Recent Reads January 2024

 

The Mysteries – Watterson and Kascht

 

Everyone was excited that Watterson had a new project coming out.

 

But the buzz died down once it was released.

 

You can get this book and read through it in a few minutes.

 

It’s about the unknown and how we capture the unknown and it loses its power once we describe it and how the universe moves on without us.

 

It’s not that’s its bad but that people of my generation have such warm memories of what Watterson created before that anything was going to be something of a letdown. And that’s what this is, a bit of a letdown. At least the art is cool.

 

How the South Won Civil War – Heather Cox Richardson

 

I went through a couple of weeks there just reading books with depressing subject matter, and this was one of the more depressing.

 

Richardson covers just a litany about how racism was built into the country at its founding, and how it continues. What was interesting to me was how she traced the move of southern racism to go with the expanding west – an ideal of a lone cowboy on the frontier that replaced the tidewater cavaliers.

 

The only drawback is there are places where the narrative lags and feels a bit repetitive, which is balanced out by the shortness of the text.

 

A Creature Wanting Form – Luke O’Neil

O’Neil is one of my favorite writers working today, publishing in his “Welcome to Hellworld” newsletter where he shows his readers things to be both sad and mad about. This is a related text to that project, but it is his fictions (fictions that are very close to the real world but that allow him to shape the narrative some). They’re short and punch you in the gut and the best description is that these stories are like what emo would be if emo were a literary form and not a musical genre.  

 

Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict – Crossley & James

I enjoyed reading this materialist approach to the life of Jesus. It was a good exploration of both what his life would have been like and the world he lived in, as well as the construction of the gospels and the epistles. The author did a really good job putting the construction of the books of the bible in context in looking at similarities and differences in the stories between Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and examining how that represented what might have been going on in the larger “Jesus Movement” that sprang forth 2000 years ago. Even as an atheist, this book made me want to go back to the original text to look at it with fresh eyes.

 

A Fear of Too Much Justice – Bright & Kwak

 

Our authors here show the myriad ways that the justice system does not serve justice, from how differently different jurisdictions apply the death penalty and how hard it is to appeal those cases, to the problem of all-white juries to how disproportionate justice is meted out to the poor than it is to the rich (the right to an attorney being more on paper than in practice). It seems that the justice system in America exists more as a form of social control than a way to actually attain justice for any victims, real or perceived. It’s not that I didn’t know this going in, but books like this are good in that they lay out the case in a well-organized manner that gets you all red and mad with the system and those that perpetuate it. The problem, of course, is that it is way easier to look at the problems than to make a single fix. You can spend your whole career trying to reform just one little piece of the larger issues and though you would be doing a lot of good to the world, the system would still be 99.99% as bad as it was when you found it broken and wanted to go about fixing it.

 

 

 

math exposition poster

 

Walmart: Benefits of the Blockchain in the Supply Chain

I must admit to being something of a skeptic on the blockchain. The first I really became aware of the technology was a decade ago, when the first hype cycle for bitcoin was raging. For me, writing in “A skeptical look at Bitcoin” (Mihelic 2013), I argued that bitcoin itself did not fulfill any of the three basic definitions of money. Instead, it acts like a commodity or an equity, but the difference is that there is not cash flow except for the new people coming into the space, and that is problematic if you want people making transactions and treating the technology as a currency. Bitcoin and related protocols have not sold me, despite their incredible appreciation in dollar value. I have learned more in that there are also limits to how fast you can make transactions and the cost of these transactions with the proof of work protocol. Some of these issues have been worked on with different protocols that make the transaction less computation heavy.

The ideal blockchain is one where you have a need for two parties that function as equals in an exchange but there might be limited trust, and this is a transaction where you want the details to be immutable. The very nature of the ledger is that the history is there embedded in the chain. This transparency is good in that there is no need for middle-people and the market can clear and exchanges or contracts are executed, and the people move on. This exchange is recorded, but there is a potential for distance in not knowing who the actors are. There is a balance between transparency and anonymity. Using a cryptocurrency based on the blockchain is thus the primary possible use case, especially for something like remittances. Unfortunately for the boosters, it feels as if cryptocurrencies are actually exchanged for goods or services the anonymity is the prime benefit, using the technology for ransomware or drugs and not for something like remittances. Ultimately the blockchain feels like a cool and interesting technology chasing a use case. In a lot of ways you could use an ordinary currency or an SQL-based Access database for a lot of the things people trumpet as uses for the blockchain.

However, blockchains do have their uses, even if only in niche cases. For example, the video “Blockchains: how can they be used?” covers using blockchain technology to prevent odometer fraud (2018, 1:10). It is the perfect example because you have two or more parties at the same basic level of power, and you want that transparency so that everyone can track the mileage of a car – from the insurance companies and mechanics to a future purchaser of the used car. It’s a niche case and as the second example of a way that blockchain be used, it is not very overwhelming. The problem with this is that it still needs centralization and coordination to work. To really make blockchain work, you need people to want to coordinate their efforts or you need some sort of centralized director. The niche cases of blockchain thus will work best if siloed in one company or industry that has these existing incentives.

One company that has the power and incentives to work on these niche cases is Walmart. Aside from everything else they do, and their giant footprint in the digital retail space, they have over a quarter of the market share in the US grocery market (“CEOS,” 2022). This means that they are basically responsible for coordinating the feeding of 80 million Americans every year.  That Walmart manages has managed to do so as they have grown is a marvel of efficiency, but there are always more places to be more efficient. Using the blockchain in their supply chain management will have multiple advantages, in an initiative called by McKeen and Smith as a “Business Improvement,” where the goal is to “reengineering initiatives to help organizations streamline their processes and save substantial amounts of money by eliminating unnecessary or duplicate activities” (2019 p. 23).

Currently many retailers use the UPC codes, which identify which specific group that an item belongs to, but the UPC just shows that item as part of a set. With blockchain technology, every single individual item will be able to be tagged with a unique identifier. Either it can be scanned at different points, or it can take advantage of technology like RIFD chips which will allow the item to be tracked in real time and not rely on scanners. This technology may be cost prohibitive at scale for less expensive items, but it does have the benefit of not needing the human labor in the loop every time an item needs to be scanned and inventoried. A company with the scale of Walmart will have the ability to find the break-even point and implement the technology, and additionally this connects to the internet of things which as it scales will help drive company costs down.

Once the tagging and blockchain are implemented, Walmart should be able to see several business improvement benefits. Most of these will be clear to the bottom line, while others will be less tangible. First, the entire supply chain will be visible to the blockchain system in real time. The company will be able to see where things are moving well and places where things are sitting around causing bottlenecks. This will help them be able to be smarter in their purchasing and to be able to reduce prices to move out stale inventory and hopefully reduce the cost of storage as having real time tracking means that just in time purchasing is more feasible. If there is one thing worse than having too much inventory, it is not having the inventory your customers want to buy.

A blockchain based system is also more secure. The ledger is permanent, so any potential malfeasance in terms of faking the inventory count is lowered. The real time tracking also means that you know where your items are until the moment that the leave your store. If you are Walmart, you want that item to have left the store through the act of purchasing, and not by leaving surreptitiously through the front or back door. The blockchain supply chain will lower shrinkage from your customers and your employees.

Finally, the blockchain based inventory system will make your customers safer. The news often has frightening information about some sort of vegetable that has some sort of contamination that makes it unsafe for consumption. This is scary because often these recalls are extremely broad, making you throw out your spinach that might be perfectly fine, but that you dispose of it out of caution. A more robust inventory and supply chain solution will allow Walmart to be able to identify that supplier and to remove their products from the stores immediately. There would be a greater benefit if Walmart could use their power to push tagging and identification out to their suppliers so they could track any potential issues to a single box of grapes, but that is an initiative that might be for down the road as it exists on the edge of the company’s silo. The swift and targeted removal of tainted produce will not just save money, but will help generate goodwill from the customer base, as they learn that Walmart can be trusted to have fresh and safe produce.

There may be other benefits from the implementation of a blockchain for supply chain and inventory tracking at Walmart, but of the potential business improvements that we looked at, all should have a positive effect on the bottom line of the business, and help grow the business as customers know that Walmart will continue to have what they need, when they need it, and at competitive prices because of the efficiencies that they gain from their investments in technology.

 

References

Bitter, A. (2022, December 1). CEOS from Kroger and Albertsons say they're worried about competition from Amazon, but the e-commerce giant barely makes up 1% of US grocery sales. Business Insider. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-kroger-still-top-grocer-challengers-amazon-gopuff-2022-2

McKeen, J. D., & Smith, H. (2019). It strategy et innovation. Prospect Press.

Mihelic, J. E. (2013, November 28). A skeptical look at Bitcoin. Econ Autodidactic. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://econautodidactic.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-skeptical-look-at-bitcoin.html

Simply Explained. (2018, May 29). Blockchains: How can they be used? (use cases for blockchains). YouTube. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQWflNQuP_o

Recent Reads in September

 

Schulz – The Street of Crocodiles

 

The thing about Schulz is that he is great at making atmosphere. It reminds me of something from Kafka or Thomas Mann. I’m not sure if it is just a thing from time and place or something else.

 

The problem is that the thing with plot or character goes lacking where the whole thing seems to be the weather hanging over this mid-war black sea community. So, in all the stories it felt like something was wanting.

 

Rodney – Decolonial Marxism

 

I recently made it through the text that made Rodney’s name, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” and the bulk of these essays feel like the seed of that larger work. I sure have learned more about the African side of decolonialism through reading Rodney, but some of these essays are hit or miss – reading the text as a book started slow and didn’t pick up until the middle. This might be a question of the editing choices though.

 

Burmila – Chaotic Neutral

 

Burmila’s book is hard to read. It’s well written but it’s hard to read because as someone who doesn’t really identify with the Democrats, but hopes that they win over the other guys, a lot of the book is just a list of all the dumb things that the party has done over the years to marginalize themselves and not fight back against Republican selfishness.

 

For better or worse, he also eschews simple, pat answers at the end. It made me think of Selfa’s “ The Democrats: A Critical History” but snarkier. And you can feel that Burmila is a bit invested in the success of leftish electoralism and hasn’t fully given up.

 

Moore – Batman: The Killing Joke

 

I enjoyed this book – the art in the text is beautiful and well printed and looks clean and crisp printed in the hardcover. It’s worth holding on to. The story is interesting as well, with the Joker having some back-story and the end of the book closing on a hilarious joke. A worthwhile read for the evening.

 

 

Moore – Swamp Thing: Book Six

 

So, it feels that by the end of the arc, Moore started running out of ideas about what to do with the character. Thus, you end up with these books where Swamp Thing is making his way back home through space. The stories are more science fiction, more experimental, and less grounded than some of the other books in the series. I’m not 100% sure it works, but the entire arc ends up tying together well.

 

Recent Reads, August

 

Second Treatise of Government – John Locke

 

I’ve read a couple of things recently from enlightenment-era political philosophers that start from some supposed state of nature  but their idea of a state of nature is wrong from what we know of anthropology. I’m not sure if this entirely invalidates Locke here or Rousseau elsewhere.

A couple of things here that strike me. What Locke in this work was doing was basically writing in support of the status quo. But I find it weird that a hundred years later the framers in the colonies went and took his defense of a constitutional monarchy and then adjusted it a bit for a somewhat representative democracy.

There’s a lot of assumptions built in here that go unquestioned from what a “just” war is to slavery to patrilineal inheritance that probably should be unpacked a bit but are not.

 

Swamp Thing Book One – Moore

I was looking for a fun book to read to clear my mind and this fit the bill pretty well. Moore is an interesting writer, and the stories are compelling, even if the character constrains some of what can be done. It’s organic and very green in the environmental sense. I’ve already ordered the next couple of collections of the series.

The art, coloring, and page composition also work well with the story. I think of the early 80s as a period of reinvention in the genre with Moore and Miller and having read a few Miller texts recently and been underwhelmed, the Swamp Thing book feels like an amazingly coherent text in a way that The Dark Knight Returns wasn’t for me.

 

The Hurting Kind – Limon

Limon’s poems have these spare lines and the focus on nature that make me feel like I’m standing at the shore of a lake as the sun sets in the west behind me. They’re good poems and I can understand why they were award-nominated but they just weren’t for me in the moment I was reading them.

 

Floaters – Espada

 

I don’t know exactly why I liked these poems, but this collection is my jam. I like the structure, the longer, looping lines that are almost prosaic but not. I like the subject matter, this immigrant, class conscious text as the poems and their subjects navigates a world that is against them. I will definitely seek out more work by Martin Espada

 

Black Aperture – Rasmussen

This collection of poems centers around the subject of the suicide of the brother of the poetic first person – I am assuming it is the poet’s personal voice but well done if in a persona. The poems work on their own level individually but build up as if a composer were layering instrument over instrument to make a coherent whole. The poems feel youthful, but not like juvenilia but fresh like the spring after a frigid winter.

 

Hard to Be a God – Strugatsky Brothers

 

I found this book to be a real page turner. The conceit is that the protagonist is a visitor historian in this medieval like setting who can observe and participate but not really have any drastic life changing effect on the people in the world he is visiting. I like it because it really melds the idea of science fiction and fantasy in a way that is outside of the genre constraints I am used to as a western reader. The situation the authors create is interesting, the plot within that world is compelling, and the characters are fairly well fleshed out. This is a trifecta that is often not met in science fiction writing and I appreciate it.

 

Middlemarch – Eliot

Reading this felt like homework. I bought it a while back because someone said that it was one of the funniest books in the language and as someone with multiple degrees in English it felt wrong to not have read the text.

So, I started reading it in early March to be able to make a joke about the middle of march when I finish it, but it took me months and months to read. It did pick up, but the first several hundred pages or so are these character sketches where I was saying to myself “Oh, the title is after the town because the town is the main character.” We do start to focus on some people.

The thing is I do not care about these people or their problems (except maybe the ambitious doctor who is working to revolutionize science but is not readily accepted by the town with his new-fangled ways). Its all about who is married or going to marry whom and where is this inheritance going. It is incredibly well written and structured, but I just don’t care about these people.

A couple of other things. Sure, it is about the town but there’s no servants or tradespeople except for in passing, an invisibility that is noticeable by the absence. There’s one place where a couple is bankrupt, and they are lamenting that they will be only able to keep one servant. The horror! The other thing is that when it was written, it was a period piece written about the time of the passing of the first reform bill which was by then decades in the past. I’m guessing a lot of the humor is based on that but from this vantage point you need the footnotes and footnotes aren’t funny.

 

Discourse on Inequality – Rousseau

 

I have the Penguin edition of this text, which wraps the short two books of the discourse in a lengthy introduction and then copious notes. Rousseau’s text isn’t actually exceptionally long, but in spite of its brevity there are some interesting quotable parts, none more so than the first part of book two where he claims that the first person to make a fence was the creator of civilization. I’ve long liked that quote and it was the whole reason I read the text, wanting to see that in context.

It was mostly worth it, mainly since the book is so short. What really got me though was that the first book was mainly about the development of language. It kind of makes sense to examine that since in a way you could argue that the fact of language is one of the defining characteristics of humans. However, it was hard to read since (like other enlightenment era philosophers such as Locke’s “Second Treatise”) Rousseau posits a state of nature where people are not social but are isolated individuals. So, his basis of civilization and language development are wrong based on what we know now. I guess that’s ok in a way since each generation builds off the last, but it is jarring from my current position.

In concert with that issue of the state of nature is that the introduction here talks about Rousseau’s writing process in that he went to a cabin and walked in the woods to develop his ideas. It’s like Descartes sitting on a pot and recreating the world through his own reason – a wanting of empiricism in a world that was learning more about itself. What is really striking though is that I wanted more sources and there are truly little in the text but there’s a proof of some research that’s in the notes. It’s like this text is just the seed of a larger project that was taken off into a different direction.

 

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – Hume

I didn’t really connect to Hume here. Things just felt muddled, and I don’t know if it is Hume’s thought, how it was presented here, or something else.  Dude was huge into looking at causation but more than anything this book made me think of the bigger picture. Going back to Hume made me wonder what philosophy would have looked like in enlightenment Europe had the church not have had such a huge influence. You had to work from a Christian cosmology as a starting point and that was even the lens that the ancients were seen though. I can’t help but think that it was a hinderance. Or not – Kantian deontology needs some sort of basis for its ethics that are outside of the human realm so a posited perfect god might not be horrible. Perhaps it just slowed the development of utilitarianism.

 

Road to Nowhere – Paris Marx

Here Marx outlines the history and present of transportation and deconstructs how the current capitalistic visionaries are just basically throwing software at a broken system. While I was reading it, I kept mentally going back to that Henry Ford quote where if he asked the people what they wanted, he would have just given them a faster horse. What Elon Musk is doing is basically just doing that – giving the world a faster horse and not really creating the future of transportation that we need, a future that looks to the past but deals with current problems of mobility, climate, and livability.

 

Internet for the People – Tarnoff

I read this book in the weekend after the decision striking down Roe passed and let me tell you that this not the mindset that an author hopes that their readers have. Tarnoff shows how the development of the internet was in public hands and how it was given away to private interests and how we might take it back and why we should want that. I agree with all of that but reading it I felt like it was part of a larger and necessary project that involves the democratization of more of the economic sphere. It is important but when I was reading it, I felt that this part wasn’t urgent. I think the book was good, but I would advise you not to read it while you have utter despair for the state of the nation hanging over you.

 

People’s Republic of Walmart – Phillips and Rozworski

 

I really like the Verso and Jacobin crossover texts. They’re well designed and easy to read. Here the authors make the argument that basically central planning is already happening, it is just happening at the firm level. I like the argument and it is interesting, I just worry about the efficiency of the planning, as we know that the firms here like Wal-Mart and Amazon have a lot of waste embedded in them. If we wanted to scale that up to a higher level, we would want to minimize that waste. I’m still somewhat skeptical of any central planning based on Hayek’s knowledge argument from the uses of knowledge in society that was his ultimate answer to the socialist calculation debate, but this is an issue that has been explored since then and I think we’ve gotten closer to potential full efficiency. This book is a good introduction to these issues, and it is a worthwhile read. My only real complaint is that there no bibliography at the end – I really wanted to go to their sources and that’s not collected at the end.

 

The Foundation Trilogy – Asimov

 

I wrote my master’s thesis on this trilogy. I’ve read it cover to cover over a dozen times, and parts of it more than that. I have come to a conclusion about Asimov generally and this text specifically, and that is that Asimov was not that great of a writer when it came to plot or characters but awesome when it came to ideas. What do we know about his texts? Psychohistory and the three laws of robotics! But the characters and the things they do? Not much.

I didn’t go down this path to find out just what has been researched about the writing of the books, but I feel like Asimov came across the idea of Psychohistory (Basically history plus math and economics to tell (and control) the future). And he’s writing the first stories and the who arc is that there’s a crisis and then the characters go to the Time Vault and see Seldon, and the problem is solved though his Deus ex machina. That gets boring so he needed something outside of his own creation which is why he created the Mule and then had to bring in the Second Foundation. It’s like the old lady who swallowed the fly thing – and worse when you think of how he integrated everything in the late books he wrote in the 80s. Everything works if you don’t think too hard about it, but I literally spent years thinking about the thing and it falls apart on examination. Is it worth reading? Yes, a thousand times yes. But is it good? Not really.

Blackshirts and Reds – Parenti

I bought this because I had not read anything by Michael Parenti before and this was one of his shorter texts. The thing that struck me most about it was that I had thought that it was more recent, not 30 years old . The problem with that is that it still feels of the time and important – fascism is always present and needs awareness and pushback. We just have to keep fighting, in all eras.

 

Archaeologies of the Future – Jameson

 

This book is interesting in that it is structure as theory for the first half (postmodern utopias, dystopias, and anti-utopias) and then a set of essays in the second half where Jameson is applying the ideas he’s talking about as he examines various science fiction texts. I read this because I was working on the idea of utopia in science fiction but eventually didn’t use it since my project went a different direction. It was worthwhile and I read through it a couple of times since it was good background in helping me develop a vocabulary for critically thinking about and writing about science fiction  -- even if I didn’t understand half of what he was writing about.

 

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

 

I read this right as I was starting out on a project writing about science fiction for a school project. It was a lot of surface level on both the canon and the criticism, but it was a great jumping off point for my research as I took this and extended my research on specific texts and critics. If you’re looking for an introduction on science fiction criticism, this is a good starting point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Politics of Love

 I know that not everyone shares my personal politics, which are to the left of the general public. There may be places that they stand in contradiction to each other, and some things are hard to reconcile but I imagine most people’s personal politics aren’t 100% ideologically coherent – we all live contingent and reactive lives and often only deal with what’s in front of us at the moment.

 

That said, my own personal politics come from a deeply empathetic place, one that knows some suffering and knows how big the world is and how each and every one of us has our own interesting story and hopes and dreams and fears and love.

 

Love – that’s where I come from. I love humans in all their varied and messy ways since we are all imperfect creatures continually trying to make sense of this big and confusing world. There are a few things that I don’t love though, and that includes cruelty and selfishness. These go against my fundamental empathy because it creates out-groups who it is ok to treat differently. I understand the impulse as we live on the edge of scarcity or deep within it. Though I understand the impulse, I cannot accept it. As the poet said, we must love one another, or die.

The Unhidden Curriculum: Bellemare's "Doing Economics"

Back when I was a baby in undergrad, I saw my professors and wanted to have their job. How nice, I thought, it must be to only teach a few classes a semester and have all that free time.
 
I sought out graduate school and even then, my main waring was that I should not got into debt for graduate school. It was not until I was in graduate school when I had a class that an introduction to graduate studies (this being an earlier version of myself who wanted to be a poet or something like that). Only then was there a glimpse of what it meant to work in and around academia as a profession and not just as a scholarly pursuit.
 
There’s a hidden curriculum that doesn’t stay hidden on purpose, I don’t think, but is more passed on down though folk wisdom. I imagine this is why PhDs are way more likely to have parents with terminal degrees than any random person on the street. There’s a lot below the surface that even if you are studying a subject that you just don’t know. There’s rules to these games and a lot of people walk though the door without even knowing that they’re playing a game.
 
In “Doing Economics,” Marc Bellemare tries to lay these rules out for people. He breaks down what you should have in your applied econ papers, and he breaks down what your approach should be to different kinds of presentations and even about how you should approach social media. One noticeable absence is how to navigate the job market, but I guess even with then more standardized search method econ has the market is heterogeneous enough and changes enough it would be a dated topic the day the book was published. The author does make acknowledgements of this absence.
 
My only real quibble is that I think the subtitle has the audience wrong. It might be worthwhile for junior scholars, but I think the real utility would be more for your motivated juniors who are thinking about going to graduate school. That introduction to grad studies was great in that it really showed me what the profession would be like. I might have better served professionally had I not moved across the country as a young man trying to pursue my dreams when I didn’t really even know what my dreams were. It all worked out in the end though, so I have no complaints.

We Pluribus Unum : No Thin Blue Lines

 

I want to talk about this flag but first I want to talk about infrastructure.

I live in a suburb that was founded in the late nineteenth century. Some of the houses date from then but there are a lot more that were built in the postwar boom in suburbanization. That means that the pipes we have under the street are getting old. The city was connected with water and sewer pipes and then streets and sidewalks were laid on top of that without much thought of how to access the pipes. The layout was not a problem when the village was shiny and new. But over time things break and you must access the pipes and sometimes that means digging a hole through asphalt and cement. Over time things degrade and you also might realize that the material you made the pipes with has a chance to leech heavy metal into the drinking water. Upgrades are necessary.

We’re looking at this with our sewers as the fall apart. There are connections that have lead that need to be replaced for safety reasons and legal reasons. The question is how to pay for it. Does it make sense to just have the homeowner connected closest to the problem pay out of pocket? Not really – it’s a big one-time expense that needs done and the whole community benefits. The most equitable way to fix it is through taxation or fees. Our village board is increasing the water rates. People aren’t happy since the cost of living continues to increase but this is the way that all users can invest in the system. It’s a village problem with a collective solution.

In the candy-colored world of elementary schools civics, this is what government is for at its most base level. It coordinates collective action to solve collective problems. Here our democratically elected board came to the decision that made the most sense for the community. But this isn’t always the case. People are often not involved in their civic life – our board elections only receive something like 20% turnout and even the presidential elections see a third of people not participating in the election for whatever reasons they have.

This abstention is in part because people are alienated from the process. The government doesn’t feel like an extension of our collective will. Though you will hear about our representative democracy – “A republic if you can keep it” – the people who represent us, especially at the higher levels, feel like a breed apart. At the federal level, even our representatives in the house represent about 700,000 people in spite of Madison’s warnings in the Federalists papers. Writ large, the various representatives are not responsive to their constituents but more so to their donors. Reading about the mechanics of the job it sounds like half of a rep’s time is spent in dialing for dollars, fundraising for themselves and the party so they can get reelected. It sounds like a horrible job despite its prestige. I’m very conscious that in multiple roles I have that I serve the public. I’m a local elected official and I work for a nonprofit that has state contracts, so in diverse ways I am a steward of the public trust. I am not apart from the community but a part of the community.

Others have different approaches – typified by the thin blue line flag. This symbol leans into the othering of the government and its servants as something apart from the people. This flag says that you and I are different and through my role I am special. That’s not just so. The original flag is a symbol of unity. The thirteen colonies coming together to make one United States, a nation with problems in practice but with grand ideals at its foundation. The recent shootings and the failure of the police in  Uvalde have had me reflecting on this symbolism. The children who were shot down were our children. Someone else gave birth to them but they were all ours and we failed to protect them as we failed the young man pulled the trigger as well. It’s a collective problem with collective solutions. No one stands apart.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? For Student Loan Forgiveness

 
The most recent floated proposals on student loan cancellations is that the Biden administration wants to cancel ten thousand in loans per borrower, with an income limit of about 300K per family.

I support this, in part because it will materially help me out, but it doesn’t go far enough.

Here’s what I’m think happens if this goes through.

1)      A lot of people are actually helped. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money. It’s almost 1400 hours at the federal minimum wage which is like 34 weeks of full-time work.

2)      But it’s means tested. The whole problem with means testing versus universal programs is that means testing means that people fall through the cracks where they would otherwise be eligible. This is in itself a travesty when I’m sure a quick google would find all kinds of estimates of people who are eligible for current federal programs but don’t because there is onerous compliance. It might be less here since it would be a one-time thing but introducing hoops to the process means there will be people who won’t see relief.

3)      People are going to be mad. No matter what the dollar amount it will be spun out by the political opponents as a kind of handout to an undeserving population. They’re going to do this no matter what so why be snakebit and prematurely capitulate to the bad faith arguments?

4)      You proved, by doing any relief, that you have the legal authority to do all the relief.

5)      You don’t solve the debt burden problem. Ten thousand is a lot, but a small fraction for people who bought into the idea that you needed education to advance or are in low paying jobs that require a lot of education that will still have a lot of debt. I have teachers, social workers, and librarians in my orbit that will still have onerous debt burdens. The public service loan forgiveness program adjustments might help but are in their own morass of red tape and bureaucratic uncertainty.

6)      The important thing for me is that by doing a one-time, smaller fix you don’t create any urgency to fix the system. Higher education has evolved in the last 40 years as it has come under attack in how it is delivered and administered and paid for. Public schooling has moved from state support to individual tuition support and that tuition has been paid through loans and grants. It’s how we got here. There’s a lot of potential fixes for this constellation of  problems but they’ll remain in the ether as long as there’s no political urgency.  

The Opposite of a Hagiography: Winston Churchill by Tariq Ali

 

The subtitle here is “His Times, His Crimes,” and as much as I wanted it to be “His Life and Crimes,” the subtitle works. The book is a little over four hundred pages and there is a lot of the historical context baked in – much more than in a typical biography. Ali also covers his crimes, bringing to light things I didn’t know about the man. For example, his repression of a popular government in Greece in the post war era isn’t talked about much. The man was the spoiled child of the late Victorian elite and through his class position and the historical circumstances, his reputation gets elevated. This new biography shows why that is wrong.

Some books I read, May 2022

 Scorched Earth: Jonathan Crary

The author of this text really does not like modernity. And in this book he explains why. I think the only real problem with it is that he talks about the inevitable post-capitalist future but he doesn't really align with any sort of positive post-capitalist future. With path dependency it's hard to see how we go from here to anything good. Perhaps it will be in his next text.

Undoing the Demos: Wendy Brown

Before I say anything about the content of this book I think I need to say something about the physical nature of it. For some reason the Press decided to make it about an inch wider than a normal paperback should be so that it's really awkward to read.

As for the content, it's pretty good. Basically she tracks a social shift from a political creature to an economic creature on the broader umbrella of what neoliberalism is. My only real complaint is that it might lean a little too heavily on Foucault. I kept joking to myself when I was reading the difference between economics as a discipline as it exists and everything else is that economics doesn't mention Foucault, but once you mention Foucault they become sociology. I feel as if the work in her argument gets stronger towards the end as she leans less heavily on Foucault directly and develops her own evidence. Definitely worth reading but it took a minute to get through.

Squire: Sara Alfageeh & Nadia Shammas

Squire is a cute little story about a young girl who comes from a subordinate class in an Empire. To gain citizenship and to have Adventure she joins the army but over the course of the text she realizes that these Adventures and the violence that's part of it are too much. So what you end up here is an anti-war book starring a young girl and her friend group. It's not too didactic and I would say overall it works..

Dead Dog’s Bite: Tyler Boss

This book is kind of like a small town murder mystery where people are going missing and the main character is trying to uncover what's going on. It's not bad, just not really memorable. I'd say it's got some Shirley Jackson The Lottery vibes.

Fine: Rhea Ewing

I have a sense that gender is like sexuality and that it is a spectrum but also that it is fluid and that it could change over time. But also that how we talk about gender is also shaped by what's available in the culture. Trying to figure out who you are is a huge part of growing up and I think it's good that right now at least in the culture we're allowed to talk about where we fit in instead of trying to shove everything down. It's probably healthier psychologically for everybody involved. In this graphic examination Ewing Interviews a number of people about their own experience with gender over time. It's not systemic or scientific but it's a good journalistic examination. And I think that it's good that they did it in a graphic form so that it's more accessible than someone having to go pull Judith Butler off the shelf. The reader can see there are all sorts of types of gender expressions available to them and they are not stuck into a hard-and-fast binary. And this goes for everybody, not just anyone who might be questioning their own gender expressions. I think we'd all be best served if we understood that there isn't a hard-and-fast binary.

Hyperion: Dan Simmons

I came across this book when I was researching my Master's thesis on science fiction. It was mentioned that there was a book structured like the Canterbury Tales and I thought that was interesting. I have some mixed emotions about this text. because it is kind of like the Canterbury Tales in that there are pilgrims going to a place and they're telling a tale. The difference is that all the tales the pilgrims are telling here are related to the larger frame story. so there is more thematic coherence. 

I think the problem is that the larger frame story is kind of interesting in itself but I don't know if the structure that the author chose is the best way to develop the idea he had. Additionally, only a couple of the Pilgrim's Tales are actually interesting. It's a real slog to read as you transition from one story to another. He does some stuff with making each of the individual stories such that they could be stand-alone novellas. Two of them really work like that, and one doesn't fully rely on the frame story at all. So it's like this really ambitious book that doesn't fully come together. Finally. I think the worst sin of all for me is that it doesn't resolve within one text. So instead of a coherent novel it really more feels like a setup to a series and I'm not interested in reading more of the series. 

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction: Istvan Csicsey-Ronay Jr.

I really enjoyed the Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. It is a book of theory but it also has little bits of how the author would apply the theory to different texts and it shows how his theoretical concepts apply in practice. It's a very beautiful way of going about it. I think what was best for me is that he really gave me a vocabulary to describe and criticize science fiction in a academic manner. There are a lot of themes and tropes and characters and settings n that are present in science fiction that don't really have a place of your come from a place of criticism of realistic fiction,  and so it gives you a way to talk about it. This is the book I would give anybody who was trying to write a paper or to think more critically about science fiction. It's a very good starting place and you'll be glad you read it.

Mistaken Identity: Asad Haider

This book, when it comes down to it, is more than anything a call to solidarity across whatever traditional identity category you might draw. I think it is important because a lot of times as he points out that whatever these categories are drawn by the oppressor so that we really need to make sure we have solidarity because the world is hard and it's relentless.

SQLBI

 

On The End of Policing by Alex Vitale

 

I have this book here, and it’s good.

What’s weird is that it was written in 2017. So, this book is just a rundown of why we’ve moved past the need for policing and how it is bad for society in its current form and even in its history it was never good.

It feels like a response to the protests of 2020, but it wasn’t.

Sometimes you read a book and it is really grounded in its time and place, but this was timely a few years ago and is even more timely now. It is amazing how you have internalized and normalized the way that policing happens in this country, the good old United States. You don’t really think about all the contradictions unless you are at the sharp end of the stick, or you are paid to study it.

But it’s not good and it doesn’t really keep us safer and is just more or less designed to protect property over people. It’s sad and even sadder knowing how entrenched it is so that even the mildest reforms are met with howls of indignation not just by those who wield the stick, but the oppressed as well.

Recent Reads Late September

 The Spoils of War – Andrew Cockburn

 

Reading these essays did remind me of having read them before, since a couple of them I know I already read in Harpers. But it’s worth it because what Cockburn does show just so many ways that the foreign policy priorities of the last 20 years goes against what should be our national priorities. Mainly it’s an appalling list of how many ways we direct our resources to stupid priorities and how these resources are poorly spent even with those priorities. Not only do we spend on the wrong things, but we also don’t even do it well. Well written and will make you justly angry.

 

 

The Souls of Black Folk – Du Bois

 

Du Boise was writing after the general failure of Reconstruction and reading this made me want to go deeper on the reconstruction history, especially the failure of the Freedman’s Bank. It’s just a throwaway paragraph, but it seems like a real important turning point to me. A lot of the essays are interesting as history, and there’s the sad thing where a lot of them still feel relevant and pertinent. However, others feel alien, talking about specific concerns that may have been forgotten. The style is interesting. It’s almost uncanny – like the cadences are off for a modern reader, maybe it is based on a then-current speaking style or something. This book is an important bridge from the postwar era to the rebirth of the civil rights era.

 

A World Without Police – Maher

 

This is one of those books that kind of go into greater detail on things you already know and just say it more fluently and with greater detail. The policing and justice system are interrelated with so much of the current social structure and it’s broken (as is the current political and economic system). Maher will teach you just how this is broken and calls strongly for abolition. What’s really important here is that it just isn’t a utopian idea. What Maher calls for is greater community involvement shows examples how different places have worked though abolition of this incredibly broken system, from police on the streets to the broader incarceration system.

 

Feminist Antifascism – Majewska

 

I’ve been reading more theory lately, and a lot of it does do that thing where it is written in a way that feels deliberately obtuse stylistically. Thankfully, Majewska does not do that here. Her book calls for important third places against fascism and for feminism (thus the title and subtitle). However, what this book does do is assume familiarity of the reader for a lot of different other theorists. There’s a section on 131-2 that just drops the names of 10 different theorists and though I have heard of most of them she didn’t really even give a shorthand of the ideas of all of them. Partly on me, but it makes following along a bit harder. What’s weird is that there’s a chapter on the Polish Solidarity movement where she goes over the movement’s history and I think that because she isn’t assuming that people know that history she goes into detail and though it is more alien to me, it is the most successful essay of the book. Overall, another interesting offering from Verso but had some hurdles for me.

 

 

 

I Read Some Descartes

 I dropped my only philosophy class in college because it was one of those huge lecture halls and the professor was not a good lecturer. He spent the lectures talking to the board and the first book in the syllabus was a book on string theory. I get what he was doing now but I wanted Plato.

 

So, I’ve been circling back around and trying to get a grounding in some of the foundations of western thought. For that I really like these thin Hackett books – accessible and not over-whelming.

 

Some interesting things that I came across here is that the two things that Descartes is most famous for, the Cogito Ergo Sum and the mind / body duality are literally in back-to-back paragraphs in the Discourse. He seems to be arguing to take everything from first principles, and it is an interesting path on one hand but on the other seems to deny all prior learning and feels a bit solipsistic. Only I can determine what is real and true. It’s whatever the opposite of standing on the shoulders of giants is.

 

The thing that strikes me is if he does that, it seems he doesn’t go far enough. There are multiple assumptions built into Cogito Ergo Sum, basically what the singular is, what thinking is, what being is, and what causation is. You really need to define all these before you stop at thinking. I could be missing something, or it could just be that the bar was way lower back then.

 

The other thing is that a huge part of the second book is trying to prove the existence of God, but it really feels to me like he basically makes an assumption about what God’s nature is like and then says it must be so. I wasn’t convinced.

Recent reads 8.6.2021

 The Relentless Moon

 

The Relentless Moon is the third in a series of alternate history books that basically look at what would happen if sometime in the 1950s a giant asteroid hit the earth and wiped out most of the eastern seaboard of America.  What the combined governments of the nation decide to do is create a space race to get to space and get on the moon and get on Mars. They do this because they have a theory that the aftereffects of the asteroid impact which first created essentially nuclear winter will turn around and become a runaway greenhouse effect. I don't know if the science behind this is true. But will take that precipitating event at face value.

 

For me of all the series it's those first 50 pages that are most interesting. For some reason I still don't really buy the idea that they would turn around a create a space race when there was no real existing technology for it. Even now with the technology we have over half a century later colonizing the moon or Mars seems like a huge effort. So, in the book they're spending huge amounts of resources on an effort that sounds like a really wouldn't save a lot of people. What's interesting is that there is within the text of the book a group of people who are fighting against this project because it is a waste of resources and they'd rather spent the effort of the governments on earth. The other part that really doesn't seem to work is that after the after impact everyone starts working together. On a country-to-country basis for me it would seem to be agree catastrophe would be something that pushes us towards conflict and not word unity, which she was especially prevalent in the face of the pandemic. I think the author may have wanted to use this as a metaphor for global warming writ large, but we've had a more concentrated global emergency that kind of throws away the foundation of her thought in the book.

 

The thing is this is the third book that I have read the series. So, what I'm thinking about the book and the series itself I think “Hey why am I attracted to this series?” because normally if I had these kinds of qualms about the basis of a story I probably wouldn't keep reading. And the more I think of it I think what really drives my interest is the characters. Kowal creates characters very well and they're interesting they have flaws. It's a very feminist book so there's still fighting against a lot of gender and racial norms that existed. The other thing is that this book focuses on a different character than the previous two books do so as a reader it took a minute to get into it since you had to get the grounding with these main characters in her life. Overall though she tells good stories and I keep reading the books so I have to say there's something good going on there even if I can't fully articulate it.

 

 

The Last Man Takes LSD

I went to Graduate School in English about 20 years ago. Somehow, I didn't have to read much Foucault. I think I read Discipline and Punish but only on my own time.  We may have read some sort of excerpts in a larger theory class. But that doesn't mean I'm not kind of familiar with the concepts of the man because the postmodern, post-structuralist thinking, that he helped engineer was everywhere at the Academy at that time. Even if you were more structural, Marxist or something that wasn't as grounded in French theory you still had to deal with that environment.

 

That basically means that I don't have the full context to completely judge this book because it is somewhat of a biography and somewhat of an intellectual biography but also a criticism of his work. So, reading this I learned a lot about Foucault and his thought and the things he was involved in. But I can't say where the authors got it right where they got it wrong how much he was involved in the creation and strengthening and dissemination of what we now call neoliberalism. What I can say is that the subtitle means more to the structure of the book than the title. There is sadly very little about LSD and it's more about the fizzling out of revolutionary potentials. I'm glad I read this book and I think I learned a lot from it.

 

Recent Reads 8.4.2021

 Red State Revolt

The Jacobin and Verso partnership published a book based on the Chicago teachers strikes a while back. And then after 2018 they published a book about the broader teachers strikes that struck the nation. This is that book.

 

I really liked what Eric Blanc does mainly because even though he gets up close to the people who really worked with the strikes he doesn't over invest in them which for me would be very easy to do as a non-journalist. But you still do get a lot of empathy for the people. What makes this strong is his comparison of the strikes in West Virginia and Arizona versus the ones in Oklahoma. It makes it like points of comparison which could be useful as a handbook for future work.

 

The thing that makes me sad reading this is thinking about all the promise that we had based on Bernie’s run in 2016 and then the teacher strikes in 2018 and then it felt like a letdown as a member of the left that we didn't get more progress especially considering the pandemic. Reading it just felt as if we had something within our grasp that slipped away a moment in time in the ebbs and flows where you hope you could strike wear the iron is hot, but you miss. And it's not missing that's sad.

 

Puppy Dog Ice Cream

 

I don't normally buy a book that would be a biography of a band. But when I was a little bit younger Japanther became my favorite band. The problem was that the time that I was becoming a big fan of them it was at the very end of their cycle. I saw them at Riot Fest and then once later and then I had tickets for a show in the spring of 2014 and then I got an email that said they weren't going to do that tour. It made me very sad, and I didn't know why it happened.

 

So, the thing was getting this book and seeing it offered - I was excited at long last to see an explanation about what happened. My hope was that I would get an entire view of the whole arc of the band. Which is pretty much what this book’s got so that's good. The problem is that as a reader and a story once most interesting is the conflict period and what we have here is Ian's side of the whole thing and we don't really get mad side. So, the subtitle is the story of Japanther, but it's only half the story. I enjoyed reading it was a quick read, but I would like the sequel if it were Matt story of Japanther.

 

I don't mean to disparage what Ian did because the book itself is very well written and I think he is introspective and insightful about his own experience. I think if you were a fan of the band, you would enjoy this book.

 

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

 

I have been reading Allison Bechdel’s work for a while. It started with Fun Home, but I also circled back and read her comics. I think especially in her books Bechdel isn't necessarily just writing about the subject matter at hand. What she's really writing about is herself and her own inner journey. Nominally it could be about her mom or her dad or her lifelong exploration of different kinds of exercise, but really, it's just a journey inward looking at the self. Overall, it's not a bad journey and there's a very good reason that she is an award-winning author and artist -- it's that she really touches the soul, or the nub, she gets to the root of the problem. I don't know. Whatever it is that she does she's very good at it. If you like graphic novels and you like memoirs you are going to like The Secret to Superhuman Strength.

 

The only quibble I have is that I read the whole thing and I don't think I found what the secret was. But I do have to admit to sometimes being an inattentive reader, so perhaps it's in there and I just missed it.

Recent Reads 6.18.2021

 

Fear and Trembling

Okay so here's the thing I really can't tell what Kierkegaard  is going on about here. I read the whole book and thankfully it's a short book because there's all the stuff about Abraham and there's a bit about a merman and the ethics of listening to God to kill your own son.

Reading this made me think less about Abraham and more about both the directions given  by the deity and the son who would have been the sacrifice. I want to learn more about that position and a universe that accepts that as formally true and accepts it as a question of faith and not as fundamental Brokenness to the entire edifice of the mythology. Overall it was an interesting  and worthwhile read but if you really ask me exactly what I'd read and could synthesize a summary I probably couldn't.

Revolutionary Suicide

I really like reading this book because I got to learn more about the Black Panthers from Huey's perspective. I knew they were really interesting and had some good policies. I didn't realize just how awesome they were. But I think what Huey really covers is how much the white power structure goes against anyone who might push back against that power structure. 

So it was interesting to read but also kind of depressing because you saw how it all played out in the 60s. And you're reading it and you go oh wow this is very similar to how the world is today and hasn't changed that much. And that's the not fun feeling to have. 

I'd say that the only thing that really dragged about this book is the last 80% where he really covers his trials to the minute detail. It seems as if it was probably recent to the writing so it was well within his mind but I think it kind of goes against the broader structure and it's not as effective as some of the earlier chapters. Overall it made me want to learn more about the Black Panther Party and the history of Huey and his companions and how Eldridge Cleaver did him wrong.

Planet on Fire

This was a hard book to read Because I probably agree with all the descriptions of the problems they look at in the book. I agree that there is a emergency that we need to deal with on the climate front and that's embedded in an entire social and political structure that is fundamentally broken and will not fix the emergency on its own accord. 

The problem is that this book is written like a very well-written undergraduate paper. It talks about the problems and I kept wanting to say “well okay what is the mechanism that we use to fix these problems?”. Because to really address them as you mentioned earlier we have to fundamentally reshape the political and economic structures. So I'm reading it and I see at the very end of the kind of hand-wave towards it but even then I already made my decision about this book and so it didn't really strike me as a good strong mechanism for change.

Which is unfortunate because so many of these books are able to diagnose the problem and we can fall back on that world. That's like the quote we attributed to Jameson where it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If we don't end capitalism as we know it there's going to be a major dislocation in the political and economic social structures anyway in the later part of the century. It's very scary and depressing and it's something we need to do something about and I think I'm of the same boat as the authors here and not knowing exactly what we can do about it

Existentialism is a Humanism

This book serves as a pretty good introduction to the philosophy of existentialism. The core of it is a speech that Jean-Paul Sartre gave with the same title.  It's interesting because it's a short book anyway but the speech itself was so short that they had to wrap it up in an introduction, the Q&A of speech, and a separate commentary on The Stranger. It even includes something like a 10-page question from some other dude. It strikes me as the most exemplary example of the “This is more of a comment than a question" style question that you will ever see. In spite of all that it's still like 100 page book. So if you're interested in existentialism like I am it's not a bad thing to look up. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a PDF of the speech itself somewhere that you can just read. It might really do exactly what you need instead of this presentation format that I have from Yale. 

The Antifa Supersoldier Cookbook

Matt Lubchansky Is a National Treasure. They're probably the third or fourth best left-wing political cartoonist working today, at least in my opinion. I usually see their work through the neighborhood so it's nice that I was able to get this long-form version where we get to see help water a narrative Arc. It's really a smart look at the ongoing conflict between the citizens of America and the police we pay. That makes you laugh but also makes you a bit sad because it also shows the ongoing escalation that's not really necessary and it shouldn't be necessary but we kind of live in a police state which isn’t fun.

Diaspora Boy

I'm a fan of Eli Valley.  What his art is able to do is really make you uncomfortable. And it makes you uncomfortable because he's telling you the truth and he's showing you things as they are. 

I think it's a skill a lot of cartoonists don't really have. I think the other thing that I really like about him is his drawing style -  that real heavy dark line work I'm sure has the name but it reminds me of old school woodblock prints. So they're also very visually interesting. 

The book itself is actually kind of hard to read. And it's not because of subject matter but because of the very physicality of the book. It's printed as if they were printing a broadsheet page but it's much heavier than a broadsheet page so I had to lay it out on the table to thoroughly read it. The other piece about this specific text is that it is really focused on Jewishness and the Jewish experience as a left-wing American Jew and how to deal with the state of Israel and how it goes against so many of your ideals. Something I really like that Valley does here is that he includes short essays to give context to what was going on both in his career  and World politics of the time because there's a lot of deep cuts that if you're not hyper conscious and aware of what's going on within that specific context you'll only miss it.

Unfortunately the conflicts that Valley writes about are daily ongoing and they don't seem to have any resolution so that even though this book was published 4 years ago it still feels very timely I would recommend that you read it.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

There's a line from the preface to this book we're James Agee says but he's going to take his subject matter seriously.

It Is hard to find the cogent words to talk about this book.

It's not a novel, but it is novel.

See if you go look up the reviews you'll find confusion about what it is that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was supposed to be about. And I have the same confusion. Ultimately I think this book is often lumped in with Grapes of Wrath not because they're stylistically the same or did they really kind of hit on the same subject matter or even though that's more parallel. But what I think Steinbeck has in common with James Agee is that they both took that subject matter seriously. If I could compare this book to anything in literature I think it is those interstitial chapters to Grapes of Wrath that aren’t specifically about the Joad family but that are trying to set the scene.

Because ultimately what this book is more than anything “about”  it's not about the sharecroppers it's nominally covering but I would say it's more a close reading of the land of the objects and the clothes and the things that they touch. More than anything it reminds me of that mid century literary criticism before the French broke everything but it's a literary criticism that applies to the physicality of the world. So it's kind of like a precursor to Barthes looking at the semiotics, the laundry detergent or whatever.

So It's a really interesting book but it's impossible to read cover-to-cover because it is like a kind of pastiche of bringing together notes and clipping. You don't get any kind of narrative arc but it's as if you're looking at a world from one inch away. I tried to understand it like that. I think it's a rightfully celebrated text but you have to understand it on its own terms and not try to see it as something else that you wanted to be. 

Cancel Student Loans

 I'm a bit of an untraditional case when it comes to student loans.

My wife and I met in graduate school where we were both working towards MAs in English. In 2007 she graduated, and I left the program without a degree. We moved to Chicago where we both got jobs. I was teaching and she was working with a website. In 2008 I lost my job and was unemployed until 2011. Thankfully, we didn't have much debt from the first round of school and managed to pay it off (about 15K total). There's a weird generational thing where when we first went to school it was like you can major in anything and get a job, but then we left graduate school right as the worst recession in our lifetimes to that point was starting. What the crash and the recession afterward really cemented was that in this modern economy you need to keep refreshing your skills (though I worry at some point I'll end up overqualified). So, once I got a job after being unemployed, I realized I needed to learn more stuff within the framework of that job and that agency. The problem is education is expensive. I started taking classes at a community college and in 2014 I started an MBA which I graduated from and then did an MA in Economics where I graduated last year.  My wife did a post-graduate certificate program for her work and is looking to extend that for her second Masters. We've been employed and taking out loans  and then paying them as we go but still owe close to 30K. 

Here's the weird thing that doesn't make me a sympathetic character - over the last year when they announced the moratorium I just opened a savings account and plowed money into that, We both kept our jobs and I got a raise and there was no commuting or leisure costs so we were able to put enough money away last year to be able to pay off our entire balance. It would be cool if they cancelled the debt because it means we can replace our windows or go on a real vacation.

Because what debt does is constrain. We have been married since 2008 and have never gone on a real vacation. When we have time off, we visit family and that's about it. When you have the monthly payments, it hangs over you and limits what you can do. Part of why we've never really entertained having children is the cost of childcare when you have other costs already. There's this paradox that you need to keep learning things to survive but that costs money, so you need to keep upping those skills. 

I support a cancellation of student debt but should just be a part of a much broader structural change because a lot of people have stories worse than mine and greater constraints, but we have generations behind us who will have the same needs. A cheap master's degree with face-to-face learning is between 30-40 K. There are programs with online delivery with lower price points, but there aren't many. And the other costs like housing and childcare and health care are only going up with our real wages mostly stagnate. Just a huge broken system. 

But - if cancellation is something that Biden can do unilaterally (and I think it is) then it is something he should do. Not only will it help so many people who have been trying to survive in this economy and economic system, but I would imagine it has electoral benefits.

The other final  thing to add is current policy creates uncertainty. They ran on forgiveness of some of the debt while others were pushing higher amounts. They rolled in and pushed back the start of repayment to the fall, but I was really hoping movement before then. But it's coming soon, and they want to spend their political capital on getting a bipartisan consensus on infrastructure which from where I am standing doesn't seem likely. Freeing up cash flow for borrowers, even if it spikes inflation some, should be a net good.