Education | Benjamin Studebaker

December 7, 2019

Britain: For the Love of God, Please Stop Boris Johnson

On 12 December, Britain has a general election. I care deeply about British politics–I did my BA over there and am finishing up a PhD there as we speak. But more importantly, the Conservative Party has managed the country’s economy and future with stunning fecklessness, and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do my part to point this out.

Let me tell you the story of what happened in Britain and how Cameron, May, and Johnson are making everything much, much worse.

Read the rest of this entry »

April 5, 2019

Let a Studebaker Tell You What’s Wrong With the Mayor of South Bend

My name is Benjamin Studebaker, and I grew up in Indiana. I am not happy with the way the press is covering Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Let me tell you why. Read the rest of this entry »

January 7, 2019

Self-Care Puts Us on an Amusement Treadmill

For some years now there’s been some people who have written pieces encouraging folks to engage in “self-care” and other people who have picked at this concept from the left. The pro self-care pieces tend to give people practical life advice for dealing with the stress and anxiety of modern life. The anti self-care pieces point out that self-care puts the burden of coping with the failures of modern capitalism on the individual. We experience higher incidences of stress and mental illness because our economic system leaves us in precarious positions. We fear being outcompeted for an ever scarcer number of good, professional class jobs. This pushes us into an arms race to polish our resumes. The more we try to look good, the more everyone else feels they must try to look good. So anti self-care pieces frame the practice as a luxury open only to those who are already reasonably secure–it doesn’t address the fundamental structural causes of precarity and it doesn’t rescue people from those forces.

These are the usual arguments surrounding self-care. But today I want to make a different argument–I want to claim that self-care is itself a celebration of a behaviour ancient political theorists rightly associated with slavery.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 8, 2018

Are We Trying to Make Everyone an Aristocrat or a Peasant?

On the left, we care a lot about equality. But we really, really don’t agree on what that means. Some of us want everyone to be an aristocrat. Some of us want everyone to be a peasant. Some of us want everyone to be a worker. Some of us want everyone to be middle class. Some of us want everyone to spend some time doing all of these things. We don’t talk about this difference very much, but it seems kind of important, because these proposals are not at all the same thing.

Read the rest of this entry »

June 12, 2018

How to Use Minimum Wage Laws to Improve Local Schools

In American towns, school systems are the backbone. Strong schools attract affluent residents. Affluent residents boost land values and median incomes. Higher land values and median incomes means higher tax revenue. Higher tax revenue means more money for schools. More money for schools means strong schools, and that means more affluent residents. It’s a virtuous circle:

What kills American towns are low income residents. Low income residents lower the amount of tax revenue local schools have per student, damaging school performance. As the schools decline, the affluent residents dry up, and that hits land values and median income, eroding tax revenue and further damaging the schools. Towns get into death spirals, where declining schools and collapsing prosperity feed off each other. Today I want to talk about how towns get thrown off this cycle, and how higher local minimum wage laws can keep them on track.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tag: Education