14 ms·

Educated Fools

• wonderment 7y ago
  I know it's maybe too political for HN but I found this article more interesting than expected. Its main idea is "the loss of social standing, social claims, the social assets that working people used to have, because, in our time, education is so much more decisive".
  • jxramos 7y ago
    The authors point about having little meaningful intersection with the bulk of society's high school educated masses reminded me of David Brooks old piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are-ruining-america.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are-ruinin... He details joining a friend of his with a high school education to lunch. He soon recognizes that they jumped a guardrail of sorts in how she was baffled by this fancy world created by elites caught in the microcosm of a gourmet Italian sandwich shop. He reads into the encounter pretty deeply, but backs up a bunch of other elite practices that make elite culture out of reach. It's a pretty interesting read. Pretty shocking to read this Educated Fools piece where the author basically admits to what are more commonly called unintended consequences. The authors bit about Trump embracing the poorly educated is interesting. It jibes with something I read once but can't find the source at the moment. It had something to do with his frequent dealings with construction workers and going out to speak and meet the people crafting his buildings. He as a developer supposedly developed a rapport and respect from those working class folks. Also being a landlord in his early days dealing with poor folk. I think I heard about that in this Japanese documentary bit https://youtu.be/rwNTjlEpJD0?t=443 https://youtu.be/rwNTjlEpJD0?t=443. Kind of interesting to see a Japanese perspective on the guy and how they craft stories. His crazy dealings with professional wrestling too and all that gaudy raucousness also intersects with that other class of people. Seems like its not a recent foray for him, he's been engaging with folks in other classes for sometime by the looks of it. That's probably something that went unnoticed for a long time till folks started to scrutinize what the heck happened.
• baryphonic 7y ago
  > There is no foothold left in big cities, or anyplace else where the global winners live, for high school graduates to exercise even a tiny bit of power. There’s no church to slot into as a deacon, no chance on the shop floor to rise as a foreman, no union in which to become a shop steward or officeholder, no big-city political machine that in this digital age needs anyone to go door to door. Our wage workers have been stripped of every way to exercise the kind of morality or have the opportunities that come so easily to the top fifth. At least in the case of the Industrial Revolution, as described by E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, there was religion—the new Methodist faith that gave the English working class a sense of moral superiority over their owners. But in the working class remade and discarded for the postindustrial age, there is an uptick in drug abuse, one-parent families, and indebtedness. The top fifth of the country, the most educated, may well be more moral—and, God knows, even more religious in terms of actual Christian values—than the current white working class. But that, too, represents another form of class oppression, worse than in the Industrial Revolution—the top fifth have appropriated all the morality. I've never seen an article that is simultaneously semi-self-aware yet contains such a high level of arrogance and condescension. That on its own makes it an interesting piece.
  • watwut 7y ago
    It is interestingly skipping period after 1832 (where The Making of the English Working Class ends) and now. The social problems were quite large and very real.
• krnsll 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. The piece makes an urgent point that needs to be appropriately acknowledged. It falls in the vein of arguments I've come to term as "relational poverty" or "relational inequality" arguments (what Popper is presented as terming "moral inequality" in the piece) that most social science research I've come across has failed to or is ill-equipped to account for. I do recall Amartya Sen making a definition of poverty along these grounds (in the sense of dignity, or lack thereof, in what one perceives as their social environment) some years back but haven't been able to trace it down since or see if any further work was done on it. (If someone reading this happens to know more about such work, I'd appreciate being directed towards it). The point made about Trump expressing a liking for poorly educated folk is also noteworthy. Even if the more sensible in the political class come to acknowledge the paradox we face, the matter of articulating and expressing it appropriately arises. Currently, as the author notes, the "college for all" approach doesn't appear to be resonating electorally (that said, there are a number of confounding factors one could put forth) but rather is serving as a reminder to the once robust (perhaps this is romantic nostalgia) working- and lower-middle-classes of their lowered social standing and relational dignity. Update: I have found a presentation of the relativistic perspective on poverty by Sen (1983). Apologies for the earlier bit, that was laziness on my part. Worth a read. https://are.berkeley.edu/courses/ARE251/fall2008/Papers/sen83.pdf https://are.berkeley.edu/courses/ARE251/fall2008/Papers/sen8...
  • claudiawerner 7y ago
    Sen's work is closely associated with philosophical and economic concerns about exploitation, not just poverty, and I think it's a shame that's missed out on. J.E. Roemer was the main theorist of post-Marxian theories of exploitation, but I've observed that when the discussion centers around poverty rather than exploitation, the resulting theory is much more tame. Also related is capability theory and the various objections to purely negative liberty (something I've also noticed many people miss out on - to speak of liberty as if it is strictly a concept that belongs to the liberal tradition and no other tradition may use it, and to then claim that the only real kind of liberty is negative liberty). Poverty is the kind of thing you can fix within the current system, or at least make attempts to alleviate. Exploitation and domination are not, which is why you will never hear an elected official talk about it as a systematic issue inherent to the current system - if they knew about the literature on the topic, they'd know they're powerless to do anything about it.
• woodandsteel 7y ago
  Conservatives are split about the changes the article discribes. Traditional conservatives are glad the labor movement was destroyed, and see the Knowledge Economy as good because it is the latest product of the unrestrained free market. On the other hand, Trump supporters are very angry, but the problem is that Trump's program won't do anything at all to fix the problems that are making them unhappy.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • DebtDeflation 7y ago
    > Trump supporters are very angry, but the problem is that Trump's program won't do anything at all to fix the problems that are making them unhappy. There's no way around the fact that more education (doesn't necessarily mean college) and greater labor force mobility (providing people with the ability to move where the jobs are) has to be a significant part of the solution. Stating the facts is not condescension, but I guess it can and does cause politicians to lose elections.
• baybal2 7y ago
  Man, this is gold. I for long tried to write something along those lines, but I think the author did summarise my thoughts better than I could've done myself. The class conflict — something that western literati class keep denying acknowledgement, is really the driver of much of social progress. And this holds more even more true in the West than in the East. The class warfare is there, it exists, and it is what has been responsible for the prime majority of political developments in the West for the last 30 years.
  • petermcneeley 7y ago
    30 years eh. I think one might argue that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
    • dluan 7y ago
      Shhh we're busy reinventing Marx as a new idea for the pundit brained technocrats. We need people like Elon and Andrew Yang to tweet it to us before it can be considered cool again.
      • jdc 7y ago
        eh.. not _all_ analysis of class conflict is Marxist
      • contingencies 7y ago
        How about generating a synthetic group of such personalities using ML with retweet and emotional conflict generation as feedback parameters? Then letting them loose on the public? Wait, that's already happening...
  • jml7c5 7y ago
    >The class conflict [...] is really the driver of much of social progress. How so?
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
• alexashka 7y ago
  Can someone translate this into: Perceived problem, attempted solutions, potential new solution. I have no idea what the hell the article is going on about - it reads like a rant by a typical politically active idiot.
  • agrenader 7y ago
    Same impression
• yoz-y 7y ago
  > We don’t trust them, and would never vote for one of them. Why should they trust or vote for one of us? For the same reason I wouldn’t trust a doctor without a degree proving they did due diligence for years. I know this feels different because “anybody can do politics” but without a large worldview the measures taken will be inevitably short sighted. Now, it works the other way too. As the article states, losing touch with the base leads to problems.
  • ben_w 7y ago
    I was thinking about this recently. I’m not qualified in politics, and I’m aware that my knowledge is too limited to be properly aware of how limited it is, but the thought was: Democracy isn’t so much the best form of government as the best steering wheel to keep the government aligned with the interests of the people. The best actual form of government is technocracy, but technocracy with no democratic accountability is just going to competently achieve things that the people may not care about or may actively dislike.
    • hogFeast 7y ago
      I am "qualified in politics"...I can tell you that people who are "qualified" think no less bizarre things than people who are not (they are just of a different type). Stating that there is some kind of qualification suggests, ironically, that you don't understand what politics is. The point is that there is tension, uncertainty (this is a bit like modern views on capitalism...can we have the money but no failure, pls...lul).
    • pdonis 7y ago
      > The best actual form of government is technocracy In a fantasy world where we actually had sciences for all the things governments are asked to do, sure. But in the actual world we live in, no way. You can't have experts running government if there are no actual experts.
      • chii 7y ago
        or worse - experts that have an inbuilt bias (which they might not even know they have!). For example, economic experts.
• paganel 7y ago
  > This all fits the claim of the French geographer Christophe Guilluy about his own country in his 2016 book The Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France. +1 for Christophe Guilluy's book, it's really eye-opening, even more so considering that he wrote/published it even before the "gilets jaunes" movement started. Not sure there's a solution for this "periphery" problem, but I see it in my parts of the world (Eastern-European country and EU member), it certainly is present in France and I suppose in other Western European countries, and according to the article is also a real problem in the US.
  • te_chris 7y ago
    God it’s rampant in the UK, completely bisected between London and the rest of the country.
    • growlist 7y ago
      Not much more than 100 years ago, 40% of world trade passed through Liverpool: 40%! It's staggering how quickly things can turn around, and I find it just unfathomable how the wealth somehow just leached away to other places over time.
• analog31 7y ago
  In my view, education has begun to act like wealth, because education is a form of wealth, and the productivity divide between wealth and work is increasing. Still, I'm skeptical of the whole idea, because it just seems too convenient for Republicans to drive a wedge between the Democratic party and the working class based on a perceived social division rather than real policy: We took away your unions and safety net, but by golly, we'll protect your "dignity."
  • toasterlovin 7y ago
    The Democratic Party is driving a wedge between itself, FWIW. The talking points around political correctness could not be better designed to alienate working and middle class white people.
    • rayiner 7y ago
      Or middle class people of any race: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/05/trump-latino-poll-066187 https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/05/trump-latino-poll-0... > But according the Telemundo poll, nearly two-thirds of Latinos said they wouldn't vote for a candidate who describes himself as a “socialist.” Sanders identifies as a democratic socialist.
      • gbear605 7y ago
        I’m not sure what that has to do with political correctness, seeing as how socialism is a political theory about economics, not about politically correct language.
        • rayiner 7y ago
          I’m talking about OP’s point about the Democratic Party driving a wedge within itself.
      • dragonwriter 7y ago
        On the other hand: https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790319860/polls-show-sanders-is-the-top-democratic-presidential-candidate-for-latino-voter https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790319860/polls-show-sanders-... Abstract preference questions often don't predict preference for specific candidates, because they don't capture subtleties in the area of preference being polled or how it is weighted against other concerns.
• salt-licker 7y ago
  Great article that exposes many college-educated blind spots, in particular that education is not a panacea for inequality. But the proposed solution of more democratic workplaces — somehow convincing capital-holders that investing in human labor rather than automation is in their own self-interest — feels like swimming against the tide of history. Meritocracy is a dangerous ideal for humanity to continue to hold so dearly. IQ is partially genetic, and with a low ceiling — sooner than we’re ready to accept, nobody’s brain will hold a candle to AI. Equating our economic value with moral worth will only lead to further cultural division, despair, and anarcho-primitivism. Instead, let’s try to build a culture, society, and government that takes the intrinsic value of human life as an axiom, before it’s too late.
  • commandlinefan 7y ago
    > nobody’s brain will hold a candle to AI Nobody can outrun a car, either, but cars haven’t made humans obsolete. Instead, we use them as tools to accomplish our goals: just as we will with AI.
    • Proziam 7y ago
      I'm very undecided about AI, but this argument doesn't feel right to me. The ability to run fast was never the 'unfair advantage' of being human. Cars are a tool to help us overcome physical limitations. But what happens if a general AI is capable of outdoing us intellectually? I'm not of the opinion that AI will just decide to destroy us all or anything particularly extreme. Still, I find it very hard to believe that humans could actually 'control' entities that are smarter than we are. Anyone making high-confidence predictions about how that would play is worthy of some skepticism, I believe.
      • Aperocky 7y ago
        While AI topic today is all fearmongering essentially, I agree with you that we can’t actually or should actually control something that’s smarter and more advanced than us. I’ll give the wheel to them, like how I trust my doctor to know what’s best for my body. They might not be the best for me but could be better for the Earth Civilization.
• wisty 7y ago
  I think this essay is missing a discussion on the theories of what make university graduates better paid. The two main theories are: 1. Human capital. People learn stuff at university which makes them more valuable workers. 2. Credentialism. Universities select (or pass) people who were already going to be valuable. Now let's look at what we might mean by "valuable": 1. You can fool hiring managers into thinking you're competent - good resume writing skills, good interview skills, an impressive certificate. 2. You can fool your manger's manager into thinking you're competent. All the above, plus you're good at churning out superficially credible explanations and justifications. Some critics of university might argue that they've optimised towards teaching students how to fake competence - 4 years of general education isn't enough to produce a truly competent thinker in a field (not reliably for a large fraction of society) but it is enough to teach them to write a clean-looking essay with proper citations, and to churn out paragraphs with "topic sentence, evidence, analysis, transition" (but not enough time that this will get too stale - you'll still be able to grade the students from A-E). 3. You'll actually be good for your company / society because of your ability to analyze things, domain skills, intelligence, conscientiousness, etc. We could also talk about general vs domain specific skills, but they're often fairly well correlated. Competence in a domain requires thinking skills, and thinking skills are best built up in some real domain where skills can actually be tested (not just abstract "critical thinking" courses).
  • rossdavidh 7y ago
    One other possibility to consider: college degrees are considered a way of making sure the person is from the social class that you feel comfortable being in the room with. It's a (usually) legally defensible requirement that enables class prejudice.
  • mar77i 7y ago
    To an employer, this seems kind of missing the point: you spent your time at college. Did you do real work yet?
    • claudiawerner 7y ago
      As someone who's about to graduate with an MEng degree: No, I haven't done real work yet, and I hope that most employers don't share this attitude which gets me in a catch-22. I need to have worked to find work, but to work I need to have found work. The only option seems to be these "graduate jobs", a large percentage of which demand arcane tests modelled after IQ tests and tedious timed calculator tests in order to even consider me. Graduated with 70%+ with the title "Master of Engineering"? Not good enough, do an IQ test to get the job. Write a compiler for a self-designed embedded language for your final project? Not good enough, you forgot how to concatenate lists in MATLAB. Oh, and you don't get to find out your prospective salary until you have an offer; until then, you'll be happy to know it's "competitive", whatever that means. At this point, I'm not sure if I'd recommend anyone go to university unless they want to stay in academia or something. I'm not convinced it's worth the hassle if this kind of job search is the end result, and if you're going there for knowledge, you're better off not getting yourself into debt with a 4% interest rate.
• wangii 7y ago
  as Chinese lives in uk, they had been my questions for a long time: why did you guys voted for david cameron, barack obama, (any politician, really) at all? had they ever struggled to pay their bills? do they really feel your pain?
  • thrwaway69 7y ago
    Why would people from UK vote for barrack Obama?
    • wangii 7y ago
      barrack Obama was super popular in UK. the day he was elected, his speech was played everywhere in Manchester, over and over again. my questions were for US voters as well.
      • thrwaway69 7y ago
        Yeah it is clear now but I am wondering if you edited the comment or I just misread.
        • wangii 7y ago
          no, I didn't.
  • dluan 7y ago
    Democracy isn't just David Cameron and Obama, when you go to vote for them, you also cast votes on local precinct leaders, local referendums, and local positions like school board and sheriff. In some places, you might even know those people personally.
    • wangii 7y ago
      correct me if I was wrong: the turn out ratio in local elections is very low, to the degree i feel meaningless.
• burlesona 7y ago
  > But the truth might be something closer to this: “It’s only because of race that we have any part of the working class turning out for us at all.” I’ve thought a lot about this, and wondered if we’ll see a major flip post-Trump (perhaps a few more presidencies past), where the republicans somehow manage to shed their racial baggage and suddenly are the party of the entire working class while the Democrats are left with only the “coastal elites.” Five Thirty Eight ran an article on those lines a while back... can’t find the link, but that was also a good read.
  • war1025 7y ago
    I fully expect that to happen. Just tossing my two cents in the hat.
  • rossdavidh 7y ago
    The first time you have a black or latinx Republican presidential nominee. It could have been Colin Powell, at one time, and Herman Cain came somewhat close. I would not be surprised to see it in this decade.
  • tzs 7y ago
    If Republicans lose the racial baggage they are still substantially at odds with a substantial majority of voters on health care [1] and climate change/pollution/environment [2]. I don't see them becoming the party of the entire working class as long as that remains true. [1] https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer-national-health-plans-and-expanding-access-to-medicare-coverage/ https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-views-on-climate-and-energy/ https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi...
  • watwut 7y ago
    Coastal elites expression it self rejests many working class people living in coasts. Majority of Americans live there, many of them working class. They kind of don't exist in this rhetorics.
• sandoooo 7y ago
  As a society, a portion of the workforce has to do the plumbing, make the furniture, serve coffee, and do all the jobs that don't require college. The people doing those jobs shouldn't need to spending four of their most productive years not working and accumulating debt. They should just start four years earlier, or get vocational training for a few months to a year. Instead of college for all, what's needed is an alternative pathway from high school to (optional) industrial training/ apprenticeships to jobs, skipping college altogether for those who don't want/need it. Employers need to be able to hire non-college-graduates without worrying they're getting the dregs of the college system. They should have fine-grained input into getting exactly the sort of skills they want into their workers, and a large portion of this program (for some of the low-req jobs, the entirety) should involve no-strings-attached industry placements to get those employers comfortable with the people they'll be hiring.
  • harimau777 7y ago
    Those jobs tend not to pay as well as jobs that require a career focused college degree (e.g. business, engineering, computer science, and even teaching).
    • sandoooo 7y ago
      I think getting four years of head-start would make up for it a lot. Plus, not everybody is suited to the career focused college degrees and not everybody should be in them.
      • harimau777 7y ago
        I agree with you that everyone shouldn't have to work the sorts of jobs that require a degree. However, as long as college is the most effective way to a better job, I think that people are going to keep preferring to go to college. Hmm, it's a good point that having a four year head start would help balance things. However, I think in the long run things would probably workout in the favor of the person that went to college. Especially in the higher paying majors such as business, CS, and engineering.
• dunkelheit 7y ago
  Funny how being credentialed by a proper institution (using this phrase because it is more precise than just "education") is as important as ever for achieving certain social standing and at the same time there is a constant stream of voices preaching "universities are imploding, college is a waste of money," etc.
  • JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    Both can be true simultaneously, if you expand the concepts. Nobody will disagree that attending an Ivy provides some prestige and social standing. Of the universities imploding, most are smaller liberal arts colleges that can't withstand changing demographics (less college students). College is indeed a waste of money if you don't complete your degree program: you get none of the benefits in the job market, with all the debt you took on-- the worst of both worlds.
  • randomdata 7y ago
    The problem is that a certain social standing is only attainable by a limited number of people. While college may be necessary to get to that social standing, not everyone will be able to get there, even if they go to college. If your only reason for going to college is to try and attain that certain social standing, and you fall short, then it truly was a waste of money (and, more importantly, time). Colleges do have a struggle to convince those people of their relevance. A similar phenomena has been seen in incomes. Incomes have held stagnant for decades, even as more and more of the population have become credentialed. Maybe a degree is necessary to reach the top 1%, but those who fall short of that goal are no better off than people were in the past, when they didn't go to college.
• blazespin 7y ago
  Yeah, these leaders are trying to get free university. But what if a lot of voters don't want to go to university?
• motohagiography 7y ago
  Very glad this was written and posted. However, it could have been shorter. If education were indeed the true social value, we could just improve the quality of public education, add an additional year or two to high school, and essentially fold the undergrad syllabus back into the public system. Simply, the purpose of college is to create a culturally separate managerial elite in society. The basic problem is the legitimacy of the elite it has produced in the eyes of people subject to it. There was always tension, but code changed everything. PhD holding managers today are often functionally illiterate in their domain of responsibility, and that has a huge cultural impact. There is reliable predictive power in explaining the culture wars of today as the reaction against a managerialist elite using radical cultural change in an attempt to dilute the bargaining power of competent working people, and to insulate itself from a working class from whom they are increasingly undifferentiated. This is a pet issue of mine, and glad to see it's getting traction, as it's really the defining conflict of today.
• overgard 7y ago
  I totally agree with the article, but to me the saddest part of all of this is I'm unconvinced that a college education is actually even that useful. (I say that with a four year CS degree). Most majors, to be blunt, are pretty useless in terms of real world skills. The argument is "they teach you how to think". I don't know how you would even measure that, but it doesn't seem that true, especially since colleges are hotbeds of intellectual fads that are easily disproved by reality. The only prerequisite to learning to think is making an effort at it. College used to be a good signal for that, but now its not. So we essentially created a "virtuous" class of "educated" people that aren't as smart as they think they are, talking down to people that are struggling economically by telling them that they need to spend 100k to "learn to think". It's amazing things have stayed relatively peaceful. It's funny to me because arguably I am part of this liberal elite, and even I feel a lot of contempt and irritation towards my increasingly smug compatriots. People really need to tone down the "flyover state" and "redneck" rhetoric. I definitely didn't vote for Trump, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get why people did.
  • tjr225 7y ago
    I agree. I say all of this as someone making over six figures working from home in a situation I could have never imagined myself in ten years ago. I needed my degree; but just to get my foot in the door. I didn't learn much during the process itself other than to recognize the meta fact that I had to do it to get out of my current situation. This would have been a real problem for me financially if it didn't work out the way it did because I wouldn't have been able to get out from under my(and more so my wife's) student loan debt. It should be useful and I think it can be, but that was not the experience that I had.
    • titanomachy 7y ago
      It seems that a lot of people feel their degree was not useful. My studies were definitely far removed from what I now do for a living. However, I have not met (except on HN) any successful "knowledge workers" without a degree. I'm sure there are many factors contributing to that: smarter people are more likely to pursue degrees in the first place, companies may ignore otherwise good candidates since they lack a degree. But another possibility is that many of us underestimate the skills we learned in pursuing our degrees. Certainly many people obtain those skills in other ways, but it's impossible to know if I personally would have.
• Gatsky 7y ago
  This raises some good issues but does ramble. Coming from a country where tertiary education is more accessible and cheaper, there is decent free healthcare and more social welfare, all of which give more people the option of higher education, what ends up happening is people go to University too much. Universities have undergone a huge explosion in headcount and footprint. As publicly funded institutions, they have funded this expansion with a kind of Ponzi scheme where more and more full fee paying international students are required to sustain the machine. At the same time there has been a lot of training institutes and vocational colleges popping up, some with dubious quality and intent. The stimulus for this seems to be that young people can't get enough quality work, and so they try and educate themselves. They can do this partly because of the largesse of their boomer parents. This effect is happening at all levels, including fields where lots of education is already required, like medicine, law and engineering. So I would agree that pumping education is not a panacea. It is starting to feel almost exploitative around here (Australia). Weddings, healthcare and education are surefire ways to extract money from people even when the economy is in a slump. At least you get cake at a wedding.
• remir 7y ago
  Now those of us with postgraduate degrees and who are in the elite of the Democratic Party live in our own Versailles, and we don’t know any working-class people either—except perhaps the name of a barista at Starbucks or the woman who comes by at night to clean the office. I think this is one thing churches did really well; people from all social spheres coming together to serve their God. It didn't matter what job or status you had. Everybody was equal. I'm sure the same could be achieved today without the religious aspect as well. There's plenty of volunteering opportunities, for example. Being part of a amateur sports team can bring people from all classes together.
  • burlesona 7y ago
    The churches that still exist often still do work this way, and there are still a lot of them, even in places like SF. They are shrinking, though.
  • InitialLastName 7y ago
    Right, except that we've rebuilt a world where working-class people don't have time for leisure activities like amateur athletics and volunteerism due to the second full-time job they need to pay the rent.
    • benrbray 7y ago
      Not to mention we've built great walls separating rich and poor in the form of highways, so the classes never share common ground, literally.
  • marcosdumay 7y ago
    A long time ago churches did work that way. But during the last ~2 centuries, people of different classes would go into different churches nearer the place they live.
    • organsnyder 7y ago
      Some churches are better than that at others, and I suspect this has always been the case (unless you go all the way back to churches in Paul's day or something like that). My church, which is home to a number of college professors, lawyers, and other overly-educated people, is soon to be celebrating a member receiving her high school diploma; she returned to school to finish it (she's in her mid-20s and has two kids) and is just taking initial steps to enter the workforce and try to get away from depending on public assistance.
• ycombonator 7y ago
  Case in point. CNN segment mocking working class people. https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1221999373829144578 https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1221999373829144578
• whatsmyusername 7y ago
  TBH I'm indifferent to the rural working classes plight. I'm LGBT and they've proven time and time again that they aren't my friends (both growing up in flyover country and later after I escaped that wasteland by how they vote and how they treat my brothers and sisters who didn't escape). If they want to vote against our shared interests and suffer the consequences, so be it. Me and mine will keep building without them and I won't spare a moments thought for their self inflicted suffering (except to be glad it isn't me).
  • WillDaSilva 7y ago
    I completely understand your position, and sympathize with it, but it seems a bit shortsighted given that you have to live with these people, and things won't improve for your "brothers and sisters who didn't escape" if things don't get better for them. They'll happily drag you and yours down with them. This is all to say that we're all in this together, and while your indifference towards their plight may be justified, it is not productive.
    • anonsivalley652 7y ago
      In general: Give hate and antipathy no quarter. Where there is pain, it must our pain, or there will inevitably be revolution and chaos. Love without discrimination, even with those you disagree with, because they cannot be moved if we act like impetuous children by refusing to talk to them. Prejudice also cannot be convenient, or we likely possess internal inconsistencies we must face if we are to be honest and have integrity.
      • deleted 7y ago
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    • whatsmyusername 7y ago
      I don't have to live with these people anymore. Their "communities" are dieing, their businesses are failing, and their smart kid leave. The only question is whether those fools death throes doom the rest of us. Hilariously, on the fringes they're being supplanted by refugees from metro areas that got priced out. Those people are bringing sanity to the wasteland with them like pilgrims in an unholy land. From my perspective, I can do little to nothing to influence how all this plays out besides voting, living my life as I see fit, and directing my time and attention toward those I deem worthy. And that's exactly what I'm going to do. "You could see that they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn't give a fig for anyone who wasn't." C.S. Lewis
• hogFeast 7y ago
  The UK is a good example of this...the Labour Party went from solidly working class with good connections to voters to a party of the wealthy, metro elite with no connection to voters. You can point to individual factors of circumstance (an ill-conceived 2015 leadership election) or big structural issues (rising inequality). But the end result is the same: no empathy, no interest. It is funny the article talks about race...did everyone just suddenly become a racist overnight? Or did they just decide they don't like being talked down to? Which is more likely (bearing in mind that the people talking down do like to talk about race a hell of a lot). The left will get nowhere by trying to "learn to talk" to these awful poor people (sarcasm). They don't care. Not interested. Give the working class their voice back (Blair and Clinton did just fine). Go back to suburbia, find another job in which you are way overpaid for incompetence, and stop talking. Btw, Trump has done this...he is the worst candidate, the worst president...and still the Dems can't muster anything up...how is this incompetence even possible? Just generally, as someone who falls firmly into the category of metro elite...I have never understood why other rich people feel the need to always tell poor people what they want. Politics is to help those people but it has gone from helping them to telling them what they should think, how they should live, etc. Is it any wonder that doesn't win votes?
• cleandreams 7y ago
  I grew up in the author's city in the midst of long term economic abandonment and decline. It was terrifying, to be honest. I think the spread of this across the industrialized Midwest elected Trump. I have had many arguments with fellow liberals about the globalized economy. In a nutshell, I don't believe in it, if the result is an alienated wasteland where the old working class economy used to be. We, the elite (I include myself as I'm a well off and successful engineer), have destroyed the social contract by supporting and implementing outsourcing and automation. The result may well be the destruction of our democracy. Cheap consumer goods from China are not worth this price. The article is only wrong in downplaying the potential of bringing industrial jobs back to this country. That is essential, as a part of the overall change in priorities.
  • InitialLastName 7y ago
    > Cheap consumer goods from China are not worth this price. The only answer is to stop buying cheap consumer goods from China (or anywhere, for that matter). Disposal-oriented consumerism is ripping our society (and the world) to shreds.
  • amanaplanacanal 7y ago
    If we had not exported manufacturing to the far east, we would have automated the jobs away instead. I don't see an obvious way around this problem.
  • yborg 7y ago
    >implementing outsourcing Exactly, this seemed completely missing from the hand-wringing about how what's wrong with the Democratic party is that it is just too elitist for the working classes now. There is in fact a lot of truth to that, but it is the economic policy, or lack thereof, of both parties has allowed capital, controlled by very few, to flow unimpeded overseas. If you want to retain a middle-class economic base, you have to take measures to incentivize capital to remain in the country. My own employer is aggressively moving to shift all of it's technical knowledge work to India; companies like Accenture and IBM now employ more people there than in the US. There will soon be as little Knowledge Economy work in the US as there is old Industrial Economy work. Where will all of these college (or Denmark-style vocationally trained) end up working? Wal-Mart. Sell the people out twice and you will end up with some kind of revolt. You're not going to convince anybody at that point that it's the grad school gap that's killing America and that we should have a Ph.D. For All program to solve it.
• anonu 7y ago
  The social trend discussed in the article has taken over the world. Not just the USA. I realized this a bit late with the "gillet jaune" uprisings in France. The working class from outside the cities were upset with the increasingly disconnected ruling class and "bobos". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobo_(socio-economic_group) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobo_(socio-economic_group) (this wikipédia page really should be much longer)
• mar77i 7y ago
  It made me realize that the reason "Learn to Code" was treated as such an insult on social media is exactly its topical proximity to this very discussion.
• Proven 7y ago
  Lost me during the Warren donation paragraph. A learned person wouldn't support Warren so I am certain I've nothing of value to learn from the article. Up to the Warren paragraph I realized socialist-leaning parties suck more than illiberal democracy. No wonder globalists and socialists can no longer win in Europe. College degree is non-essential for most people, unnecessary for at least 50%.
• slowdog 7y ago
  Great article, covering something we should probably keep in mind. Higher education is often a needless gatekeeper for keeping those with generational wealth wealthy Often a subtext that I feel is missing here is that in the end people aren't that different on average, and our parent's wealth matter more Today, zip code is a pretty accurate predictor of success, there's so much embedded in a zip code such as wealth, industry, and safety that affects kid's outcomes.[0] [0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/too-often-student-success_b_10132886 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/too-often-student-success_b_1...
• supernova87a 7y ago
  The problem of modern liberal America is not a divide between educated / less-educated, or race, or any of that. Those are just symbols that make it easy for someone to try to pin it on those false issues. The problem is that many liberal-thinking people, having believed that they (or the country) has solved many of the material and quality of life needs in their little pocket of the world (and told thus by the daily media), find rarer and rarer things to become their problems and occupy their consciousness. In short, liberals ironically are the one-percenters of America. Because they live in relatively safe cities, with good incomes, and concerns for the distant future, they think that transgender bathrooms are the most important topic that should be discussed in the national priorities. Or that MeToo represents the daily worry of every reasonable American. Or because things are so comfortable and rich, why can't we afford to look the other way at immigration laws that we disagree with? Let's have another KQED segment on Latina artists struggling to keep their rent controlled studios in the Mission! Well, the other half of the country, the 99%, are not interested in putting those rarified political issues before their daily, material struggles, the kind that don't make it to the front page of the New York Times because they're boring. Their unemployment, or only slightly better, their dead end jobs that have experienced no growth in the last 10 years. Their health plans that cost more and more, or their pension benefits that got cut. Or the rejection letters (or just no letters) that come when they try to apply for a different job, run by some company in the very liberal cities that spurn them, whose medium level execs make 7 figure salaries. Maybe it's time we confronted the fact that unless you can cut off the coasts of this country, we will have to find a way to make the concerns of the middle of this country, our concerns -- concretely and strategically. Because if we don't, that middle of the country will vote to spite everything, before they vote to help themselves, and we will all go down together.
  • mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Honestly it sounds like you’ve been watching too much TV/Twitter. No one I know in real life is concerned with that stuff. Another article on the site talks about the “exhausted majority.” Indeed.
    • dbsmith83 7y ago
• chicagoscott 7y ago
  This post has some relevant information: http://www.andrewlangman.com/articles/class-culture-gap.html http://www.andrewlangman.com/articles/class-culture-gap.html Or just read What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class at: https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-t...
• anonsivalley652 7y ago
  Raw intelligence, by itself, is just that: raw. A wise and learned individual has to go beyond multiple choice exam pedigree and actively seek-out the nuances of history and the real world rather than retreating into a comfortable filter bubble. Furthermore, the lack of quality mentors and parental involvement has contributed to a decline of empathy and decency. Otherwise, the result is plenty of "smart" people who are below average in other life domains including self-awareness, philanthropy and civic participation.
• barrenflats 7y ago
  This one really hits home for me. I’m at a cross roads in my life right now and kind of lost. I had a great job working as the number 2 at a small business that I lucked into, but for various reasons beyond the control of the corporation, had to close. I’m in my late 20s, and as this article puts it, merely a high school graduate. I can code and do IT work, coordinate problem solving between businesses, read scientific texts, understand statistics and am very capable of managing others, amongst many other skills. Indeed these were all attributes that allowed me to rapidly rise up the ranks. But trying to find a fulfilling job without a Bachelor’s is beginning to feel like a fool’s errand. My parents were both college grads and waited a long time to have kids, so I don’t have the problems with rationalizing and asking questions that article presupposes—indeed my inability to accept orders and not have intellectual freedom drives me to keep looking for rewarding work, against the odds. Despite being described as bright my whole life, I’ve never done well in an academic environment for a few reasons, I could readily absorb the material but I was terribly antagonistic towards teachers who generally desire a sense of authority in their class rooms. I also as an adult have been diagnosed with ADHD, which to me at least explains a good portion of why I struggled in school. I never did my homework and was told endlessly that going to community college was the best financial option, and I was very freaked out by student loans, the problem being that community colleges put much more emphasis on grading coursework, which ended up being my downfall. Part of me thinks I should just start lying on my resume about having attended a 4 year STEM program, because the credentialism seems so real and absolutely bullshit. I have work experience, if I got an interview they’d probably be blown away with this “high school graduate”, but I never get interviews, no matter how qualified I am. I’ve even been encouraged to do this by people in the “educated elite”. They tell me to just study a given schools curriculum, learn some names of professor and call it good enough. But I really hate lying about myself, it feels so contrary to my nature. As the article mentions, I feel very depressed with my life and reading people who say that a degree is a golden indicator is genuinely depressing. I don’t know what to do, and I honestly feel victimized by credentialism, which makes me resent the concept of dropping everything and taking on loans to go to school. (At least my interest rate would be good now!)
  • burlesona 7y ago
    My life experience is that there are a lot of places, especially those that hire remotely, that will happily interview folks with non-traditional backgrounds including no degree at all. If you're willing to go on-site there are a lot of other good options as well. If you want to chat privately about this, I'd be willing to. My email is my hn handle at gmail.
• Ericson2314 7y ago
  The class analysis is right, but the economic one is a bit bonkers. 1. The people with college degrees are also debasing their own degree by pushing for more college, not just marginal college grads. That's not self-interest, just naivite. 2. As others said, college is vastly overrated. The author gets that there is diminishing returns for new college grads, but doesn't see we are already getting little bang for buck because there is a shortage of non-bullshit jobs, and what work doesn't demand society fails to teach. 3. Author should spend time with the UBI crowd. Contrary to the popular imagination amoung guilty costalites of emasculated coal miners having to find a new line of work, actua poor people understand work is not dignifying and their is no shame in UBI (even if they think there is shame in means-tested welfare!) It's the rich Democrats who cling to education who regurgitate the dribble they were told about work being meaningful. Gah, the author is sooo close to getting it. Just need to combine with something like https://medium.com/@alexhowlett/introduction-to-consumer-monetary-theory-78905b0606ca https://medium.com/@alexhowlett/introduction-to-consumer-mon... and they'll be there.
• CriticalCathed 7y ago
  After finishing this article I can't help but think that he's writing about himself for himself than anyone else. Not everyone lives in Ivory Towers or is the partner at a prestigious law firm. I truly can't imagine this applying to any of the leftist activists I know; and by activists I mean they organize, protest, and collaborate multiple times a week. They're all working class people -- of the top of my head, off the ones i know personally, there's a retired school teacher, a caretaker for the elderly, a machinist, a waiter, an electrician, a nurse, a mechanic, an engineer, and a janitor. They all have various degrees of involvement in the leadership of the local D party and activist groups. Just who is this article aimed at? I don't mean the article doesn't have some good points, but the way it treats this as a monolithic generally true problem immediately strikes me as incorrect. Dude's in a bubble of his own to think this is sage advice that can be generally applied.
• lngnmn1 7y ago
  Education (and inflated government) is a new way of signaling a higher social state, similar to scholastic priesthood of the past. It is entirely a social construct (aside from practical, concrete-math-based STEM and engineering). Another real-life aspect is that passing through a really decent schools like MIT or Caltech (or Yale, as an exception) is a proof (by example) that one is capable of self-discipline, concentration, self-improvement, able to do research and learn on by doing. Aside from that a degree is just and merely a social status certificate, a certificate of belonging to a higher social class (no matter actual skills and abilities). I myself am from a third-world social shithole and never went to a high school. I could, however, beat a vast majority of so-called liberal arts majors and even some Stanford grads, which I regularly did on this very site before CoCs and bans for use of an "inappropriate" language. So, there is nothing much to talk about. A crappy degree is a social status certificate, and obsession with language usage, long-words and polit-correctness and fancy abstract terminology is merely a signaling of assumed, self-proclaimed (and almost always absent) virtue.
• IIAOPSW 7y ago
  I'm going to break slightly with the authors opinion here and say we do solve every problem with "be more like us" but that doesn't always mean college. Other solutions involve "why don't you just move", better mass transit / fewer cars, some form of retraining (not college per se) etc. There's a whole basket of diverging "elite" values such that even if they stopped telling people to go to college tomorrow they would still be despised by the working class. Maybe I am being one of those dastardly, snobbish, grating coastal elites. But if you don't like me and my solutions, what else is there? There is literally nothing I could suggest to help the lower class which can't be construed as "just be more like me".
  • tacitusarc 7y ago
    Part of the problem is the suggestion that they need help in the first place. So what Joe the garbage truck driver didn't go to college? So what he has a small house in a kinda shitty neighborhood? Maybe he's doing the best he can and maybe he actually has a pretty happy life. The working class doesn't need pity and suggestions to move or go get a degree. Here's something novel: why are the roads in nice neighborhoods always better repaired than roads in poor neighborhoods? Instead of telling the working class to move or get college degrees, maybe advocate for equality in road repair.
    • hinkley 7y ago
      I always wonder how the mental model works for some people. They espouse a way to live that they think everyone should do, but that way includes not making your own food, hauling your own trash, or (at least for many of them) building your own things. If they got their way, they’d have to do all the stuff they look down on other people for being competent at. But I don’t think they want them to do these things, they just want a way to either prop themselves up, or keep other people down.
      • jacquesm 7y ago
        Besides that, Joe the garbage truck driver may be a better dad than the people criticizing him.
• jariel 7y ago
  In Germany, like most places where 'University is free' - they generally have strict rules on the numbers that can attend, so those with proper Uni degrees hover around 25%. (FYI in America and Canada 'post secondary' can mean something broader). But they have something called 'Mittelstand' or middle industry - vast numbers of mid-sized firms that employ zillions of people, in particular, the take take in apprentices as part of the education program. Millions of kids pour into these programs wherein they learn one of a myriad of highly specialised trade skills. Said skills are highly relevant to industry, and point right at employment. There's nothing wrong with a History major, but maybe they're only good for people who really do want to do that, because the debt and cost to society of people who just want to 'tick the Uni' box is too much. But consider the major social impact of training and employment: Dignity and a Respected Role in Society. This to me is the oft overlooked element. These people do something useful, material, gainful, often have unions (with board representation), they can pay for themselves and other people respect them as having an important role to play in society. Obviously, this system institutionalises class to some degree. The ranks of those going on to higher ed are full of upper/upper-middle class kids, but, at least there's 'something with integrity for everyone'. If Republicans were smart, they'd pursue this path because it's better for business, but I don't believe their leadership is forward thinking enough. The Democrats could play this angle too, however, it just doesn't have enough 'purity' and doesn't play the progressive angle hard enough. It might be possible to start doing these things on the state level, or to elected a leader that starts to think in these terms coming from a different angle. We can only hope.
  • zhdc1 7y ago
    Germany also has an issue with its small and medium size enterprises being increasingly outcompeted, relatively weak demography, and a rural to urban hallowing that somewhat mirrors are what is taking place in China and in the states. I don't want to make this argument, but I get the impression that the German economy looks somewhat similar to the American economy in the 60s and 70s, but has managed to persist longer thanks to its unique position in the EU and some very real competitive advantages, such as the quality of vocational training you mentioned. I'm worried though that these have only delayed the transition to what you currently see in the US and UK. I'm a big fan of vocational training - most of my extended family came up in the trades - but I don't know if it's the pancia that both parties in the states seem to think it is, or if the German model is feasible or even preferrable in this context.
• realtalk_sp 7y ago
  I read this and can't help but think that the real fools are the ones buying into the elitism narrative that the far-right has been peddling for years. It's a deliberate red herring exploiting the very human tendency to chafe at any perceived condescension. If people in the US primarily voted the issues (that matter and affect them) instead of on the basis of nonsense, Democrats would win by a landslide. Republican politicians are trading away relatively meaningless concessions (on things they likely don't genuinely care about like guns, LGBT rights, abortion, religion, etc) as a cover for tremendously detrimental policymaking that includes broad spectrum deregulation, huge transfers into the military-industrial complex, and massive cuts to social programs including education, healthcare, welfare, etc. We know that's the game plan. The real fools are the people who continue to fall for this shit. Edit: I should add that I don't necessarily believe everything about the Democratic Party's platform is valid. But they are unquestionably the better choice for the vast majority of voters.
  • jariel 7y ago
    " and massive cuts to social programs including education, healthcare, " The US spends more per-capita on education than almost any other nation, and produces a higher % of college grads as well. [1] The US spends more per-capita on healthcare than any other nation - not just private but public as well! The US spends more per-capita on public healthcare alone than does Canada, wherein Canadians get full coverage. [2] These issues goes way beyond just 'spending'. [1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-604-x/2016001/ch/chb-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-604-x/2016001/ch/chb-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health-expenditure-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...
    • realtalk_sp 7y ago
      I should have clarified that my comments did not apply purely to the federal level. In fact, it's a fairly well-understood irony that more local levels of government have a higher impact on peoples' lives yet receive less attention from voters. Republicans are pummeling education systems in many of the states that they control. They've likely stolen the opportunity to be properly educated from multiple generations in the deep south. It's a tragedy. (http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/us-news-best-states-rankings-dont-smile-on-red-states.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/us-news-best-states-r...) I shouldn't have to point out that government healthcare spending is not higher in this country because we're doing a better job of providing it. The fact that you quoted the raw per capita spending number suggests you're unfamiliar with the dynamics of inflated healthcare costs in the US.
• deleted 7y ago
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• known 7y ago
  "If you can't do great big things, do great little things" --Unknown
• growlist 7y ago
  I think the title is appropriate. I read more and more content (in what used to be considered the more intelligent news sources) that I could pull to shreds line-by-line, yet the publications are successful and apparently this content is being lapped up. Their seems to be just enough sophistry, pretentious verbosity and reinforcement of existing beliefs to make the reader believe they have read an accurate and objective appraisal of the situation, and to feel confident to regurgitate this speciousness on command as if it's the truth. I'll read some obvious rubbish and can almost predict point-for-point exactly how someone's words will proceed - and these are educated people, supposed to be able to distinguish. It's depressing.
• GloriousPecan 7y ago
  People vote republican because they believe in individual liberty, minority over the majority, equality, and federalism. Historically, the liberals believe in pure democracy (majority rule), authoritarianism, equal opportunity (not the same thing as equality), and centralized government. You can see the undertones of these ideas in both parties today. Republicans want to trim regulations (individual liberty, federalism), and the Democrats want to create socialized medicine. (centralized, authoritarian) The author thinks he can boil down the differences to race and social class. Anyone who thinks “white racists” voted Trump into office is extremely juvenile. People vote against Democrats because they’d rather shoulder their own burdens than be controlled. A vote for Trump was a vote against the Democratic party, nothing more. If we don’t want people like Trump in office, then we should be running people like Bloomberg instead of socialists like Sanders and Warren.
• deleted 7y ago
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• mkd1964 7y ago
  I'm not sure how no one has figured out that the long-term goal of the Democrats is to eradicate the middle class entirely. To be fair, it's not a Democrat or Republican thing at all; although, in recent years, the Democrats have become the public face of the (dare I say it) Deep State. Almost everyone in congress is someone else's puppet, controlled through blackmail or bribery. They do the bidding of faceless, nameless, un-elected globalists, who's long-term agenda is, and has always has been, the total control of all aspects of society. Their mandate is to vote in favor of policies that benefit the elite, not the working class. It is no accident that the education system in the US has become what it is today. It does not educate, it indoctrinates. It teaches kids what to think, not how to think. And those that do manage to get a four-year degree are often no better equipped to step into high-paying jobs than they were before. So they're not getting the job offers and they now have huge student loans to pay off. The elite do not want a population of thinking individuals who ask questions. They want people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, but not so smart that they start questioning the system. As Trump said, "The system is rigged". And as George Carlin said, "It's a big club, and YOU AIN'T IN IT."