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The article is a book teaser for The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, by Peter Temin at MIT. The central point, he argues, is that

The article is a book teaser for The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, by Peter Temin at MIT. The central point, he argues, is that the top 20% professional-and-up top crust of American society has enacted structural gatekeeping processes like many years of education, and low minimum wages to systematically repress groups by race. From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis, where a simple economic one would do: close the door on others after they're already in the castle. You can see this play out everywhere, from how 'disruption' pivots to regulatory capture, from how homeowners fiercely guard their property values, and society self-sorts into cohorts of similar income and circumstance. We've seen in recent years with working-class people's backlash against neoliberal ideas of governance and trade, in Europe and the US, that the economics notion that growth creates wealth at all levels, and wealth isn't a zero-sum game, is a perception not widely shared among everyday people. The fact is, most people perceive wealth solely in relative terms: are they better off than their neighbors, or people with similar life circumstances? Or are they plagued by the same anxiety and insecurity as people they always thought of as poorer than them? Race plays into this, sure, but more in terms of shared history or the lack thereof, and of being a convenient visually-obvious indicator for a dimension of difference. The people fighting for the scraps below try to band together along dimensions they find relatable -- similar upbringing, comparable treatment by the same sorts of people, similar biases, similar goals and struggles, and race often correlates with enough difference in these life circumstances to interfere with relatability. Conversely, outside of the upper crust of society, different groups all quest for the same opportunities, where victory of one group is quite often to the economic detriment of another. Simply, every group is trying to keep another out. Those whose families have recently ascended to economic security have a vested interest in keeping large waves of additional risers out, while those competing for opportunities to be upwardly mobile are fighting over limited capacity in education, employment, and housing.

coldtea 9y ago
>From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis, where a simple economic one would do: close the door on others after they're already in the castle. As you yourself admit, race is a very convenient way to help close the door.
- PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
  The parent post was saying that race doesn't need to be the end, because there is simpler explanations for why people want to pull up the ladder behind them. But using race to close the doors is making it the means, not the end. I think the overall point being made is that these days race is neither purposefully included in either the means or the ends, but due to historical factors accidentally included. Pulling up the ladder for everyone poorer than you will have a disparate impact by race if poverty isn't equal between races, and due to historical reasons it isn't. But that doesn't mean that anything about race fuels the choice of action. The core problem is attributing bad behavior that is caused by something other than racism (such as classism, greed, or just trying to win a non-infinite sum game) can create problems by hampering discussions of the actual root issues. Of course, we shouldn't completely dismiss it as a reason for some people to do what they do. But there has to be a middle ground between saying it is the primary factor and it is never a factor.
- jerf 9y ago
  Yes, but is it actually what people are thinking when they enact these policies? Or is it a side effect? For instance, this went by recently in my feeds: http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/shampooing-hair-and-piloting-commercial-airliners-require-same-number-of-training-hours-in-michigan http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/shampooing-hair-a... In Michigan, getting a hairdresser's license requires requires 1,500 hours of training, the same as an airline pilot. Was somebody going yeah, this'll keep those nasty other races down? Was it just an attempt to pull the ladder up behind them by the existing hairdressing firms? Was there some regulator somewhere who was honestly convinced by someone that hair chemicals are so dangerous that they require 1500 hours of training as to how to handle properly? Was it something else? If you don't identify the problem correctly, you don't stand a chance of solving it. The zeal to attribute everything that can possibly be attributed to racism to racism ironically hurts the very people it's trying to help by ensuring the problems facing them do not get correctly addressed, when it isn't always racism. Maybe it was this time. I dunno. Maybe there really were some legislators or regulators in Michigan who where just champing at the bit to find a way to keep down those nasty people, and ha ha, here's my chance to strike, no hairdressing for you unless you pay the rent! Ha ha ha! But I suspect that sounds pretty silly to most of you reading this. I mean, even the most stereotypical racist I can come up with in my head isn't standing there ranting about how terrible it is that "those people" have hairdressers who didn't have to take the full 1500 hours of hairdressing training like good, decent people. It was probably something else.
omegaworks 9y ago
> From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis In the United States, race is inextricably bound up in economic outcomes. To pretend that race is separable from a person's experience here is intellectually negligent, and any theories that do not include race as a major factor should be looked at with more scrutiny, not less. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...
- djtriptych 9y ago
  I upvoted this comment, which is exactly correct. HN will, as a group, attempt to remove race from any analysis, when in fact racial bias is present basically everywhere we have enough data to look.
  - wjnc 9y ago
    Racial bias can be present everywhere without race needing to be a part of every theory or else face the accusation of intellectual negligence. It's not a persons race that's discriminating... Persons discriminate. Adding a factor for race in an economists model explains nothing. Proper theory needs to explain the motivations behind discrimination. That actual means (IMHO) theories without 'race' (but with broad socio-economic explanations) to explain racial discrimination and segregated outcomes.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >In the United States, race is inextricably bound up in economic outcomes. To pretend that race is separable from a person's experience here is intellectually negligent Race is inextricably bound up in economic outcomes, but the author appears to be more than just acknowledging it - Peter Temin, the cisgendered white male boomer, is using it as a scapegoat for other, larger structural causes of poverty - namely the power and wealth of the 1%. The "top 20%" (e.g. programmers like us) also appears to be another scapegoat stand in. Asserting that programmers were the ones actively keeping the minimum wage down "just because we're white", using a thin veneer of academic legitimacy, is way worse than just intellectual negligence: it's class war.
justin66 9y ago
> Race plays into this, sure, but more in terms of shared history or the lack thereof, and of being a convenient visually-obvious indicator for a dimension of difference. Oh, is that all?
rayiner 9y ago
But a simple exonomic thesis doesn’t fully explain the data, right? > In the group that has been here longer, white Americans dominate both the FTE sector and the low-wage sector, while African Americans are located almost entirely in the low-wage sector Simple economics doesn’t explain why white immigrant groups (Irish, Italian) that came here more recently at the bottom of the economic rung have overtaken African Americans, who have been here much longer.
- kolinko 9y ago
  Well, Irish or Italian weren’t brought into slavery, and locked up for >100 years. If it was white people making it difficult for other races to get in, Asian and Indian people would have difficulty getting into higher classes as well. Also, if I’m not mistaken, African Americans are 10% of US population. Since there were only 2-3 generations since the Civil Movement, even with 10% of each generation moving one class higher, the expected number of African Americans would be ~3% in middle class and close to zero in the upper class. So saying that there are very few African Americans in middle class is not a sign of racism. Irish and Italian had 20 generations of a head start.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    > Since there were only 2-3 generations since the Civil Movement > So saying that there are very few African Americans in middle class is not a sign of racism. I cannot figure out how to reconcile these statements.
    - wjnc 9y ago
      He is making a statement akin to a growth process: wealth and social position accumulate over time and need many generations to come to fruition in that argument. I think the Asian example vs A-A in the US is a counterexample to this argument.
      - rayiner 9y ago
        Right, and african americans have had many more generarions to accumulate it compared to irish americans or asian americans, right?
clavalle 9y ago
While it is the norm (certainly taught as the norm) to profit by coming together in a transaction where both parties leave with more value it is also possible to profit by taking value. This can be done through outright robbery but it can also be done in more subtle (and legal) ways by making a transaction look more voluntary than it is. When one party is negotiating from a position of strength (employers) and the other party is negotiating with their life and physical well being on the line (employees, especially those on the lower end of the pay scale) then the first party can take more value and profit from the transaction than if they were both negotiating for a net gain in value. So, somewhere along the way, largely by historical accident and inertia, we've decided as a society that it is ok to keep a huge portion of the population on the edge of desperation and that if they fall it is their own concern. Any moves to change this is seen as an attack on business owners and their profits. This is short-sighted since if people are motivated rather than forced to produce value there will be more people contributing to the improvement of the castle and fewer looking at the walls with jealousy and chip away at it whenever they get the opportunity.
- fnordsensei 9y ago
  This analysis made me think about a comment someone made about basic income (paraphrasing): "If we renamed it to 'guillotine insurance', maybe the rich and powerful would get the point of it"
  - cuspycode 9y ago
    That's a strange comment considering that most people who get hurt in a blood-thirsty revolution are generally not the rich and powerful.
    - cmurf 9y ago
      Depends on your perspective. There are worse things than death. And equalizing misery is almost romantic. And compared to other revolutions, the French Revolution was not that bloody. It was just the localized executions that made for all the blood running in the streets for weeks. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheidel-great-leveler-inequality-violence/517164/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheide...
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> The central point, he argues, is that the top 20% professional-and-up top crust of American society has enacted structural gatekeeping processes like many years of education... I don't think that the top 20% put in education requirements as a way to systemically repress the less-well-off. Instead, look at the jobs that get you a top-20% income. How many of them can be done with little education? Sure, in software engineering you can be self-taught (though I'm not sure how true that is for someone just starting out). I don't want a self-taught doctor operating on me, though, or a self-taught pilot flying me, or a self-taught chemical engineer running the chemical plant a mile from my house. Those jobs have education requirements for a reason. It's not "I got mine, and now I want to make sure you don't get yours." It's "If you mess up, there can be real-world consequences, and you don't know enough to not mess up without a thorough education in the area, no matter how much you think you know after you've taught yourself." So the net result looks similar, but there are legitimate reasons rather than bad motives behind the education requirements.
- gaius 9y ago
  Sure, in software engineering you can be self-taught The rampant security holes everywhere suggest that that isn't as true as was once believed.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Well, you can (to some degree) be self-taught and still get a high-paying job. Whether that leads to issues in the code was not a question that I was trying to address.
  - geebee 9y ago
    Yeah, this is to some extent a matter of how you define "self taught". I believe that learning to write code does require reading and analytical skills at a level typically found in a college graduate. If you've had many years of formal education developing these skills, but didn't take courses that involved formal coding... I'd say it's stretching things to act like you're entirely self taught. Suppose you go to college and double major in philosophy and pure mathematics, but never write a line of code. Then you get a job and start reading and coding extensively on your own, until you get good at it. To me, it blurs the line somewhat to call a person like that "self taught". There's a lot of ambiguity, and I'm not entirely sure what the term means, at that point. I mean, everyone has to learn something they weren't taught in school on the job.
gaius 9y ago
enacted structural gatekeeping processes like many years of education, and low minimum wages to systematically repress groups See, that's just silly. There was no meeting of "the 20%" where we all talked about it and had a vote and decided to go ahead with our Evil Plan(tm). Or if there was, I was busy that day.
- lgessler 9y ago
  I think your tone is inappropriate given the seriousness of the matter at hand. Please try to be more charitable in trying to understand why someone might have claimed something like that.
jabgrabdthrow 9y ago
As a Cis White Male, you don’t understand what race means to other people, but don’t worry, others will be sure to treat it as a racial issue even if you refuse to.

coldtea 9y ago

>From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis, where a simple economic one would do: close the door on others after they're already in the castle. As you yourself admit, race is a very convenient way to help close the door.

PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
The parent post was saying that race doesn't need to be the end, because there is simpler explanations for why people want to pull up the ladder behind them. But using race to close the doors is making it the means, not the end. I think the overall point being made is that these days race is neither purposefully included in either the means or the ends, but due to historical factors accidentally included. Pulling up the ladder for everyone poorer than you will have a disparate impact by race if poverty isn't equal between races, and due to historical reasons it isn't. But that doesn't mean that anything about race fuels the choice of action. The core problem is attributing bad behavior that is caused by something other than racism (such as classism, greed, or just trying to win a non-infinite sum game) can create problems by hampering discussions of the actual root issues. Of course, we shouldn't completely dismiss it as a reason for some people to do what they do. But there has to be a middle ground between saying it is the primary factor and it is never a factor.
jerf 9y ago
Yes, but is it actually what people are thinking when they enact these policies? Or is it a side effect? For instance, this went by recently in my feeds: http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/shampooing-hair-and-piloting-commercial-airliners-require-same-number-of-training-hours-in-michigan http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/shampooing-hair-a... In Michigan, getting a hairdresser's license requires requires 1,500 hours of training, the same as an airline pilot. Was somebody going yeah, this'll keep those nasty other races down? Was it just an attempt to pull the ladder up behind them by the existing hairdressing firms? Was there some regulator somewhere who was honestly convinced by someone that hair chemicals are so dangerous that they require 1500 hours of training as to how to handle properly? Was it something else? If you don't identify the problem correctly, you don't stand a chance of solving it. The zeal to attribute everything that can possibly be attributed to racism to racism ironically hurts the very people it's trying to help by ensuring the problems facing them do not get correctly addressed, when it isn't always racism. Maybe it was this time. I dunno. Maybe there really were some legislators or regulators in Michigan who where just champing at the bit to find a way to keep down those nasty people, and ha ha, here's my chance to strike, no hairdressing for you unless you pay the rent! Ha ha ha! But I suspect that sounds pretty silly to most of you reading this. I mean, even the most stereotypical racist I can come up with in my head isn't standing there ranting about how terrible it is that "those people" have hairdressers who didn't have to take the full 1500 hours of hairdressing training like good, decent people. It was probably something else.

omegaworks 9y ago

> From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis In the United States, race is inextricably bound up in economic outcomes. To pretend that race is separable from a person's experience here is intellectually negligent, and any theories that do not include race as a major factor should be looked at with more scrutiny, not less. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...

djtriptych 9y ago
I upvoted this comment, which is exactly correct. HN will, as a group, attempt to remove race from any analysis, when in fact racial bias is present basically everywhere we have enough data to look.
- wjnc 9y ago
  Racial bias can be present everywhere without race needing to be a part of every theory or else face the accusation of intellectual negligence. It's not a persons race that's discriminating... Persons discriminate. Adding a factor for race in an economists model explains nothing. Proper theory needs to explain the motivations behind discrimination. That actual means (IMHO) theories without 'race' (but with broad socio-economic explanations) to explain racial discrimination and segregated outcomes.
crdoconnor 9y ago
>In the United States, race is inextricably bound up in economic outcomes. To pretend that race is separable from a person's experience here is intellectually negligent Race is inextricably bound up in economic outcomes, but the author appears to be more than just acknowledging it - Peter Temin, the cisgendered white male boomer, is using it as a scapegoat for other, larger structural causes of poverty - namely the power and wealth of the 1%. The "top 20%" (e.g. programmers like us) also appears to be another scapegoat stand in. Asserting that programmers were the ones actively keeping the minimum wage down "just because we're white", using a thin veneer of academic legitimacy, is way worse than just intellectual negligence: it's class war.

justin66 9y ago

> Race plays into this, sure, but more in terms of shared history or the lack thereof, and of being a convenient visually-obvious indicator for a dimension of difference. Oh, is that all?

rayiner 9y ago

But a simple exonomic thesis doesn’t fully explain the data, right? > In the group that has been here longer, white Americans dominate both the FTE sector and the low-wage sector, while African Americans are located almost entirely in the low-wage sector Simple economics doesn’t explain why white immigrant groups (Irish, Italian) that came here more recently at the bottom of the economic rung have overtaken African Americans, who have been here much longer.

kolinko 9y ago
Well, Irish or Italian weren’t brought into slavery, and locked up for >100 years. If it was white people making it difficult for other races to get in, Asian and Indian people would have difficulty getting into higher classes as well. Also, if I’m not mistaken, African Americans are 10% of US population. Since there were only 2-3 generations since the Civil Movement, even with 10% of each generation moving one class higher, the expected number of African Americans would be ~3% in middle class and close to zero in the upper class. So saying that there are very few African Americans in middle class is not a sign of racism. Irish and Italian had 20 generations of a head start.
- rayiner 9y ago
  > Since there were only 2-3 generations since the Civil Movement > So saying that there are very few African Americans in middle class is not a sign of racism. I cannot figure out how to reconcile these statements.
  - wjnc 9y ago
    He is making a statement akin to a growth process: wealth and social position accumulate over time and need many generations to come to fruition in that argument. I think the Asian example vs A-A in the US is a counterexample to this argument.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      Right, and african americans have had many more generarions to accumulate it compared to irish americans or asian americans, right?

clavalle 9y ago

While it is the norm (certainly taught as the norm) to profit by coming together in a transaction where both parties leave with more value it is also possible to profit by taking value. This can be done through outright robbery but it can also be done in more subtle (and legal) ways by making a transaction look more voluntary than it is. When one party is negotiating from a position of strength (employers) and the other party is negotiating with their life and physical well being on the line (employees, especially those on the lower end of the pay scale) then the first party can take more value and profit from the transaction than if they were both negotiating for a net gain in value. So, somewhere along the way, largely by historical accident and inertia, we've decided as a society that it is ok to keep a huge portion of the population on the edge of desperation and that if they fall it is their own concern. Any moves to change this is seen as an attack on business owners and their profits. This is short-sighted since if people are motivated rather than forced to produce value there will be more people contributing to the improvement of the castle and fewer looking at the walls with jealousy and chip away at it whenever they get the opportunity.

fnordsensei 9y ago
This analysis made me think about a comment someone made about basic income (paraphrasing): "If we renamed it to 'guillotine insurance', maybe the rich and powerful would get the point of it"
- cuspycode 9y ago
  That's a strange comment considering that most people who get hurt in a blood-thirsty revolution are generally not the rich and powerful.
  - cmurf 9y ago
    Depends on your perspective. There are worse things than death. And equalizing misery is almost romantic. And compared to other revolutions, the French Revolution was not that bloody. It was just the localized executions that made for all the blood running in the streets for weeks. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheidel-great-leveler-inequality-violence/517164/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheide...

AnimalMuppet 9y ago

> The central point, he argues, is that the top 20% professional-and-up top crust of American society has enacted structural gatekeeping processes like many years of education... I don't think that the top 20% put in education requirements as a way to systemically repress the less-well-off. Instead, look at the jobs that get you a top-20% income. How many of them can be done with little education? Sure, in software engineering you can be self-taught (though I'm not sure how true that is for someone just starting out). I don't want a self-taught doctor operating on me, though, or a self-taught pilot flying me, or a self-taught chemical engineer running the chemical plant a mile from my house. Those jobs have education requirements for a reason. It's not "I got mine, and now I want to make sure you don't get yours." It's "If you mess up, there can be real-world consequences, and you don't know enough to not mess up without a thorough education in the area, no matter how much you think you know after you've taught yourself." So the net result looks similar, but there are legitimate reasons rather than bad motives behind the education requirements.

gaius 9y ago
Sure, in software engineering you can be self-taught The rampant security holes everywhere suggest that that isn't as true as was once believed.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Well, you can (to some degree) be self-taught and still get a high-paying job. Whether that leads to issues in the code was not a question that I was trying to address.
- geebee 9y ago
  Yeah, this is to some extent a matter of how you define "self taught". I believe that learning to write code does require reading and analytical skills at a level typically found in a college graduate. If you've had many years of formal education developing these skills, but didn't take courses that involved formal coding... I'd say it's stretching things to act like you're entirely self taught. Suppose you go to college and double major in philosophy and pure mathematics, but never write a line of code. Then you get a job and start reading and coding extensively on your own, until you get good at it. To me, it blurs the line somewhat to call a person like that "self taught". There's a lot of ambiguity, and I'm not entirely sure what the term means, at that point. I mean, everyone has to learn something they weren't taught in school on the job.

gaius 9y ago

enacted structural gatekeeping processes like many years of education, and low minimum wages to systematically repress groups See, that's just silly. There was no meeting of "the 20%" where we all talked about it and had a vote and decided to go ahead with our Evil Plan(tm). Or if there was, I was busy that day.

lgessler 9y ago
I think your tone is inappropriate given the seriousness of the matter at hand. Please try to be more charitable in trying to understand why someone might have claimed something like that.

jabgrabdthrow 9y ago

As a Cis White Male, you don’t understand what race means to other people, but don’t worry, others will be sure to treat it as a racial issue even if you refuse to.