2 readings: Joseph Stiglitz, “Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society”

Karen Ho, “Biographies of Hegemony”

In “Rent Seeking and theMaking of an Unequal Society,” economic analyst Joseph Stiglitz argues that“[o]ur political system has increasingly been working in ways that increase theinequality of outcomes and reduce the equality of opportunity” (396). Thissystem “gives inordinate power to those at the top,” who “have used that powernot only to limit the extent of redistribution [of wealth and opportunity] butalso to shape the rules of the game in their favor, and to extract from thepublic what can only be called large ‘gifts’” (Stiglitz 396). In “Biographiesof Hegemony,” anthropologist Karen Ho writes, “The building blocks of dominantcapitalist practices are also personal and cultural; people’s experiences,their university and career tracking, are constitutive of capitalist hegemony;and the financial is cultural through and through” (168). To help us arrive ata more layered and complex understanding of how inequality is both created andperpetuated in the U.S., synthesize Stiglitz’s economic and political analysis of“rent seeking” with Ho’s “personal and cultural” approach to elitism as youanswer the following question: In what ways might the ideology of“smartness” that Ho discusses help to create and sustain a culture of “rentseeking”?

Required formatting: stapled, double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-pt. font (Times New Roman)

one introduction paragraph and three body paragraphs, do not need to write the conclusion paragraph.