Stay updated with breaking news from ஜான் கோல்தோர்ப். Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
MacroBusiness Access Subscriber Only Content at 12:40 pm on July 5, 2021 | 9 comments You can read the local China apologia from Xi Jinping’s cadre of local useful idiots today, Stan Grant and James Curran, both of whom continue to dodge the question: which parts of liberal democracy are they prepared to sacrifice for a better relationship with the CCP? Or you can read this excellent piece from Ho-fung Hung, who has nicely summarised the forces at work in Cold War 2.0: Represing Labour, empowering China Though the lockdown in 2020 threw many workers out of work, the big fiscal stimulus, fueled by government debt and an unprecedentedly large monetary expansion, offered stimulus checks and elevated unemployment benefits to millions of Americans. In 2020, US federal spending grew by 50 percent, making the deficit share of GDP the largest since 1945, and the M2 in the economy grew by 26 percent the largest annual increase since 1943. Such fiscal and monet ....
Allen Lane; 496 pages; £25. To be published in America in July by Skyhorse; $24.99 THIS MASTERLY book offers a robust defence of meritocracy. Adrian Wooldridge, The Economist’s political editor, traces the idea from Plato’s “Republic”, through Napoleon’s “career open to talent” to the attack on Victorian nepotism led by Britain’s intellectual aristocracy. He ends with interesting speculation that meritocracy may now have better prospects in Asia than in the West. The term “meritocracy” was coined by Michael Young, a British sociologist, in a book published in 1958. Young feared that a system that rewarded merit defined as IQ plus effort could actually be dystopian because the losers would suffer more than ever. He predicted a revolt against it and that revolt is indeed under way, with powerful challenges from critics including Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, and Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard Law School. Such ....
TODAY “social mobility” is a synonym for fairness and meritocracy in many Western societies. There are all kinds of flaws with this as a project and they become abundantly clear when we consider women’s experiences. By examining women’s lives across the past century, we see the need to fight for a more egalitarian society and for true liberation not just a few more black or female faces in our ruling class. The sociologist John Goldthorpe set the parameters for how mobility is measured and understood back in the early 1970s. Goldthorpe argued that mobility could be measured between a father’s class at the age of about 35, and his son’s class in adulthood. ....
New research suggests that ideas about hard work and equal opportunity are firmly entrenched, despite the pandemic âWhat happens if people now on furlough â disproportionately not graduates â emerge into a world of economic crisis and rising unemployment?â A jobcentre in Staffordshire, England. Photograph: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images âWhat happens if people now on furlough â disproportionately not graduates â emerge into a world of economic crisis and rising unemployment?â A jobcentre in Staffordshire, England. Photograph: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images Thu 4 Mar 2021 08.59 EST Last modified on Thu 4 Mar 2021 13.02 EST âWe are meritocrats,â declared Tony Blair in his adoption speech as candidate for Sedgefield in 2001. Nearly two decades later, on 13 December 2019, Boris Johnson travelled from Westminster to Sedgefield as the newly elected prime minister. He was the first Conservative party leader to win the former min ....
Chatto, pp.448, 25 ‘Whatever your background,’ Margaret Thatcher told the Sun’s readers in 1983, she was determined that ‘you have a chance to climb to the top’. So, too, Tony Blair in 2004 (‘I want to see social mobility a dominant factor of British life’), David Cameron in 2015 (‘Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world we cannot accept that’) and Theresa May in 2016 (‘I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege’). Put another way, for the best part of four decades equality of outcome was largely on the back burner; equality of opportunity was, at least in theory, the name of the game, and social mobility became one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie causes, like corporate social responsibility in the business world, which it was almost rude not to sign up to and utter warm words about. ....