races — amounting to blatant racial profiling. 

In the New York Magazine feature profiling Serrano: “In 2011, 87 percent of the people stopped were African-American or Latino. And in the overwhelming majority of stops—nearly 90 percent of them—police officers didn’t make an arrest or hand out a summons.”

Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton wrote a great piece in the Washington Post on the effect money incentives have on performance and motivation: “When paying more stops paying off.”

The piece explains: 

In a series of large-scale experiments with school children, paying kids a reward of as much as $5,000 to maintain at least a B average had absolutely no detectable influence on their performance in school. Other research has even shown that paying kids for good grades leads to decreased motivation—it can “crowd out” any natural enjoyment they may have had for those activities. 

Research shows that companies that offer flextime—the ability for employees to schedule their own starting and stopping times at the office—are better places to work than those that stick to a more typical 9-to-5 mentality. Not only do employees rewarded with flextime like their jobs more, they also have lower absenteeism and better performance. In fact, firms that adopt employee-centric mindsets and offer flextime have even been shown to be more profitable.” [Emphasis mine] 

“During your working lives, you will have to reinvent yourselves many times. Success and satisfaction will not come from mastering a fixed body of knowledge but from constant adaptation and creativity in a rapidly changing world.”

—Ben Bernanke in his Bard College at Simon’s Rock Commencement Speech