Many thoughtful people in the US are concerned about the effects that the 2025 federal budget reconciliation law will have on poor people in many states who are currently enrolled in Medicaid health coverage. KFF has put together a comprehensive analysis of the implications of this omnibus act for Medicaid patients here. I asked Gemini for a summary … Continue reading "The consequences of a trillion dollars"| Understanding Society
Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. Artist Gustave Caillebotte. A current exhibition of the paintings of Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) at the Art Institute in Chicago is quite remarkable. It demonstra…| Understanding Society
1 post published by Daniel Little during August 2025| Understanding Society
Chicago is a highly diverse city, and it is a good example of life in a multicultural democracy. The image above is a photo of the crowd on Navy Pier on a recent Saturday summer evening. According …| Understanding Society
Science proceeds through research communities whose participants share important and often distinctive features of thought and method. This is one of the key insights of the “historical turn” in the philosophy of science initiated in the 1970s (link, link), and it underlies much work within the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies. But what … Continue reading "Ethnography of high-energy physics"| Understanding Society
Historical research may seem to be a field in which AI tools will be especially useful. Historians are often confronted with very large unstructured digital collections of documents, letters, image…| Understanding Society
A prior post made an effort to gain greater analytical clarity concerning the unfairness involved in the separation between the “one percent” economy and the rest of us. In what ways is the wealth owned by the super-billionaires an “unfair” extraction from the rest of US society? How can we account for the very rapid … Continue reading "Stock ownership as system-wide exploitation?"| Understanding Society
Much thinking about economic justice for working people has been framed by the nineteenth-century concept of “capitalism”: owners of enterprises constitute a minority of the population; they hire w…| Understanding Society
Philip Pettit’s writings about republicanism offer a valuable and distinctive perspective on individual freedom and the nature of a good society. He develops those ideas most fully in Republicanism : a theory of freedom and government. Pettit’s core idea is that we should conceive of freedom as “non-domination” — that is, that an individual is … Continue reading "Republicanism and multicultural democracy"| Understanding Society
In his influential article “A definition of physicalism” (1993) Philip Pettit attempts to formulate a consistent and coherent account of physicalism as an ontology of the world. I belie…| Understanding Society
The current war on DEI has proven to be unrelenting and highly destructive to the independence, academic freedom, and inclusiveness of American universities. And yet the values that gave rise to DE…| Understanding Society
