Assignments

There are three written assignments for the course. They are each described below.

First Writing Assignment
- A 5–7 page paper worth 20% of your grade. This paper will be on an assigned topic and will analyze various theoretical frameworks used to understand capitalism.
Second Writing Assignment
- A second 5–7 page paper is worth 20% of the grade.
Final Writing Assignment
- The final written assignment is a 10 page research paper on a topic of your choosing that relates to the 2008 financial crisis. The paper is worth 40% of your final grade. Each student will also give a brief 10 minute presentation on his or her final paper topic in class and then lead class discussion for 5 minutes. The oral presentation and participation in class discussion will count for 20% of your grade.

Writing Resources

Students in this course worked with tutors from the MIT Writing Center. These resources may help you in your own writing. Both documents are courtesy of Diane Hendrix.

Please write a 10 page (double-spaced) essay on some aspect of the financial crisis of 2008. Some possible topics are listed below, but feel free to choose your own topic/focus. For whichever topic you choose, consider yourself an anthropologist/ethnographer. Although you won’t be able to conduct fieldwork on the topic, try to think about the social dimensions of the problem at hand and try to locate information that helps elucidate those questions. If a topic is one that is heavily debated, consider some of the following questions:

What is the range of actors involved in this issue?
How are they positioned in relation to each other in social, economic, or political terms?
Why do they take different positions on this issue? and what is at stake for them?
What ideas or moral and ethical arguments do they make/offer on behalf of their position?
What economic or policy-oriented arguments?

If the topic is more exploring a particular issue or dimension of an issue rather than competing viewpoints, different questions might be appropriate. Try to go beyond just the “ideas” to consider why such ideas are compelling for particular categories of people. What is going on in social and economic terms that cause such ideas to have wider salience?

In addition to analyzing the viewpoints of various actors in your paper (including an attempt to make sense of the social, economic, and moral logics at work for those actors even if one disagrees with their viewpoints), your thesis should encompass your own perspective on the issue that emerges from what you have learned in writing the paper and which may also link back to some of the broader discussions/debates we have had in class about how to understand the nature of capitalism.

In your paper, you must cite two to three of the class readings from the last section of the class, perhaps in a discussion of the overall dimensions of the financial crisis. (If your topic is such that it doesn’t make sense to cite these particular readings and you would like to substitute others, you must confer with the writing tutor or the professor).

In addition to readings cited from class, you will be expected to cite 4–5 other sources offering competing viewpoints on the topic and based on respected sources where you know where the information is coming from. These should include academic works but may also include media pieces, particularly for topics that have happened too recently to be thoroughly explored in the academic literature.

Cite works that offers different perspectives on a topic. (For example, if you cite media articles, perhaps pair the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; the Economist and the New York Review of Books; or the Weekly Standard and the Nation).

In citing academic work, also include different perspectives or disciplinary orientations. The professor can offer help in suggesting relevant academic work. Although you may reference different disciplines, keep in mind that the orientation of this paper is primarily a social scientific one that focuses on social analysis rather than statistical or policy analysis.

Each student will be required to meet with the course writing tutor for feedback on his/her draft as it is developed. Due dates for the paper topic, draft, and final paper are in the Calendar section.

Possible Topics:

The shareholder value revolution on wall street
Occupy wall street
The tea party
Executive pay
The mortgage crisis
SAC Capital
The social implications of growing inequality
The impact of the financial crisis on Europe
The impact of the crisis on local and state governments
The use of new media in activist movements responding to the crisis (whether tea party or occupy wall street)
An analysis of 3–4 movies made about the crisis (for example, margin call; inside job; too big to fail; frontline’s “the warning”; the queen of Versailles)
Debates over regulation of new financial instruments like CDOs and credit default swaps
The cultural world of everyday life on Wall St.

Please answer one of the following essay questions. In doing so, please offer detailed discussion based on close analysis of the readings for the class. The length of the paper should be 5–7 pages double-spaced.

1. Choose any three of the following theorists and compare their viewpoints on capitalism. How did each understand the nature of capitalism and its implications for society? On what basis did they offer their views? How and in what ways did their perspectives parallel or differ from the other two?

You might want to consider how particular historical influences came into play or whether they were in dialogue with or reacting against each other. Which arguments do you find most persuasive and why?

You may choose three of any of the following theorists:

Adam Smith
Karl Marx
Max Weber
Pierre Bourdieu
Laclau and Mouffe (you may count them as one since they write together)

2. In the 1940s, the work of Austrian economist F. A. Hayek and Austrian economic historian Karl Polanyi emerged out of the maelstrom of two world wars and attempted to address the question of whether or not capitalism was beneficial to society overall. (For Hayek, this question was linked to questions of individualism). In your paper, describe the viewpoints of these two theorists on capitalism. How and why did they see capitalism as either supportive or destructive of social relations? On what did they base their opposing viewpoints? In your view, who offers the more and less persuasive arguments about capitalism and why?

Answer one of the following two questions. Essays should be 5–7 pages double-spaced.

1. Within debates over capitalism, one longstanding argument concerns the nature of social class. While in classic Marxist conceptualizations, class is defined by a person’s position within the economic relations of production (i.e. as capitalists who own the means of production or the proletariat who works for them), other scholars have broadened this focus.

How do Sherry Ortner and Julie Bettie understand social class in ways that differ from this classic formulation?
In their view, how do class differences relate to other kinds of differences such as race/ethnicity and gender?
Why might it be important to explore class formation in places like schools that are outside of people’s work experiences?

Explore these questions through a discussion of the different class experiences of working class and middle class white and Mexican-American girls that Julie Bettie worked with at a high school in Central California. What do you find useful—or potentially less useful—in this kind of social scientific research on social class?

2. Understandings of social class also need to consider the experiences of those who are relatively well off. While Ortner and Bettie consider working class experiences in relation to middle class ones, Nelson Aldrich and Karyn Lacy consider the experiences of the wealthy and upper middle class in relation to the middle class.

According to Nelson Aldrich, what are some of the cultural attitudes that Old Money East Coast elites exhibit towards things like work, education, money, possessions, family, taste, and history in contrast to what they view as the striving middle class “market man”?
How do such attitudes differ from or parallel those of upper middle class African-Americans studied by Lacy in the Washington D.C. suburbs and who in turn hold different viewpoints from more middle or lower middle class African-Americans in that region?
In both sets of readings, how are such class experiences cross-cut by issues of race (whether acknowledged or not)?
In your view, what insights about social class emerge from discussions of wealthy or upper-middle class groups and why might such insights be useful in understanding class more broadly?

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What is Capitalism?