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If the technology behind the sharing economy is not the source of its dominance, though, what is? "Financialization" may be the most relevant answer. "Finance, at its most basic level," writes the cultural critic Alison Shonkwiler, "is the domain in which value is less likely to be produced than …

[...] NAFTA and American agribusiness are treated not as political circumstances but as metaphorical storms: since "we cannot control the volatile tides of change," they write," we can learn to build better boats." These examples are all part of a long tradition of naturalizing our contemporary pol…

[...] As Young himself wrote in a 2001 essay deploring his term's enthusiastic adoption by the New Labour government of Tony Blair, that education had become a means of concentrating power. "It is good sense," he wrote, "to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when t…

[...] Another advantage to employers of treating education or health care as human capital development is that risk in labor markets can be outsourced to employees. Why train someone on the job when they might just leave and take their knowledge elsewhere? Why spend time and money teaching skills t…

[...] defying the odds is, by definition, improbable. And while it may work as advice in a business world predicated on competition, to fashion a democratic educational policy around the possibility of defying odds makes little sense. If everyone, or even many people, could defy the odds, then casi…