So many voices around our university emphasize the teaching of specific skills to make students “career ready” - it’s reassuring to see someone else calling out the value of learning to make sense of what’s happening.
"Thinking about institutions as malleable instantiations of enduring conflicts among groups—capital and labor to begin with, but extending far beyond that—would help resolve these tensions."
I also do wonder if some of the nature of the enduring conflicts have shifted. Biden's relatively low popularity relative to economic fundamentals and actually having delivered on catch up growth for quartiles is contrary to some of my enduring conflict intuitions. And obviously some of this is just competing identities and rural and urban and education differences becoming more salient and all that. But I think some of what leads to my own sense of being unmoored is the global headwinds on social democracy even in those countries that are delivering on the promised agenda. My own intuition is that growing wealth for median laborers dilutes the power of working class identity. That said, those are more vibes than an actual concerted study of the literature on a fairly obvious hypothesis,
This is a very good observation and one that tracks even better with my lede. What IS the current alignment of threat and conflict that we are observing? I think that it is a much more fundamental realignment, as you note, and that leaves us slightly afield. In other words, the conflicts and the meta-conflicts may be changing--in which case having a grammar of conflict and of investigating conflict is the best we can hope for!
So many voices around our university emphasize the teaching of specific skills to make students “career ready” - it’s reassuring to see someone else calling out the value of learning to make sense of what’s happening.
"Thinking about institutions as malleable instantiations of enduring conflicts among groups—capital and labor to begin with, but extending far beyond that—would help resolve these tensions."
I also do wonder if some of the nature of the enduring conflicts have shifted. Biden's relatively low popularity relative to economic fundamentals and actually having delivered on catch up growth for quartiles is contrary to some of my enduring conflict intuitions. And obviously some of this is just competing identities and rural and urban and education differences becoming more salient and all that. But I think some of what leads to my own sense of being unmoored is the global headwinds on social democracy even in those countries that are delivering on the promised agenda. My own intuition is that growing wealth for median laborers dilutes the power of working class identity. That said, those are more vibes than an actual concerted study of the literature on a fairly obvious hypothesis,
This is a very good observation and one that tracks even better with my lede. What IS the current alignment of threat and conflict that we are observing? I think that it is a much more fundamental realignment, as you note, and that leaves us slightly afield. In other words, the conflicts and the meta-conflicts may be changing--in which case having a grammar of conflict and of investigating conflict is the best we can hope for!