scholarly journals MUMBAI

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Rosengaard
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Life Strategies ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Suburban Life ◽  
The City

The last ten years of growth in the Indian economy has nurtured dreams of the ‘good life’ among both the rich and the poor in the city of Mumbai (Bombay). The city and the home are important scenes in which the realizations of this metropolis’ 16 million inhabitants are played out. Whilst the middle classes, to an ever growing extent, realize dreams of the good life, inspired by the tranquil suburban life of the Western middle-class, the underclass must employ other life strategies in their attempt to turn dreams into reality.  

Class, Crime, and Cannibalism in The String of Pearls; or, The Demon Barber as Bourgeois Bogeyman

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Leah Richards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Resonance ◽  
String Of Pearls

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!

Costruire per il ceto medio a Milano. Note sulla filiera imprenditoriale

TERRITORIO ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 88-94
Author(s):  
Luca Gaeta
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Property Market ◽  
High Concentration ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Construction Companies ◽  
Land Owners ◽  
The Social ◽  
City Construction ◽  
The City

The precise boundaries of the supply chain for the production of housing for the middle classes in Milan during the boom years are not clearly defined. And yet its activity is of crucial importance to an understanding of the social and tangible forms of the middle class city. Construction companies constituted the key link in relations between land owners, clients, architects and end users of the asset that is a home. This paper offers a provisional picture which documents the firms most active in the sector, the prevailing operating practices and two businessmen who were interviewed. The conclusions identify two lines for further research into the middle class city: the role of non-professional mediators in the property market and the high concentration of up-market new housing construction within the ‘cerchia dei bastioni' (inner part of the city).

Performative Morality: Godey's Match Plates, Nineteenth-Century Stage Practice, and Social/Political/Economic Commentary in America's Popular Ladies’ Magazine

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 613-637
Author(s):  
CYNTHIA LEE PATTERSON
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Tableaux Vivants ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Mystery Novels ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The City

Recirculating the assertion of magazine historian Frank Luther Mott, subsequent generations of scholars maintained that Godey's Lady's Magazine eschewed content treating the social, political, and economic issues of the day. This article challenges that nearly universal reading of Godey's by arguing for the importance of a close reading of the “match plates” commissioned by Godey for his magazine. Appearing between 1840 and 1860, these plates, many engraved from pendant paintings created expressly for Godey, draw on the popularity of stage melodrama, dramatic tableau, and tableaux vivants to enact a performative morality addressing major social, economic, and political issues. Early match plates contrast virtue and vice, capitalizing on the enormous popularity of William Hogarth's engraving series Industry and Idleness. Match plates appear also in the popular fashion plates of the magazine – echoing the city mystery novels, plays, and prints first popularized by Eugene Sue – in Christmas for the Rich/Christmas for the Poor and Dress the Maker/Dress the Wearer. By 1860, even the magazine's “useful” contents, such as the pattern work prized by Godey's readers, echo the popularity of match plates: hence Fruit for Working/Flowers for Working. Closer attention to Godey's engravings calls for a reassessment of Mott's assertion.

scholarly journals Competitive Nonlinear Taxation and Constitutional Choice

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo Morelli ◽  
Huanxing Yang ◽  
Lixin Ye
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Optimal Taxation ◽  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Relative Power ◽  
Constitutional Choice ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

In an economy where agents have different productivities and mobility, we compare a unified nonlinear optimal taxation with the equilibrium taxation that would be chosen by two competing tax authorities if the same economy were divided into two states. The overall level of progressivity and redistribution is unambiguously lower under competitive taxation; the “rich” are always in favor of competing authorities, whereas the “poor” are always in favor of unified taxation; the preferences of the middle class depend on the initial conditions in terms of the distribution of abilities, the relative power of the various classes, and mobility costs. (JEL D72, H21, H23, H24)

Income Inequality, Life Satisfaction, and Economic Worries

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Roth ◽  
Elisabeth Hahn ◽  
Frank M. Spinath
Keyword(s):  
Life Satisfaction ◽  
Income Inequality ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Panel Study ◽  
National Level ◽  
Negative Relationship ◽  
Income Disparity ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

We analyzed the effect of income inequality on Germans’ life satisfaction considering factors explaining the mechanism of this relationship. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study for the years 1984 to 2012, we found a negative relationship between national-level income disparity and average life satisfaction, meaning that people felt happier in years with lower inequality. The effect was completely mediated by economic worries, which increased with rising inequality and in turn reduced people’s satisfaction. However, people’s reaction to inequality depended on their income level: Considering the direct effect of inequality, higher income disparity was clearly detrimental only for the poor and the middle class. Moreover, we found a significant mediation through economic worries for the middle class but not for the poor. The rich showed a more complex pattern of interrelations with both, positive and negative effects of inequality when controlling for economic worries.

scholarly journals Collections for the poor: monetary charitable donations in Dutch towns, c. 1600–1800

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIËLLE TEEUWEN
Keyword(s):  
Urban Population ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Charitable Donations ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTIn many localities in the Dutch Republic, charitable collections were the single largest source of income for relief institutions for the outdoor poor. This article takes into account both the role of the authorities organising collections and the role of the city-dwellers making charitable donations. It is demonstrated that people from almost all layers of urban society contributed to the collections. By means of thorough planning and exerting social pressure, religious and secular administrators of poor relief tried to maximise Dutch generosity. They presented making charitable donations as a duty of the rich as well as of the less well-off. In the Dutch Republic, not only the elites, but also the middling groups of society, who approximately constituted almost half of the urban population, were of vital importance in financing poor relief.

The Making of the Middle-Class City: Transportation Policy in São Paulo

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
E A Vasconcellos
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Circulation Pattern ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
Transportation Policy ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The City

The adaptation of urban spaces to cope with increased automobile traffic has been called the ‘building of automobile cities’. This is a vague and otherwise politically naive interpretation of these important changes in capitalist societies. Cars do not run on their own and one has to ask who is behind the wheels, and for what purposes. I argue that these spatial transformations are definite economic and political undertakings related to capitalist modernization processes, in which the middle classes, as preferential partners of ruling classes, play the most important role. In these contexts, the automobile turns out to be an essential means for the reproduction of the middle classes in their pursuit of social mobility. Therefore I argue that these large transformations should instead be seen as the ‘building of middle-class cities’. This paper is about how São Paulo was transformed into a middle-class city. In it I emphasize the period from 1960 to 1980, when the city population increased from 3.6 million to 8.5 million, and 1.6 million new automobiles were put into circulation. In this period Brazil experienced a highly dynamic capitalist modernization process, with high rates of GNP growth, under authoritarian (and often repressive) political rule. New middle-class sectors were generated, supported by the concentration of income and by their ideological commitment to the new regime. The city space was physically transformed to allow for a new pattern of circulation which was directly related to the new economic activities and the new lifestyle of these middle-class sectors, for whom the automobile became a vital means of social reproduction. The middle classes were represented, inside the state, by transportation planners who promoted the ideology of modernization. The space was then reshaped in a way which favored the circulation needs of the middle class population, in its prime role of driver, rather than the needs of the majority of the population, in their primary roles of pedestrian and captive public transportation user. Moreover, the mobility and fluidity needs of these selected middle-class sectors were pursued regardless of the safety and environmental consequences of the new circulation pattern. Similar processes can be identified in the developing world where other middle-class cities have been created. In spite of social and political differences, these processes share the objective of readapting space to ease the circulation of the social sectors which are relevant to economic accumulation and political legitimation.

scholarly journals Responsible Solutions

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245
Author(s):  
Jay Sterling Silver
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Task Force ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Conducting Research

At the end of Brian Tamanaha’s instant classic, Failing Law Schools, tracing the economic forces behind exorbitant law school tuition and graduate debt and unemployment, he lays out his plan to help resolve the crisis. He would eliminate tenure, dispense with the final year of law school, rely heavily on adjuncts and apprenticeships, and loosen the ABA accreditation standards mandating “one-size-fitsall” law schools to allow the marketplace to fashion more affordable models of legal education. Some schools would remain in the traditional, three-year mode, with faculty conducting research. Others would morph into, or spring up spontaneously as, the “law school parallel . . . of vocational colleges.” Very candidly, Tamanaha explained that the “two-year law schools . . . would be dumping grounds for the middle class and the poor . . . . Few children of the rich will end up in these law schools.” He calls the plan “‘differentiated’ legal education.” Others, including Paul Campos, founder of the Inside the Law School Scam web blog and author of Don’t Go To Law School (Unless), and the ABA Task Force (“Task Force”) on the Future of Legal Education, have endorsed Tamanaha’s prescription.

warrants would be to consider in your minds how far this offence exceeds the rest in seriousness. You will find that all other crimes harm a part of one’s life, while outrage ruins the whole of one’s affairs, that many households have been destroyed by it and many states devastated. [10] Why waste time speaking of the misfortunes of others? We ourselves have seen the democracy overthrown twice and been robbed of our freedom twice, not by people guilty of other kinds of criminality but by people who despised the laws and were willing to be the enemy’s slaves and subject the citizens to wilful violence. [11] And the defendant is one of them. Even if he is too young to be part of the constitution in place then, still his character belongs to that regime. It was natures such as his which handed our power to the enemy, knocked down the walls protecting our land, and killed fifteen hundred citizens without trial. [12] It is appropriate for you to remember those events and take vengeance not only on the ones who abused us at that time but also on those who now desire to reduce the city to that condition, and on those whom you expect to turn out evil more than on those who offended before, in so far as it is better to find a means of preventing future crimes than to punish those which have already taken place. [13] Do not wait for them to band together and seize an opportunity to offend against the whole city, but use any pretext on which they are handed over to you to take vengeance on them. Consider it a stroke of luck whenever you catch a man who has demonstrated the whole of his criminality in petty acts. [14] It would have been best of all if the wicked among mankind bore some mark to enable you to chastise them, before any of the citizen body is wronged. But since it is impossible to discover them before someone is harmed by them, at least when they are recognized everyone should hate such men and consider them public enemies. [15] Bear in mind that risks to property do not apply to the poor, but we all alike are subject to assault on our persons. So when you punish people who take money, you benefit only the rich, but when you chastise those who commit outrage, you are helping yourselves. [16] So you must take trials such as this especially seriously, and in the case of transactions in general you should assess the penalty at the amount you think the prosecutor should get, but in the case of outrage you should assess a penalty whose payment will make the defendant desist from his current excesses. [17] If then you deprive of their property people who subject citizens to wilful abuse and if you hold the view that no penalty is sufficiently severe for people whose crimes are

2002 ◽  
pp. 107-107
Keyword(s):  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City
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