Individualistic culture increases economic mobility in the United States

Where an individual grows up has large implications for their long-term economic outcomes, including earnings and intergenerational mobility. Even within the United States, the “causal effect of place” varies greatly and cannot be fully explained by socioeconomic conditions. Across different nations, variation in growth and mobility have been linked to more individualistic cultures. We assess how variation of historically driven individualism within the United States affects mobility. Areas in the United States that were isolated on the frontier for longer periods of time during the 19th century have a stronger culture of “rugged individualism” [S. Bazzi, M. Fiszbein, M. Gebresilasse, Econometrica 88, 2329–2368 (2020)]. We combine county-level measures of frontier experience with modern measures of the causal effect of place on mobility—the predicted percentage change in an individual’s earnings at age 26 y associated with “growing up” in a particular county [R. Chetty, N. Hendren, Q. J. Econ. 133, 1163–1228 (2018)]. Using commuting zone fixed effects and a suite of county-level controls to absorb regional variation in frontier experience and modern economic conditions, we find an additional decade of frontier experience results in 25% greater modern-day income mobility for children of parents in the 25th percentile of income and 14% for those born to parents in the 75th percentile. We use mediation analysis to present suggestive evidence that informal manifestations of “rugged individualism”—those embodied by the individuals themselves—are more strongly associated with upward mobility than formal policy or selective migration.

Dream in Disguise: A Marxist Analysis of Presentation of Dream in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist

This study investigates Paulo Coelho’s highly popular novel, The Alchemist (1988), in its English translation. Coelho’s The Alchemist has positively influenced millions of its readers worldwide as it inspires them to pursue their dreams or their “personal legends” in their lives without being afraid of failure. Santiago’s quest for his dream becomes a motivation for the readers to face challenges in their road to success in life. Coelho himself advocates for being aware of our “personal calling” which he says is “God’s blessing” or, “our own dream”. The current research questions the presentation of this dream by the author in this novel as it does not seem to be a simple dream. The dream is regarded as a metaphor not only by the author himself, but also by many critics who interpret this dream from a positivistic outlook to life. In this research, I would argue that this dream has its other metaphorical connotations too due to its way of presentation. Santiago’s dream and its pursuit highly resemble the pursuit of American Dream, a capitalist ideology. Santiago’s quest for his dream and the hidden treasure which he finds in the end has been argued as promotion of “rugged individualism” in this study. Thus, the paper, from a Marxist point of view, decodes the dream metaphor in The Alchemist, and tries to understand the operation of other capitalist ideologies in it.

Reflections of the Impact of Umunthu/Ubuntu on My Upbringing

The idea of Ubuntu meaning humanness is contrasted with that of unyama meaning beastliness. Analytically, Ubuntu touches on integrity, wisdom, hard work or economic productivity, social solidarity as a people who are in relationship as constitutive of their identity as opposed to rugged individualism. This leads to a philosophy that is very different from that which has developed in the West. Therefore, the upbringing that was shaped by the author's mother and the communal ethos insisted on that which characterized Ubuntu.

The Ragged Edge of Rugged Individualism: Wage Theft and the Personalization of Social Harm

Every year, millions of low-wage workers suffer wage theft when their employers refuse to pay them what they have earned. Wage theft is both prevalent and highly impactful. It costs individuals thousands each year in unpaid earnings, siphons tens of billions of dollars from low-income communities, depletes the government of necessary resources, distorts the competitive labor market, and causes significant personal harm to its victims. In recent years, states and cities have passed new laws to attack the problem. These legal changes are important. They are also, broadly speaking, failing the people they are supposed to protect. This Article fills a significant gap in the literature by detailing the full scope of damage caused by wage theft and by critically examining the dominant approach to combatting it. Drawing on existing research and nearly 60 in-depth interviews about wage theft in the District of Columbia, this Article paints a thorough picture of wage theft’s harms, explores why and how existing reforms are failing, and explains what must be done instead. Enforcement schemes reflect the current view that wage theft is a personal harm properly addressed on a case-by-case basis in the civil justice system. As a result, reforms—both as written and implemented—generally attempt to empower and incentivize individuals to action. These approaches are failing. They misunderstand what wage theft is, how it plays out, and how it must be addressed. Wage theft is not an individual problem, but a social harm, and it therefore requires a broad, public response. Because low-wage workers live economically precarious lives and are so dependent on their jobs to survive, they almost never take formal legal action over violations of their rights. Government bodies cannot continue to rely on workers themselves to enforce their rights, but must take on a new role as robust, active, and strategic enforcers. Unless and until they do, millions of people will continue to suffer violations of their basic workplace rights with no meaningful recourse.

The Neoliberal Disciplining of LeBron James and Kevin Durant: Sports Media Discourse on NBA Free Agency as Ideological Critique

Through content analysis of sports media commentary focusing on the high-profile free agencies of NBA stars LeBron James and Kevin Durant, the author demonstrates how commercial sports media discourse responding to these critical exigencies strategically reinforces neoliberal ideology and parlays its disciplinary rhetoric into a derogatory ideological critique of James, Durant, and their contemporaries. The analysis demonstrates how media discourse surrounding James and Durant covertly but significantly reinforces cultural myths of rugged individualism, self-sufficiency, and competition as concomitant with success and self-worth while exalting idealized constructions of the prior generation of basketball icons, particularly Michael Jordan, whose mythic self-reliance is metonymic of an influx of nostalgic discourse which framed today’s players as constitutionally inferior to the stars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Suki Kim’s The Interpreter

This article argues that Suki Kim’s The Interpreter (2003) is influenced by and, at the same time, critically revises early American hard-boiled crime fiction, the genre with which it is least likely to be associated. Although dead bodies do not pile up in the novel, the urban world in which Kim’s protagonist operates, attempting to solve the case of her parents’ murder, is as treacherous as the world portrayed in early hard-boiled detective fiction. Kim has inherited from early hard-boiled crime fiction such elements as its rugged individualism, a cynical-but-sentimental worldview, and not least, its social concerns about economic inequality and corruption among the powerful. At the same time, Kim’s novel subtly reconfigures her hard-boiled sleuth as well as adapts the genre to a contemporary racial context. In this revision, both the institutional and personal practices of racism are placed on trial. Female solidarity is also celebrated as a means to counter the violence and corruption of a racialized society. In so doing, Kim’s novel subverts both the sexism and racism of the traditional detective genre. The conclusion of this article is that the novel legitimates a female immigrant and person of color’s right to belong and challenges the white masculine hegemony that the traditional hard-boiled genre maintains.

Improving Industry

This chapter considers how a group of six hundred manufacturers met in Cincinnati in January 1895 to address the challenges of their day, including deep depression, falling prices, and cutthroat competition. Manufacturers saw overproduction as the primary cause of their woes and had two responses to it. First, they turned to the promise of foreign markets, both to offload surpluses and find new markets. And second, they tried to find ways to subvert the debilitating effects of competition through cooperation and planning, first in the form of unworkable “pools” and “gentlemen's agreements” and eventually, more legitimately, in the form of trade associations. These manufacturers were creating an organization that would pursue both strategies, thereby facilitating the modernization of American industry and government. The result was the “corporate reconstruction of capitalism”: a new form of capitalism based on cooperation, rationality, and long-term planning superseded a nineteenth-century proprietary capitalism based on competition, “rugged individualism,” and decentralized government. Trade associations like the National Association of Manufacturers were key to this transition.