stillness is a lie, my dear
Silicon Valley is a land of haves and have nots, but it’s also a land of the salaried and the independent contractors — the 1099 economy (gig economy, piecework economy, hustling economy, share economy, etc.) is booming and freelancers are the rock on which tech titans are built. They are modern-day disposable workers akin to […]
A class crisis is exploding in San Francisco, where housing pressures are creating a cascade of problems for residents. The city’s limited geographic footprint and rising housing costs are creating a perfect storm that drives out many lower and working class residents who can no longer afford to live there, with average rents on a […]
So, ‘wealth therapy.’ Let’s talk about it, because it’s become the subject of a number of trend pieces, and at the same time that it makes me want to crack up and spit out my tea, it also makes me want to cry, because it’s emblematic of so much that is wrong with this country. […]
16 million children in the United States are currently living in poverty. That’s 22 percent of US children. 18 million women in the United States are currently living in poverty. That’s one in seven. Neither of these figures has been adjusted for race (people of colour are more likely to live in poverty), disability status […]
Social inequality in the United States is rooted in a number of factors, but class is a key one. Without access to funds, people find it difficult to go to college, achieve life goals, confront poverty, and prevent the buildup of debt. People without financial freedom get backed into corners and the results are bad […]
Thanks to the internet, it’s become extremely easy for food service workers to share their tales of abuse and frustration with each other and with the world. Working in food service can be incredibly degrading and awful because customers often appear to be under the impression that their servers are robots, placed there to cater […]
Friend and colleague Somer Sherwood recently shared an interesting article that I’ve been mulling over ever since — it is, on its face, a straightforward tale of economic and financial planning. But it’s also more than that. It’s about family, and the collective bonds of people (related or otherwise) willing to work together to support […]
Earlier this year, the Bureau of Economic Research published a paper about the obesity epidemic(TM) and the growing threat it poses to the pursuit of happiness, national security, and not looking at gross ugly fat people in public. Just kidding, the story was about changes in the BMI. The multivariable study considered 27 state-level factors […]
Companies in the US are always coming up with new and creative ways to torment their workers and circumvent the law to avoid accountability for it. In recent years, they’ve undergone a forced shift, as critics of abusive corporate policies have called firms to heel for a growing number of violations, with minimum wage in […]
The escalating debate over minimum wage in this country is often framed in very simplistic liberal versus conservative terms, with the assumption that liberals support higher wages and conservatives do not. The truth, though, is a bit more complicated, for while many conservatives do resist a higher minimum wage, they shouldn’t, and not just because higher minimum […]