The Brooklyn Rail

Degrees of Privilege

Marx once wrote that “it is essential to educate the educator.” Of late, educators have done quite well all on their own.

The Overproduction of Intelligence
The Reshaping of Social Classes in the United States

Every economic crisis brings in its wake a wholesale reordering of society. The Great Recession of 2008, no matter how mild in comparison to past upheavals, has altered the world in ways unanticipated just a decade ago.

Weimar: Then or Now?

For reasons somewhat unclear, liberal democracy, when pushed to its logical extension in terms of actual, and not just hypothetical, equal rights for all, also generates social forces that call for its own curtailment.

The Future of Automation

Gary Roth reviews two timely and important books—Jason E. Smith’s Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation and Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work.

In Conversation

A TALE OF TWO AGES
STEVE FRASER with Gary Roth

Your new book, The Age of Acquiescence (Little, Brown and Company, 2015), describes two major periods of wealth acquisition in the United States—the Gilded Age of the late 1800s and the current “Age of Acquiescence.”

Higher Education and the Remaking of the Working Class

During its heyday following World War II, a college education was a means to lift parts of the working class into a newly-defined middle class, no longer based on the occupations of the past but instead conceived in terms of education, home ownership, well-paid employment, and household consumption.