Another superficial take on the "white working class" Republican voters

Joan Williams of Hastings Law School last November made an entry into the currently fashionable anthropological speculations about the mysterious white working class. Which she gives the abbreviation WWC. It's What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class Harvard Business Review 11/10/2016.

Her effort has the same basic problem so much of this type of analysis share, a vague definition of what the working class is:

The terminology here can be confusing. When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008. That is the true “middle class,” and they call themselves either “middle class” or “working class.”

“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.

The favorite journalistic definition of working class is "people without a four-year college education."

A more meaningful sociological definition would start with something like "people eligible to join a union" and define it more closely from there. That would locate the definition as dealing with people's process in the production process, and not by income level or educational attainment. I would think the big difficulty in establishing such a definition would be on issues like how to treat "indepedent contractors," some of which would count as entrepreneurs or small business people, others as working class.

Williams' approach seems to be more impressionistic. And, by intention or not, her version isn't a lot different than the lazy establishment pundit version, which in turn is largely that preferred by Republicans. I'll skip over her repetition of the usual about Mean Libruls being elitist, etc. This observation is worth a bit more attention:

One little-known element of that ["class culture"] gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters ... and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

This is part of the problem with using a hazy definition of working class. Most kindergarten, elementary and secondary teachers are working class by almost any reasonable definition. And maybe not doctors but a large number of healthcare providers, notably nurses, also are in that position.

There are some big assumptions being made there, and I'm not sure how much polling or sociological data backing them. I don't recall seeing any political polling looking at voting patterns correlating with the particular attitude Williams describes here. The claim, "the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money," strikes me a broad, dubious generalization.

I'm also not so sure about the idea that working class people (at least if the term is reasonably defined) have very little contact with the wealthiest people but more with professionals. It has been a long-standing assumption, which I believe are based on studies over a long period of time, showing that in the case of "keeping up with the Joneses" competitiveness, people tend to compare themselves more with people in similar situations than with people in drastically different income levels. But that is a different thing that what Williams is arguing. Normally people looking to increase their income are obviously likely to look for the next steps on that goal. So a 25-year-old technician at a large corporation may have no aspiration to replace the CEO next year. But that person is likely to be keenly aware of whether they will get an open senior technician position or whether it goes to one of their current technician colleagues.

But that doesn't mean that the technicians are indifferent to what the CEO does or that they are unaware of the disproportionate power and wealth held by CEO's compared to most everyone else. The comment of the "laborer" she quotes saying, "[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding" and clerk who "chimed in" with, "There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” should be seen in that light. Those are the kind of anecdotal comment we often see columnists or commentators using to illustrate a point in a relative small space or a brief period on television. But they don't mean much outside of context. Those two comments are both pretty mundane. And therefore "safe." They are things that you might hear from a free-market libertarian, a flaming socialist and various people in between on the political spectrum.

Jamie Galbraith in Inequality and Instability (2012) has an analysis that is based on real in-depth studies that adds a geographical dimension to this issue of how closely the non-rich observe the rich in the United States. He finds that the increase in national inequality in recent decades has been remarkably geographically concentrated, with a very large part of it identifying with five counties: Santa Clara, San Francisco and San Mateo in California; New York; and King in Washington. All of which benefitted greatly from the technology and financial industries. He writes:

lt is well known that technology firms are not distributed uniformly; they are concentrated in centers such as San Francisco and SanJose, Seattle, Raleigh-Durham, Austin, and Boston. Th.eir :financiers are concentrated in New York County, New York-otherwise known as Manhattan. Income growth in the counties surrounding these areas accounted for the bulk of the inequality increase in the late i990s, and when the information technology bubble burst in 2000, falling relative incomes in these same areas reduced aggregate between-county inequality. In particular, the same four counties that contributed most to the increase in between-county income inequality from 1994 to 2000 contributed most to the inequality decline from 2000 to 2003: New York, Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco.

California, New York and Washington are all known as liberal states.

Galbraith devotes a separate chapter to the effects of inequality on voting in the US. His concluding summary:

Our analysis suggests that high inequality levels are weakly associated with a larger Democratic vote and also with diminished turnout. These results are strengthened when fixed effects are introduced; rising inequality correlates to deepening Democratic preference and reduced turnout. When the spatial location of voting groups is considered, our results suggest that it is not so much the raw inequality of incomes that is decisive, but the existence of inequalities across populations that do not confront each other aggressively in daily and political life. [my emphasis]

In other words, Galbraith's in-depth analysis shows that a situation where the wealthiest people and the rest "do not confront each other aggressively in daily and political life" has exactly the opposite effect suggested by Williams.

Problems with "market triumphalism"

Market triumphalism confuses national income with national welfare; it ignores the positive returns to government insurance and government investment; it confuses life outcomes with the hand of Providence; and it justifies a distasteful narcissism and possessiveness toward all material goods. It enables the unreflective affluent to sleep at night, their consciousness assuaged by its message that their success is explained by their own admirable virtues alone.

That's a quote from Ed Kleinbard in his book We Are Better Than This: How Government Should Spend Our Money (2014) from a review by Jared Berstein, Edward Kleinbard’s “We Are Better Than This.” On the Economy 10/08/2014

Martin Luther King, Jr. on economic inequality

This clip from The Young Turks, Why Conservatives Hate This Fact About MLK 01/20/2014, talks about the present-day implications of what Martin Luther King, Jr. had to say on economic inequality:

Tags: inequality, martin luther king jr., militarism, white racism

MLK Day 2014

For MLK Day, this is the famous Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam of 04/30/2014

The text is available from Pacifica Radio and UC Berkeley.

The fight against militarism contains. As does the fight for voting rights. Ben Mankiewicz reports for The Young Turks in The Fight For Voting Rights Continues 01/20/2014:

Joan Walsh writes about how important it is to get beyond the goody-two-shoes image of King that has become standard for the mainstream media in The radical MLK we need today Salon 01/20/2014:

King and [Nelson] Mandela had much in common, but one thing stands out this week: As they were lionized globally, both were deradicalized, pasteurized and homogenized, made safe for mass consumption. Each was in favor of a radical redistribution of global wealth. Each crusaded against poverty and inequality and war. Both did it with an equanimity and ebullience and capacity to forgive and love their enemies that made it easy to canonize them in a secular way. White people love being given the benefit of the doubt and/or being forgiven. I speak from experience. ...

King was always a radical, but at the end of his life, he was something of an outcast, criticized by liberals, the left and the right.

Forget about the right, for now: King crossed some Democrats and labor leaders when he turned against the Vietnam War in 1967, after his unparalleled Riverside Church speech. He knew the war was not only wrong, but was making Johnson’s alleged “War on Poverty” fiscally impossible. Meanwhile a growing black power movement mocked King’s commitment to nonviolence and integration. Even some close allies in the civil rights movement blanched when he joined Marion Wright Edelman and other organizers to start a Poor People's Campaign later that year – a movement of black, white, Latino, American Indian and Asian people mired in poverty, to fight the war and get the help they deserved. They were to march on Washington and set up a camp there in April 1968, the month King was assassinated.

Of course, to anyone reasonably in touch with reality, President Obama is anything but a radical. But Joan uses his recent rhetorical stress on income inequality to frame her point:

We are ready for the radical King now. President Obama, perhaps belatedly, has declared income inequality "the defining issue of our time." Even poverty seems back on the agenda. The man who may be doing the most to advance these issues right now isn’t a politician or a rabble rouser; it’s Pope Francis, who’s been hailed by everyone from Obama to Paul Ryan (Ryan gets him wrong) as helping us make the issue of poverty central to our politics. “If Dr. King were alive today, he would be in Rome visiting Pope Francis holding a joint press conference to summoning the world to aid the poor eradicate poverty,” Clarence Jones says. The president promises he’s going to the Vatican to meet the new pope, and that's a start.

Tags: inequality, martin luther king jr., militarism, white racism

Ethics, incentives and inequality

Joe Stiglitz digs out a quote from Adam Smith, the great classical liberal theorist of capitalism, and uses it in an op-ed piece, In No One We Trust New York Times Opinionator 12/21/2013:

The undervaluing of trust has its roots in our most popular economic traditions. Adam Smith argued forcefully that we would do better to trust in the pursuit of self-interest than in the good intentions of those who pursue the general interest. If everyone looked out for just himself, we would reach an equilibrium that was not just comfortable but also productive, in which the economy was fully efficient. To the morally uninspired, it’s an appealing idea: selfishness as the ultimate form of selflessness. (Elsewhere, in particular in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments," Smith took a much more balanced view, though most of his latter-day adherents have not followed suit.)

AS it happens, I just finished reading Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). He took fellow Dutch philosopher Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733), whose most famous work was The Fable of the Bees, to task for his philosophy that asserted a radical version of a sort of invisible hand that bring virtuous results out of selfish actions:

It is the great fallacy of Dr. Mandeville's book to represent every passion as wholly vicious, which is so in any degree and in any direction. It is thus that he treats every thing as vanity which has any reference, either to what are, or to what ought to be the sentiments of others: and it is by means of this sophistry, that he establishes his favourite conclusion, that private vices are public benefits. [my emphasis]

Smith was specifically rejecting this Ayn-Randian philosophy of Mandeville's. Contrasting the "love of glory" to "the love of virtue," he argues for the virtue on conforming to the moral standards of the community: "The man who acts solely from a regard to what is right and fit to be done, from a regard to what is the proper object of esteem and approbation, though these sentiments should never be bestowed upon him, acts from the most sublime and godlike motive which human nature is even capable of conceiving."

Stiglitz' op-ed emphasizes the need for a minimum level of trust in the functioning of a country's banking system, referring to the crisis that began in the US in 2007:

One of the reasons that the bubble’s bursting in 2007 led to such an enormous crisis was that no bank could trust another. Each bank knew the shenanigans it had been engaged in — the movement of liabilities off its balance sheets, the predatory and reckless lending — and so knew that it could not trust any other bank. Interbank lending froze, and the financial system came to the verge of collapse, saved only by the resolute action of the public, whose trust had been the most abused of all.

There had been earlier episodes when the financial sector showed how fragile trust was. Most notable was the crash of 1929, which prompted new laws to stop the worst abuses, from fraud to market manipulation. We trusted regulators to enforce the law, and we trusted the banks to obey the law: The government couldn’t be everywhere, but banks would at least be kept in line by fearing the consequences of bad behavior.

Decades later, however, bankers used their political influence to eviscerate regulations and install regulators who didn’t believe in them. Officials and academics assured lawmakers and the public that banks could self-regulate.

But it all turned out to be a scam. We had created a system of rewards that encouraged shortsighted behavior and excessive risk-taking. In fact, we had entered an era in which moral values were given short shrift and trust itself was discounted. [my emphasis]

He discusses a critically important issue, how supposedly performance-based incentives have in practice contributed to reckless behavior that can be rational for individual CEOs but destructive to the society at large and to their own corporations:

So C.E.O.’s must be given stock options to induce them to work hard. I find this puzzling: If a firm pays someone $10 million to run a company, he should give his all to ensure its success. He shouldn’t do so only if he is promised a big chunk of any increase in the company’s stock market value, even if the increase is only a result of a bubble created by the Fed’s low interest rates. ...

In practice, the right’s narrow focus on incentives has proved inimical to long-term thinking and so rife with opportunities for greed that it was bound to promote distrust, both in society and within companies. Bank managers and corporate executives search out creative accounting devices to make their enterprises look good in the short run, even if their long-run prospects are compromised.

And he explains how the staggering levels of inequality in American society corrode the basic levels of trust within society.

Tags: adam smith, inequality, joseph stiglitz

Stiglitz and Krugman on inequality and the recovery

I just wanted to take note of a notable difference in the economic analysis of fellow Nobel economists Joe Stiglitz and Paul Krugman on how inequality is affecting the recovery at this point.

Stiglitz lays out his case in Inequality Is Holding Back The Recovery New York Times 01/19/2013. Krugman replies in Inequality and Recovery 01/20/2013.

Without digging into the differences here, I think part of what we're seeing here is that Krugman, despite his sometimes radical-sounding tone (especially among the dimmer lights of many of his fellow commentariat), seems to be much more of a reluctant Keynesian than Stiglitz. I don't mean that in terms of political goals, but in terms of how they analyze longer-term trends. Krugman even says explicitly he sympathizes with the general policy drift of Stiglitz' analysis.

Presumably, they would be in agreement with this part of Stiglitz' argument:

Our skyrocketing inequality — so contrary to our meritocratic ideal of America as a place where anyone with hard work and talent can “make it” — means that those who are born to parents of limited means are likely never to live up to their potential. Children in other rich countries like Canada, France, Germany and Sweden have a better chance of doing better than their parents did than American kids have. More than a fifth of our children live in poverty — the second worst of all the advanced economies, putting us behind countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Greece. ...

Even were we able to ignore the economic imperative of fixing our inequality problem, the damage it is doing to our social fabric and political life should prompt us to worry. Economic inequality leads to political inequality and a broken decision-making process.

Tags: inequality

God, Mammon and the Christian Republican Wrecker Party

The Worship of Mammon (1909) by Evelyn De Morgan

If the "Christian" part of the Christian Right groups were anything meaningful and constructive in this world, they would be screaming about the current bipartisan austerity economics being ungodly. Past popular leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez, both of whom were motivated in large part by their Christian religious convictions (Baptist and Catholic, respectively), would also be leading resistance against it. And, no, the ethnicity of the President would make no difference to them.

Glenn Smith in The Big Lacuna Firedoglake 04/10/2011 mostly doesn't use explicit religious language. He relies more on psycho-social concepts, e.g., the Congressional Republicans are "brutal sociopaths." But he makes the moral case against it very clear and he does mention the sin of idolatry:

Last October, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a Medicaid cost-cutting bill that ended funding for life or death organ transplants. After two people died, the state restored the funding.

To rave reviews from the centrist Village idiots, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan took the Brewer/Arizona plan much further. His "courageous" proposal will abolish Medicare in favor of health-care vouchers experts already know will be worthless. It's a certain death sentence for many American seniors.

Let me repeat that. The bold Ryan plan will kill Americans so the wealthy can have their tax cuts. People’s lives will be sacrificed for gold.

But that's the lacuna. The thieves of America's wealth talk in endless abstractions. Numbers, numbers, numbers. The national debt, which they make an incarnate monster, has more reality to them than the people who will die at their hands.

They want to be seen as tough-minded pragmatists, but they are really weak-minded true believers and fantasists who have a hardened faith that sacrifices must be made to the God of the Market.

For all the ecumenicism a liberal Christian theologian might be able to muster, Mammon is still a destructive deity. Especially when worshipped fanatically by mean white people.

Tags: inequality, us economy