There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

Hill asserts that we don’t need to “build back better” as President Joe Biden’s campaign slogan suggested, but to “build forward together” (286). America’s political divisions are the greatest threat to democracy because they allow foreign actors, like Russia, to exploit weak points and turn citizens against each other. Major demographic shifts, coupled with the lack of opportunity, make frustrated people blame anyone they perceive as other while clinging to what they know. Trump played on this cultural tendency to polarize the country further. Now, the inability of the US to deal with problems at home has made it an even weaker player abroad.

Hill calls out several accelerants of national divisions. COVID-19 had terrible economic impacts, making the poorest even poorer and enriching the ultra-wealthy. Algorithms further drive bias and create cycles of poverty. For instance, the UK Ofqual’s standardized statistical model, which was supposed to make A-level test scores (comparable to AP exams in the US) fair during COVID-19, instead based final scores on data sets that skewed in favor of privileged children who attended private schools and penalized students from lower income areas. The UK had to rescind this algorithm’s results due to protests.