Fried-days

Thursdays are seriously a killer. It starts at 8:30am with an hour and a half lecture on building systems, then an hour later, I'm off to urban books for another hour and a half. Then there's this odd break for a few hours which gives me time to get downtown to SLU where my urban issues class is, and then it's another two hours of class. Classes end and I try to wrangle a ride back to campus from the other Wash U students, and then its another several hours of studio before I finally collapse on my desk and attempt to use public transit to get back home. So friday's I'm pretty fried. I don't really have much to show for studio's desk crit since really, I've only had about 8 hours to work on it.

Got a super political lecture today in urban issues- the speaker was describing Adam Smith's original conception of a free market economy as occuring in an equal playing field and in a closed system. In reality, we do not have an equal playing field. There are those who have power to set the rules of the game, and the leverage to make the game work for them, and there are those who tend to get shafted since that's kind of the outcome that the rule makers want. In democracy, politics is the method by which the equation of power is rewritten. However, in recent history, there has been a tenancy for de-politicization. People don't use the dialogue of politics, and the speakers' point was that anymore, everyone from the middle class down has become blind to the nature of the 'game' and their own disadvantaged position within it. He also reiterated a point I heard a few days before in a very different lecture and context, that most situations in life, like poverty, are made conditions. They're not resultants, they're not byproducts, they were designed. It's a very strong statement. Some agent or group of agents, has acted and made decisions that systematically disenfranchise and impoverish. It's not a shadowy cabal conspiracy, its part of the game that someone has designed.

 I don't know enough about economics to argue the merits of the position that there must always be poverty. I was under the assumption that the free market seeks an equilibrium, and the fact that the gap between the rich and poor has drastically increased, and that we have enduring poverty, and enduring wealth, makes me think, well, we're definitively not reaching equilibrium here.