Spirit Level
In Editor on January 13, 2010 at 02:16An important study has been published online by the Equality Trust in England, which shows that the greater the disparity between wealthy and poor, the greater the health and social problems.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have written a book which explains this study in detail (with a mouthful of a title): The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. It can be purchased online at Amazon UK, Amazon US, Canada, as well as independent booksellers, such as one of my favourites, Elliot Bay in Seattle.*
Refugées in Ethiopia. Sebastiao Salgado
Great inequality is the scourge of modern societies. We provide the evidence on each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage births, and child well-being. For all eleven of these health and social problems, outcomes are very substantially worse in more unequal societies.
We have checked the relationships wherever possible in two independent test beds: internationally among the rich countries, and then again among the 50 states of the USA. In almost every case we find the same tendency for outcomes to be much worse in more unequal societies in both settings.
Recently (Dec.27 09) on CBC Radio’s flagship program the Sunday Edition, hosted by Michael Enright, a segment on inequality featured Kate Pickett. I was going to paste their description of this segment, but it was so poorly written I hesitate to expose you to their grammer, and will instead paraphrase: during the current season, Sunday Edition will explore the dilemna of poverty: how it is defined and measured, and what we can do about it. As wealth is concentrated in fewer people, the ones left behind suffer, and the nation must deal with an increase in social ills caused by the gap between rich and poor.
photo by Sebastaio Salgado
The Equality Trust has made available a PowerPoint slide show with 35 of the graphs featured online and in the book (link redirects to download page).
Eyes Wide Open
In Editor, Liberal Studies on January 5, 2010 at 19:26Thomas H. Benton (penname of Prof. William Pannapacker)–associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Michigan–writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, says of pursuing the humanities at the graduate level: don’t do it. I disagree, but first, his argument:
As things stand, I can only identify a few circumstances under which one might reasonably consider going to graduate school in the humanities:
- You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.
- You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.
- You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.
- You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it.
Those are the only people who can safely undertake doctoral education in the humanities. Everyone else who does so is taking an enormous personal risk, the full consequences of which they cannot assess because they do not understand how the academic-labor system works and will not listen to people who try to tell them.
Read his depressing article in full. It is in two parts; in the followup, he admits that telling prospective graduate humanities students “don’t do it” isn’t terribly helpful, especially to those already in the system. However…
Some may say all the hand-wringing about the majority of humanities graduates who do not end up in tenure-track positions is overblown. I mean, lots of doctors don’t get their first choice of residency. But a more relevant question is, How many trained physicians are never allowed to practice medicine at all? Would we consider thousands of unemployed doctors a waste of societal resources, to say nothing of the costs to the individuals involved? Would they feel sadder about a neurosurgeon who wanted to cure Alzheimer’s disease working as a bartender?
My experience in the humanities began in 2007 when, eyes wide open, I returned to university. I had been working in one field (film and television production) for about thirty years; I quit, cold-turkey, in large part due to professional exhaustion, but also to the realisation that I was going nowhere. I didn’t have a new career in mind, but I did want an MA. I had no idea, at the time I applied for admittance, at the extent to which Graduate Liberal Studies would fuel my intellectual curiosity.
2007 GLS cohort
