What We're Reading: Ellen Messer-Davidow

The Chair of the Department of English has assigned the Affordable Care Act as required reading. Her department classes have titles such as "Probing the Social Text," "Civil Rights Discourse," and "Consumer Culture." In her research, Professor Messer-Davidow explores how one phenomenon is explained differently by different parties, from scholars and activists to lawmakers, the media, and the public. You might say the world is her text, along with such soundings as Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century--and a thriller or two.


Professor Ellen Messer-Davidow writes about 20th-century American social movements, disciplinary and interdisciplinary forms of knowledge production, and certain areas of public policy and law. She's working on a book about the first two cases to reach the U.S. Supreme Court challenging race-conscious admissions programs at law and medical schools. Whenever her energy level plunges, usually early evening, she reads mass-market thrillers and heavy-duty scholarship. On the thriller side, she likes David Baldacci's black ops stories, Sara Paretsky's adventures of Chicago detective V. I. Warshawski, and Laurie King's series about the semi-retired Sherlock Holmes and his young protégé/wife Mary Russell. On the scholarly side, she trolls the humanities and social sciences for "big ideas" books.

What are you reading, Professor Messer-Davidow?
For several years I've been teaching an undergraduate course called "America in Crisis" that examines our economic problems--unemployment and low-wage work, income and wealth gaps, inequalities in K-12 schools, personal and public debt, and the near-collapse of the economy in 2008. This summer, I purchased a (very expensive!) hardcover copy of Thomas Pikkety's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. This literally weighty tome of almost 700 pages created a big stir this year in economics circles and the public sector in large part because Pikkety, regarded as the world's leading expert on income and wealth inequality, integrates conventional disciplinary methods (quantitative analysis and abstract modeling) with heavy qualitative doses of the history, theory, and explanation of economic trends from the 18th century to the present. Focusing mainly on Western countries, he explains the nature and consequences of the split between capital and labor, the modulations of capital over time (from the Industrial Revolution to globalization), the forces that produced economic inequalities, and the structures of individual and national inequality in various systems. In the last section of the book he offers recommendations on currently hot topics--for instance, how to modernize the social state; tax income, wealth, and profits; reduce public debt; regulate the financial, industrial, and business sectors; and achieve a democratic and transparent economy. His conclusion is not to dismantle the state or jettison capitalism but to rein in a rate of return on capital that has so far surpassed the rate of income and output growth as to pauperize peoples and countries. Although any 700-page book would be hard-going, Pikkety uses almost conversational prose to create a reader-friendly journey through one of the most important and expansive issues of our time.