In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
by
Stephen Macedo
and
Frances Lee
Published 10 Mar 2025
According to the authors of the Declaration, lockdowns were themselves just a form of focused protection for professional and managerial workers, a “luxury of the laptop class.”17 The costs of enforced quarantines w ere easy to discount for t hose able to work from home; order food, wine, and medicine online; count on the maintenance of our utilities and internet; and even upgrade our home furnishings and appliances. All these activities were only ever possible because other, less privileged p eople w ere exposing themselves daily to the virus and doing all the in-person work that was necessary to make the laptop class comfortable. Debate about this particular distribution of costs and benefits was surprisingly truncated.
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Despite the vast scale of the Covid response, no policies were enacted to protect 14 chapter 1 essential workers at elevated risk from Covid.31 While white-collar workers quarantined at home at full pay and laid-off nonessential workers of all health statuses received generous unemployment benefits, essential workers—often poorly paid and receiving no fringe benefits—were required to continue on the job regardless of their personal risk. Such workers rarely even received hazard pay. As one might expect, they and their family members were substantially more likely to get infected.32 It was striking how little attention or discussion these inequities received during the pandemic. Members of the “laptop class”—adult knowledge workers and others able to work remotely—typically coped adequately with or even thrived amid pandemic restrictions. The wealthy saw their bank accounts, home values, and investment accounts grow. The poor experienced economic and educational setbacks during the pandemic and then had to endure protracted high inflation downstream of pandemic policies.
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Leaders such as Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York went as far as seeming to boast about considering only one metric: lives saved by interventions. It was well-known from prepandemic plans that the interventions would also cost lives and damage the basic well-being of young p eople and the poor especially. The interventions most benefited t hose who made them: mature and well- off members of the “laptop class.” Among t hose who bore a disproportionate burden w ere the 30 or 40 percent of workers deemed essential. Women bore more of a burden than men. A tremendous cost was imposed on young p eople, who were quarantined and isolated for the sake of protecting the elderly and vulnerable, despite being at very low risk from the pathogen themselves.
The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
by
Susan Pinker
Published 30 Sep 2013
After a year he wanted out. The school administration, anxious to prove that the pilot program was working, wouldn’t allow it. So committed were they to their experimental laptop program that they wanted empirical proof that it worked, no matter what. They got it by keeping the highest-performing students in the laptop class, sometimes against their will. The interesting question is why otherwise exacting parents and school administrators have fallen so hard for classroom technology. In his book When Can You Trust the Experts? psychologist Daniel Willingham uses research in cognitive science to debunk sacred cows in education.
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For example, a selection of schools participating in the state of Maine’s universal laptop program for seventh- to ninth-graders showed that after their laptops arrived, the older kids’ writing improved, as did some of the students’ math skills—as long as their teachers had received “a well-designed and executed professional development program.”59 The training program beefed up the teachers’ knowledge of math with face-to-face and online workshops, targeted their classroom practices to improve their teaching skills, provided “professional learning communities” of other math teachers so they could mentor each other, and finally, helped them integrate the new technology into their teaching. If experimental laptop-class teachers participated in such training for two years, their students’ math scores improved slightly more than the control group’s did (the experimental group improved by 22 percent while the control group improved by 20 percent). Any teacher who gets all that extra training should get better at her craft, laptops or no laptops.
The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians
by
Denise Hearn
and
Vass Bednar
Published 14 Oct 2024
After what must have seemed like an eternity spent scrambling to support his sole sibling, Gregg and his family solemnly said their goodbyes at a nearby hospital. The Rogers outage lasted for several hours and impacted more than 12 million Canadians on a summer Friday in July of 2022. For some, the outage was a nuisance that prevented them from responding to a work email or making a phone call. Downtown coffee shops were swarmed as the laptop class sought Wi-Fi. Small businesses that used the popular payment processor Interac, which relied on Rogers, lost thousands of dollars.2 For others, the outage had grave consequences. Reflecting on the ordeal his family endured during the outage, Shane Eby said: “It’s not just about an economic transaction.
Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
by
Zoë Schiffer
Published 13 Feb 2024
That is a priority. We can’t scale to one billion users and take massive losses along the way. That’s not feasible.” Then he launched into a diatribe against remote work. The pushback he was getting seemed ridiculous. If people building cars and serving food couldn’t work from home, why should the laptop class get to do so? “Let me be crystal clear,” he said. “If people do not return to the office when they are able to return to the office, they cannot remain at the company. End of story . . . Basically, if you can show up in an office and you do not show up at the office, resignation accepted. End of story.”