Krugman: Money and Morals

[n2doc]

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 9, 2012

Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.


So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals.

But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.

To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.

But the first question one should ask is: Are things really that bad on the values front?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/opinion/krugman-money-and-morals.html?_r=1&hp

[rfranklin]

1. It's all about the money...

They fuck us over and then tell us it's our moral failing.

It's the same old Calvinistic bullshit justifying the one percenters.

[angstlessk]

2. If I could reply to an individual I would sign on to the Times..and just say

"You sound like a pompous ass"

It seems to me that Conservatives tend to be more susceptible to committing the 'fundamental attribution error,' that liberals, in essence, commit its opposite {and ergo are more likely to endorse state action and treat legal issues as politics by other means} whereas both camps, qua such, engage in the 'ultimate attribution error' {as well as resort to ad hominem} when assessing members of the other group-qua-such.

More simply, Dr. Krugman here laments a facile assertion made by some {most? all?} conservatives, which seems to fairly distill to the Herman Cainsian notion that if one is poor one must blame oneself.

Yet it seems to me that in blaming 'society' for not providing enough jobs for uneducated men, Dr. Krugman glosses over some things:

- Why men only? There are plenty of nursing and related jobs, many of which pay an above-median wage. There has certainly been an increase in men studying nursing, but it's not clear that the supply is outpacing demand. Why, precisely, is 'society' to blame for the student who simply fails to apply himself, and/or drops out early?

The poor inner city male is at substantial disadvantage to wealthy suburban whites - but he remains an agent, and if he does not seek education and training, or if he turns to crime - is this because our society in 2012 doesn't have many good paying jobs for him, or because he did not study and train to find a job in the modern jobs environment?