Phenomenal World in the Financial Times

We are grateful to Financial Times Alphaville for including Andrew Elrod’s interview with Gabe Winant, “Where Americans Work,” as recommended reading.

From the interview:

Typically the way payment manifests as a political issue is in terms of whether a political coalition can find a way to attach a subsidy to demand somewhere. On the left, we often think what we would like to do would be to take more direct control over supply, like in the public education example—and directly politicize the conditions of supply. In the absence of the political power to accomplish that, the kind of partial measure that winds up coming on the table is a subsidy—a subsidization of demand for a service supplied by some market or quasi-market institution. That’s a very politically convenient mechanism because it brings some suppliers, service providers, and clients onto the same side.