Exceptionalism's Exceptions: The Changing American Narrative

Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Levering Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Endangered Species ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
The Other ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Private Profit

Seven years after 9/11, the American way of life was again shaken to its foundation by the Great Recession of 2008. The logic of an unregulated market economy produced its predetermined result. The American middle class, the historic protagonist of the American narrative, became an endangered species. Against a bleak backdrop of indebtedness, unemployment, and rapid decline in traditional jobs and in the affordability of the essentials of health and education stands the stark wealth of the top 1 percent of Americans. With the vital center no longer holding and consensus fraying, 53 percent of the electorate wagered in 2008 that it could deny race by affirming its non-importance and thereby audaciously reinvigorate the exceptionalist narrative. The choice before us, however, is still much the same as that posited by W.E.B. Du Bois when he described two antithetical versions of the American narrative: one was based on “freedom, intelligence and power for all men; the other was industry for private profit directed by an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power.”

The Great Financial Crisis: an Ethical Rejoinder

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (01) ◽  
pp. 19-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Charles Merrill
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Ethical Question ◽  
Heterodox Economics ◽  
Ethical Philosophy ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Economy ◽  
Radical Reconstruction

The Great Financial Crisis that broke in 2008 and the Great Recession that followed has led many to question the very structure of contemporary economies. Some argue that the economic model of the past forty years is now broken. Criticism has also been directed at the orthodoxies of economics. For example, neoclassical equilibrium economics, the mainstream economics of the day, is accused of failing to understand some of the most basic aspects of the modern economy (debt and money), of supporting policies that have led to the economic breakdown (deregulation), and of failing to see the crisis coming (Bezemer 2012, Keen 2011). Consequently, heterodox thinking in economics is getting a hearing as never before. Heterodox economics offers itself as the requisite radical reconstruction of the science of economics and also proposes policies for the radical reconstruction of the major economics.Yet to talk of the reconstruction of the modern market economy is at the same time to raise the ethical question: what shape ought the market economy to take? Heterodox economics may acutely analyse the inadequacies of real economies and propose plausible reforms, but as an essentially descriptive science there will be limits on its ability to state what ought to be. Rather, what is required seems to be a systematic prescriptive ethics. In other words, recent events in the world of economics have provided an opening for what ethical philosophy should be best at providing. Determining whether a specific ethical philosophy, to be identified shortly, has the capacity to address the questions raised by heterodox economics is the task of this paper.

Disparate Recoveries: Wealth, Race, and the Working Class after the Great Recession

2021 ◽  
Vol 695 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Fenaba R. Addo ◽  
William A. Darity
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Net Worth ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Consumer Finances ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Relationship

What does it mean to be working class in a society of extreme racial wealth inequality? Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we investigate the wealth holdings of Black, Latinx, and white working-class households during the post–Great Recession (pre–COVID-19) period that spanned 2010 to 2019. We then explore the relationship between working-class and middle-class attainment using a wealth-based metric. We find that, in terms of their net worth, fewer Black working-class households benefitted from the economic recovery than white working-class households. Among white households, the working class saw the greatest increase in wealth in both absolute and relative terms. Working-class households were less likely to be middle class as defined by their wealth holdings, and Black and Latinx households were also less likely to be middle class. For Black households, racial identity is a stronger predictor of wealth attainment than occupational sector.

scholarly journals Workers’ EU political alignments during the Great Recession

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Freire ◽  
Luís Cabrita ◽  
Mariana Carmo Duarte ◽  
Hugo Ferrinho Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
The Other ◽  
Election Study ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Political Alignments ◽  
European Election ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The One ◽  
The Eu

Using data from the European Election Study 2014, this article focuses on workers’ EU political alignments during the Great Recession. It deals with two research questions. First, how does the attitude of (manual) workers towards the EU compare to that of the middle and upper classes in the aftermath of the Great Recession? Second, when it comes to workers’ support for the EU, are there systematic differences between countries affected by the crisis? The article finds that, on the one hand, in terms of patterns of workers’ EU political alignments, there are no systematic differences between countries affected to varying degrees by the Great Recession. On the other hand, workers still feel fundamentally detached from the EU, especially when it comes to the manual workers. However, high levels of generalised detachment from the EU are not clearly translated into preferences for Eurosceptic parties, since there are high levels of vote fragmentation.

Appropriating the Comanche: Hell or High Water and the New Southwest

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
Douglas E. Green
Keyword(s):  
American Indian ◽  
Real World ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
High Water ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Old West

AbstractHell or High Water (2016) takes the elegiac mode – the wistful lament for the myth of the Old West – and recasts it as a raucous country song on the dismantling of that myth by twenty-first-century capitalism. In the wake of the Great Recession, director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan pair off two iconic sets of Western characters: a couple of down-and-out bank-robbing brothers shadowed by an old, White Texas Ranger and his American-Indian/Mexican-American deputy. The values of the lawmen and the outlaw brothers are not mutually exclusive – each pair shares more with the other than with the new materialistic order around them. The overarching metaphor for men who repeatedly confront the socioeconomic forces pitted against their values is the Comanche, to which several characters lay claim. Hell or High Water gives us both a lament for the myth of the Old West and a tart critique of the film Western and of the real-world exploitation of the region, its people, and the American dream they cling to.

On the asymmetries created by the Great Recession in the US real estate market

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Achille Dargaud Fofack ◽  
Serge Djoudji Temkeng ◽  
Clement Oppong
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Interest Rate ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Real Estate Market ◽  
The Other ◽  
Quantitative Easing ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Us

PurposeThis paper aims at analyzing the asymmetries created by the Great Recession in the US real estate sector.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses a Markov-switching dynamic regression model in which parameters change when the housing market moves from one regime to the other.FindingsThe results show that the effect of real estate loans, interest rate, quantitative easing and working age population are asymmetric across bull and bear regimes. It is also found that the estimated parameters are larger in bull regime than bear regime, indicating a tendency to create house price bubbles in bull market.Practical implicationsSince three of those asymmetric variables (real estate loans, interest rate and quantitative easing) are related to monetary policy, the Fed can mitigate their impact on an interest-sensitive sector such as housing by engaging in a countercyclical monetary policy.Originality/valueThe estimated intercept and the variance parameter both vary from one regime to the other, thus justifying the use of a regime-dependent model.

Robots, skill demand and manufacturing in US regional labour markets

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancey Green Leigh ◽  
Benjamin Kraft ◽  
Heonyeong Lee
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
International Federation ◽  
Labour Markets ◽  
The Other ◽  
Manufacturing Employment ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Regional Labour Markets ◽  
Job Postings

Abstract Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) technology have spurred a re-examination of technology’s impacts on jobs and the economy. This article reviews several key contributions to the current jobs/AI debate, discusses their limitations and offers a modified approach, analysing two quantitative models in tandem. One uses robot stock data from the International Federation of Robotics as the primary indicator of robot use, whereas the other uses online job postings requiring robot-related skills. Together, the models suggest that since the Great Recession ended, robots have contributed positively to manufacturing employment in the USA at the metropolitan level.

scholarly journals Gentrification and Racial Transformation in One Neighborhood in the City of Cincinnati during the Great Recession

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 119-145
Author(s):  
Evelyn Ravuri
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
American Population ◽  
African American Population ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Public Investments ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Separate And Unequal ◽  
Household Incomes

This article examines the process of gentrification and racial transition in one neighborhood in Cincinnati between 2000 and 2016. Madisonville (Tract 55) was defined as a racially integrated middle-class neighborhood in the 1970s. In the early 2000s, substantial private and public investments in the neighborhood initiated the process of gentrification and an in-migration of wealthier (mostly white) residents. This revitalization of Madisonville coincided with the Great Recession of 2008 and with a massive exodus of the middle-class African American population. Median housing values and median rent in Madisonville increased significantly between 2010 and 2016, indicating that cost of living had become too expensive for a percentage of the population. In 2000, the white and African American population in Tract 55 had comparable median household incomes, but by 2016, white median household income was 3.5 times that of African Americans, suggesting that two separate and unequal housing markets had emerged. Using Google Street View and a gentrification index designed by Hwang (2015), this article undertakes documentation of the process of gentrification between 2009 and 2016 to visually support that gentrification occurred in the built environment after the Great Recession.

scholarly journals Expenditure Cuts and Access to Healthcare Under the Great Recession in Europe: Income Groups Are Unequally Affected

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lore Torfs ◽  
Stef Adriaenssens ◽  
Susan Lagaert ◽  
Sara Willems
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Access To Healthcare ◽  
The Other ◽  
General Effect ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Difference In Differences ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Medical Needs ◽  
Income Groups ◽  
Unmet Medical Needs

Abstract Background:The Great Recession,starting in 2008, was characterized by an overall reduction in living standards. This pushed governmentsacross the European Unionto restrict expenditures, also in the area of healthcare. Theseausterity measures are known to have affectedthe access to healthcare, probably unevenly among social groups.This study examines the unequal effects of cuts in healthcare expenditures on the access to medical carefor differentincome groups across European countries.Method:Using data of two waves (2008 and 2014) of the European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditionssurvey (EU-SILC), a difference-in-differences (DD) approach was used to analyse the overall change in unmet medical needs over time withinand between countries.By adding an additional level thedifferences in the effects between income quintiles (difference-in-difference-in-differences: DDD) were estimated.To do so, three relevant comparisons weremade: Greece versus the other countries, Iceland versus Sweden, and Ireland versus the United Kingdom.The latter two are comparisons of countries with recessions equal in magnitude, but with different levels of healthcare cuts, in order to isolate the effect of these cuts .Results:The DD-estimates show a higher increase of unmet medical needs during the Great Recession in Greece comparted with the other countries (+4.15pp). Although this first model gave only a view of the overall effect of the recession, the same but weaker effects were found in the two other models (Iceland vs Sweden: +3.24pp and Ireland vs United Kingdom: +1.15pp).The DDD-estimates shows difference results over the three models. In Greece and Iceland the lowest income groups were most affected, while this was not the case in Ireland.Conclusion: Restrictions on health expenditures during the Great Recessioncaused an increase in self-reported unmet medical needs.The burden of these effects is not equally distributed; in most cases the lower income groups suffer most. The case of Ireland, nevertheless, shows that certainpolicy measures may sparelower income groups, whiledisproportionately affecting middle class income groups.These results bring in evidence that policies can reduce and even overshoot the general effect of income inequalities on access to healthcare.

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