How Music Helped James Baldwin Make Sense of Inequality

What can music offer to economists? Ed Pavlić, Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia, explains how music offered a powerful lyrical companion to the social scientific tools used by the great midcentury critic of American society, James Baldwin.
Referring to his book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener, Pavlić discusses Baldwin’s immersion in the performative tradition in African American music, which could communicate harsh social and economic realities into a relatable and transportable form. Baldwin was not the only prominent black thinker who engaged with music: Frederick Douglass studied slave work songs that, in Pavlić’s words, captured “tactical survival, tactical rebellion.”

[@patricklongstreth]

Beautiful discussion. I can't wait to read the book.

[@smartiepancake]

Inequality: completely explained by Henry George, yet endlessly discussed today like it was some kind of puzzle.

[@mp517q]

D Bruce you even watch the video?

[@smartiepancake]

I did - it's not about inequality at all is it. I'm responding to the title.
Come to think of it I do find it irksome that so many people are harping on about inequality and injustice these days but 0% of them talk about the single tax. I call that not doing your job properly. We do have a solution for inequality, but we don't talk about it, even now. Georgism makes spectacular claims - that it would end the boom bust, moderate real estate prices permanently, raise wages and employment, stimulate entrepreneurship, shrink the parasitic parts of the economy, price the environment correctly, shrink bureaucracy, shrink the cost of government, end the main driver of inequality, improve the urban environment, optimise land use in general .... all that by tweaking the bureaucracy - there's so much there to talk about.

[@jesuswesleyramirez4165]

@@smartiepancake true

[@johntravena119]

Sony’s Blues

[@djalead.7301]

To call Dubois simply a "writer" is an insult to one of the most eminent sociologists (some say one of the first) and scholars in American history. The book does seem a remarkable and important one including a great writer and activist, J. Baldwin, along with other eminent African Americans (e.g., Douglass). The theme of music and the struggle for Black liberation is an important and stimulating one. I will definitely read this book.

[@mountainlinx]

A Lover’s Question, my recording with James Baldwin, you don’t talk about?!?!?!??

[@um4341]

have you talked or written about it somewhere? I am doing a research on it and would be helpful! :D

[@guymella]

well this has nothing to do with inequality... or economics.

[@jesuswesleyramirez4165]

Then you got nothing to do with openess... or the future

[@roc7880]

@@jesuswesleyramirez4165 I beg to differ. I think that the reason we did not win the war on poverty is the fact that we narrowed the issue to wages, hourly rate, taxes, and economics. Poverty is more than lack of money, it becomes a state of mind. When a community becomes destitute and poor acroos generations, simply giving money or jobs will never solve the problem, or at least immediately. This kind of scholarship is what is needed to fill our information gap.