Educated Fools
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
Its main idea is "the loss of social standing, social claims, the social assets that working people used to have, because, in our time, education is so much more decisive".
He details joining a friend of his with a high school education to lunch. He soon recognizes that they jumped a guardrail of sorts in how she was baffled by this fancy world created by elites caught in the microcosm of a gourmet Italian sandwich shop. He reads into the encounter pretty deeply, but backs up a bunch of other elite practices that make elite culture out of reach. It's a pretty interesting read.
Pretty shocking to read this Educated Fools piece where the author basically admits to what are more commonly called unintended consequences.
The authors bit about Trump embracing the poorly educated is interesting. It jibes with something I read once but can't find the source at the moment. It had something to do with his frequent dealings with construction workers and going out to speak and meet the people crafting his buildings. He as a developer supposedly developed a rapport and respect from those working class folks. Also being a landlord in his early days dealing with poor folk. I think I heard about that in this Japanese documentary bit https://youtu.be/rwNTjlEpJD0?t=443. Kind of interesting to see a Japanese perspective on the guy and how they craft stories. His crazy dealings with professional wrestling too and all that gaudy raucousness also intersects with that other class of people. Seems like its not a recent foray for him, he's been engaging with folks in other classes for sometime by the looks of it. That's probably something that went unnoticed for a long time till folks started to scrutinize what the heck happened.
The point made about Trump expressing a liking for poorly educated folk is also noteworthy. Even if the more sensible in the political class come to acknowledge the paradox we face, the matter of articulating and expressing it appropriately arises. Currently, as the author notes, the "college for all" approach doesn't appear to be resonating electorally (that said, there are a number of confounding factors one could put forth) but rather is serving as a reminder to the once robust (perhaps this is romantic nostalgia) working- and lower-middle-classes of their lowered social standing and relational dignity.
Update: I have found a presentation of the relativistic perspective on poverty by Sen (1983). Apologies for the earlier bit, that was laziness on my part. Worth a read.
https://are.berkeley.edu/courses/ARE251/fall2008/Papers/sen8...
Poverty is the kind of thing you can fix within the current system, or at least make attempts to alleviate. Exploitation and domination are not, which is why you will never hear an elected official talk about it as a systematic issue inherent to the current system - if they knew about the literature on the topic, they'd know they're powerless to do anything about it.
Maybe I am being one of those dastardly, snobbish, grating coastal elites. But if you don't like me and my solutions, what else is there? There is literally nothing I could suggest to help the lower class which can't be construed as "just be more like me".
If they got their way, they’d have to do all the stuff they look down on other people for being competent at. But I don’t think they want them to do these things, they just want a way to either prop themselves up, or keep other people down.
The family growing up in "shitty neighborhood" likely means that kids are growing up seeing a lot of alcoholism or drug taking and so on and in them being in higher risk to internalizing that regardless of what parents do.
There are many people willing to do these jobs and not enough of these jobs - meaning people get overworked, mistreated and not much paid. There is this romantic idea of idyllic work-class families happy driving trucks that seem to ignore economic and physical realities of their situation.
The unions themselves grew fat and some of them corrupt, but cleaning that up discarded the baby along with the dirty bath water.
And if you go to any large company, you'll find that it's the same there unless you're in the upper "employee" caste--you're working for a contractor company, and have the same bad deal.
For all the discussion of diversity, any pathway out is pretty much closed. Even if you're in a historically disadvantaged group, the large company doesn't want to set a precedent that would establish the contractor group as employees. So the large company will block training and advancement, extracurricular networking opportunities, etc.
And historically disadvantaged minorities will be overrepresented in the contractor group because of both economic and educational disadvantage.
And to throw salt on it, arbitration agreements that you are forced to sign to work will preclude you using a class action suit to try to fix it, like Microsoft's testing group did in the 1990s. (Thank you Roberts court.)
Here: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Waste-Management-1/reviews?fcount...
This gets compounded because nicer streets also lobby for school bus stops central to them, which leads to even more dollars being spent there.
Last of all, if too little is being done on the roads then the neighbors on a nice street pool their money and privately fix the road themselves.
"Go to college" or "just move" is very much the modern "let them eat cake" it is a complete and utter failure to understand the dire position that the Other is in. Likewise, the problem is not one of convenience, having no bread and so resorting to cake, but of necessity of life, working without receiving a wage that one can live on.
Teddy Roosevelt's New Nationalism speech is alluded to in the article but I feel like its spirit is not reflected in the writing. I would recommend reading the speech itself rather than the article about the speech that is linked to. The warnings and predictions it contains are very applicable to the times we are living through. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/12/06/archive...
This strikes me as a perfect example of [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_principle
> Maybe I am being one of those dastardly, snobbish, grating coastal elites.
You absolutely are. The use of the words "lower class" in your post is a perfect proof of that.
The overriding divide in today's politics is between those that benefit from immigration and outsourcing and those that are harmed by it. Those that benefit say "be more like us" so that you too can benefit. Those that are harmed say change the system so that we are not harmed.
I'd like to broaden this position a bit before laying out the alternative. I think the philosophy here (which I largely share) is that "if what you're doing isn't working, try something else".
Get educated, sure, but also think about moving for opportunities. See what's working for other people, and make it work for you. If your town's coal mine is shutting down, don't tell your kid to be a coal miner -- change something.
Funnily enough, this is an old-fashioned value on both the left and the right, even though it doesn't sound "conservative". It stresses drive and personal responsibility. It's a founding American value -- come to America, "Go West", all that. The policies to support it encourage a strong economy, education, transport, and a limited safety net, so when you fall down you can get back up again.
But "personal responsibility" sounds a bit like "poor people choose to be poor". And so the more recent philosophy: If there isn't a future for coal miners, don't tell people to do something else -- that's insulting, they are coal miners. You're not going to win any votes telling people their identity is wrong, and they should just try being something else.
If that coal mine is shutting down, we should protect the industry. We should move some government jobs into town to support the local economy. We should support them.
That's the message TFA is trying to get across. In America's new "identity-politics" mood, the poor are no longer "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", the less educated aren't just in need of more education. It's a populist philosophy that says to voters "We love you just they way you are, and we want to protect you and help you without judging you or changing you."
Fair, question. 1) Just moving your stuff costs a lot of money but with some savings it can be accomplished. You end up spending half the value of the sofa to move it. Then you need curtains, wall paper, paint and carpet. That money just doesn't exist. 2) The comfort of their own home is much more important if you lack a sense of financial security. Trying to recreate this isn't guaranteed to work. 3) Poor people to a much greater extend depend on friends and relatives nearby as do they depend on you. Rebuilding the network takes decades if it happens at all. They are not just there to save you when things turn sour but they are the main activity. You don't go to the movies, a bar, a restaurant, London, Disney world or to Ibizza, you go visit a friend.
I'd bet money you're not in a trade union.
I for long tried to write something along those lines, but I think the author did summarise my thoughts better than I could've done myself.
The class conflict — something that western literati class keep denying acknowledgement, is really the driver of much of social progress. And this holds more even more true in the West than in the East.
The class warfare is there, it exists, and it is what has been responsible for the prime majority of political developments in the West for the last 30 years.
How so?
If you're discriminated or treated unfairly by a group of people, the natural reaction would be to separate yourself from that group of people, not fight it. But if for some reason you really want to join that group - perhaps because they're of higher socioeconomical class - then you have a motivation to fight and reform things.
They don't want to improve anything for anyone in a strategic sense. They want textbook authoritarianism with a daddy figure lying that he loves them, and telling them who to hate so they can feel better.
It's an utter infantilisation, and the right are happy to sponsor it and farm it for their convenience. But attacking the left for pointing out that it's not really a solution seems to be part of the rhetorical package it's wrapped in.
The right are always happy to demonise the left for the working classes, because duh - of course they are.
The problem on the left - and I wouldn't consider most of the US Democratic Party as the left, incidentally - isn't so much "be like us" as a failure to understand just how murderous, dishonest, and literally criminal the elites on the other side are, and how limitlessly violent, self-serving and treacherous they can be in pursuit of their aims.
This wasn't a problem for the old turn-of-the-19th-century left, which had direct experience of being beaten up and shot at. But by the time you've been through college and acquired a fairly comfortable job it's hard to remember what your comfort is built on.
These facets of political history are conveniently erased from official nation-building stories of "progress" in the UK and the US, and people have to make a real effort to find out about them - which hardly anyone does now.
Either you've completely failed to pay attention to modern history or are deliberately ignoring a huge part of it but the left is just as guilty of the right of that very thing. They just (and even this only lightly) couch their authoritarianism and drive to spread hatred in different terms. In some countries (such as where I live), the left is just as nationalistic as any rightist.
To also claim that the elites with murderous, dishonest and literally criminal intentions are mostly unique to the self described right of politics is absurd.
Your statement comes from your philosophical stance. As it happens I share your view about my own motivations. Despite that I recognize that most people do not.
Also: your position sounds American (are you?). The idea of “class” and most of the literature around it is European, where class is not something that people can typically change. Even in the US there is little class mobility.
Anyway, I think class mobility is actually a real thing over here. For one, a good chunk of Europe was under Soviet rule until ~1990, and in the early days of proper market economy, a lot of enterprising individuals moved up a few rungs in the ladder. Secondly, it's hard to not see our industry as a perfect way for easy upward mobility. Myself, I jumped up a level just by virtue of preferring computers to sports as a kid.
Many European countries have far more class mobility, especially ones with strong social welfare systems like the Scandinavian ones
https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...
So any class struggles, much as I dislike the term, are very effectively silenced by the media because none of the talking heads have an interest in putting it up in lights.
It adds an interesting perspective to Trump and the incoming Twitter/Facebook/Youtube revolution that seems to be hitting the political sphere. It is harder to drown out lower class opinions because the broadcasting channels have become so accessible.
Still, I'm skeptical of the whole idea, because it just seems too convenient for Republicans to drive a wedge between the Democratic party and the working class based on a perceived social division rather than real policy: We took away your unions and safety net, but by golly, we'll protect your "dignity."
> But according the Telemundo poll, nearly two-thirds of Latinos said they wouldn't vote for a candidate who describes himself as a “socialist.” Sanders identifies as a democratic socialist.
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790319860/polls-show-sanders-...
Abstract preference questions often don't predict preference for specific candidates, because they don't capture subtleties in the area of preference being polled or how it is weighted against other concerns.
Language policing is still big in dem circles.
And when you zoom in on specific linguistic struggles, you often find that it's less a matter of one side being the police and the other being the anarchists, or cerebral philosophers accurately reckoning with the hazard of losing some ideas in a wide-ranging territory of thoughtful discourse, and more two sides with competing values they understand are promoted or eroded with certain language. For example, there's no "freedom" side in the fight over "Merry Christmas" vs "Happy Holidays" (however much inflated), just two forms of "policing" with different implicit values.
Sometimes, of course, you do find topics where one side of a struggle is much more about restraint and the other side is struggling against restraint itself. See, for example, people who are upset that they can't tell racist jokes anymore without someone getting offended.
> Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness
> Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem.
> So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.
(I should caveat this by saying I’m in the apparently 18% of Asians who doesn’t think political correctness is a problem. But there is a huge class/education divide.)
As a middle class white, I ask "such as?"
Or pretending that the incredible success of East and South Asians in the US doesn’t basically completely torpedo the notion that racism is a significant barrier to the success of poorly performing ethnic groups.
Latinx, drag queens as family friendly content, overreach on dilution and removal of gendering (no more daddy/daughter events), politicizing sports, politicizing popcorn movies, censorship of standup comedians, social media bans, student loan forgiveness pitches. Anything that looks like a bailout to the rich and upper middle class, including for homeowners.
FWIW, I think there’s a good chance the republicans will start figuring out to flip Latino and Asian voters by appealing to social conservatism.
Organized labor may not have been targeted explicitly like by Republicans, but Democrats haven't really been a friend to them either [1]. Both parties have been on board with the neoliberal agenda for 40 years.
[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/democrats-paid-a-huge...
Unions in other countries have historically been a voice of the people, and don’t have a lasting allegiance with any political party or movement. I have no idea why American unions collapsed; perhaps, it was justified in the moment, but the present absence of a strong voice for organized, skilled labor is tragic.
While not as extreme, the result is similar as well over here: knowledge workers make a lot of money, blue collar workers cannot afford to live in the large cities. The elite consists primarily of lawyers, political scientists and teachers, and the mocking of the lower class (with a hint of paternalist "we cannot let them be free, they don't know what to do with freedom") is palpable.
Not true in the UK - the unions have a strong relationship with the Labour party, in terms of providing funding and endorsement of leadership candidates. Indeed, in its original form [0] the Labour party was created as the political wing of the unions. Many unions automatically took a cut of their members' subscriptions as labour party funding.
Battles between the unions and the Conservative party have been key a feature of UK politics, e.g. the Miners' strike in the 1980s [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984–85)
I learnt a lot about that unknown history from Alex Carey's classic Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (1987). It was no accident but a huge and deliberate campaign. The story is pretty horrifying.
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=Alex+Carey&column=autho...
A small part of the story, from p31:
"The American Advertising Council represents large corporations and large advertising agencies. In April 1947 the council announced a $100 million advertising program which, over the next twelve months, would use all media 'to "sell" the American economic system' to the American people. The program was officially described as a 'major project of educating the American people about the economic facts of life'.
Daniel Bell, then an editor of Fortune, provides a perspective on both the scale and the anti-union and anti-New Deal purposes of these campaigns:
"It has been industry's prime concern, in the post war years, to change the climate of opinion ushered in by...the depression. This 'free enterprise' campaign has two essential aims: to re-win the loyalty of the worker which now goes to the union and to halt creeping socialism [i.e. the New Deal] ... In short the campaign has had the definite aim of seeking to shift the Democratic majority of the last 20 years into the Republican camp ..."
Bell sketches some of the resources, created to sell goods but now used in an overwhelming campaign to sell ideas. 'The apparatus itself is prodigious: 1,600 business periodicals, 577 commercial and financial digests, 2,500 advertising agencies, 500 public relations counsellors, 4,000 corporate public relations departments and more than 6,500 "house organs" with a combined circulation of more than 70 million. Of the opinion-shaping product Bell observes: "The output is staggering. The Advertising Council alone, in 1950, inspired 7 million lines of newspaper advertising stressing free enterprise, 400,000 car cards, 2,500,000,000 radio impressions ... By all odds it adds up to the most intensive "sales" campaign in the history of industry'
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Commission_on_Fiscal_...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/31/dnc-superdelegates-...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/31/dnc-shifts-debate-r...
Unfortunately one of the side effects of Obamacare is that rates have skyrocketed to the point that many people can't afford it.
There are subsidies, but the premiums / deductibles are still high enough to be basically useless for many people. Add to it that we had a mandate that you needed to have insurance or you'd be fined.
There are a lot of good things that came from Obamacare, namely the removal of pre-existing conditions and the ability to keep your kids on your health insurance after they've left the house.
But there are real issues with the program, and what many people hear when they raise them is effectively "You're just holding it wrong" to steal that old iPhone marketing wank.
I honestly don't know anyone who is against improving healthcare in the US. The main thing people are afraid of is that a well-intended change will make things worse for them.
(This is a rant at this point that I'm not even sure is responding to anything you said)
Is that really a causal relationship? What I see in the data is annual insurance premiums rising at 3-4X the CPI inflation rate starting in the 1990s and continuing to the present. The ACA was an attempt to address the fallout from this. It may not have been entirely successful in doing that, but it certainly wasn't the cause of the problem.
* Check the McKinsey study and the Commonwealth Fund study for data. In the 3 years prior to the ACA, nationwide premiums averaged a 10% annual increase, in the 3 years after the implementation of the ACA they averaged a 6% annual increase.
I will admit I didn't look at the study. Does this mean the 3 years prior to the law passing or the 3 years prior to the law going into effect?
I would expect insurance companies to start adjusting rates in anticipation of the new law, even if it hasn't taken effect yet.
In a democracy, every interest or issue is either represented by a constituency that will vote reliably in support of it, or it's not and it will suffer. Labor's suffered for the last half century for two reasons:
1) The Democratic buy-in on civil rights and reproductive freedom, and subsequent defection by those hostile to it -- these cut across the lines drawn around working class constituencies and eroded that constituency's reliability.
2) Americans have examined and bought into neoliberal-supporting ideas (or auxiliary ideas that keep progressive economics from gaining mindshare). Discourse architects have been effective enough at shaping political and policy conversations that a good number of politically active citizens and officeholders understand issues the way those advancing neoliberal policies would like.
When you understand this dynamic, you don't see the movement as Mr-Burns-thumb-twiddling by DLC/DNC sellouts, you see the Democratic party struggling for a constituency that will let it win elections along the odd way that key lines are drawn in the US system and finding that it had to move a neoliberal direction.
And you get a sense of the scope of the work that'd be necessary for a working-class friendly politics to take root again, which is gonna be much harder than just electing President Sanders or Warren (which is not an easy sell in itself).
See Mont Pelerin Society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society
... and Friedrich Hayek, Frank Knight, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman.
Implemented by Reagan and Thatcher.
Biases:
• The Market is efficient => give it free-reign
• The State is incompetent => remove it
• Trade is win-win => open borders
• Society => There is no such thing (see Thatcher)
• Finance is infallible => 2008?
For the Democrats, it's more like less than 28; the neoloberal faction didn't become dominant over the economically progressive, faction until during Bill Clinton's Presidency; Clinton himself obviously was a member of the neoliberal faction, but most of the Democratic Party in Congress opposed NAFTA; it wasn't until sometime after the midterm defeat in 1994 that the neoliberals faction definitely dominated the Party.
And the neoliberal faction in the Democratic Party is fighting desperately against being swept from power in the party right now, to the extent of prioritizing that intraparty fight over defeating the other major party.
You might be interested in reading “The Meritocracy Trap” which discusses how elitism, particularly in regards to education and hyper-competitive productivity, drives inequality. The idea is that this is ultimately worse for both the non-elites who can no longer compete and the elite who must continue to stretch themselves ever thinner to remain competitive.
No satisfaction
Only quiet despair
For those unbending heroes
Trapped in Darwin's nightmare.
Competition...
-- DeGarmo & Key-- Winston Churchill
Instead of college for all, what's needed is an alternative pathway from high school to (optional) industrial training/ apprenticeships to jobs, skipping college altogether for those who don't want/need it. Employers need to be able to hire non-college-graduates without worrying they're getting the dregs of the college system. They should have fine-grained input into getting exactly the sort of skills they want into their workers, and a large portion of this program (for some of the low-req jobs, the entirety) should involve no-strings-attached industry placements to get those employers comfortable with the people they'll be hiring.
Hmm, it's a good point that having a four year head start would help balance things. However, I think in the long run things would probably workout in the favor of the person that went to college. Especially in the higher paying majors such as business, CS, and engineering.
Being a barista is a reasonable job for a 14-year-old. Adults shouldn't be taking jobs from teens.
The issue is that most jobs pay too little. College is not a reasonable way to achieve income equality. You can graduate as many people as you like, it doesn't create more jobs (this is how majors get a track record...by controlling the number of people who apply).
But, and here's the kicker, there are a lot of people who lump all college degrees together, either mentally or in their writing on the topic, and then justify going into debt to get a degree based on that. "Go to college" is not that easy to swap out with "go to college in one of the majors with a track record of leading to a good career", not least because there are numerous colleges (Fine Arts, some parts of Liberal Arts, etc.) where if that were the way people thought, that college would shrink to half its current size or less.
Which, maybe is what needs to happen, or maybe we need to find another way for society to fund people who study those topics (my preference), but either way it's not what's happening now, and those closest to the university system are generally the ones most hostile to the idea of looking plainly at the facts about the current situation.
A low-wage manufacturing job can lead to high-wage automation and tooling maintenance and eventually design positions, or shop steward, training or mentoring.
And “learn to code” should be a basic school curriculum topic! It is well, frankly, disgusting that such a universally powerful, useful and accessible skill has been withheld from the vast majority of students, and now made almost into an “epithet” meaning disrespect toward lower-skilled people. I don’t know any job, no matter how menial, that couldn’t be improved by some automation of it’s most repetitive book-keeping tasks.
1. The people with college degrees are also debasing their own degree by pushing for more college, not just marginal college grads. That's not self-interest, just naivite.
2. As others said, college is vastly overrated. The author gets that there is diminishing returns for new college grads, but doesn't see we are already getting little bang for buck because there is a shortage of non-bullshit jobs, and what work doesn't demand society fails to teach.
3. Author should spend time with the UBI crowd. Contrary to the popular imagination amoung guilty costalites of emasculated coal miners having to find a new line of work, actua poor people understand work is not dignifying and their is no shame in UBI (even if they think there is shame in means-tested welfare!) It's the rich Democrats who cling to education who regurgitate the dribble they were told about work being meaningful.
Gah, the author is sooo close to getting it. Just need to combine with something like https://medium.com/@alexhowlett/introduction-to-consumer-mon... and they'll be there.
But they have something called 'Mittelstand' or middle industry - vast numbers of mid-sized firms that employ zillions of people, in particular, the take take in apprentices as part of the education program. Millions of kids pour into these programs wherein they learn one of a myriad of highly specialised trade skills. Said skills are highly relevant to industry, and point right at employment.
There's nothing wrong with a History major, but maybe they're only good for people who really do want to do that, because the debt and cost to society of people who just want to 'tick the Uni' box is too much.
But consider the major social impact of training and employment: Dignity and a Respected Role in Society. This to me is the oft overlooked element. These people do something useful, material, gainful, often have unions (with board representation), they can pay for themselves and other people respect them as having an important role to play in society.
Obviously, this system institutionalises class to some degree. The ranks of those going on to higher ed are full of upper/upper-middle class kids, but, at least there's 'something with integrity for everyone'.
If Republicans were smart, they'd pursue this path because it's better for business, but I don't believe their leadership is forward thinking enough. The Democrats could play this angle too, however, it just doesn't have enough 'purity' and doesn't play the progressive angle hard enough.
It might be possible to start doing these things on the state level, or to elected a leader that starts to think in these terms coming from a different angle. We can only hope.
I don't want to make this argument, but I get the impression that the German economy looks somewhat similar to the American economy in the 60s and 70s, but has managed to persist longer thanks to its unique position in the EU and some very real competitive advantages, such as the quality of vocational training you mentioned.
I'm worried though that these have only delayed the transition to what you currently see in the US and UK. I'm a big fan of vocational training - most of my extended family came up in the trades - but I don't know if it's the pancia that both parties in the states seem to think it is, or if the German model is feasible or even preferrable in this context.
Thinking creatively, perhaps there's an opportunity to point the apprentice systems towards 'white collar skills' as much as anything else. Lab workers are apparently in high demand.
+1 for Christophe Guilluy's book, it's really eye-opening, even more so considering that he wrote/published it even before the "gilets jaunes" movement started.
Not sure there's a solution for this "periphery" problem, but I see it in my parts of the world (Eastern-European country and EU member), it certainly is present in France and I suppose in other Western European countries, and according to the article is also a real problem in the US.
For the same reason I wouldn’t trust a doctor without a degree proving they did due diligence for years. I know this feels different because “anybody can do politics” but without a large worldview the measures taken will be inevitably short sighted.
Now, it works the other way too. As the article states, losing touch with the base leads to problems.
Democracy isn’t so much the best form of government as the best steering wheel to keep the government aligned with the interests of the people. The best actual form of government is technocracy, but technocracy with no democratic accountability is just going to competently achieve things that the people may not care about or may actively dislike.
Stating that there is some kind of qualification suggests, ironically, that you don't understand what politics is. The point is that there is tension, uncertainty (this is a bit like modern views on capitalism...can we have the money but no failure, pls...lul).
In a fantasy world where we actually had sciences for all the things governments are asked to do, sure.
But in the actual world we live in, no way. You can't have experts running government if there are no actual experts.
Everyone loves experts in an advisory role, but they want someone who shares their values in charge
They can have your children taken away.
They can have your vehicle license revoked: car or aircraft.
I still want one that is well educated and competent.
1. Human capital. People learn stuff at university which makes them more valuable workers.
2. Credentialism. Universities select (or pass) people who were already going to be valuable.
Now let's look at what we might mean by "valuable":
1. You can fool hiring managers into thinking you're competent - good resume writing skills, good interview skills, an impressive certificate.
2. You can fool your manger's manager into thinking you're competent. All the above, plus you're good at churning out superficially credible explanations and justifications. Some critics of university might argue that they've optimised towards teaching students how to fake competence - 4 years of general education isn't enough to produce a truly competent thinker in a field (not reliably for a large fraction of society) but it is enough to teach them to write a clean-looking essay with proper citations, and to churn out paragraphs with "topic sentence, evidence, analysis, transition" (but not enough time that this will get too stale - you'll still be able to grade the students from A-E).
3. You'll actually be good for your company / society because of your ability to analyze things, domain skills, intelligence, conscientiousness, etc.
We could also talk about general vs domain specific skills, but they're often fairly well correlated. Competence in a domain requires thinking skills, and thinking skills are best built up in some real domain where skills can actually be tested (not just abstract "critical thinking" courses).
Graduated with 70%+ with the title "Master of Engineering"? Not good enough, do an IQ test to get the job. Write a compiler for a self-designed embedded language for your final project? Not good enough, you forgot how to concatenate lists in MATLAB. Oh, and you don't get to find out your prospective salary until you have an offer; until then, you'll be happy to know it's "competitive", whatever that means.
At this point, I'm not sure if I'd recommend anyone go to university unless they want to stay in academia or something. I'm not convinced it's worth the hassle if this kind of job search is the end result, and if you're going there for knowledge, you're better off not getting yourself into debt with a 4% interest rate.
University helps shape you socially and drag you through some cultural stuff that a lot of people would otherwise ignore, that’s about it.
3. Those who are more able in the workplace also have improved chances of completing higher levels of schooling thanks to their ability (or lack of disability).
I believe this one is validated by the fact that even as more and more people attain a university education, incomes have held stagnant.
Despite being described as bright my whole life, I’ve never done well in an academic environment for a few reasons, I could readily absorb the material but I was terribly antagonistic towards teachers who generally desire a sense of authority in their class rooms. I also as an adult have been diagnosed with ADHD, which to me at least explains a good portion of why I struggled in school. I never did my homework and was told endlessly that going to community college was the best financial option, and I was very freaked out by student loans, the problem being that community colleges put much more emphasis on grading coursework, which ended up being my downfall.
Part of me thinks I should just start lying on my resume about having attended a 4 year STEM program, because the credentialism seems so real and absolutely bullshit. I have work experience, if I got an interview they’d probably be blown away with this “high school graduate”, but I never get interviews, no matter how qualified I am. I’ve even been encouraged to do this by people in the “educated elite”. They tell me to just study a given schools curriculum, learn some names of professor and call it good enough. But I really hate lying about myself, it feels so contrary to my nature. As the article mentions, I feel very depressed with my life and reading people who say that a degree is a golden indicator is genuinely depressing. I don’t know what to do, and I honestly feel victimized by credentialism, which makes me resent the concept of dropping everything and taking on loans to go to school. (At least my interest rate would be good now!)
If no Haskell, well, good luck!
If you're willing to go on-site there are a lot of other good options as well.
If you want to chat privately about this, I'd be willing to. My email is my hn handle at gmail.
We have a lot in common. I have managed to make a career without a degree. It is fairly common in Silicon Valley. I started with computer consulting, then was a sysadmin/IT, and now I am in DevOps.
I'd guess this is the root of your problem. People don't want to hire those that are terribly antagonistic towards authority figures (a.k.a their boss) and don't do their homework (a.k.a work).
Really though, how would an employer know either of these things; it’s not like I‘d put them on a resume or a cover letter. I added it only to give context to why going to college didn’t work out for me at the time, not to describe why I think I have trouble finding a job I enjoy. I’m confused by the unconstructive nature of this comment, it seems purposefully derisive.
I think this is one thing churches did really well; people from all social spheres coming together to serve their God. It didn't matter what job or status you had. Everybody was equal.
I'm sure the same could be achieved today without the religious aspect as well. There's plenty of volunteering opportunities, for example. Being part of a amateur sports team can bring people from all classes together.
My church, which is home to a number of college professors, lawyers, and other overly-educated people, is soon to be celebrating a member receiving her high school diploma; she returned to school to finish it (she's in her mid-20s and has two kids) and is just taking initial steps to enter the workforce and try to get away from depending on public assistance.
So we essentially created a "virtuous" class of "educated" people that aren't as smart as they think they are, talking down to people that are struggling economically by telling them that they need to spend 100k to "learn to think". It's amazing things have stayed relatively peaceful.
It's funny to me because arguably I am part of this liberal elite, and even I feel a lot of contempt and irritation towards my increasingly smug compatriots. People really need to tone down the "flyover state" and "redneck" rhetoric. I definitely didn't vote for Trump, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get why people did.
I needed my degree; but just to get my foot in the door. I didn't learn much during the process itself other than to recognize the meta fact that I had to do it to get out of my current situation.
This would have been a real problem for me financially if it didn't work out the way it did because I wouldn't have been able to get out from under my(and more so my wife's) student loan debt.
It should be useful and I think it can be, but that was not the experience that I had.
However, I have not met (except on HN) any successful "knowledge workers" without a degree. I'm sure there are many factors contributing to that: smarter people are more likely to pursue degrees in the first place, companies may ignore otherwise good candidates since they lack a degree.
But another possibility is that many of us underestimate the skills we learned in pursuing our degrees. Certainly many people obtain those skills in other ways, but it's impossible to know if I personally would have.
Aside from hearing the odd person tell a funny story from their college days (which, I might add, does not guarantee that they successfully attained a degree), I don't think I've met anyone (except on HN) in the last decade or so where scholastic background has even come up in conversation.
It was something to talk about when we were young and being fresh out of school was news, sure, but as I get older the conversations have moved on to more pertinent topics like homeownership and children. Nobody really cares to talk about something that happened so long ago that people born back then are now in college themselves.
So, I am rather curious as to how you would ever know? I cannot even begin to see if your assertion holds true within my professional peer group as I have absolutely no idea if any of them have degrees or not.
So college comes up too. Plus if you are hiring it is in cv.
Moreover, the older we are the less interesting new things we have to tall about. We work and then go home to children. And there is often not much else engaging to talk about. So people talk about past.
All of that pales to the real process going on: good students were matriculated into my program, and I credential them via a bunch of assessments that I wrote despite never having any classes on formal assessment design. If you gave us a random sample of the population, I doubt we'd be that great at turning them into Computer Scientists.
PG had a post here recently on (approximately) that subject. http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html
Very few assessments are well-designed.
Thank you for distilling the essence of what I feel when I hear people say college education is not necessary. I suspect those individuals are no longer college-aged and have matured. Sure, a 19 year old could self-study online instead of going to college - but what 19 year-old has the discipline and motivation to do so consistently for 3-4 years? Granted - I don't believe that college it should cost six figures, but the structure provided is very helpful.
How is this a question? How many high school grads have you interviewed and thought you could spin them up to the usefulness of a graduate from nothing in a reasonable amount of time/effort?
Education is expensive, sure. We can talk about that... but useful? It seems obviously useful to me.
Poster is more likely asking whether the education gained in college is actually useful vs the doors opened by having that diploma.
If one dropped out of college right before graduation with 99% of the education, likely that person would end up with worse off job prospects compared to the person who completed their program
However, they said college education not college diploma. They're clearly talking about the skills learned.
That said, the argument still stands with a candidate with a degree and a similarly aged candidate with no relevant work experience but similar maturity, odds are you'll still be able to pass the Pepsi challenge and see the difference.
Remember, I'm only arguing against the notion that college is useless.
If you're lucky enough to get a mentorship that will teach you everything you need right out of high school, great. Go for it. That's not exactly a common occurrence. College is a high cost, low risk way to get some experience and land a job but its certainly not useless.
And I went to a top-20 undergrad for CS. That doesn't mean it wasn't useful. It was. I use stuff I learned in my past education a reasonable portion of the time, now, as a researcher.
That doesn't mean that it was a more direct way to "get a job", had I the courage to try that path at the time, than just doing an apprenticeship would have been.
It all depends what your definition of "Education" is. If you mean a college degree, then I'd agree that in most cases (depending on your major), it's indeed not particularly useful.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
I've no problem with dedicated medical schools and law schools etc, but there's something about the university system that is deeply corrupt and self absorbed.
We should break them up, have the schools be separate schools, and have separate certification centers and competition in certificates (which would plug it all back into the real world).
The fact they set their own exams is a big part of the rot. It's not different to one of us setting our own driving test.
But it isn’t a gate anymore really; in the UK at least basically everyone below a certain age has a degree, since they converted the polys. Having a degree isn’t in any way “elite” now, although of course there are still elite universities.
As the article states, in the US, 70% of people over 25 do not have a 4-year university degree. And contrary to the UK and the rest of Europe, American University is staggeringly expensive. And despite what you might read on HN, without a 4 year degree, nearly all professional jobs would be off limits. And if you did manage to sneak past the first gate, as some talented coders on HN have done, you can look forward to a lifetime inferiority complex, knowing that your co-workers have a safety and desirability you lack.
In the US, the 4-year degree really is a significantly high barrier to entry to the professional class. You also need to be living in one of a dozen elite cities, be the right race, have the right politics, the right friends and family, and the right set of previous employers. Only then have you gained that special status that lets you own a home you're not afraid to lose, go to a doctor you can afford, and enjoy a job that affords you comfort, stability, respect, and some measure of control over your destiny.
The overall point of this article is that in the US economy, there's not enough spots at the top for everyone. And everyone not at the top will live economically precarious lives. One political party likes to pretend that there is endless opertunity for all with promises of more university, and the other party has realized the lie and is decending into anti-intellectual madness, rejecting acedemia, experts and science.
Your country has some uncertain times ahead and there will be plenty of call to more closely emulate the free-market American system now that you've distanced yourselves from the more regulated and socialist European system. Do be careful.
While CS related knowledge comes up almost never in day to day work and conversation, it is a common background I share with most people at work. We all have the same frame of reference, and can pick up what each other are talking about more easily that way. And perhaps the most useful aspects of our degree have become so second nature to our thinking we do not notice them anymore.
Also, the experience during the degree of working with rarified problems does train my mind to find the underlying concept behind it all, instead of hacking barely working pieces of code together. Or at least helps me feel more shame when I do the latter, and give me some instinct to push for something better.
I’m not sure you can quantify that the way you want to. People voted for trump because he said what they wanted to hear and they didn’t care About the details because they’ve never had to apply critical thinking at that level. That’s not a good thing...
So while you may expect to struggle economically after a university degree, it behooves the rest of us to listen to what they have to say, because those of us who did get vocational training, or no training at all, in all likelihood never had time or reason to stretch the ratio as far as they. I would be very disappointed if they did not develop a sense of smugness, it would mean they didn't see any problems with how society at large currently thinks or operates.
A university graduate without an opinion would be time and money wasted.
I can't talk for every majors but at least for STEM, you need to study hard for years to acquire solid foundations. I don't see how you can gather all the required knowledge by yourself.
If you want to do that by yourself, you need to:
- decide what you need to learn, and find what are the best resources to learn it
- keep motivated for many years, without feedback that you're on the right track
- convince your future employer that you have skills
We should keep learning all life long, but I don't think anything can replace a formal education. It's one thing to learn things on the side when you need them. But it's much harder to tackle heavy foundational topics without supervision.
I also couldn't have done that myself because I was only able to do it with access to student loans, as I had to (at the minimum) eat and have somewhere warm to sleep, which I certainly had no money for, so I had to take out loans for food and rent.
my questions were for US voters as well.
Once upon a time, a lot more power was held by local politicians, who were often from the working class. Over time, more and more of that became centralized, and the ability to speak well in public is not something that even most professional class jobs prepare you for. Put a programmer up against a lawyer or a CEO, and the programmer will not do well. We not only have mostly professional class politicians, they are overwhelmingly from only a few of those professions, because there are only a few that prepare you to speak, from a script, to a large group of strangers, staying on message and keeping your message short and clear.
Thank god that people vote for people like Cameron and Obama. Both are examples of politics working. Competent, middle-of-road types, not ideological, willing to compromise, intelligent...the aim of politics is to further the aims of the people (both were democratically elected) and do so with competent leadership. They are both examples of processes built up over centuries working (even Trump is, in terms of personal values he is disgusting...but this is a democratic choice of the people, and seeing the checks and balances of the American system jumping into action is very reassuring).
Politics isn't a suffering competition where we all get really angry about the bad things that happened to us, and compete to see who has suffered the most grief. A politics built on jealousy, pain, and suffering is no politics at all (for references, Chinese history is the perfect example of this...Mao achieved something that Hitler never could, he convinced ordinary people to murder their neighbours in cold blood, how? Jealousy, pain, and suffering...works every time).
you are absolutely right about "Politics isn't a suffering competition", but I'd argue it's a reasonable(even good) starting point: only when you want no one no more people suffering the same as you, you are motivated to play the game of politics.
on the example of Mao, I have no problem with your opinion. however I'd like to point out you simply couldn't use it as 'fact' to support your argument. it only weakens your position.
I don't see a clear connection because:
1. the current U.S. president won without having either of those attributes you imply are worth mentioning
2. Bernie Sanders hits both of your imagined electability points and couldn't even beat Hillary Clinton to gain the Democratic nomination last election.
3. Bill Clinton, probably the epitome of "relatable and struggled," did beat George H. Bush who was the opposite of that. But George H. had already been president for four years!
4. OMG Sarah Palin! It's as if the universe read your question and traveled back in time to deliver the perfect counterexample to your implication. Remember that Republican voters absolutely loved her folksy ways, her seemingly unrehearsed speeches, and her professed rejection of PC culture and Democratic elitism. She was unfortunately so much like the average voter that she lacked the basic competency necessary to run. That was noticed by the voting public and it did help tank McCain's campaign.
So yes-- relatability and personal story are an inescapable part of American politics. Also, major triads probably make up a significant proportion of Mozart's symphonies. But if one implies that's all there is to talk about in either case it doesn't show an understanding of the subject matter.
Edit: protect against irrelevant digressions.
my questions are really about you, as voters, not campaign strategist. your analytical response reminds me the episode of West Wing, about 'presidential'.
The federal government has very little influence on how people live their daily lives. Because many people no longer believe that elections matter, they're more than happy to vote for the most entertaining candidate.
It’s a good question. The last genuine PM we had was John Major, the son of a gardener who studied at night school while working for his father during the day. Before him was Maggie Thatcher, an industrial chemist by trade.
All since then have been career politicians from the political class. Blair went to Fettes, the “Scottish Eton”. Cameron and Boris were classmates at Eton and Oxford. Even Jeremy Corbyn, supposed champion of the Workers never worked a day in his life. He will likely be followed as leader of the Labour Party by Sir Kier or Lady Nugee.
Only because you can only vote for the candidates on the ballot paper and the two main parties have already been captured. There are other parties of course, but they are loons or worse.
Ironically Boris has done much more real work in his life than Corbyn, but neither has very much in common with the average voter-taxpayer.
Meritocracy is a dangerous ideal for humanity to continue to hold so dearly. IQ is partially genetic, and with a low ceiling — sooner than we’re ready to accept, nobody’s brain will hold a candle to AI. Equating our economic value with moral worth will only lead to further cultural division, despair, and anarcho-primitivism. Instead, let’s try to build a culture, society, and government that takes the intrinsic value of human life as an axiom, before it’s too late.
Nobody can outrun a car, either, but cars haven’t made humans obsolete. Instead, we use them as tools to accomplish our goals: just as we will with AI.
I'm not of the opinion that AI will just decide to destroy us all or anything particularly extreme. Still, I find it very hard to believe that humans could actually 'control' entities that are smarter than we are. Anyone making high-confidence predictions about how that would play is worthy of some skepticism, I believe.
I’ll give the wheel to them, like how I trust my doctor to know what’s best for my body. They might not be the best for me but could be better for the Earth Civilization.
AI is cognitive automation. Not only will blue collar jobs be replaced, but so to will white collar jobs as well. We’re approaching the point where capital alone (without labor) will be able to generate wealth in more general cases. When that happens, employing people will be a hobby. When that happens, humans will need other ways to make income than with their labor.
How much time was spent worrying about what would happen when energy was too cheap too meter? It didn't happen.
It's easy to come up with problems to worry about that don't actually exist.
In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy.
Those at the top seem to embrace a much more base instrumentalism of “might (by proxy of wealth) makes right.”
Why do you think that the members of the professional class would personally benefit from more solidarity with the working class? Many high-earning professionals own millions of dollars worth of "capital" (shares, rental properties) and would not benefit from any kind of revolution that would tank the value of these assets. They also already possess many of the benefits that the working class are agitating for (good benefits, high pay), and don't need an overhaul of the economic structure to obtain those.
I'm not saying solidarity is bad, I'm just saying your derisive view of high-income professionals as dumdums brainwashed by the rich into acting against their own interests when they decline to participate in the revolution is not an accurate reflection of their actual incentives.
Uh... I think that's the wrong argument. The people making "high salaries" (let's say... >= $100k/year, base salary) at FAANG companies really are, de facto, petty bourgeois. They don't just get "stock options" that never materialize. They get annual bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars, plus stock options or RSUs that vest to create further paper wealth. In the Bay Area with its stupidly stratospheric housing prices, maybe we can talk about these people being "middle class" in the same way my parents are (ie: as white-collar employees making middling salaries). Maybe.
But really, just about anywhere outside the Bay Area, most of those high salary FAANG employees are building capital far faster than they lose money to living expenses, and provided they're willing to live cheaply and far away, a secure early retirement in middle-age is a strong possibility. Given some moderate but successful investments, they could even get truly rich.
Working class is when you convert labor into money into commodities. Owning class is when you convert money into commodities into money.
But what's correct to point out is that the vast majority of programmers, software engineers, and IT staff aren't high-salary FAANG workers. They take home a median income, in fact, of about ~$65k/year.
How can you possibly allocate resources efficiently if you don't consider whether those you are allocating to are competent? What do you propose? Derisk with massive government bureaucracy?
Ultimately, scarce resources, which take their own industries to produce, need to be allocated so the many goods and services we need and want can be designed, built, and/or executed/delivered. If you do not rely on merit to decide who does what, everything will absolutely collapse.
By “meritocracy” I mean the idea that it is morally just for people to be rewarded in money or social status proportional to their economic usefulness — an idea most people implicitly hold to some degree and which some libertarians trumpet as a core tenet. I think the implied inverse to this belief — in the extreme, that lack of economic usefulness deserves poverty — is morally repugnant and dangerous.
I've never seen an article that is simultaneously semi-self-aware yet contains such a high level of arrogance and condescension. That on its own makes it an interesting piece.
Higher education is often a needless gatekeeper for keeping those with generational wealth wealthy
Often a subtext that I feel is missing here is that in the end people aren't that different on average, and our parent's wealth matter more
Today, zip code is a pretty accurate predictor of success, there's so much embedded in a zip code such as wealth, industry, and safety that affects kid's outcomes.[0]
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/too-often-student-success_b_1...
The basic problem is the legitimacy of the elite it has produced in the eyes of people subject to it. There was always tension, but code changed everything. PhD holding managers today are often functionally illiterate in their domain of responsibility, and that has a huge cultural impact.
There is reliable predictive power in explaining the culture wars of today as the reaction against a managerialist elite using radical cultural change in an attempt to dilute the bargaining power of competent working people, and to insulate itself from a working class from whom they are increasingly undifferentiated.
This is a pet issue of mine, and glad to see it's getting traction, as it's really the defining conflict of today.
Coming from a country where tertiary education is more accessible and cheaper, there is decent free healthcare and more social welfare, all of which give more people the option of higher education, what ends up happening is people go to University too much. Universities have undergone a huge explosion in headcount and footprint. As publicly funded institutions, they have funded this expansion with a kind of Ponzi scheme where more and more full fee paying international students are required to sustain the machine. At the same time there has been a lot of training institutes and vocational colleges popping up, some with dubious quality and intent. The stimulus for this seems to be that young people can't get enough quality work, and so they try and educate themselves. They can do this partly because of the largesse of their boomer parents. This effect is happening at all levels, including fields where lots of education is already required, like medicine, law and engineering.
So I would agree that pumping education is not a panacea. It is starting to feel almost exploitative around here (Australia). Weddings, healthcare and education are surefire ways to extract money from people even when the economy is in a slump. At least you get cake at a wedding.
If your only reason for going to college is to try and attain that certain social standing, and you fall short, then it truly was a waste of money (and, more importantly, time). Colleges do have a struggle to convince those people of their relevance.
A similar phenomena has been seen in incomes. Incomes have held stagnant for decades, even as more and more of the population have become credentialed. Maybe a degree is necessary to reach the top 1%, but those who fall short of that goal are no better off than people were in the past, when they didn't go to college.
You can point to individual factors of circumstance (an ill-conceived 2015 leadership election) or big structural issues (rising inequality). But the end result is the same: no empathy, no interest. It is funny the article talks about race...did everyone just suddenly become a racist overnight? Or did they just decide they don't like being talked down to? Which is more likely (bearing in mind that the people talking down do like to talk about race a hell of a lot).
The left will get nowhere by trying to "learn to talk" to these awful poor people (sarcasm). They don't care. Not interested. Give the working class their voice back (Blair and Clinton did just fine). Go back to suburbia, find another job in which you are way overpaid for incompetence, and stop talking. Btw, Trump has done this...he is the worst candidate, the worst president...and still the Dems can't muster anything up...how is this incompetence even possible?
Just generally, as someone who falls firmly into the category of metro elite...I have never understood why other rich people feel the need to always tell poor people what they want. Politics is to help those people but it has gone from helping them to telling them what they should think, how they should live, etc. Is it any wonder that doesn't win votes?
The only answer is to stop buying cheap consumer goods from China (or anywhere, for that matter). Disposal-oriented consumerism is ripping our society (and the world) to shreds.
Exactly, this seemed completely missing from the hand-wringing about how what's wrong with the Democratic party is that it is just too elitist for the working classes now. There is in fact a lot of truth to that, but it is the economic policy, or lack thereof, of both parties has allowed capital, controlled by very few, to flow unimpeded overseas. If you want to retain a middle-class economic base, you have to take measures to incentivize capital to remain in the country.
My own employer is aggressively moving to shift all of it's technical knowledge work to India; companies like Accenture and IBM now employ more people there than in the US. There will soon be as little Knowledge Economy work in the US as there is old Industrial Economy work. Where will all of these college (or Denmark-style vocationally trained) end up working? Wal-Mart. Sell the people out twice and you will end up with some kind of revolt. You're not going to convince anybody at that point that it's the grad school gap that's killing America and that we should have a Ph.D. For All program to solve it.
Turns out "Beware the behaviors you incentivize" doesn't only apply to scrappy startups, but scales up to whole nations. If profit is the sole metric you judge companies/CEOs/boards by, don't be surprised by the lengths they will go to maximize it.
How about the multitude of America products/software/services that are exported around the globe? Globalization is not a one-way street: a good chunk of the American economic growth is due to exports ("How's your 401k doing?")
> The result may well be the destruction of our democracy.
Who could have predicted unfettered/crony capitalism could work against democracy; after all, profits, political power and human dignity are completely unrelated to each other, right?
http://www.andrewlangman.com/articles/class-culture-gap.html
Or just read What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class at:
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-t...
The problem is that many liberal-thinking people, having believed that they (or the country) has solved many of the material and quality of life needs in their little pocket of the world (and told thus by the daily media), find rarer and rarer things to become their problems and occupy their consciousness.
In short, liberals ironically are the one-percenters of America. Because they live in relatively safe cities, with good incomes, and concerns for the distant future, they think that transgender bathrooms are the most important topic that should be discussed in the national priorities. Or that MeToo represents the daily worry of every reasonable American. Or because things are so comfortable and rich, why can't we afford to look the other way at immigration laws that we disagree with? Let's have another KQED segment on Latina artists struggling to keep their rent controlled studios in the Mission!
Well, the other half of the country, the 99%, are not interested in putting those rarified political issues before their daily, material struggles, the kind that don't make it to the front page of the New York Times because they're boring. Their unemployment, or only slightly better, their dead end jobs that have experienced no growth in the last 10 years. Their health plans that cost more and more, or their pension benefits that got cut. Or the rejection letters (or just no letters) that come when they try to apply for a different job, run by some company in the very liberal cities that spurn them, whose medium level execs make 7 figure salaries.
Maybe it's time we confronted the fact that unless you can cut off the coasts of this country, we will have to find a way to make the concerns of the middle of this country, our concerns -- concretely and strategically. Because if we don't, that middle of the country will vote to spite everything, before they vote to help themselves, and we will all go down together.
I also want to point out that it's not just twitter/tv. You can see true policy changes happening in the schools and workplaces--at least within the west-coast liberal strongholds.
I’ve thought a lot about this, and wondered if we’ll see a major flip post-Trump (perhaps a few more presidencies past), where the republicans somehow manage to shed their racial baggage and suddenly are the party of the entire working class while the Democrats are left with only the “coastal elites.” Five Thirty Eight ran an article on those lines a while back... can’t find the link, but that was also a good read.
[1] https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi...
To be fair, it's not a Democrat or Republican thing at all; although, in recent years, the Democrats have become the public face of the (dare I say it) Deep State. Almost everyone in congress is someone else's puppet, controlled through blackmail or bribery. They do the bidding of faceless, nameless, un-elected globalists, who's long-term agenda is, and has always has been, the total control of all aspects of society.
Their mandate is to vote in favor of policies that benefit the elite, not the working class.
It is no accident that the education system in the US has become what it is today. It does not educate, it indoctrinates. It teaches kids what to think, not how to think. And those that do manage to get a four-year degree are often no better equipped to step into high-paying jobs than they were before. So they're not getting the job offers and they now have huge student loans to pay off.
The elite do not want a population of thinking individuals who ask questions. They want people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, but not so smart that they start questioning the system.
As Trump said, "The system is rigged". And as George Carlin said, "It's a big club, and YOU AIN'T IN IT."
On the other hand, Trump supporters are very angry, but the problem is that Trump's program won't do anything at all to fix the problems that are making them unhappy.
There's no way around the fact that more education (doesn't necessarily mean college) and greater labor force mobility (providing people with the ability to move where the jobs are) has to be a significant part of the solution. Stating the facts is not condescension, but I guess it can and does cause politicians to lose elections.
If people in the US primarily voted the issues (that matter and affect them) instead of on the basis of nonsense, Democrats would win by a landslide.
Republican politicians are trading away relatively meaningless concessions (on things they likely don't genuinely care about like guns, LGBT rights, abortion, religion, etc) as a cover for tremendously detrimental policymaking that includes broad spectrum deregulation, huge transfers into the military-industrial complex, and massive cuts to social programs including education, healthcare, welfare, etc.
We know that's the game plan. The real fools are the people who continue to fall for this shit.
Edit: I should add that I don't necessarily believe everything about the Democratic Party's platform is valid. But they are unquestionably the better choice for the vast majority of voters.
The US spends more per-capita on education than almost any other nation, and produces a higher % of college grads as well. [1]
The US spends more per-capita on healthcare than any other nation - not just private but public as well! The US spends more per-capita on public healthcare alone than does Canada, wherein Canadians get full coverage. [2]
These issues goes way beyond just 'spending'.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-604-x/2016001/ch/chb-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...
Republicans are pummeling education systems in many of the states that they control. They've likely stolen the opportunity to be properly educated from multiple generations in the deep south. It's a tragedy. (http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/us-news-best-states-r...)
I shouldn't have to point out that government healthcare spending is not higher in this country because we're doing a better job of providing it. The fact that you quoted the raw per capita spending number suggests you're unfamiliar with the dynamics of inflated healthcare costs in the US.
I've lived and had healthcare services in two states, and lived and had health services in several nations abroad.
I'm familiar with the problems.
You can't help see the right as wrong because you can't even manage to represent their opinions in any kind of fair light.
The transgender bathroom debate. The Starbucks holiday coffee cups. There's a fantastic scene in 'Vice' depicting Republican strategists conceiving the 'Death Tax' line against a live test group. These are all variations on a theme of weaponizing emotions and biases to mislead.
In my opinion, if you don't see the elements of carefully-crafted mass behavioral manipulation and you don't see WHY they're doing it, you're just not looking hard enough or you simply don't want to know.
There are conservative positions that I believe have merit. I think that many social issues have remained unresolved for many decades because there are no perfect solutions to them.
The political construct that is the Republican Party, however, is a destructive force tearing at the fabric of our society.
That is my opinion.
I meant two things: 1. in terms of their effect on peoples' lives, these issues pale in comparison to certain other ones AND 2. Republican politicians are using these highly emotionally-charged social issues to induce people to vote against their own interests on dimensions of governance that would meaningfully impact their quality of life.
But I get the sense that you're aiming for the presentation of being objectively insightful when really you're quite transparently arguing in bad faith for the sake of provocation, so I'll just leave it at that.
Their tactic is to call you stupid, liar, racist, sexist... You know the list. If you argue on their terms, if you start arguing you're not stupid for example, you're accepting their framing. This is a losing battle. Instead I find it's more effective to simply draw attention to their tactic. Once the tactic is revealed it loses efficacy.
If I genuinely believe you to be stupid, evil, disingenuous, etc. I won't be able to genuinely hear you. You're just making noise. I would encourage you to try this experiment out some time. Instead of arguing specific policy, point out the tactic. It's repeatable and quite telling.
> If people in the US primarily voted the issues (that matter and affect them) instead of on the basis of nonsense, Democrats would win by a landslide.
> The real fools are the people who continue to fall for this shit.
Gosh, it's hard to see where people get the impression that they're being condescended to. It's a pity they're so easily manipulated into voting against their own best interests.
Also, I'm obviously just one person expressing an opinion. But yes, any Republican strategist worth his salt (and you seem like someone who might do a sparkling job of it) would squeeze this picked cherry for all it's worth. Ergo all liberals are condescending. Q.E.D.
It is entirely a social construct (aside from practical, concrete-math-based STEM and engineering).
Another real-life aspect is that passing through a really decent schools like MIT or Caltech (or Yale, as an exception) is a proof (by example) that one is capable of self-discipline, concentration, self-improvement, able to do research and learn on by doing.
Aside from that a degree is just and merely a social status certificate, a certificate of belonging to a higher social class (no matter actual skills and abilities).
I myself am from a third-world social shithole and never went to a high school. I could, however, beat a vast majority of so-called liberal arts majors and even some Stanford grads, which I regularly did on this very site before CoCs and bans for use of an "inappropriate" language.
So, there is nothing much to talk about. A crappy degree is a social status certificate, and obsession with language usage, long-words and polit-correctness and fancy abstract terminology is merely a signaling of assumed, self-proclaimed (and almost always absent) virtue.
College degree is non-essential for most people, unnecessary for at least 50%.
If they want to vote against our shared interests and suffer the consequences, so be it. Me and mine will keep building without them and I won't spare a moments thought for their self inflicted suffering (except to be glad it isn't me).
Give hate and antipathy no quarter. Where there is pain, it must our pain, or there will inevitably be revolution and chaos. Love without discrimination, even with those you disagree with, because they cannot be moved if we act like impetuous children by refusing to talk to them. Prejudice also cannot be convenient, or we likely possess internal inconsistencies we must face if we are to be honest and have integrity.
Their "communities" are dieing, their businesses are failing, and their smart kid leave. The only question is whether those fools death throes doom the rest of us.
Hilariously, on the fringes they're being supplanted by refugees from metro areas that got priced out. Those people are bringing sanity to the wasteland with them like pilgrims in an unholy land.
From my perspective, I can do little to nothing to influence how all this plays out besides voting, living my life as I see fit, and directing my time and attention toward those I deem worthy. And that's exactly what I'm going to do.
"You could see that they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn't give a fig for anyone who wasn't." C.S. Lewis
Copy-pasting unattributed quotes doesn't make you look smart.
Perceived problem, attempted solutions, potential new solution.
I have no idea what the hell the article is going on about - it reads like a rant by a typical politically active idiot.
Just who is this article aimed at? I don't mean the article doesn't have some good points, but the way it treats this as a monolithic generally true problem immediately strikes me as incorrect. Dude's in a bubble of his own to think this is sage advice that can be generally applied.