The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
This video runs long, but is worth it if you’ve the time. Watch it and tell me that any of the candidates has EVER spoken to these issues.
More here.
Archive for the ‘economics’
Urban women’s wages greater than men’s
I knew this was coming. Because we’ve been seeing this same pattern among black men. And what happens to us eventually trickles up, for good or ill. Note the last couple of paragraphs.
Several experts also said that rising income for women might affect marriage rates if women expect their mates to have at least equivalent salaries and education.
“When New York college women say there are few eligible men around, they’re right if they mean they’ll only settle for someone with an education akin to their own,” Professor Hacker said.
Doesn’t this sound familiar? Now among working class women I am not sure what the trends are, nor am I sure what the trends will be. Could be that they too will experience a rise in income while their male counterparts fall behind. But this may not be true. There are more manufacturing jobs for white men than there are for black men if for no other reason than the fact that many of those jobs are still the product of patronage and whites have more power to allocate those types of resources than blacks do. Or Latinos for that matter.
But whatever backlash we see, I’m not sure this genie will ever be put back into the bottle. Not unless some type of catastrophe occurs.
The Crisis of the Negro Entrepreneur
There’s an interesting discussion with two parts
over at P6 about cooperative economics. The belief that black businesses will somehow lift black people from our place on the bottom rungs is driven by a mythical belief in the power of capitalism. If trickle-down economics does not work for whites, why exactly would it work for us? Yes black people are under-serviced, and there is a market that someone like Magic Johnson is perfectly situated to take advantage of. But while I’d rather have someone like Magic making loot than some faceless white-owned development corporation, Magic doesn’t line my pockets.
I watch most of my movies at home at any rate.
But there are two classes of black folk that could use one another, and perhaps leverage their power to generate new urban visions–black intellectuals, and new black money. For two interesting models check out Fast Company, the Global Ideas Bank.
It’s accepted as a cliche that crisis and opportunity are generated in the same moment. In cities like Detroit, what the hell will black book stores, and starbucks really accomplish?