I’m back in the land of paper-grading, and dividing the time left before midnight by the number of papers remaining tonight indicates that I’m probably not going to have anything to write tonight about what I’ve been reading about economics. Sigh. And I can’t believe I volunteered to lead off discussion about one of the texts in the Rethinking Economy seminar on Wednesday: I mean, I’m auditing; I should know better than to feel like I need to do that kind of stuff. But on the good side of being too busy, I came and gave a little talk tonight on class to the comp theory seminar my advisor’s teaching, which was pretty cool. People actually seemed interested.
Anyway. Part of tonight’s tiny insight, that’s kind of a continuation of earlier stuff: I’ve noted repeatedly that most definitions of class seem directly or indirectly to have economic components or aspects. I’ve coupled that to what I’ve been seeing as the problematic ways people talk about higher education having to serve the economy, and the ways that higher education then becomes perceived as a vehicle for primarily economic class mobility. My problem, though, was that a monetized economy — an economy where money is the medium and measure of exchange — commodifies knowledge; it turns learning into a product. The thing is (and I know this is kinda familiar), the economy isn’t entirely monetized: there’s plenty of non-monetary economic activity. Which imples that even if higher education serves the economy, it doesn’t have to do so in a commodified way (although that’s often the way it gets talked about).
The problem with this small insight is that it may make it easier to turn away from concerns of economic inequality. Those concerns are what interested me in class in the first place. But maybe I should ask: what are the relationships between monetized and non-monetized economic inequalities?
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