I’m more than a little hesitant to write about the shootings at Alabama. It sounds like an incident that we can use as an occasion to talk about the horrors of the current academic status system, which too often licenses the worst sorts of pettiness and nepotism. My sense, though, is that while tenure is involved, the real story at Alabama is the more familiar tale of our cultural embrace of violence, our cowardly gun control laws, and especially our terrible mental health care system.

It makes us look bad enough, in other words, even without thinking about tenure. (In any case, “The Trouble with Tenure” gives it a good shot.) Still, I could not help but think…

Everyone’s got their own favorite form of literacy: emotional, mathematical, computer, or cultural. But I think economic literacy needs to get a lot more attention. A good critical thinker can tell shit from shinola, and you can’t do that in a capitalist economy unless you understand something about economics. I’m not talking about the intricacies of macro or micro economics as much as I am about the basic assumptions that underlie our particular dismal system.

It’s important to see the assumptions as assumptions rather than facts. Economics, as they say, is an interested subject, profoundly shaped by the underlying interests of the economist. That’s why this piece by Henry Banta in the Nieman Watchdog, despite its partisan-sounding…