Critical Exponent

Popular discourse vilifies the economic top 1% for being responsible for the great inequality in the US. But what if they are not the only culprit? In his book Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It , Richard V. Reeves argues that the upper middle class (defined as the top quintile of income) is in some ways even more responsible for the unequal opportunity in American society. The upper middle class has enough collective wealth to exert influence, and constitutes a large enough voting block to wield political power. How exactly does the upper middle class contribute to inequality? By unfairly hoarding opportunities for itself: using policies ranging from legacy admissions to 529 plans, using connections to secure jobs and exclusionary zoning to isolate neighborhoods. We do this out of a very natural desire to prevent losing the advantages that we have gained (possibly over generations ...

After a long hiatus, I am rebooting Critical Exponent! My original site was built on WordPress and hosted on HostMonster . A few years ago, I got “ pharma-hacked ”, and HostMonster would not fix my site until I signed up for their security monitoring package. I figured I would fix the site myself, and I actually made good progress on doing that, learning a bit about the annoying way pharma-hacks work. Unfortunately, I got distracted by life and never did quite complete the process, and HostMonster somehow deleted my blog database. Luckily, I had backed it up when I started fixing my blog, so all that content is not completely lost. Anyway, I decided to start afresh. At the moment I am on Blogger for simplicity. At some point, if I need more features than Blogger offers I may switch this over to self-hosted WordPress again, but for now, my aim is to keep the administration simple so I can focus on content. It is also likely that I will import and back-date older posts, either from...