"You are suffering economically because you didn't achieve high enough in life"

[AZ Progressive]

I bet that's what affluent Hillary supporters believe about the bottom 80%. I'd believe Thomas Frank before I'd believe whatever any Hillary supporter says.

http://inthesetimes.com/features/listen-liberal-thomas-frank-democratic-party-elites-inequality.html

What’s the content of the ideology of the professional class and how does it hurt working people? What are their guiding principles?

The first commandment of the professional class is the idea of meritocracy, which allows people to think that those on top are there because they deserve to be. With the professional class, it’s always associated with education. They deserve to be there because they worked really hard and went to a good college and to a good graduate school. They’re high achievers. Democrats are really given to credentialism in a way that Republicans aren’t.

If you look at the last few Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Obama, and Hillary Clinton as well, their lives are a tale of educational achievement. This is what opened up the doors of the world to them. It’s a party of who people who have gotten where they are by dint of educational accomplishment.

This produces a set of related ideas. When the Democrats, the party of the professionals, look at the economic problems of working-class people, they always see an educational problem, because they look at working class people and say, “Those people didn’t do what I did”: go and get advanced degrees, go to the right college, get the high SAT scores and study STEM or whatever.

That was an essential point that I try to make in Listen Liberal: that there is no solidarity in a meritocracy. A meritocracy really is every man for himself.

Don’t get me wrong. People at the top of the meritocracy, professionals, obviously have enormous respect for one another. That is the nature of professional meritocracy. They have enormous respect for the people at the top, but they feel very little solidarity for people beneath them who don’t rise in the meritocracy.

Bonus quote:

One of the most shocking quotes in the book is from Alfred Kahn, an advisor to Jimmy Carter, who said, “I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off.” He then basically says that unionized workers are exploiting other workers.

Isn’t that amazing? He’s describing a situation in the 1970s. There was all this controversy in the 1970s about labor versus management—this was the last decade where those fights were front and center in our national politics. And he’s coming down squarely on the side of management in those fights.

And remember, Kahn was a very important figure in the Carter administration. The way that he describes unions is incorrect—he’s actually describing professionals. Professionals are a protected class that you can’t do anything about—they’re protected by the laws of every state that dictate who can practice in these fields. It’s funny that he projects that onto organized labor and holds them responsible for the sins of another group.

This is a Democrat in an administration that is actually not very liberal. This is the administration that carried out the first of the big deregulations. This is the administration that had the great big capital gains tax cuts, that carried out the austerity plan that saw the Federal Reserve jack its interest rates sky high. They clubbed the economy to the ground in order to stop “wage inflation,” in which workers, if they have enough power, can keep demanding higher wages. It was incredible.

The Democratic Party has been invaded by affluent moderate Republicans and they are the ones that need to leave the party, not the progressives.

[bkkyosemite]

1. That last sentence rings a bell.

[whatthehey]

2. Utter crap

Plumbers make more than most accountants. They deserve to. It's hard unpleasant work with high risk and cost if done wrong. This latter is really the key among employees in business, and favors educated folks only because that risk and cost usually applies more if professionals screw up. If a fry cook screws up in the general operation of their job you have to make hash browns again. If a plumber screws up your second floor is covered in water. If an engineer screws up, you have massively expensive redesign, reproduction, recall etc. costs. If a surgeon screws up people die. Typically the salary goes up in that order

Education is nothing more than a qualifier that says "I can do X". X could be surgery or it could be as basic as "follow instructions, complete assigned tasks and navigate bureaucracy." That's why companies often insist on BAs for admin and general positions like planning folks or salespeople. They don't care if your degree is in Sociology or French. What the salary range is for just about any job outside entertainment depends on just three things, in ascending order (in entertainment itall boils down to how many people will pay for you to do it as opposed to anyone else):

1) How many people can and are willing to do the job.
2) How bad things get if you fuck it up
3) How easily can we get somebody/thing cheaper to do it approximately as well as you

Education is a subset of 1 especially when applied to specific skills but also general attributes such as our Sociology grads who can demonstrate the ability to graduate. It's only a tangential but correlated factor to 2 (those planners and salespeople can screw up the bottom line more than an incompetent assembler) and really not all that relevant to 3, as adjunct lecturers, Indian IT support and remote diagnosis tell us.

Also such screeds never tell us what should replace meritocracy. Nobody would want a surgeon chosen by random lottery or fly in a plane designed by fry cooks with no engineering training. Should there be no advantage to demonstrating an ability to gain and apply knowledge even in general subjects? On what basis should higher paying jobs be awarded except on demonstrated merit? If your job is to understand things analyze options and apply solutions, which frankly is what both management and politics boil down to, isn't the demonstrated ability to do that what we should look for?

[Baobab]

3. Hillarians believe in supply and demand only so wages must fall if either supply increases

or demand falls. by their logic, automation will make wages eventually approach zero. they are against sustainability arguments on principle.

The only reason Hillary is claiming to be for a minimum wage increase to $12 an hour is because she wants to teach the country a lesson with globalization.

Which could result in our ending up with no minimum wage at all, if the WTO rules its a trade barrier- or if US firms find themselves unable to win bids on even local business due to the Government Procurement Agreements requirements that work (with contracts valued over some threshold) go to the lowest qualified bidder.

[BillZBubb]

10. Wow! Frank's words just went right over your head.

Your simplistic supply/demand argument leaves out the role of government. You naively accept that higher paying jobs are awarded based solely on merit. You tacitly accept that whatever those jobs pay is exactly the correct amount. You totally miss the logical conclusion of what a meritocracy means to those on the bottom part of the "merit" scale.

[lostnfound]

4. In 12th grade my best friend taught me the world is starved for compassion, more than knowledge

And when I visited Peterborough Canada where my dad was born 110 years ago, and I met descendants -- kind second and third cousins --and found the cemetery plots of our common ancestors -- I realized more concretely than ever: if you are satisfied with the kind of "meritocracy" that lets people suffer, starve, struggle just because they aren't rockets scientists or math whizzes, then you are saying you don't care about the standard of living of 18 out of your 20 great grandchildren. Or you don't care about most of the other descendants of your own bread grandparents.

There needs to be a life afforded to the man who is good with his hands, to the child with autism, to the aging teacher with no kids to care for, to the ones who are not smart enough, mean enough or focused enough to make it in this complicated society.

[Warren DeMontague]

5. THE BUMS LOST, DO YOU HEAR ME MR. LEBOWSKI?

THE BUMS WILL ALWAYS LOSE!

[vintx]

6. Excellent

[riversedge]

7. So you write a big thead about your demeaning Hillary bet.

And attribute a nasty comment to her. Nothing new--but your comments are shameful.


............ "You are suffering economically because you didn't achieve high enough in life"

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I bet that's what affluent Hillary supporters believe about the bottom 80%. I'd believe Thomas Frank before I'd believe whatever any Hillary supporter says. ............

[Downwinder]

8. Gentrification.

[kgnu_fan]

9. kick for a thought