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Dissent Magazine

Dissent magazine was founded in 1954 by Iriving Howe, and continues to...

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First, debt teaches that higher education is a consumer service. It is a pay-as-you-go transaction, like any other consumer enterprise, subject to the business franchises attached to education.
Second, debt teaches career choices. It teaches that it would be a poor choice to wait on tables while writing a novel or become an elementary school teacher at $24,000 or join the Peace Corps. It rules out culture industries such as publishing or theater or art galleries that pay notoriously little or nonprofits like community radio or a women’s shelter. The more rational choice is to work for a big corporation or go to law school
Third, debt teaches a worldview. Following up on the way that advertising indoctrinates children into the market, as Juliet Schor shows in Born to Buy, student loans directly conscript college students. Debt teaches that the primary ordering principle of the world is the capitalist market, and that the market is natural, inevitable, and implacable. There is no realm of human life anterior to the market; ideas, knowledge, and even sex (which is a significant part of the social education of college students) simply form sub-markets. Debt teaches that democracy is a market; freedom is the ability to make choices from all the shelves. And the market is a good: it promotes better products through competition rather than aimless leisure; and it is fair because, like a casino, the rules are clear, and anyone—black, green, or white—can lay down chips.
Fourth, debt teaches civic lessons. It teaches that the state’s role is to augment commerce, abetting consuming, which spurs producing; its role is not to interfere with the market, except to catalyze it. Debt teaches that the social contract is an obligation to the institutions of capital, which in turn give you all of the products on the shelves.
Fifth, debt teaches the worth of a person. Worth is measured not according to a humanistic conception of character, cultivation of intellect and taste, or knowledge of the liberal arts, but according to one’s financial potential. Education provides value-added to the individual so serviced, in a simple equation: you are how much you can make, minus how much you owe. Debt teaches that the disparities of wealth are an issue of the individual, rather than society; debt is your free choice.
Last, debt teaches a specific sensibility. It inculcates what Barbara Ehrenreich calls “the fear of falling,” which she defines as the quintessential attitude of members of the professional middle class who attain their standing through educational credentials rather than wealth. It inducts students into the realm of stress, worry, and pressure, reinforced with each monthly payment for the next fifteen years.

Anders Tunold Kråkenes

Dissent Magazine

Tags: development, growth, poverty, equality, economics on 2008-06-01 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Kerim Friedman

Dissent Magazine

Tags: quickd on 2008-03-16 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Ognjen Strpić

Europe's Choice :: Dissent Winter 2006 Issue

By Sheri Berman

Tags: sberman, politics, europe on 2006-11-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Ognjen Strpić

The 'Usefully Dangerous' Economist :: Dissent Spring 2007 Issue

Galbraith & Krugman, via http://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/16/pleasantly-contentious-perhaps-even-usefully-dangerous/

Tags: economics, politics on 2007-05-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Ognjen Strpić

Arendt's Judgment :: Dissent Spring 2004 Issue

There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging. We're all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone.

Tags: philosophy, arendt, 5 on 2007-07-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

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