DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ Opinion | What Happened to the American Dream?
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-27 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

number — third-quarter growth at a 4.9 percent rate — coexists with data showing disposable personal income actually dipping just a bit, suggesting that the post-Covid stagnation in real earnings hasn’t fully broken yet.) Whereas the Trump era was less complicated: For a few short years, the American economy performed in ways Americans once took for granted, closer to the long post-World War II boom than to the decades of recession-punctuated deceleration we’ve experienced since the 1970s. Lately, I’ve been reading a portrait of that long age of disappointment — “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream,” a new book by my Times colleague and former podcast sparring partner David Leonhardt. The book’s argument belongs to a genre, reconsiderations of neoliberalism, that’s somewhat familiar by now but is usually more narrowly polemical, where my colleague offers sweep and detail and depth of historical narrative. And the genre’s entries usually come from predictable “outsider” ideological perspectives, from the far left or lately the populist right, assailing the neoliberal age in the voice of its traditional enemies.

Persons: Donald Trump, Trump, Covid, Trump’s, they’ve, I’ve, —, David Leonhardt, It’s, Leonhardt, Wright Mills, Robert Bork, Barbara Jordan, that’s Organizations: White House, Biden, Times

☆ Opinion | ‘Doing the Work’ and the Obsession With Superficial Self-Improvement
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-03 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

And when you notice something like this on social media, it’s a safe bet that there’s an aspect of performance at play: “Do the work” isn’t just about doing the work; it’s about being perceived as a person who does the work. The colleague wondered, “Why didn’t she just say she was sick?” That’s because until very recently, saying “I need a mental health day” wouldn’t have been understood as an acceptable motive for missing a class. But now, focusing on your mental health is more normative. Tannen agreed with Smith that when you’re talking about “doing the work” and tending to your burnout, there’s “a sense that this makes you a good person,” Tannen said. But when we talk about introspection and reflection as work, it cheapens the whole enterprise.

Persons: Mychal Denzel Smith, ” Smith, “, ”, Deborah Tannen, Smith, Wright Mills, Tannen, ” Tannen, it’s Organizations: Georgetown University, Wright

☆ Why hasn't U.S. poverty improved in 50 years? Pulitzer-prize winning author Matthew Desmond has an answer
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Annie Nova | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

In his new book, "Poverty, by America," sociologist Matthew Desmond proposes a reason for that stagnation: We benefit from it. His last book, "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. I think many of us can go about our daily lives only confronting poverty from the car window or in the news. Zoom In Icon Arrows pointing outwardsAN: So you think there should be fewer tax breaks like the home mortgage interest deduction and more policies to help poor Americans? Matthew Desmond sociologist and authorAN: Thinking that poverty in the U.S. is avoidable makes its existence feel so much worse.

Search resuls for: "Wright Mills"

3 mentions found