All Hollowed Out the lonely poverty of America’s white working class
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Useful cross-references:
Thomas Franks, book, Listen, Liberal. http://www.worldcat.org/title/listen-liberal-or-what-ever-ha...
Franks makes the point that the USA is the only developed nation in the world where the major leftward-leaning political party does not appeal to working people, but rather to elites.
A Bloomberg piece on how Larry Summers, president of Harvard, economic bigshot in Obama 44's first term, blasted Trump's move to keep some United Technologies (Carrier) mfg jobs in Indiana instead of moving them to a maquiladora. He blasted Trump on the grounds that politicians have no business trying to influence keeping jobs in their districts. That's an astonishing position. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-02/summers-s...
Max Weber, book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S... This three-generation-old work digs in to the moral roots of lonely striving.
True, especially since there are fine grounds to oppose Trump's "deal", namely that the same amount of government money could have just paid the workers' salaries directly, or the government could seize the factory and put it under worker ownership, or the government could use the money as part of the proposed trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.
Bribing a company to "save jobs" with more money than it will actually pay out in salaries is just plain wasteful.
Your math is off. The company agreed to keep 700 jobs in the US, and will in return get $7 million in tax breaks over 10 years. That's only $700,000 per year.
So it's not a bad deal if you look at it in isolation, but there are reasonable concerns on whether this is scalable and whether we want to introduce protectionist policies with the expectation that the rest of the world may retaliate.
Because if that's not the plan, then the Carrier deal is just showmanship with little substantive impact.
Here's a way for executive-branch politicians to spend tax money to keep jobs in their districts.
1. agree with the legislature about the value of the jobs, and how much to spend on the subsidy, and for how long.
2. figure out the ratio between the subsidy and company payroll headcount and/or cash outlay. For example, "We are willing to subsidize employment at this location to the tune of US$50 per W2 employee per week", or "We are willing to subsidize employment at this location by one half of the employer contribution to social security and medicare."
(Should subsidies be based on headcount or gross pay? I don't know. Working that out is part of the task of deciding the subsidy.)
3. After each payroll, get the employer to submit receipts for their social security and medicare contributions.
4. Certify that those receipts are legitimate (not faked, etc). That should generally be easy, and it's necessary for public trust.
5. Pay the agreed-upon amount, promptly, to the employer.
This has the advantage that the subsidies go down immediately if employment goes down in the subsidized location. It rules out monkey business surrounding long term tax breaks for short term jobs. It's transparent in its costs and benefits.
And, guess what, Dr. Summers? Spending the public's money in this way is certainly within the remit of elected politicians. If the public doesn't like it they can put a stop to it.
Perhaps "elites" are just a hobgoblin, invented to be feared. The leaders of both parties are elites, by definition.
Its pretty clear there was a disdain for the working class from the democrats at the national level, and even the republicans too. Thats why Bernie and Trump did so surprising well.
... and immigration, both legal and illegal. To have both a robust safety net and also unrestricted immigration is to turn poor people into wards of the state, and they know it. It shouldn't be any surprise this is rejected by the working class, which after all would prefer to be the working class and not the lay-about-the-house-and-collect-benefits class.
If you'll recall, before the first votes came in Iowa he was supposed to lead a "political revolution" because rather than appealing to coalition of interests and identity politics, he would cut across it all with universal class appeal and bring back. After the votes started coming in, it became clear that revolution never came and he was just another left wing politician, who couldn't get the numbers like all the others before him (Dean, Bradley, Brown, Jackson etc)
Leftists always imagine that if they talk about class and nothing else it'll magically erase all other distinctions between their voters and they'll come to power. Maybe that works in other places, but not in America. If you're on the lower rungs of the social ladder and you get treated like shit and some politician offers you some extra cash/benefit, you know you're still gonna get treated like shit afterwards.
Michael Moore explains it pretty well. A large population of americans simply wanted to a hurl a human molotov into the current system which failed them.
I also suggest the following talk by Mark Blyth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm2Vfj42FY which concisely outlines the economics behind the decline of western middle classes, and the link to sentiment against mainstream political parties. If you are interested in how bad things look for europe (from 2013, but the fundamentals have not changed): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQuHSQXxsjM
One interesting and troubling aside:
This is focused on the working class and so doesn't talk very much about college educated people. But it does mention education, and still holds it up as a way forward. Well, that's also being hollowed out.
There's a large and growing number of college graduates who cannot find a decent job and who amass large amounts of student debt. They did everything they were supposed to, but the jobs aren't there. Or the jobs are not what they used to be (see adjuncts v. tenure in academia, for instance). Or after all that schooling and debt, you have to "pay to play" by taking long term unpaid internships in expensive cities, which only the affluent can afford.
This is bad on its own for people who would normally go to college and get white collar jobs, but it also destroys upward mobility for the working class.
It's not just about unions and manufacturing any more. Hollowing out the middle class has become structural.
I think That sentiment is a big part of the problem right there. College isn't a checkbox, it's a tool to increase the value you can provide to others and yourself. Any credential is, at its core, just a proxy for expected value. If you give higher regard to the credential than the expected value, you're likely to have a bad time.
The shift from tenured to adjunct positions in academia doesn't have anything to do with the quality of applicants. The shift in tech from salaried employees to contractors (offshored or not) has nothing to do with the pool of qualified applicants. Lower pay for positions that create the same value are not the fault of the worker.
When these sorts of issues become structural there are far fewer options for individuals to pursue. Whatever path they choose, their chances of success is less.
Lobbying, regulatory capture, bankers, bailouts, a brazenly corrupt financial system, foreign policy warmongering, the security state, surveillance have been out of control for years now and show a state completely divorced from its citizens interests. Yet there is hardly a peep because there is no civic society.
Structurally it seems the hatred between the various groups that form our society is so visceral and deep that a credible pushback is a near impossibility.
Without any pushback what does one imagine happens? Entire sections of society have been thrown under the bus with hand waving and manufactured economic ideology. This is not how democracy works.
It's ironic. Corporations are anything but individualist. They're collectives. Almost always top-down authoritarian structures that resemble fascism closer than most fascist governments. And full of bureaucracies that have nothing to do with making products, like marketing & finance depts.
And in this article, "education" is a euphemism synonymous with college. Not talking about self-learning. Some administration that gives people certificates.
Except of course that (1) the corporation only survives ultimately by selling a product or service that someone of their own free will, wishes to purchase; i.e., it is of more value to them than their cash. (2) local conditions excepted (no other job available), people are not forced to work in these organizations.
Making products is all very well but if your potential customer doesn't know about it and/or its production is not financed properly, the activity is a waste of time.
Well that's had highly debatable. Consider the amount of resources corporations spend trying to convince people what their will should be.
Edward Bernays. Dole Fruit Company. The Pinkertons. United Steel strikebusting. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
I'd strongly recommend boning up on your history.
Peter Thiel has described at length this kind of error
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLJIpBexKhQ
It has always impressed me how doctrinal higher education as a terminal goal has become for the middle class. I personally believe it is utterly worthless for 9/10 of the people going to college right now. The students would be better off doing almost anything else.
For those who are wondering, HN is intended for gratification of intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Intellectual curiosity is far removed from political battle, and much weaker a force, so it needs protecting. Occasional political comments aren't a problem, so long as they're civil, but using HN primarily for politics is not ok.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13247955 and marked it off-topic.