The Moral Center of Meritocracy Collapses

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

You are shocked—shocked—I know. According to the FBI, a network of 33 wealthy parents engaged in a massive fraud to buy places for their children at elite colleges. Didn’t they realize that there are many perfectly legal ways to do that?

You can hire a legitimate college counselor for $10,000 and up. You can get test prep for anything from $120 to $375 an hour. You can buy personal coaches, fencing equipment, and squash-club memberships, often for less than the price of a Sub-Zero refrigerator. You can arrange for unpaid internships that will allow Junior to shine as a true humanitarian. You can game your way into a great private school—it’s so much easier to play the angles in kindergarten or sixth grade than in college admissions. If all else fails, you can just make a big donation to the school of your choice.

Have the rich gotten dumber? Or are they getting cheaper? Actually, the affidavit suggests that there are two deeply connected structural problems. The first is that the price of admission has gone up. The second is that the moral center of the meritocracy has collapsed.

[Read: Why the college-admissions scandal is so absurd]

Back in 1988, buying a spot at Harvard cost $2.5 million—or at least that’s what the case of Jared Kushner suggests, according to reporting from ProPublica’s Daniel Golden. But in this affidavit, William Singer—identified as “Cooperating Witness 1”—informs one of his parental conspirators that it takes “in the many millions” now to accomplish the same trick. Much more sensible to fork over something between $400,000 and $1.2 million, as Singer’s clients allegedly did.

College-admissions policies are going to take a lot of heat in the next few days, and they will deserve it. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this scandal, like so many others, is firmly rooted in rising inequality and the class system that has come with it.

According to the story that Americans usually tell ourselves, inequality is a game played by flashy celebrities, tech bros, and other freaks of nature. The coverage of this fast-breaking scandal, true to form, has focused with laserlike imprecision on the two of the 33 defendants who happen to be semi-famous Hollywood stars.

But rising inequality has also produced a large upper-middle class—the 9.9 percent—and it is made up of some much more ordinary characters: business executives, bankers, lawyers, physicians, dentists, and real-estate developers, more or less in that order. Nice people. People with good families, good degrees, living in good neighborhoods. People who have learned how to use all those good things as weapons in the struggle to preserve privilege.

Now take a look at the list of defendants. It consists of business executives, bankers, one lawyer, several real-estate developers, a physician, a dentist, and, yes, the pair of desperate Hollywood stars. The entertainment angle here isn’t that a few corporate types succumbed to Hollywood values. It’s that even starlets aren’t free from the grip of the culture of meritocracy.

[Alexandra Robbins: Kids are the victims of the elite-college obsession]

Probably the least surprising thing about this case is the neighborhood setting. Go to your nearest geographic database and look for the neighborhoods with the highest median home prices, the best-rated public schools (for the little people), and the highest number of advanced degrees per capita. Yep, they’re right there in the affidavit: Mill Valley, Atherton, La Jolla, and Newport Beach in California, and Greenwich, Connecticut.

Now let’s talk family values. “The parents are the prime movers of this fraud,” says Andrew E. Lelling, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts. It is touching, and sad, that many of the defendants appear to have taken great care to make sure their children did not learn about the efforts to cheat on their behalf. But it’s also deeply twisted. “Son, I love you, but you’re too stupid to know what I have to do for you”—Is that the message?

Family life itself has become part of the battleground of the classes. There are two kinds of families in America now, down from an infinity or so. There are the “good” families that mostly have two parents and invest huge amounts of their own money and time, and of their nanny’s time, in the cultivation of their offspring. And then there are the families that have been stuck into the bottom 90 percent of the economic pile.

For the “good” families, getting kids into the “good” schools isn’t just about loving the kids. It’s proof of status. That’s probably why the defendants in this case were so desperate to get their kids into academic institutions so ill-suited to their evident lack of academic talent. Much more was at stake here than Junior’s happiness. Setting aside the allegations that these defendants have engaged in truly reprehensible behavior—and trust me, with a daughter applying to college next year, I will not be outdone in outrage—the defendants represent these “good” families.

Meanwhile, the rest of America’s families haven’t got the time or money for the helicopter bills, they are much more likely to find themselves in single-parenting situations, and they have longer commutes from neighborhoods with less desirable schools. They are the ones who are counting on public schools to prepare their children for the future, and on colleges to give their children a chance to do good things. And they are the ones that this system, and the 9.9 percent, is shafting on an epic scale.

This case should open the eyes of the people who haven’t yet learned to use their families as weapons in their ongoing fight to maintain privilege. The core of the problem that emerges with rising inequality is that it makes everybody unreasonable. And it’s a very short step from unreasonable to flat out immoral.

If you read the affidavit, you can see that step illustrated by the slightly thuggish cellphone dialogue. The defendants here are all winners in the meritocratic system. But even they think merit has nothing to do with it. “The way the world works now is pretty unbelievable,” says one parent, as he arranges a scheme to pass off his athletically challenged scion as a sports icon. “The whole world is scamming the system,” Cooperating Witness 1 assures another client. Indeed.

Brutal mass sacrifice saw 140 children have hearts ripped out to appease gods…

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Brutal mass sacrifice saw 140 children have hearts ripped out to appease gods

The remains of 140 children whose hearts were ripped out in a mass sacrifice have been discovered in Peru.

Dozens of boys and girls, aged between five and 14, were killed in the largest known mass sacrifice of children in The Americas.

Many had their hearts removed as part of the grisly spiritual ceremony which happened at the height of the ancient Chimu civilisation in the 15th Century.

Researchers suspect major flooding and storms caused by an El Nino weather event could have sparked a panic to appease the gods with the systematic killing – which was also the largest known llama sacrifice in the world.

The children’s skeletal remains and those of more than 200 juvenile llamas found in a 7,500-square foot area were carbon dated to around 1450.

The Huanchaquito-Las Llamas burial site is less than half a mile from the Chimu’s capital Chan Chan, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Its ancient empire controlled a 600-mile-long territory along the Pacific coast and interior valleys from the modern Peru-Ecuador border before the Incan empire took over.

The study findings come after six years of excavation work at the site from 2011 to 2016.

Study author John Verano, Professor of anthropology at Tulane University, in Louisiana, US, said: “This site opens a new chapter on the practice of child sacrifice in the ancient world.

“This archaeological discovery was a surprise to all of us – we had not seen anything like this before, and there was no suggestion from ethnohistoric sources or historic accounts of child or camelid sacrifices being made on such a scale in northern coastal Peru.

“We were fortunate to be able to completely excavate the site and to have a multidisciplinary field and laboratory team to do the excavation and preliminary analysis of the material.”

Professor Gabriel Prieto, of the National University of Trujillo in Peru, said cut marks transecting the sternums and displaced ribs suggest both the children and llamas may have had their chests cut open, possibly during ritual removal of the heart.

Human and animal sacrifices are known from a variety of ancient cultures, often performed as part of funerary, architectural, or spiritual rituals.

But very little evidence of the brutal practice is known from the northern coast of Peru.

Prof Prieto said: “In number, it greatly exceeds the known sample of Inca child sacrifices from high altitude sites in the Andes.

“It also is substantially larger than the only other mass sacrifice of children known from the New World, that of 42 children in Offering 48 at the Mexica Templo Mayor in Central Mexico.

“The presence of a thick layer of mud on top of the sand in which the children and camelids were buried, as well as the presence of human and animal footprints made while the mud was still wet, suggest that the sacrificial event occurred shortly after heavy rainfall and flooding, in an arid region that receives negligible rainfall under normal conditions.

“While the correlation between heavy rains and the sacrifice may be coincidental, it is tempting to hypothesise that the two events are associate, and that the mass offering of children and camelids may have been an attempt to appease the gods and mitigate the effects of a major El Ni o-Southern Oscillation event that occurred around 1400-1450.”

The study found the human remains were almost entirely children, and the animal remains, all juvenile, were identified as most likely llamas, but possibly alpacas.

Anatomical and genetic tests suggested the children included boys and girls between five and 14 years old, according to the findings published in the journal PLOS One.

Prof Prieto said cuts across the children and llamas’ sterna suggested they had their chests cut open to remove their hearts.

He said: “Accessing the heart by transverse sectioning of the sternum is a technique familiar to modern thoracic surgeons, and is known by various names.

“The purpose of opening the chests of the children at HLL can only be hypothesizsd, but heart removal is a likely motivation.”

The researchers now hope to study the ritual’s victims, by analysing the life histories and cultural origins of the sacrificed children.

Wednesday round-up

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Ralph Steinhardt discusses Jam v. International Finance Corporation, in which the court held that international organizations have the same immunity from lawsuits that foreign countries currently have and can therefore be sued in U.S. courts for their commercial activities, suggesting that the case “may be understood as a continuation of the effort to hold intergovernmental organizations accountable for violations of international law, without relying on their internal watchdogs.” At Law360 (subscription required), James Berger explains why “Jam effects a sea change in the legal posture of international organizations before U.S. courts.”

In an op-ed at The Daily Signal, Michael Berry maintains that “[t]he Supreme Court is the last hope for preserving the Bladensburg World War I Memorial” in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association, an establishment clause challenge to a memorial shaped like a cross on public property, and “[i]t may also be the last hope for returning the First Amendment to its original intent and meaning.” At The Harvard Law Review Blog, Luke Goodrich advocates “a historical approach” to the case that “is not only more objective and administrable than the alternatives, it is more faithful to the underlying purpose of the Religion Clauses—which is to leave religion as untouched by government power as possible.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is counsel on an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in this case.]

Briefly:

• At Constitution Daily, Lyle Denniston writes that “[t]he high-stakes fight now unfolding in the Supreme Court over the 2020 census [in Department of Commerce v. New York], testing whether everyone in America should be asked about their citizenship, is now intensifying into a major constitutional controversy.”
• At NBC News, Pete Williams looks at Iancu v. Brunetti, in which the court will consider whether a ban on the registration of “immoral” or “scandalous” trademarks that led the government to refuse to trademark a “brand name [that] was phonetically equivalent to the past tense form of the universally known f-word” violates the First Amendment.
• At SCOTUS OA, Tonja Jacobi and Matthew Sag discuss data from their recent paper on laughter at Supreme Court oral arguments, arguing that laughter can be used to predict case outcomes because “for the most part, the justices use courtroom humor intentionally and strategically.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Jonathan Metzl weighs in on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York, a challenge to New York City’s limits on transporting personal firearms that will be heard next term, arguing that the case “has implications far broader than sport shooting,” and that “[i]f the court decides against the city, New York City and other cities around the country could become far more dangerous places.”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes the justices’ frequency in the majority over time, concluding that “[w]hatever led to the past high level of consensus no longer holds quite as true.”

We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast, or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!

The post Wednesday round-up appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

The Myth of Joe Biden’s Working-Class Support

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

People always talk about Joe Biden’s special connection to the white working class, those vaunted lost voters throughout the industrial Midwest whom Democrats are desperate to get back if they want the White House again.

No one has any proof that this connection gets anyone to vote for Biden, or vote at all.

The idea that he can win white working-class votes is part of every calculation about Biden’s likely 2020 run, in public and among his inner circle. It has become automatic filler in conversations and news stories about how he’d measure up against the rest of the Democratic field and how he might perform against Donald Trump, or which states he’d put in play. It was part of why Barack Obama put him on the ticket in 2008 and how Hillary Clinton deployed him in 2016, and it defined which districts he was asked to campaign in during the 2018 midterms.

[Read: Biden’s anguished search for a path to victory]

So is he the working-class juggernaut, ready to roll over the 2020 field of candidates on the backs of union members and people scraping to get by? Maybe. No politician speaks as viscerally about the working class as Biden does, from his own experiences growing up to the causes he fought for during his decades in government.

Just go back to that August day in 2016 when, after endorsing Hillary Clinton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he took her to the house he grew up in to show her the kitchen where his grandfather used to sit and stress about finances. He was soon bounding around the neighborhood shaking hands, trying to draw people into conversations, while Clinton was left standing on his old front lawn deflecting a question about why so many in the area were supporting Trump.

Or last year, when Abby Finkenauer’s congressional campaign persuaded him to make a trip to Iowa, despite his attempts to avoid stoking presidential speculation by appearing in the state. Finkenauer insisted to his team that he could make the difference in swaying suspicious swing voters to back a Democratic woman in her late 20s (she won, narrowly).

Or maybe the idea that he’s a magnet for white working-class votes is yet another bit of conventional political wisdom that’s about to be blown apart. Beyond two previous presidential runs that barely got off the ground, he’s never run a race on his own outside Delaware, and the last competitive race he had there was his first one, when Richard Nixon was president.

“We strongly believed that he would be a help in the industrial Midwest, and we used him there a lot,” said David Axelrod, the top Obama adviser who helped bring Biden onto the ticket in 2008. Whether he was, in the end, a help in the industrial Midwest, Axelrod said, “that’s so hard to say.”

[Joe Biden: ‘We are living through a battle for the soul of this nation]’

“Watching him campaign, it does strike me that he could campaign in all 88 Ohio counties and break through with people,” said Ohio’s Democratic Party chairman, David Pepper. He added, “I think people are too quick to make a set of assumptions about one candidate and assume that others couldn’t do it.”

While Biden is a tighter demographic fit for the white working-class voters whom the Democrats want to win back, the last Democrat to comfortably win the Iowa caucuses and go on to win Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in a general election was a half-Kenyan, half-Kansan from Chicago by way of Hawaii.

Biden certainly wanted to believe on Tuesday morning that he was reaching people in their guts, looking out from the stage in the basement of a Capitol Hill hotel at the International Association of Fire Fighters union convention, which has essentially pre-endorsed him, handing out free Firefighters for Biden T-shirts to members after the speech. It was a crowd full of Run Joe Run signs and chants from a mostly white crowd. He spoke emotionally about collective bargaining, fair pay, standing up for the people who want to warp the country toward the rich, and the crowd responded.

[Steve Clemons: One last trip with Joe Biden]

“I appreciate the energy when I came up here. Save it a little longer—I may need it in a few weeks,” he said. With an introduction by his wife and a cheerleading introductory video, the event was a dry run for what a campaign announcement might be like. “Be careful what you wish for,” he said. “Be careful what you wish for.”

He’s enjoying his coquettishness, answering questions with a smile and a wave, or a little comment while taking selfies in the crowd after and saying, “We’ll announce that pretty soon.” The union’s president, Harold Schaitberger, seemed pleased after working the crowd with Biden. “His voice is more than connecting with the neighborhoods,” he said. “He really connects with the individuals.”

Schaitberger said Biden “absolutely” delivered votes for the ticket in 2008—a campaign in which Jim Messina, an aide on Obama’s 2008 campaign and his 2012 campaign manager, called Biden “a crucial touchstone for these white working-class voters in assuring them Obama was on their side and shared their values.”

Pressed to identify where those votes were, Schaitberger said, “It’s not like physically where they were; it’s like who were they.” He said he wasn’t going to get into saying there were any states Obama won that he would have lost without Biden on the ticket, and he’d never polled his members to see whether they shared his own love for Biden.

“I’ve just watched him and this for so long—maybe it’s my own personal bias. I’ve seen this, felt this, been on the trails with him. And I see how workers and people react,” Schaitberger said.

Bill Russo, a Biden spokesman who was at his side backstage and working the crowd at the firefighters’ event, said he doesn’t see the support as a question.

“Joe Biden has fought and will fight for policies that treat working people with the respect and dignity they deserve, and they in turn support him,” Russo said. “He believes there is no distinction between pursuing progressive policies and speaking to the real concerns of working people. It’s why he is able to campaign for candidates from Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania to Andrew Gillum in Florida—because working people know they can depend on Joe Biden.”

John Anzalone, a pollster who has been advising Biden on a 2020 run, pointed to a Harvard-Harris poll from last month that showed that three-quarters of people who said they’d support Biden don’t have a college education, and that he’s winning 42 percent of non-college-educated voters—as opposed to the closest runner-up, Bernie Sanders, who had 22 percent. Likewise, Anzalone noted that Biden was leading among non-college-educated voters with 30 percent in a Monmouth University poll that came out earlier in the week.

There’s no way to actually measure whether Biden has moved or motivated voters in the past, but Anzalone said he feels that the polls are a strong indication that he did.

“Biden has consistently had comfortable leads with non-college voters in public polls because he has a real connection with them,” he said. “They think he is both authentic, cares about them, and understands their lives and problems.”

One former 2016 Clinton operative remembered Biden’s numbers in Pennsylvania as being “supernaturally high,” and above anyone else’s in other battleground states as well. Of course, Clinton went on to lose Pennsylvania, as well as all the other states in which she had Biden campaign.

“Clearly that didn’t translate. But I don’t think most surrogates translate, so that’s not any evidence that he’s not effective when his name is on the ballot,” the operative said. He warned that could change, as Clinton’s own support among working-class voters changed in 2008, if and when Biden, and his record, are being attacked directly as a candidate himself.

Axelrod agreed.

“There is credence to the theory that were he the nominee that he could close off the industrial Midwest in a way that perhaps some others couldn’t. The challenge is you have to run a very long gauntlet to there,” he said. “The one thing polls can’t do is project what the world’s going to look like a year from now.”

After Controversy, Heartland to Close Four Illinois Shelters for Immigrant Youth

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Melissa Sanchez, Duaa Eldeib, and Jodi S. Cohen

Eight months after its shelters for immigrant children came under public scrutiny over allegations of abuse and lax supervision, Heartland Human Care Services says it will close four shelters in suburban Chicago and add staff, training and other resources at its remaining five facilities.

The decision, announced to employees in a memo Friday, comes as another agency, Maryville Academy, plans to open two additional shelters, including one as early as next month.

Heartland officials told ProPublica Illinois they plan to move children out of its four shelters in Des Plaines between now and the end of May. Altogether, the Des Plaines shelters can house as many as 116 children and teens; the change will cut Heartland’s total capacity under state rules a little more than 20 percent, from 512 to 396.

According to the memo, obtained by ProPublica Illinois, Heartland officials decided to shutter the Des Plaines facilities after an internal review and listening sessions with staff in the chaotic aftermath of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration crackdown. The practice separated more than 2,700 children from parents and sent them to shelters across the U.S., including 99 to Heartland shelters in Illinois.

“We began this process last summer following the challenges we all experienced as we cared for the influx of children who had been severely traumatized by the federal government’s practice of forcibly separating them from their parents at the border,” executive director David Sinski wrote in the memo.

Some of the separated children sent to the Des Plaines shelters said they were mistreated by staff and had witnessed an employee sedate an unruly young boy, allegations first reported last summer by The Washington Post. The allegations, which Heartland has denied, prompted an ongoing federal investigation, outcry from elected officials and regular protests at the shelters and even outside Heartland fundraisers.

In a statement, Heartland officials said the decision to close the Des Plaines shelters and move children to its Chicago facilities was prompted by the organization’s lease in Des Plaines ending and an effort to “align capacity” to the average number of children it has housed in recent years.

While the zero-tolerance crackdown brought new attention to Heartland’s shelter program, the problems the organization now seeks to address predate that policy.

ProPublica Illinois reported extensively on conditions inside Heartland shelters last year and found repeated problems related to lax supervision dating back years. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has found that Heartland failed to provide appropriate supervision in cases involving an employee having an alleged sexual relationship with a detained teen, children having sex in a common room and children running away during a field trip.

More than a dozen children have run away from Heartland facilities in recent years, including three teens who left a North Side shelter together last August.

A DCFS spokesman said the agency has two pending Heartland investigations, both involving Chicago shelters. ProPublica Illinois also has talked to several formerly detained children, in addition to former shelter employees, who said some shelter workers routinely threatened to slow reunification efforts when children refused to take part in daily activities.

Heartland officials have said such threats are not part of its policy.

Heartland Human Care Services, part of a larger nonprofit called Heartland Alliance, has provided shelter services for immigrant children and teens for more than two decades. But it expanded rapidly in recent years, opening the Des Plaines shelters about five years ago. Heartland’s five shelters in Chicago are in the Bronzeville, Rogers Park, Englewood and Beverly neighborhoods.

Nationwide, some 100 shelters house thousands of immigrant children and teens each year.

Heartland has long struggled with employee turnover at its shelters, and it has had particular trouble filling weekend and overnight shifts. The organization occasionally turns to temp agencies to staff its shelters. More than a dozen current and former employees have told ProPublica Illinois they felt overworked in emotionally draining jobs, as they dealt with children and teens who had often endured violence or other trauma in their home countries or on their treks to the U.S.

In the memo to staff, Sinski said closing the Des Plaines shelters would help “streamline our efforts and maximize our efficiency in providing care.” The organization plans to move all its employees from Des Plaines to parallel positions at its Chicago shelters “so we should have plenty of staff for the work we do in Chicago!”

According to the memo, shelter staff told Heartland officials that “our teams on the frontlines” would benefit from increased staffing. In response, Sinski said the organization would add 11 new positions and offer training to better prepare workers to deal with trauma.

Jesse Bless, a Boston-based attorney who has represented more than a half-dozen children in Heartland’s care in their immigration cases, said he was glad Heartland is working to improve its programs. He said the restructuring corroborates “the terrible events of last summer.”

“It is an implicit admission that there were mistakes made and inadequate attention to the care of children,” he said. “They took a look at their procedures and they are saying, ‘We need to do better.’”

As Heartland maps out the closure of some of its shelters, Maryville Academy, a Catholic child welfare agency that operates two shelters for immigrant children in Illinois, plans to expand. Maryville is working to open an all-boys shelter on its existing Des Plaines campus — on the same site where Heartland is shutting down facilities — and hopes to open an all-girls shelter at St. Alphonsus Church in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood this year.

The federal government approached the agency about increasing its capacity and has already approved opening the boys’ shelter, said Sister Catherine Ryan, Maryville’s executive director.

“What we hear from the folks at [the Office of Refugee Resettlement], what we hear from the other agencies, is that the need is so great for these dear children,” she said. “We can’t serve great numbers of them, but we want to serve the children we can.”

Experimental art project will pay you to do nothing for rest of life…

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

An experimental Swedish art project will pay you to do nothing for the rest of your life

Caption

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Imagine: For the rest of your life, you are assigned no tasks at work. You can watch movies, read books, work on creative projects or just sleep. In fact, the only thing that you have to do is clock in and out every day. Since the position is permanent, you’ll never need to worry about getting another job again.

Starting in 2026, this will be one lucky (or extremely bored) worker’s everyday reality, thanks to a government-funded conceptual art project in Gothenburg, Sweden. The employee in question will report to Korsvägen, a train station under construction in the city, and will receive a salary of about $2,320 a month in U.S. dollars, plus annual wage increases, vacation time off and a pension for retirement. While the artists behind the project won’t be taking applications until 2025, when the station will be closer to opening, a draft of the help-wanted ad is already available online, as Atlas Obscura reported on Monday.

The job’s requirements couldn’t be more simple: An employee shows up to the train station each morning and punches the time clock. That, in turn, illuminates an extra bank of fluorescent lights over the platform, letting travelers and commuters know that the otherwise functionless employee is on the job. At the end of the day, the worker returns to clock out, and the lights go off. In between, they can do whatever they want, aside from work at another paying job. They’re not even obligated to stay at the station all day long. They can quit or retire and be replaced by another worker anytime they want; otherwise, their employment is guaranteed for life. No specific qualifications are needed, and the artists overseeing the project assured Atlas Obscura that anyone in the world could apply.

“The position holds no duties or responsibilities, other than that it should be carried out at Korsvägen,” the job description states. “Whatever the employee chooses to do constitutes the work.”

Titled “Eternal Employment,” the project is both a social experiment and a serious political statement. In early 2017, Public Art Agency Sweden and the Swedish Transport Administration announced an international competition for artists interested in contributing to the new station’s design. The winner would get 7 million Swedish krona, the equivalent of around $750,000. Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby, a pair of Swedish artists whose previous work was inspired by offshore banking, entered and suggested eschewing the typical murals and sculptures that adorn most transit hubs.

Instead, they wrote, they would use the prize money to pay one worker’s salary and give them absolutely nothing to do all day.

“In the face of mass automation and artificial intelligence, the impending threat/promise is that we will all become productively superfluous,” their proposal said. “We will all be ’employed at Korsvägen,’ as it were.”

The pair also cited French economist Thomas Piketty’s theory that accumulated wealth has typically grown at a rate that outpaces increases in workers’ wages. The result, Piketty argues, is an ever-widening gap between the extremely rich and everyone else. Using that same calculation, Goldin and Senneby predicted that by creating a foundation to prevent the prize money from being taxed, then investing it in the market, they would be able to keep paying that employee’s salary for “eternity” – which they defined as 120 years.

A 2017 financial analysis conducted by Sweden’s Erik Penser Bank, which the artists submitted as part of their application, concurred. The artists had proposed paying the worker 21,600 Swedish krona a month, the equivalent of roughly $2,312, or $27,744 a year. Factoring in annual salary increases of 3.2 percent, consistent with what Sweden’s public sector employees receive, the bankers concluded that there was a 75 percent chance that the prize money would earn enough interest from being invested in an equity fund to last for 120 years or more.

“In this sense the artwork can function as a measure of our growing inequality,” Goldin and Senneby wrote.

Deeming the idea to be humorous, innovative and “an artistic expression of great quality,” the jury that had been convened to judge the competition decided to award them the prize. There was an “uproar” in Sweden in October when officials announced that Goldin and Senneby’s proposal had won, Brian Kuan Wood, a board member for the Eternal Employment foundation, wrote in the art journal e-flux, with outrage coming from politicians on all sides.

“Old Social Democrats accused them of using financial realism to mock the transcendental accomplishments of the welfare state,” he recalled. “Neoliberal ‘progressives’ accused them of wasting taxpayers’ money to stage a nostalgic return to that same welfare state.” Lars Hjälmered, a member of parliament from Gothenburg who belongs to Sweden’s center-right Moderate Party, decried the conceptual artwork as “stupidity” in the news magazine Dagens Samhälle.

In their own writing, Goldin and Senneby fully acknowledge that paying someone to show up at a train station twice a day and punch a time clock is unproductive and thoroughly worthless. That’s the idea. Many people believe that art is supposed to be useless, they point out. They also suggest that the pointless job could lead to the creation of a new idiom expressing apathy, indolence and boredom: You’re working “as though you were at Korsvägen.”

More from Morning Mix:

Bismarck, a town’s beloved crocodile with a ‘gentle soul,’ was found dead. Residents say he was shot.

Hipsters all look the same, man inadvertently confirms

Who is Alex Trebek? How a mustache and correct pronunciation created a TV legend.

The Atlantic Daily: When Parents Turn to Crime to Get Kids Into Elite Schools

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

What We’re Following

A U.S.-wide FBI probe alleges that well-to-do parents bribed their kids’ way into elite colleges. Fifty people—including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin—were charged in a scam that involved gargantuan sums of money thrown at trying to fake applicants as recruited athletes (sometimes for sports they didn’t even play) and to see through cheating on standardized tests (sometimes involving surrogate test-takers). It’s reportedly the largest admissions-cheating case prosecuted by the Department of Justice. But it’s no surprise the extent to which elite students have all sorts of other advantages in the college-admissions process, that are more legally sound. These include oft-cited “legacy admissions,” but also more veiled aspects of the process, such as college sports (at elite colleges, athletes skew heavily white, and affluent). Currently no students have been charged in the probe. Kids, perhaps, are the ones who suffer most from the intense frenzy over getting into elite colleges.

Parliament, for the second time this year, rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan, two weeks before Britain’s scheduled exit. If no plan falls into place before March 29, the country will be forced to deal with food and medicine shortages, trouble with international travel, and a sagging economy. That apocalyptic scenario could make postponing that deadline likelier than ever, but such a move would require the unanimous consent of the EU’s 27 other members (the group seems to be willing to grant an extension in cases such as a second referendum or finalizing an already agreed-upon deal). May is in a bind, but that doesn’t mean she’ll abandon the Brexiteers in her political party.

President Donald Trump’s critics might be getting their hopes up too high for Robert Mueller’s final document. There’s no assurance that, when the special counsel’s Russia investigation really wraps, some Kenneth Starr-esque narrative report will be released to the public, detailing the the president’s malfeasance: “If my thesis about Mueller is right, then that’s just not happening,” said a former senior counsel on the Whitewater investigation. But the public won’t lack information on how to judge the Russia ties of Trump and his orbit: Mueller’s carefully crafted indictments are chock full of information on precisely that.

—Saahil Desai

Evening Reads

(Katie Martin / The Atlantic)

Whenever Amanda Mull felt the early pangs of a cold coming on, her dog Midge already seemed to be two steps ahead. Can dogs really sense their humans’ malaise?

“Researchers have also found that a person’s mood, which can be an indicator of a larger illness, triggers a dog’s sense of smell. Human emotions manifest physically in chemosignals that are emitted by the body, and dogs are adept at deciphering those changes.

Beyond smell, dogs also pull information from a person’s voice in order to sense changes. In 2014, researchers discovered that dogs have an area of the brain, similar to one found in humans, that allows them to decipher emotional cues in the tone of a speaker’s voice, beyond what they’d be able to pick up from familiar words alone. That’s why Midge wags her little tail when I excitedly ask her if she’s my boo boo, even though she doesn’t know what that is. (To be fair, neither do I.) A person’s voice can also carry indicators of depression, lethargy, or other bad feelings.”

→ Read the rest

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You Told Us

The world produces about 10 tons of plastic every second, and much of what people assume to be recyclable isn’t. China has limited what materials it will accept from the U.S. What’s tossed is often too contaminated to sort (recyclables mixed with greasy pizza boxes and clothes hangers) or too flimsy to recycle (those plastic clamshells that most supermarket berries come in).

Last week, we asked whether you’d changed your consumption behaviors, or implemented any plastic-saving habits:

Penny McFarline, of Richmond, Va. wrote: “One of the ways I reduce plastic is to keep, clean, and reuse glass jars. I pack fruit and cut-up veggies in them for snacks at work. I freeze leftovers in them. I use them for storing bulk spices. They make decent vases and containers for homemade pickles, jams, sauces, etc. I am determined not to purchase any more plastic containers for food storage.”

Patricia Hale, of Tucson, Ariz. wrote: “I only use stainless-steel straws. I give sets of them to my friends for gifts. I also never use plastic bags. I carry my own bags in my car and in my purse. My governor prevented Arizona cities from banning plastic bags, so I send him pictures of plastic bags stuck to cactus.”

→ Here’s more of what readers had to say about cutting down on plastics

Urban Developments

Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing urban dwellers around the world. Claire Tran shares today’s top stories:

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus art school. Our week-long series will explore the movement’s history and how its designs continue to impact today’s world.

The majority of New Yorkers without bank accounts are people of color. That’s why New York is looking to ban cashless businesses for civil rights violations.

Pedestrians fatalities are rising sharply as Americans are spending more time behind the wheel. And self-driving technology isn’t likely to be the fix we need.

Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Subscribe to the CityLab Daily newsletter.

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