There is no article of faith more fancifully supernatural than belief in a natural free market.
Because when people are living on the bleeding edge, at the absolute lowest cost of existence in this society, then occasionally things are going to go wrong and the person is going to run out of money.
The elite is composed of generally smart people with servants who are either useful idiots or who have narrowly circumscribed interests/intelligence. But they are not geniuses. Elite machinations seem complex and hard to think about because the vast majority of the public is not involved in them, is not aware of the details and calculations made. Elites simply know their own business and interests and we generally do not.
The division between the commercial sector and the public sector might be a convenient rhetorical choice, but it is incoherent as an analytical framework through which to understand the politics of a surveillance society.
Nobody gets to decide who’s being poor correctly.
Education, skills and experience cannot compete with the network.
In their article, Taylor and Appel wonder if it is “time to ask whether education alone can really move people up the class ladder.” With all due respect, that is the wrong question. It is time to ask whether or not there should be a ladder. And the answer is no.
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