This seems like a great demonstration of basing arguments on a dependent variable. Every slide I've seen so far would be better explained by white collar vs blue collar rather than sitter vs stander.
This is literally the example from which we learned that standing and walking around helps prevent heart attacks.
Likewise what makes you think that the epidemiology was hard? The statistics were absolutely brutally obvious. The main problem was getting people to look at the data, not interpreting it.
See https://bcmj.org/articles/exercise-and-heart-review-early-st... for some of the early history that is involved here.
To be fair, the twist did get me. I thought it was leading up to discussing injury rates, or health in old age. Since I'm not from the US, the pivot to discussing race wasn't very interesting/relevant to me.
Is it not this way? How about where you are from, since you're "not from the US"?
Each and every one of these groupings have faced discrimination in one context or another, and all of them would be described as 'white' in American terms. Actual Asian people are too far out of context to really be considered on more than an individual basis; there aren't a lot of them here.
Germans vs Turks
Han Chinese vs non-Han Chinese
Canada vs first nations
Many countries have their racial underclasses.
While race is of course an issue in all countries, few countries hold on to their racial divide as strongly as the US.
Nonetheless, I didn't mean that discussion about race wasn't relevant or interesting to me. I simply meant that discussion about the racial divides in the US aren't relevant to me.
Since I hear and read about US specific race issues a lot I usually avoid the topic and was a bit annoyed that this post baited me into investing so much time before it revealed what it was about.
(More baffling is how the US is in complete denial of its class system - so much so that anyone who tries to talk about class is immediately told they're talking about race)
But yet, we're all mushed into the same category and expected to think alike and have the same ambitions. It's frustrating, but there's not a whole lot that I can do about it other than engage with people using my own perspective.
The actual data would still have made as much (or more) sense if it was white vs blue collar, but I suppose no one would be surprised by that, and wouldn't have clicked through long enough for the "switch" to hit.
I think it’s just not as top of mind in other places, but its there.
But I also have the impression that you have more knowledge of racism than some other countries. I mean the Dutch obviously have a horrific racist history.
> Since I'm not from the US, the pivot to discussing race wasn't very interesting/relevant to me.
Indians do a lot better economically than Bangladeshis, black Africans better than black Caribbeans, etc. People from some Eastern European countries do a lot worse than visible minorities. Of the white minorities the Irish were traditionally close to the bottom of the heap historically, but for the last few decades have done well, especially educationally, probably boosted by the quality of Catholic schools (religious schools can receive state funding here and many are therefore free to attend).
Its clearly mostly to do with lack of intergenerational social mobility. Its worth noting that the group doing worst educationally in the UK are white working class boys.
In Sri Lanka which is also my "home" country for a different definition of home the minorities are not "economically lower class" but have faced significant racism and religious discrimination (both sometimes violent) - but have also done the same themselves.
[1] All numbers I know of that compare ethnic groups lump the three biggest native groups into one, "white British".
There is a literal mountain of evidence that both color and race in the US correlate negatively with outcomes, perhaps in differing amounts, but if you ignore that, you’re also ignoring some evidence. There a lot of possible confounding reasons why one black group might fare better than another on average in the US, and that means that if you care about being accurate about whether race and class are linked, then it’s extremely difficult to separate them, and nearly impossible to declare they’re not linked. The biggest problem with your claim is that race and class absolutely were linked in the past without question, when blacks were slaves, and we have never had a period in US history where the socioeconomic outcomes of blacks matched whites on average. The situation has improved, but we have plenty of evidence we’re not there yet, and so it’s impossible and almost certainly wrong to claim that either race or color has little to do with class.
Race is far more important in the US: it seems to be fundamental to people's identity and how they are regarded in a way that is difficult to grasp from outside. It is strange to me that people who accept self-identity of gender regard race as an immutable inherited characteristic.
The nearest parallel is caste in India. It is inherited, immutable and hierarchical.
That at least is my coarse observation as an outsider and I stressed qualifiers as there are no absolutes here, just fuzzy clouds of human attributes with some overlaps and no hard borders.
The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types are pretty much the same media streams that mock trans identity, wokeness, and alphabet classification.
That's the other side from the one that most strongly regards "race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic" as far as I can see.
I am not convinced. Even Americans who accept gender self-identity AND claim to be anti-racist usually have a problem with regarding race as a superficial characteristic, and rarely seem to accept people self-identifying as a different race to their "real" one.
> The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types are pretty much the same media streams that mock trans identity, wokeness, and alphabet classification.
My point is that BOTH sides in the US regard race as an immutable fundamental characteristic.
Personally I've seen two correlations in different directions.
Race is important to the swastika-tattoo crowd on the far right, no doubt.
Meanwhile on the left, a lot of people acknowledge a widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs that can support a family without a degree. That even though the median family's situation has been improving for decades, a lot of people haven't shared in the benefits. To me this is obviously a matter of class.
But I look at American analysis and discussion, and 95% of the time they ignore class, and instead analyse it through a racial lens - reinterpreting the widening gap between rich and poor as a widening gap between white and black. The along comes Trump, and he gains a load of support from the white working class simply by acknowledging that yes, they are struggling.
So I can certainly see what graemep is getting at.
Significant US analysis, that with any meat, looks to race, class , and income to quintile the US demographic and examine the prospects of each rank and the mobility across groups.
Recent years have seen books such as Paul Fussell, CLASS: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), and a host between.
The difficulty for the US has been the dumbing down of public discourse, that was the condition that permitted a Trump to sweep through on a popularists platform.
I have posted this before so a bit reluctant to repeat, but its relevant. i wrote a blog post about my view and experience of race in different cultures : https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
I'm pretty surprised to hear that. Nearly every program I've seen in my adult life that explicitly uses race as an important factor in who gets hired or promoted or funded has come from the left. The left is also the group that is in favor of gender self-identification. Maybe these aren't always the exact same people, but the overlap politically is strong.
That's not to say that conservatives don't hold or express racist or bigoted beliefs, but I'm not sure I've ever seen an overt effort to only hire white people or exclude brown people.
Desegregation has been slow, and you can't really desegregate inherited wealth.
I'd argue sitter vs stander distinction also makes this presentation more visceral, memorable and understandable. Collar color would feel unnecessarily abstract and boring.
It's perhaps less relevant now that a lot of people can roll out of bed and start their remote job in sweatpants, but it's stuck with me.
(Despite being solidly white collar, I still shower of a night)
The majority of Americans I know shower in the morning. Japanese bath/shower at night as a general rule. A western person I know married to a Japanese person said their partner thought they were gross to climb into bed all dirty (not bathing at night). My friend thought "waking up sticky from sleep and staying sticky all day is gross". My friend's solution was to bath both in the morning and at night. Their partner still only baths at night.
Also more importantly, I think the main point of the article is that it's not just two clusters; there are several interesting axes to look at. E.g. electricians are "standers" but have autonomy; bookkeepers are "white collar" but do little problem-solving, etc.
(Also I interpreted "standing/sitting" as basically being a catchy title - I think the author's premise is that all the axes he examined are relevant, not just the standing/sitting one.)
> bookkeepers are "white collar" but do little problem-solving
If you want to see it, skip to the "explore" part and then enter "I solve problems daily" and "Bookkeeping" in the UI.
If you think that then I’d wager you’d never had to digitise any form of economic based system. I need an accountant to even begin to tell me how to do their weird nonsensical math, because it’s not actually math but law. Law which is open to interpretation. Law which still has to be boiled down to financial calculations and budget planning.
In Germany you get a green tariff when you produce solar energy. You do this in most of Europe, but in Germany the tariff goes away if you exceed a certain amount of energy production, as in, you’re either paid X or you’re paid 0.
No definition will be perfect, but this one does pretty well as you point out.
It also naturally provides an objective gradation, which many definitions that stand in for blue collar” or sit in for “white collar” won’t provide.