Join 📚Jof’S Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
Language helps us to understand our observations and organise them into categories, and material realities spring up from those uses of language.
Arguing for a Better World
Arianne Shahvisi
the promise that growth will bring prosperity to all is still sold by transnational agencies such as the World Bank, and by national governments. It also forms a centrepiece of people’s hope for a better life if not for themselves, then for their children. The world over people invest in education, migrate to find work, and despise idleness because they see work and education as the route to making a better future for their families. They buy into a story of progress which suggests that through their own diligence and skill, and sometimes with entrepreneurship, a better future will come. Economic growth linked to progress is a hopeful, sometimes utopic narrative to which a great many people are fervently attached; they elect to make, or are forced to endure, huge sacrifices in its name.
After Development: Surplus Population and the Politics of Entitlement
Tania Murray Li
Governments that obfuscate their role in human rights abuses are often excused from having to answer for egregious actions, while national mythmaking also fuels elite ignorance at the academic level, because mythologized understanding of a nation’s past comes to be slowly misperceived as factual reality, leading to misinformed policy solutions. A good example is the belief that the British state was largely uninvolved in building or regulating economic markets during the 19th century.
The Unknowers
Linsey McGoey
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