Sam Barr / December 11, 2010 4:37 pm
Peter Bozzo has posted a very thorough reply to my reply to his column which argued that we should replace race-based affirmative action with class-based affirmative action. (Got that?) Peter cites three studies, but only one of them seems to have analyzed the socioeconomic backgrounds of African-American college students, as opposed to the socioeconomic backgrounds of college students of all [...]
Max Novendstern / May 3, 2010 5:26 am
I want to comment on Sam’s final club post from the other day, which I find compelling but nevertheless insufficient. Let me try to explain why. Sam gives us the standard-line “progressive critique” of the clubs. His is an argument that’s been made many times before — by the likes of April Yee here, Sabrina Lee here, and most recently by [...]
Jimmy Wu / March 8, 2010 3:02 pm
Why the politics of immigration must be reconciled with reality
Max Novendstern / February 25, 2010 11:28 pm
The New Republic has reprinted a wonderful Depression-era essay by John Dewey about the collapse of what he calls the “romanticism of business”: But it was just at this point that the new romanticism of business so cleverly came in. Human imagination had never before conceived anything so fantastic as the idea that every individual is actuated in all his desires [...]
Max Novendstern / February 22, 2010 3:23 pm
We began The HPRgument with the goal of creating a new space on campus for lively discussion of the things that matter — political, cultural, or Harvardian Since we began three weeks ago, debate on this site has been spirited and engaged: we’ve taken on the racial politics of Avatar, praised Obama’s “shrewd” bank tax, discussed the “ Sociology of [...]
Max Novendstern / February 1, 2010 8:18 pm
The notion that economics can explain everything about everything (re: Freakonomics) is something that I’ve always regarded as silly and kinda gross. The basic economic model — the super-rational individual relentlessly seeking out his own material self-interest — is almost embarrassingly inadequate. If you want to deal with something like the Global Financial Crisis then, yes, you do have to [...]
Ethan Lyle / November 17, 2009 1:54 am
Lessons from Hurricane Katrina, and where we stand today On Aug. 29, 2005, one million people were displaced overnight when Hurricane Katrina assaulted the Gulf Coast. “We plan for what we’ve experienced, but you don’t even begin to understand [a worst-case scenario] until it is upon you,” Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA employee who took refuge in the Superdome along with [...]
Candice Kountz and Robert Long / April 2, 2009 12:55 am
When identity binds and borders divide Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the relative peace of Iraqi Kurdistan has been a notable, if often overlooked, exception to the violent insurgency, sectarian feuding, and pervasive lawlessness that has racked Iraq. Yet this achievement has also made the area of one of America’s most significant long-term security concerns in the [...]
