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"Plutocracy"
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Assessing the Socioeconomic Impacts of Transitioning from Plutocracy to Meritocracy in University Admissions
This paper examines the effects of transitioning from a plutocratic to a meritocratic university admission system on students and society. We develop a theoretical model to predict the socioeconomic impacts of this transition and validate our predictions using simulations and empirical data from Georgia, where education reform shifted university admissions from a plutocratic system to a meritocratic one, providing a natural experiment that enables us to validate predictions of our theoretical model. The findings demonstrate positive outcomes for individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds, including improved educational attainment and increased labor income.
Journal Article
The crisis of the middle-class constitution : why income inequality threatens our republic
\"For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable--and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America's republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic?\"--Page [4] of cover.
Book
Political insurance for the (relative) poor: How liberal constitutionalism could resist plutocracy
Fair value of equal political liberties is a key precondition for the legitimacy of a regime in liberal thought. This liberal guarantee is breached whenever a group is permanently or semi-permanently locked out of power. Given the convertibility, subtlety, and resilience of power, gross material inequality – produced by neoliberal economic policies – effectively locks the relative poor out of political power. Such lockout breaches the legitimacy constraint on a liberal constitutional democracy. Neoliberal democracies, sooner or later, become plutocracies. This possibility should concern not only liberal political theory but also liberal constitutionalism. The usual objections to a constitutional concern with gross inequality and plutocracy – based on concerns relating to transparency, counter-majoritarianism and flexibility – are useful design instructions, but do not rule out the constitutionalisation of egalitarian and anti-plutocratic norms. A whole panoply of legal and political constitutional measures – already familiar to or incrementally developed from liberal constitutional thought and practice worldwide – could be marshalled to effectively promote material equality and resist plutocracy. These measures – documented to map the possibilities rather than as a manifesto – seek either to prevent material inequality from becoming excessive or to prevent its conversion into political inequality. Good constitutional design, depending on the context, is likely to deploy several tools from both these toolboxes.
Journal Article
The Council on Foreign Relations, the Biden Team, and Key Policy Outcomes
We can analyze the new Biden administration, its personnel, and the policies it is likely to follow, especially on the all-important questions of the climate crisis and U.S. grand strategy toward China, by looking at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Journal Article
Money and success in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 local elections in Brazil
The close relationship between money and votes has been exposed in contemporary democracies through the influence of the former in election results and in the creation of public policies. Studies have pointed out that the progressive inequity of financial resources available to the candidates running for elections unbalances democracy and promotes plutocracy, increasing the oligarchical ruling over the political processes by the wealthiest citizens and groups. This work contributes to this debate by analyzing the relationship between fundraising and electoral performance and the success of 317,107 candidates running in local legislative elections in 2008, 2012, and 2016 in 441 Brazilian municipalities with over 50,000 inhabitants. This is an unprecedented study regarding its period, filling a gap in electoral studies on sub-national elections, particularly regarding elections for the legislative branch. Data was collected from the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court, from candidate lists, results, and accounting. The tests and data analysis and information employed correlation and regression statistical resources, along with central measures and odds ratio. The results confirmed a strong association between money, vote, and electoral success, including in the 2016 election when company donations had been prohibited. The maintenance of a pattern, regarding both time and geography, indicates the existence of structural characteristics of a plutocratic character in the election funding of those running for the council in the municipalities studied and, consequently, in the creation of public policies in Brazil.
Journal Article
Worlds apart
We are used to thinking about inequality within countries--about rich Americans versus poor Americans, for instance. But what about inequality between all citizens of the world?Worlds Apartaddresses just how to measure global inequality among individuals, and shows that inequality is shaped by complex forces often working in different directions. Branko Milanovic, a top World Bank economist, analyzes income distribution worldwide using, for the first time, household survey data from more than 100 countries. He evenhandedly explains the main approaches to the problem, offers a more accurate way of measuring inequality among individuals, and discusses the relevant policies of first-world countries and nongovernmental organizations.
Inequality has increased between nations over the last half century (richer countries have generally grown faster than poorer countries). And yet the two most populous nations, China and India, have also grown fast. But over the past two decades inequality within countries has increased. As complex as reconciling these three data trends may be, it is clear: the inequality between the world's individuals is staggering. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the richest 5 percent of people receive one-third of total global income, as much as the poorest 80 percent. While a few poor countries are catching up with the rich world, the differences between the richest and poorest individuals around the globe are huge and likely growing.
eBook
The fifty-year rebellion
This title is part of American Studies Now and available as an e-book first. Visit ucpress.edu/go/americanstudiesnow to learn more.
On July 23, 1967, the eyes of the world fixed on Detroit, as thousands took to the streets to vent their frustrations with white racism, police brutality, and vanishing job prospects in the place that gave rise to the American Dream. Mainstream observers contended that the \"riot\" brought about the ruin of a once-great city; for them, the municipal bankruptcy of 2013 served as a bailout paving the way for the rebuilding of Detroit. Challenging this prevailing view, Scott Kurashige portrays the past half century as a long rebellion whose underlying tensions continue to haunt the city and the U.S. nation-state. He sees Michigan's scandal-ridden \"emergency management\" regime, set up to handle the bankruptcy, as the most concerted effort to put it down by disenfranchising the majority black citizenry and neutralizing the power of unions.
Are we succumbing to authoritarian plutocracy or can we create a new society rooted in social justice and participatory democracy? The corporate architects of Detroit's restructuring have championed the creation of a \"business-friendly\" city, where billionaire developers are subsidized to privatize and gentrify Downtown, while working-class residents are being squeezed out by rampant housing evictions, school closures, water shutoffs, toxic pollution, and militarized policing. Grassroots organizers, however, have transformed Detroit into an international model for survival, resistance, and solidarity through the creation of urban farms, freedom schools, and self-governing communities. This epochal struggle illuminates the possible futures for our increasingly unstable and polarized nation.
eBook
Reading Obama
Derided by the Right as dangerous and by the Left as spineless, Barack Obama puzzles observers. InReading Obama, James T. Kloppenberg reveals the sources of Obama's ideas and explains why his principled aversion to absolutes does not fit contemporary partisan categories. Obama's commitments to deliberation and experimentation derive from sustained engagement with American democratic thought. In a new preface, Kloppenberg explains why Obama has stuck with his commitment to compromise in the first three years of his presidency, despite the criticism it has provoked.
Reading Obamatraces the origins of his ideas and establishes him as the most penetrating political thinker elected to the presidency in the past century. Kloppenberg demonstrates the influences that have shaped Obama's distinctive worldview, including Nietzsche and Niebuhr, Ellison and Rawls, and recent theorists engaged in debates about feminism, critical race theory, and cultural norms. Examining Obama's views on the Constitution, slavery and the Civil War, the New Deal, and the civil rights movement, Kloppenberg shows Obama's sophisticated understanding of American history. Obama's interest in compromise, reasoned public debate, and the patient nurturing of civility is a sign of strength, not weakness, Kloppenberg argues. He locates its roots in Madison, Lincoln, and especially in the philosophical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, which nourished generations of American progressives, black and white, female and male, through much of the twentieth century, albeit with mixed results.
Reading Obamareveals the sources of Obama's commitment to democratic deliberation: the books he has read, the visionaries who have inspired him, the social movements and personal struggles that have shaped his thinking. Kloppenberg shows that Obama's positions on social justice, religion, race, family, and America's role in the world do not stem from a desire to please everyone but from deeply rooted--although currently unfashionable--convictions about how a democracy must deal with difference and conflict.
eBook