Stuff I’m reading
June 5, 2014
I’m too busy this morning for a real post but I thought I’d share a few things I’m reading today.
- Matt Stoller just came out with a long review of Timmy Geithner’s book: The Con Artist Wing of the Democratic Party. I like this because it explains some of the weird politics around, for example, the Mexican currency crisis that I only vaguely knew about.
- New York Magazine has a long profile of Stevie Cohen of SAC Capital insider trading fame: The Taming of the Trading Monster.
- The power of Google’s algorithms can make or break smaller websites: On the Future of Metafilter. See also How Google Is Killing The Best Site On The Internet.
- There is no such thing as a slut.
mathbabe 
Cathy, you should read John Kay’s June 3 column in the Financial Times, “Why banking crises happen in America but not in Canada”, especially the last paragraph. In fact you should always read John Kay.
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Ok thanks I will check it out!
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Like I had nothing to do today. Thanks a lot.
But one quote from the slut one really caught my attention despite having nothing to do with sex.
“Armstrong notes that midway through their college experience, none of the women had made any friendships across the income divide.”
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Interesting point but it seems this dorm was in a school where sororities cost $$$ and this divided people. Then the upper class girls came up with what strikes me as some very strange attitudes about sex, but maybe I’m working class (or maybe the working class girls here were also Catholic?).
In my own college experience I was a commuter and was almost exclussively friends with other commuters also majoring in math or physics. I did befriend a couple working class girls living in dorms based on the fact that we had been in a common group at Freshman orientation. Strangely they viewed me as upper class because I wasn’t having to do heavy work study loads and that caused resentment from them. Reality is commuting saves enough money not to work which is why most middle class math/physics majors figured out it made more sense to commute. We had too much homework to spend 20 hours a week on work study just to sleep somewhere that would be noisy and full of parties. So I guess my point is that even among working class kids, there is a divide based on how you choose to face financial challenges.
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Christina (hit send to fast before),
Yes, that could explain part of it. But then 100% of the upper class women must have chosen to join sororities which is saying there was a conscious choice (by the “upper half”, at least) to segregate by income.
And 0 (zero) is a strikingly low number. They don’t say how they defined ‘friendship” which is obviously a fuzzy concept but presumably there were hundreds of friendships. Also, while most of my friendships at school were dorm-based, there were also people in my major, people I played softball with, friends of friends, etc. For none of those to be across economic divide is very strong sorting.
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