Sublime

changing economic circumstances—declining real wages and increased uncertainty about employment stability and opportunities—created a context in which constant self-improvement is suggested as the only reliable insurance against economic insecurity.

“Easiest job in America,” we were told.

My main criticism is that Butler spends too much time with what I consider to be weaker views (e.g., the Pope), and not enough time with the more difficult problems concerning real and potential harms to children. Her neglect of the latter verges on the intellectually criminally negligent.

The invention of ‘childhood’ and the regulation of what work ‘children’ could do only came fifteen hundred years later and is still a peculiarly Western preoccupation.