Shawn Fremstad

The Care Economy | The Care Board The Care Board: Visualizing care connections across the U.S. economy. Using data, we reveal the essential role of care in sustaining families, communities, workers, and the broader economy.

What is the care economy? It is $4b/day in developmental care, $12b/day in activities that support daily living, and another $4b/day on time caring for a loved ones' health. The equivalent of $20 billion/day of effort is invested in caregiving in the U.S. Check out the details.👇👇👇 #thecareboard

Finally, the research I review uses pre-pandemic data. Crime and incarceration rates have recently decreased, and drug arrests have fallen sharply since 2019, but this may not hold in the current political environment. /FIN.

All that said, people racialized as Black remain disproportionately incarcerated compared to their population share, and the increasing significance of class doesn't negate the continued importance of ethnoracial disparities and racial domination. 9/

The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration Mass incarceration is typically understood as a system of race-based social control. Yet this standard story mischaracterizes disparities in US punishment, ignores the sharp rise in violence beginning...

... and proposing that rising violent crime rates, economic restructuring, urban decline, and an incomplete social state contributed to the punitive turn in crime policy. 8/ catalyst-journal.com/2019/12/the-...

The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration Mass incarceration is typically understood as a system of race-based social control. Yet this standard story mischaracterizes disparities in US punishment, ignores the sharp rise in violence beginning...

See also Clegg & Usmani (2019), disputing that the carceral system functions mainly as a race-based social control mechanism ... 7/ catalyst-journal.com/2019/12/the-...

Labor markets and incarceration: The China shock to American punishment Studies have failed to show a positive effect of unemployment on incarceration despite reasons to expect such a relationship. We note that prior estimates have been muddied by the absence of substate...

Clegg and Usmani (2024) found that adverse local labor market shocks due to increased Chinese exports led to significant increases in total incarceration rates for both Black and White people. 6/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 6/

Muller and Roehrkasse (2022) observe that Black-White inequality in the prison admission rate peaked in 2000 and then declined, while class inequality in admission, using education as a proxy, has surged for both groups. 5/ escholarship.org/content/qt74...

The Declining Significance of Race in Criminal Sentencing: Evidence from US Federal Courts Abstract. Racial inequality in sentencing has decreased substantially over the last decade. In 2009, the average sentencing difference between black and wh

Light (2021) finds that the average sentencing difference between Black and White defendants in US federal courts narrowed considerably between 2009 and 2018, especially for drug offenses. 4/ academic.oup.com/sf/article-a...

A Generational Shift: Race and the Declining Lifetime Risk of Imprisonment by Jason P. Robey, Michael Massoglia, & Michael T. Light (July 2023) Demography Abstract: Mass incarceration fundamentally altered the life course for a generation of American men, but sustained declines in imprisonment in recent years raise questions about how incarce...

Robey, Massoglia, and Light (2023) highlight a substantial 44 percent decrease in the risk of incarceration for Black men between 1999 and 2019, with the fastest decline among young Black men. 3/ sociology.wisc.edu/2023/07/12/a...

Beckett and Brydolf-Horwitz (2020) document significant declines in drug arrests and imprisonment for Black individuals between 2007 and 2018, attributing this partly to increased support for drug policy reform in urban areas. 2/ lsj.washington.edu/sites/lsj/fi...

The Increasing Significance of Class in American Hyperincarceration The discussion on incarceration and class is crucial. Discover how class disparities influence the criminal justice landscape today.

This is a new piece from me on the increasing significance of class in arrests and incarceration. 1/ cepr.net/publications...

In This Brave New World, Does Scholarship Still Matter? If the recent past is no longer a useful guide to seeking change in the present, what good is policy-adjacent scholarship?

“what do you do when the pursuit of middle-range theory feels no more useful than trying to determine how many angels can fit on the head of a pin? My own response has been to zoom out, to shift my research toward the big political economy questions: …” lpeproject.org/blog/in-this...

harpers.org/archive/2025...

MPP (marriage promotion and preferences) is the new DEI.

Liberal Dominance of Cultural Institutions Hurt the Left A new book, Polarized by Degrees, argues that college-educated voters have come to dominate the Democratic Party and cultural institutions while Americans without a college degree feel increasingly al...

"Grossman and Hopkins note that today there are more nonprofit employees in the US than there are manufacturing workers, around three million as of 2023." jacobin.com/2024/11/libe...

Rescuing Class From the Cultural Turn

... and Vivek Chibber's Rescuing Class from the Cultural Turn catalyst-journal.com/2017/11/cult...

Bourdieu’s Class Theory The Academic as Revolutionary

Catalyst journal is publishing interesting stuff on class, including sociologist Dylan Riley's piece on Bourdieu's Class Theory ... catalyst-journal.com/2017/11/bour...

I also found Will Atkinson's book Class, from
@politybooks.bsky.social Key Concepts series, very helpful as an overview, especially on Bourdieu's approach to class. www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...

Erik Olin Wright's "Understanding Class" (both the 2009 New Left Review piece and the 2015 collection with the same title) is notable for bringing together three of the main approaches (stratification, Weberian, and Marxist) to class. See also his lecture here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmii...

Resistance 1.0 didn't fail because it was too reflexively anti-Trump.

Resistance 1.0 did not build sustainable power because it was too formalistic. It was focused on what was aberrant and abhorrent about Trump, rather than the impact of his corruption and incompetence on actual people.

Owen Hatherley, Bulgarian Dreams — Sidecar On Victor Petrov’s ‘Balkan Cyberia’.

"Soviet computing was–ironically–severely undermined by a lack of cohesive, collectivist planning...whereas electronics development in Massachusetts and California was lavishly state-funded, leisurely and cooperative. The Bulgarians were fully aware of this..." newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Such a telling and important figure illustrating how childcare costs impact inequality!

After not showing up to votes since Thanksgiving, Senator Sinema finally showed up today only to vote against a nominee she had voted to confirm for the same position just four years ago.

Why show up now? Sinema is currently auditioning for the role of corporate sell-out

"Gamoneda is not a poet of the establishment. Self-taught, working-class, insurgent, an extraordinary voice in post-Civil War Spain. His work is defiant: hermetic, elliptical, fragmented; words have no fixed meaning; readers must accept being cocreators" www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

NEWS: Sen. Schumer filed cloture on Lauren McFerran for another term on the National Labor Relations Board. If she's confirmed Democrats will maintain a majority on the board until 2026.

Evidence has demonstrated this effect in numerous cities now.

I understand why it sounds weird to say, 'building a bunch of fancy new townhouses and skyscrapers will make housing more affordable!' but it simply appears to be true.

People in poor health — especially in non-government plans — in large fractions do hate their plans. You have to actually use it in a meaningful way to have a view on its quality. And, quite obviously insurers work, via a range of burdens (denials, pre auths)to restrict access to care b/c profits.

Like I keep saying, Minnesota social democracy is happening and going national next.

Yes, 100%.

(Also underrated: UMass economics.)

The Origins of Enduring Economic Inequality (December 2024) - We survey archaeological evidence suggesting that among hunter-gatherers and farmers in Neolithic western Eurasia (11,700 to 5,300 years ago) elevated levels of wealth inequality occ...

"Archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that a culture of aggressive egalitarianism may have thwarted the emergence of enduring wealth inequality until the Late Neolithic...." www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...