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How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang
In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt’s (and Dubner’s) best seller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything…
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Do good universities teach better, or do they just select better students?
Research commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (and reported in the Times Higher Education Supplement) argues that the wage premium associated with studying at a Russell Group university is not statistically significant if you control for the social background of students and their A-levels. Graduates of Russell Group universities do earn 36%…
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The Purgatory of Academic Articles
I have an article forthcoming in *academic journal*. I sent the final version early 2010, and it has been put online for early view on September 6 of that year. It still hasn’t been included in an issue (1082 days later), and the journal currently has 141 articles in earlyview awaiting to be included in…
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The Vicious Circle of Inequality, Debt, Crisis, and Austerity
We are in a time of austerity. Public services are being cut, social benefits are being capped, and real wages are shrinking. In the last 5 years, the UK has gone through a big wage squeeze: real wages have declined by 5.5% since 2010, on par with countries such as Greece and Portugal. All these…
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Universities are Full of Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber writes: “Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they…
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The Next Home Office’s PR stunt
After this, I wonder If this could ever make it to souvenir shops. UPDATE: Actually, even if you’re going home, you have to face arrest.
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The Media as a Chinese Whisper Machine
In his book (based on a public lecture) on Television, Bourdieu uses a good concept to describe how information is produced within the news media: he calls it the “circular circulation of information”. In a nutshell, the main idea is that, despite its function as a window open to the world, the media actually work…
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The Swiss Apartheid
This week, Switzerland has been presented as the new country of apartheid. On Wednesday, international media outlets reported that the Federal Office for Migration had agreed exclusion rules with the town of Bremgarten in the Canton of Zurich for its new national centre for asylum seekers. Asylum seekers sheltered in that small town would not be…
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Alexandre Afonso 