Tagged: Inequality

Why Criminal Justice Isn’t Just

“Justice” is something of a buzz word in the Core: what it means, how it should be administered, and what constitutes a crime are just a few of the topics that are addressed by writers like Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and Dante. For the most part, these great thinkers propose systems wherein criminals are punished retroactively […]

The Problem of Inequality: Outsource the CEO

Relating to CC204’s study of the problem of inequality is an excellent article in Slate discussing the unclear ways a CEO’s ‘worth’ is measured. Here is an extract: It’s not exactly news that CEOs of big companies get paid a lot of money. And everyone knows that the pay gap between the big executives and […]

Gender Inequality: CC204 & The Claims of Esquire’s Editor

Relating to last week’s lecture by Professor Mears on gender inequality and Hochschild’s readings, are two articles discussing the claim made by the Esquire’s editor, that “women are there to be beautiful objects”. Some extracts: “The women we feature in the magazine are ornamental,” he said, speaking at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London on Tuesday. […]

CC204: Living Wage Calculator

This spring, the class of CC204 has been looking at inequality in terms of race, gender, social class and financial standing. “Poverty in America” has provided a very useful tool to investigate inequality in terms wages across the United States, the Living Wage Calculator: http://bit.ly/Ykr2NZ Simply enter your home town and find out how much money […]

April 13: Hochschild lecture at BU

A lecture happening here at BU next month may of particular interest to students in CC204, who in the course of their study of the problem of inequality have been reading The Second Shift. The author of that book, Arlie Russell Hochschild (University of California, Berkeley), will be on campus on Friday, April 13, 2012, […]

Analects of the Core: Katznelson on education

The 1940 Census had revealed that some 10 million Americans had not been schooled past the fourth grade, and that one in eight could not read or write. This, primarily, was a southern problem. A higher proportion of blacks living in the North had completed grade school than whites in the South. — Ira Katznelson, […]

Analects of the Core: Romero on domestic employees in the USA

Domestic service reveals the contradiction in a a feminism that pushed for women’s involvement outside the home, yet failed to make men take responsibility for household labor. Employed middle- and upper-middle class women escaped the double day syndrome by hiring poor women of color to perform housework and child care, and this was characterized as […]

Analects of the Core: Beauvoir on gender inequality

A woman who expends her energy, who has responsibilities, who knows how harsh is the struggle against the world’s opposition, needs — like the male — not only to satisfy her physical desires but also to enjoy the relaxation and diversion provided by agreeable sexual adventures. — French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, from The […]

The lingering effects of slavery in America

Prof. Thornton Lockwood writes… In my CC204 lecture on race earlier this month, I raised the issue of the Historian’s fallacy, post hoc, ergo propter hoc (Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”), which consists in attributing a causal sequence between two events based on the fact that one event follows another. My lecture […]

Introducing the new, revised CC204

The faculty in Core Social Sciences have introduced an exciting new version of CC204 (second-semester Social Sciences) on the theme of “Inequality.” Prof. Thornton Lockwood provided the following description of the course: Over the last two years, major changes have been going on with the second semester of Core Social Sciences. In the fall semester […]