News

“Despite the persistent myth that Silicon Valley was built by rogue engineers in Palo Alto garages, federal funding — especially from the military — has long been the real developmental engine of the American technology sector,” writes Assistant Professor of History Jeannette Estruth for The Drift. Estruth traces the history of Silicon Valley and its innovations, both software and hardware, outlining the longstanding partnerships between the technology sector and the federal government. “High tech’s value has long been in producing war-making technology for the federal government,” Estruth writes, a relationship that, she argues, has historically gone both ways. With public criticism of “Big Tech” on the rise, “the public is falling out of love” with Silicon Valley and its ilk. The question now, she writes, is “whether Washington could be persuaded to do the same.”

Ian Masters spoke with Pavlina Tcherneva, associate professor of economics at Bard College, research associate at the Levy Economics Institute, and author of The Case for a Job Guarantee (2020), on his nationally syndicated radio program Background Briefing. In the episode, “As Pundits Warn of Recession and Inflation, We Get the Best Economic News Since 1969,” Masters asks Tcherneva for her take on the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report, which added 517,000 jobs in January 2023 and stunned most economists and people who continue to harbor a doomsday mentality about the economy.

According to Tcherneva, two years after the COVID-induced crisis, such good news about low unemployment levels tells us that “public policy has tools. It can act boldly, quickly and bring jobs back.” She points out, however, that these low unemployment numbers also reflect the 5.7 million people who are not looking for work, and 4 million people who are working part-time but would like to have full-time jobs.

“Part of the anxiety still being experienced in the labor market is that the jobs are there but they are not exactly these well-paying jobs with very good benefits and good working conditions. On that front, there is more to be accomplished. Let us remember our minimum wage is still $7.25, and no one can live on $7.25 an hour,” she asserts.

Tcherneva sees the big fiscal policies implemented over the last two years by the Biden administration, which do not overly focus on the financial sector or prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy, as all good news. Still, she advocates for more economic progress. “The question for me is did we come out of the pandemic with better jobs, better conditions for working families than we had going into the pandemic?”

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Sucharita Kanjilal as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2023-24 academic year.
 
Sucharita Kanjilal is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a former journalist from Mumbai, India. Her dissertation project, Home Chefs: Indian Housewives Produce for the Global Creator Economy, examines the entanglements of gender, race, caste and religious nationalism in the growth of global digital capitalism, through an ethnographic study of food media producers in India.
 
Kanjilal’s research combines approaches from economic anthropology, anthropology of media, digital anthropology, anthropology of food, and theories of affect, while highlighting feminist, postcolonial, and anti-caste epistemologies. Her work has appeared in Gastronomica, the Routledge Companion on Caste and Cinema in India, Feminist Media Studies (forthcoming), Scroll.in, Quartz.com, Hindustan Times, and the Heritage Radio Network and Eat This podcasts. She is the recipient of several grants and awards, including from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, the Association for the Study of Food and Society, the UCLA International Institute and the Sambhi Foundation at UCLA.

A diplomatic dispute over an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon seen over Montana echoes a similar Cold War event, writes Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, for the Washington Post. In the U-2 crisis of 1960, an American spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, reversing years of progress in relations between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. “Lessons from that crisis tell us two things,” writes Aldous. “That unexpected events can destroy years of diplomatic effort; and that the Chinese are likely now scrambling in a panic to get their story straight.” In a statement analogous to China’s current response, NASA had claimed that the plane was used for weather research and gone off course, which Eisenhower was obliged to renounce when he later took responsibility for the spy planes used for information gathering. “The concern about the historical parallel with 1960,” Aldous continues, “Is that the U-2 crisis marked the beginning of one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War.”