B&B: Economists’ blindness to racism // We are all fast-food workers // For abolition of work // Arms purchase // Tests for profit // The financialized imagination // Gendered economics

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

This time, especially worth reading and sharing pieces:

> Racism is a system that manifests in norms, institutions, and policies. Economists who want to challenge it must abandon neoclassical assumptions and recognize the role of history, power, and institutions in shaping behavior — by Joelle Gamble

> Acquisitions of military style-weapons by local law enforcement agencies in the US increased over the past 10 years has exacerbated lethal use of force against black communities.  Olugbenga Ajilore explains how the US turned its police into an army

> Surveillance, speed, stress, and understaffing are the features of the neoliberal labor market. A powerful story of women-led Walmart strike, walkout, and struggle for workers’ rights — an excerpt from Annelise Orleck’s “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages (2018)

> “Investment” has become “a useful term to describe the transformation of ever more aspects of life into commodities and the orientation of our social imaginations towards individualized risk management and speculation” — Max Haiven tackles the monsters of the financialized imagination

> The work ideology has ruled our lives for centuries, and it does so today more than ever. But a new generation of “post-work” thinkers insists there is an alternative. Andy Beckett reflects on the radical idea to shatter an intense working culture, recalling Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality (1973), Bernard Lefkowitz’s Breaktime: Living Without Work in a Nine to Five World (1979) and Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work (1985), and reading Benjamin Hunnicutt’s Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream (2013), David Frayne’s The Refusal of Work: Rethinking Post-Work Theory and Practice (2015), Joanna Biggs’ All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work (2015), James Livingston’s No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea (2016), Ryan Avent’s The Wealth of Humans: Work and its Absence in the 21st Century (2016), Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (2017), and David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018).

> The corporate history of personality tests: they have always been bound up in politics, business, and management. Kira Lussier on how corporations convinced us personality tests are fun and how that made Cambridge Analytica possible.

> Do research topics in development economics studied by men and women differ? Yes. Does this male-dominated discipline express less interest in topics that women are more likely to be studying? Yes. Seema Jayachandran and Jamie Daubenspeck present findings on and call for change and more diversity in the economics profession.

Refusal to work - No more work

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