The Great Near (& Far)
Monopolies, patient philanthropy, restorative economics, & the student debt crisis...
Hey folks. This is the 16th edition of The Great Near. I’ll be re-launching “TGN 2.0.” in 2022 with a refresh and a bit more regularity. In the meantime, I’m sharing a weekly curation (read: no more long-form posts for a bit) of content that might push your thinking about power and the systems that shape our lives. I’m talking about the economy, public policy, finance, capitalism, the social sector, and more. Follow for new research, op-eds, hot takes, my favorite explainers, the best learning resources, and fun nuggets so that our heads don’t explode.
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The Great Near (& Far) 👀 ✨
Something to listen to: Yes, ABBA put out a new album, but you should really be listening to this conversation between Tressie McMillan Cottom, a research professor at U.N.C. Chapel Hill, and Louise Seamster, a sociologist at the University of Iowa. They discuss the debate over student debt forgiveness and make the case that it’s not as radical as we may think. They get into the culture around debt, how the experience differs for Black and white Americans, and why generational wealth is an important lens to understand the debt crisis. Seamster makes that point here:
“And Darrick Hamilton and others have argued recently, there’s a report, umbrellas don’t make it rain, that we’ve got the causal order flipped on all this, that we say education leads to wealth. It does not, on its own, lead to wealth. They say it’s more often that wealth leads to education. Wealth leads to homeownership. And it makes sense because wealth is inherited. It’s not, for the most part, built from nothing and starting in adulthood. It’s coming from behind you, not in front of you. And again, this is something we don’t want to talk about because it doesn’t fit our rags to riches orientation.”
If you don’t have time to listen, I recommend reading the transcript starting from the quote above. For a deeper dive into student debt cancellation, this Roosevelt Institute paper is 🔥🔥🔥. It explains why student debt cancellation is actually progressive, meaning that when applied evenly across the population, it provides more benefit to those with fewer resources. They argue that it would be a key driver of closing the racial wealth gap.
Something about monopolies: Anti-trust legislation is finally a focus of the Biden Administration thanks to advocates like Federal Trade Commission Chair, Lina Khan. The Democrats are even reviving talks of a crackdown on private equity under Warren’s leadership. This Atlantic essay, A Secretive Hedge Fund is Gutting Newsrooms, explores the destructive effects of one private equity firm, Alden Global Capital, in the news industry. A quarter of all newspapers have gone out of business in the past 15 years, and half of those remaining are now controlled by financial firms.
“The model is simple: gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring out as much cash as possible.
It’s not just newsrooms where power has been consolidated by a few firms. Jerusalem Demsas raised the question about real estate in Vox after Zillow announced that it would stop buying homes this year. (They discovered a fault in their algorithm that cost them $330 million. Bad day for that data engineer.) While there is reason to brush off iBuyers like Zillow—they aren’t causing the housing crisis—we should still be cautious. In Phoenix, for example, iBuyers control 5.7% of the market, and that’s growing. So yes, we might be years away from “the Amazon of real estate,” but there may be other harms from selling bundles of homes to private equity, as Zillow and others do. For more on monopoly power, I highly recommend Matt Stoller’s Substack or today’s post from Popular Information.
A weird movement in philanthropy: This Vox article by Sigal Samuel asks: “would you donate to a charity that won’t pay out for centuries?” It’s referring to the Patient Philanthropy Fund (PPF), a new charitable fund that seeks to “safeguard the long-term future of humanity.” Their approach is investing to give:
“The PPF is collecting donations that will sit in investments — maybe for decades, maybe for centuries — earning compounding returns until the fund managers decide humanity has hit a moment when the money is needed most.”
🤔 Is this not that moment? Off the top of my head, we’re facing a “sixth extinction,” extreme political polarization, and a climate crisis. Sure nuclear war and asteroid detection, some of the threats PPF wants to address, are existential threats that demand some attention. But sitting on more funds for a “rainy day,” as philanthropy already does, is just siphoning capital away from underfunded problems today. This longtermist approach has its origins in effective altruism, a movement encouraging people to maximize impact by giving to “effective” organizations. I think that’s problematic for a few reasons, but that’s a topic for another day. For more on effective altruism, check out Founders Pledge, Open Philanthropy, or 80,000 Hours.
A hot take: This New York Times opinion video, Blue States, You’re The Problem, is getting a lot of play. It’s a remake of Ezra Klein’s take on California’s failures. They argue that Americans are symbolically liberal and operationally conservative, even when Republicans aren’t standing in the way. They make decent points, states with Democratic control are not bastions of progress, but they also reduce a systemic problem to the choices of individuals. The video gives the example of local zoning laws, arguing that wealthy “not-in-my-backyard” homeowners are to blame for blocking affordable housing. And they are. But perhaps a federal tax system that allows Silicon Valley tech giants to starve their state of tax resources also contributes to this? It’s worth a watch, but I’m not sure if this “red state/blue state” finger-pointing is productive. Pair this with an essay from Michael Hobbes on “The Methods of Moral Panic Journalism,” where he argues that warnings of an increasingly illiberal left are sometimes misinformed.
A policy update: The Minority Business Development Agency (MDBA), which helps minority entrepreneurs access capital and markets, was finally approved as a permanent agency, which means more funding and stability. 🥳
A vision for the economy: In NPQ, Nwamaka Agbo, CEO of the Kataly Foundation lays out her vision for an economy that “strategically reinvests resources back into economically oppressed communities.” She calls this restorative economics, a roadmap for the economy that prioritizes five principles: democratic governance, capacity building and human development, non-extractive integrated capital, power building through social movements, and systemic change. She offers examples of this in practice, like investing in shared community infrastructure (water management systems or public preschool) and raising the minimum wage.
Governing for the common good is an approach that prioritizes the most vulnerable communities in policymaking, and Agbo recalls Angela Glover Blackwell’s explanation of this as the curb-cut effect. Blackwell explains that the benefits of expanding curb cuts—sloping sidewalk curbs to help people in wheelchairs move around freely— in the 1970s extended far beyond the disabled community.
“When the wall of exclusion came down, everybody benefited—not only people in wheelchairs. Parents pushing strollers headed straight for curb cuts. So did workers pushing heavy carts, business travelers wheeling luggage, even runners and skateboarders. A study of pedestrian behavior at a Sarasota, Fla., shopping mall revealed that nine out of 10 “unencumbered pedestrians” go out of their way to use a curb cut. As journalist Frank Greve has noted, the barricades stormed by disabled advocates in Berkeley 40 years ago were a few inches high, “yet today millions of Americans pass daily through the breaches.”
Agbo also highlights Anasa Troutman’s work with the Historic Clayborn Temple, a historic cultural hub in Memphis that is organizing resident-owned housing, cooperative food systems, and worker-owned businesses. If these ideas feel unfamiliar, I recommend following the work of leaders like Agbo and Troutman to see these principles at work.
Something different: I love pudding.cool, a data journalism publication with visual essays. My favorite is this AI bot ruthlessly judges your taste in music. My friend Sam Learner has also explored police misconduct in Philadelphia in a powerful data viz.
How I’m feeling this week:
until next time,
caitlin