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Entry tags:
Nonfiction
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor: Americans have a problem with poverty which we have converted into a problem with poor people. Thus, policymakers tout technology as a way to make various social programs more efficient, but they end up encoding the social problems they were designed to solve, thus entrenching poverty and overpolicing of the poor. Eubanks runs through three examples—welfare reform software in Indiana, homelessness service unification through comprehensive data collection and sharing in Los Angeles, and child abuse prediction in Pennsylvania—and shows that while they vary in how screwed up they are (Indiana terribly, Los Angeles a bit, and Pennsylvania very hard to tell), they all rely on assumptions that leave poor people more exposed to coercive state control that is both a result of and a contributor to the assumption that their problems are their own fault. It’s a distressing work, mainly because I have little faith that the problems Eubanks so persuasively identifies can be corrected.
Here’s the overview: “Across the country, poor and working-class people are targeted by new tools of digital poverty management and face life-threatening consequences as a result. Automated eligibility systems discourage them from claiming public resources that they need to survive and thrive. Complex integrated databases collect their most personal information, with few safeguards for privacy or data security, while offering almost nothing in return. Predictive models and algorithms tag them as risky investments and problematic parents. Vast complexes of social service, law enforcement, and neighborhood surveillance make their every move visible and offer up their behavior for government, commercial, and public scrutiny.” Her recommendation, even as more punitive measures like work requirements that will require increased surveillance are being enacted, is for more resources and fewer requirements: homelessness isn’t a data problem, it’s a carpentry problem, and a universal basic income/health insurance would do a lot better than a gauntlet of forms in allocating care.
Glynn Lunney, Copyright’s Excess: Money and Music in the US Recording Industry: Lunney marshals a lot of evidence to show that the quality of music, based on its sales and long-lastingness in critical and popular terms, increases when the music industry makes less money. He argues that this is most likely the result of a backwards-bending supply curve, since top-earning artists feel less need to go out and work when their earnings are higher. “Now you have $20 million in the bank, a sizeable and continuing stream of royalty income coming in for the foreseeable future, and a seemingly unlimited supply of prospective sexual partners from fans who love and adore you. If you can imagine yourself in this situation, here is the question: Are you going to work tomorrow?” If we want to incentivize marginal artists to enter the field by using copyright (which is uniform in coverage and doesn’t target new/marginal artists), we’d have to give tens of thousands of dollars to each top artist for every dollar that a marginal artist earned, given that by definition their audiences are smaller. “[B]ecause most new artists prove to be one-hit wonders, the loss in output from our top artists, during periods of high sales revenue, outweighs the increased output from the additional new artists.”
Rosalind Wiseman, The Guide: Managing Douchebags, Recruiting Wingmen, and Attracting Who You Want: A version of Wiseman’s book about boys, written as advice to boys. I think I would have felt talked down to and just wanted to read the other book, which has much of the same content, but YMMV. I did like the explanation of what’s toxic about the portrayal of masculinity as, ideally, Batman: it’s not just that he hides all emotion and pain and clenches his jaw and inflicts violence instead, but also—and crucially—that Alfred is nonetheless there: “If he really needs advice or he’s being stubborn and making an ass of himself, Alfred is always there without Batman having to ask and always knows what to say.” This brand of masculinity, that is, inherently relies in positive portrayals on the assumption of a feminized other who exists to serve it; the portrayals don’t work without that.
David Goldfield, The Gifted Generation: When Government Was Good: Did not finish, not because it was that bad (it wasn’t) but because I didn’t feel that I was learning anything from this history of the mid-20th century from the perspective of the (often non-WASP) US whites who benefited from an expansive, helpful government … and then oversaw its erosion into what it is now. I guess that’s appropriate, because it seems like most of us didn’t learn anything from that history, either.
Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life: A provocative book about the labels we use without attention to their effects on those with serious mental disabilities. We speak of attending class as a basic indicator of commitment to learning, but what if students (or even teachers) have disabilities that prevent attendance at certain times? Other aspects generally considered important to the professorial role, such as collegiality, are “regularly defined against mental disability”—the good professor versus the “neurotic” one. Price discusses the way that school shooters are pathologized and separated from the rest of us (it’s always assumed that the reader of these works isn’t mentally ill). I was particularly struck by the point at which she discussed how “society (in the form of access barriers) costs people with mental illnesses billions in annual income,” while the research from which she took that conclusion itself used the phrase “costs society,” implying instead that the societal burden is the fault of the people with mental illnesses.
Here’s the overview: “Across the country, poor and working-class people are targeted by new tools of digital poverty management and face life-threatening consequences as a result. Automated eligibility systems discourage them from claiming public resources that they need to survive and thrive. Complex integrated databases collect their most personal information, with few safeguards for privacy or data security, while offering almost nothing in return. Predictive models and algorithms tag them as risky investments and problematic parents. Vast complexes of social service, law enforcement, and neighborhood surveillance make their every move visible and offer up their behavior for government, commercial, and public scrutiny.” Her recommendation, even as more punitive measures like work requirements that will require increased surveillance are being enacted, is for more resources and fewer requirements: homelessness isn’t a data problem, it’s a carpentry problem, and a universal basic income/health insurance would do a lot better than a gauntlet of forms in allocating care.
Glynn Lunney, Copyright’s Excess: Money and Music in the US Recording Industry: Lunney marshals a lot of evidence to show that the quality of music, based on its sales and long-lastingness in critical and popular terms, increases when the music industry makes less money. He argues that this is most likely the result of a backwards-bending supply curve, since top-earning artists feel less need to go out and work when their earnings are higher. “Now you have $20 million in the bank, a sizeable and continuing stream of royalty income coming in for the foreseeable future, and a seemingly unlimited supply of prospective sexual partners from fans who love and adore you. If you can imagine yourself in this situation, here is the question: Are you going to work tomorrow?” If we want to incentivize marginal artists to enter the field by using copyright (which is uniform in coverage and doesn’t target new/marginal artists), we’d have to give tens of thousands of dollars to each top artist for every dollar that a marginal artist earned, given that by definition their audiences are smaller. “[B]ecause most new artists prove to be one-hit wonders, the loss in output from our top artists, during periods of high sales revenue, outweighs the increased output from the additional new artists.”
Rosalind Wiseman, The Guide: Managing Douchebags, Recruiting Wingmen, and Attracting Who You Want: A version of Wiseman’s book about boys, written as advice to boys. I think I would have felt talked down to and just wanted to read the other book, which has much of the same content, but YMMV. I did like the explanation of what’s toxic about the portrayal of masculinity as, ideally, Batman: it’s not just that he hides all emotion and pain and clenches his jaw and inflicts violence instead, but also—and crucially—that Alfred is nonetheless there: “If he really needs advice or he’s being stubborn and making an ass of himself, Alfred is always there without Batman having to ask and always knows what to say.” This brand of masculinity, that is, inherently relies in positive portrayals on the assumption of a feminized other who exists to serve it; the portrayals don’t work without that.
David Goldfield, The Gifted Generation: When Government Was Good: Did not finish, not because it was that bad (it wasn’t) but because I didn’t feel that I was learning anything from this history of the mid-20th century from the perspective of the (often non-WASP) US whites who benefited from an expansive, helpful government … and then oversaw its erosion into what it is now. I guess that’s appropriate, because it seems like most of us didn’t learn anything from that history, either.
Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life: A provocative book about the labels we use without attention to their effects on those with serious mental disabilities. We speak of attending class as a basic indicator of commitment to learning, but what if students (or even teachers) have disabilities that prevent attendance at certain times? Other aspects generally considered important to the professorial role, such as collegiality, are “regularly defined against mental disability”—the good professor versus the “neurotic” one. Price discusses the way that school shooters are pathologized and separated from the rest of us (it’s always assumed that the reader of these works isn’t mentally ill). I was particularly struck by the point at which she discussed how “society (in the form of access barriers) costs people with mental illnesses billions in annual income,” while the research from which she took that conclusion itself used the phrase “costs society,” implying instead that the societal burden is the fault of the people with mental illnesses.