Back to Class

 Happy International Labor Day!

Krugman sticks this thing ("Education has less to do with inequality than you think") under his "Wonking Out" rubric, which is a shame, because that means a lot of people who need to read it won't, and since it's indirectly making a point I've been making for a long time, but making it with an expertise I couldn't come close to, I wanted to highlight it.

His immediate purpose is to defend the idea of a broad-based program to cut or eliminate student debt, like the one Biden promised in the 2020 campaign and has recently returned to talking about; a widespread criticism of such a program is that it rewards people for doing something for which they have already been rewarded, with a college degree:

Class Interests

 

The Branko Milanovic–Christoph Lakner "Elephant Chart" showing global growth rates from 1988 to 2008 arranged by income percentiles, with its four major highlights: mediocre growth in red for the poorest people, or most people in the poorest countries, extraordinary growth in green for most people in the emerging economies of Asia, especially China, serious stagnation in blue for the pretty rich people of western Europe and North America in particular, and fabulous growth in purple for the global super-rich (not as fabulous as China, but keep in mind that the 1% are starting with a lot more money, ending up by 2020 with 43% of all the wealth in the world).

This post from Nathan Newman ("Education Polarization in Elections: People Are Voting Their Class Interests"), giving me at long last a way of thinking about that "White Working Class" that makes some sense, has been sitting in an open tab on my computer for almost a month. He's looking at the same voting pattern as everybody else, but he's seeing it in the historical context of how it effectively happened that the outsourcing economy of the last 40-odd years primarily affected white workers in relatively rural areas; because that's how the distinction between workers in the growing service industries and and those in the shrinking manufacturing industries had sorted itself out in the US, where the former remained as traditional multiracial and urban, the latter came to be concentrated in

The Playing Fields of Eton

 

Johnson at Eton, front and center as usual, in one of a number of pictures where he seems to be trying on a Mussolini face. Photo via The London Economic.

This fine Guardian piece by the novelist Richard Beard, talking about how upper-class boarding school nourishes and shapes the psychopathy of the Tory ruling class in UK, as typified by Old Etonians like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, is harrowing (see what I did there?):

One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were – in name-taped pyjamas with a single soft toy (also name-taped), blubbing themselves to sleep and wetting their beds.

Class War Comix

 

Class War Comix 1, by Skip Williamson, ca. 1970

Eric Levitz at New York informs us:

In a 2019 report, the consulting firm Cerulli Associates projected that, over the next quarter century, roughly 45 million U.S. households will collectively bequeath $68.4 trillion to their heirs. This transfer will constitute the largest redistribution of wealth in human history. Generation X stands to inherit 57 percent of that $68.4 trillion; millennials will collect the bulk of the rest.

Millennials, in other words, are one day going to be a lot richer (or at least, some millennials are). In the coming years, that reality is likely to heighten the generation’s class contradictions – and just might redraw the dividing lines in American politics.

How many millennials, exactly? Not too many, apparently. Levitz calls it about 10% who will be getting all that money, while the other 90% will continue being "one of the the poorest generations ever", crippled by debt and largely unable to build wealth, unstable in employment, often deprived by employers (in the gig economy) of benefits, and delayed in starting families. The typical Millennial holds 41% less wealth than an adult of similar age did in 1989, according to one report in 2019, and these meager holdings are very unequally distributed, especially on ethnic-racial lines:

This is not the way to bring an end to class

This is not the way to bring an end to the class system.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Meritocracy Is Ripping America Apart: How Savage Exclusion Tears the Social Fabric", New York Times, 13 September 2019:

Hey, guys, it turns out inequality is really bad! Not only for you and me and the rest of the great mediocre majority who never get a chance to rule the world, but even for the brilliant Ivy-trained wizards who do rule it! They have to work too hard, and it's ruining their lives! Meanwhile, I've learned that there are these things called state universities! They have one in Arizona! I got to visit it last spring and it knocked my socks off. Instead of doing all they can to keep people out, they keep trying to get more people in, and instead of getting worse from letting all those mediocre people in, it gets better. This could be a game-changer!

He's come to some clarity on the subject of what it is he hates about meritocracy, thanks to the book Brooksy has read the first 20 pages of for Friday's column, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor who is, according to the publisher blurb, "well placed to expose the sham of meritocracy. Having spent his life at elite universities, he knows from the inside the corrosive system we are trapped within." Well, speak for yourself, pal. If the rest of us peasants only know if from the outside, then we're not trapped within it. And if we're all trapped within it, then his experience isn't that special.

As a matter of fact it sounds like a pretty fierce indictment of something. As Thomas Frank writes, reviewing the book for The Times,

AOC v. VDH

Giovanni de Min. Spartan women wrestling, fresco, 1835-36. Villa Patt, Sedico, via .scclub.  

Victor Davis Hanson denounces the educated classes for the enjoyment and edificaton of the unlettered readership of the National Review:
T

rumpism is sometimes derided as an updated know-nothingism that rejects expertise and the input of credentialed expertise. Supposedly, professionals who could now save us tragically have their talent untapped as they sit idle at the Council on Foreign Relations, the economics Department at Harvard, or in the offices of the Brookings Institution — even as Trump’s wheelers and dealers crash and burn, too proud, too smelly, or too ignorant to call in their betters to come in and save Trump from himself.

But do the degreed classes, at least outside math, the sciences, engineering, and medicine, merit such esteem anymore?

You can tell by his plain, colloquial language that he's a hardscrabble man of the people himself, at ease with chainsaws.

Possessor Emeritus

Eton. Image from Notboxed.

Judd Gregg:

One of the great advantages of America — and the one that has drawn so many people to our shores — is the opportunity our way of life affords to people who work hard, take risks and want to succeed financially. At its core, the nation has been, and to a large extent continues to be, a meritocracy.  

To be more accurate, we have developed over the years into a benign meritocracy. We have social and government structures that funnel huge resources to helping those who need help in participating fully in our society.  But, even so, much of our success as a nation and culture is due to the fact that people can succeed on their own initiative. We do not overly penalize those who accomplish this success, and we certainly do not vilify them.

The Duke of Omnium:

The Conservative who has had any idea of the meaning of the name which he carries wishes, I suppose, to maintain the differences and the distances which separate the highly placed from their lower brethren. He thinks that God has divided [jump]

Notes from the growing bifurcation

Shorter David Brooks:

The poors are very different from you and me.

No, really; David Brooks has been hearing about social inequality in America, what he calls a "growing bifurcation of American society," and he's very worried. He's been hearing about it from Robert Putnam, author of the famous Bowling Alone, and I figure he's been hearing about it at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where Putnam just gave a talk on his recent research.

The research is pretty hot, too, and nowhere near publication, but if like me you just couldn't make it to Aspen this year (oops! I forgot all about that gosh darn mortgage and all them credit card bills, and I didn't have anything to wear anyhow), you can still read about it in writing by someone who is not David Brooks; I found a very nice liveblog by David Weinberger at Joho the Blog, and I imagine there's more out there too.

From Tales from the Lou's Blog.

Putnam has been looking at children, and seeing hard class differences right from infancy, when more women who haven't finished college are giving birth than women who have, over the past 30 years, and more kids (obviously) are getting brought up in single-adult homes. The numbers are pretty much the same, by the way, for white Americans on their own as they are for people of all races (Putnam's study is limited to white people).

Parents from the upper level invest more money in their kids and they invest more time as well; up to an hour a day of additional quality time. Their kids are more active in sports, lessons, volunteering for the community. Kids from the lower level have fewer people they can trust, are less trusting anyway, and—of course—do worse on the reading and math tests.

Color me not terribly surprised by any of this, and why? I guess I always thought poverty was more of  a problem than teachers' unions. But Brooks is pretty shocked, almost to the point of understanding, briefly, what is going on: notice how he pulls back as if in terror at his own audacity from reality into surreality between paragraphs:

A long series of cultural, economic and social trends have merged to create this sad state of affairs. Traditional social norms were abandoned, meaning more children are born out of wedlock. Their single parents simply have less time and resources to prepare them for a more competitive world. Working-class jobs were decimated, meaning that many parents are too stressed to have the energy, time or money to devote to their children.

Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other energetic, intelligent people. They raise energetic, intelligent kids in self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and have less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.

(Yes, it can't have that much to do with unemployment, can it? Must be those selfish intelligent people marrying their own kind and leaving the rest of us stranded.)

From The Final Edition (and a very funny though slow-starting Brooks parody from sometime last year).

And in the end, as he's trying to establish his left-right equivalence for the day, he really loses control:

Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.

That's all he wants us to do? I'll take it! If you can't afford to get married you shouldn't have a baby. It would also help if Brooks's friends would loosen up some on abortion....
 

It's not about contraception, it's about over (but it'll be back!)

Noting Minority Leader McConnell's plans to push the Roy Blunt bill to permit any employer to deny family planning coverage in their employees' health insurance plans, John Cole is reduced to sputtering:

I’m simply speechless. I honestly can not believe that in this day and age, the GOP is going to go all out and wage this war. This has nothing to do with religious liberty, and this is just a war on women. They are just done pretending they are anything but religious zealots and fanatics.

With all respect and affection for this great blog artist, I don't think so—not "just" a war on women, though women are clearly the primary targets.  I think [jump]

Bishops are very concerned about blogs. From Abbey Roads.