Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu

I just read Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu. It's an admirably compact read, taking only as many pages as it actually needs in order to make its case: The Professional-Managerial Class is full of neuroticism, insecurity, and hypocrisy. She focuses on three examples: Attitudes towards child-rearing (everything ever done by neurotic parents looking to get their kids into Ivies), books (a less convincing chapter), and sex (not gonna touch that). Her bigger point is that the PMC has largely tried to identify itself as being more virtuous than the lower economic classes so that they can justify having more. They want to justify it to everyone: Themselves (all that insecurity), the more affluent people for whom they work (again, they feel insecure), and those with less (to try to get the poor to strive rather than revolt).

Liu is far-left on economics, more lefty than I'll ever be, but you don't need to be lefty to (1) agree with her cultural critiques of the PMC and (2) think that actual material living conditions should be a bigger concern than whether somebody spoke about a social issue in precisely the right language. One could support reforms from any number of angles, left, right, or otherwise, and think that those reforms should concentrate on tangible economic issues instead of culture.

My most important takeaway from her book is from the intro: The contrast between the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th and the PMC of today. Educated professionals were prominent in that progressive movement as they are among today's self-styled progressives. However, the progressives of the earlier era were often in sympathy with the working classes, while today's PMC finds the working class appalling.

I'm not convinced her history is strong there. I'm hardly an expert on this, but labor movements were generally aligned with the Democrats, at least by the time of FDR, while many (not all) progressives were identified with the Republicans. Yes, FDR came after the days of the capital-P Progressives, and I'm no expert on that history, but it seems clear that the story was probably a bit more complicated than hinted at in Liu's intro. (I'm quite certain that historians will always agree with the statement "[Insert movement here] was more complicated than a short summary.")

Still, to the extent that she might be capturing some truth, it's worth noting (as Liu does) that the educated professionals of the PMC are largely salaried people working for bigger organizations. They don't own the means of their production (her wording, she's very proudly leftist) the way that many small-town professionals did a century ago. Hofstadter noted that the progressive movement of a century ago had plenty of professionals and businessmen (not normally a leftist bunch) who felt threatened by corporations. They had enough ownership of their jobs to feel threatened AND enough ownership to have some ability to push back. Today the educated professionals mostly work for someone else, not themselves.

I'm also reminded of Claudia Goldin's observations about how working for corporations closed gaps between male and female pharmacists. On one level this is unambiguously good: Of course we want to see men and women enjoy the same opportunities. And it is obviously something that the PMC would and should celebrate, both because of the wider gender implications and because it is in their self-interest. However, Liu would note that the victory doesn't necessarily trickle down to women working in other jobs (e.g. the low-paid cashiers in those pharmacies). A segment of the PMC gained equity in the sense of fairness by giving up their equity in the sense of ownership. Maybe it's a very good thing from many angles. Maybe it's better for patients, especially certain kinds of patients. If I traveled a lot I'd probably want to be able to go to any CVS in the country and get my prescription refill.

On the other hand, I know from family experience that certain specialty services seem to be easier to get at independent pharmacies.

But whatever the bigger-picture pros and cons of corporate vs independent pharmacies, the main point is that the PMC prioritizes certain social goals and has partly achieved some of those goals...at least for themselves...by accepting the economic power of larger entities. And so we can't really stand up to larger entities. I'm just a guy with an inconsequential blog. If I actually caused real trouble for a big entity I'd lose my job and health insurance. We all know this.

I think this is Liu's best point, separate from her critiques of various books and sexual politics.

Thoughts on Goldin's _Career and Family_

There's a lot of history and data that wasn't exactly familiar but wasn't necessarily surprising either, so it didn't really jump out at me as something that changes my view of things. But the discussion of pharmacy careers was interesting. In short, Goldin spent much of the book making the important but commonplace point that family responsibilities pose a major challenge in women's careers. Even when women are well-represented and make the same pay as men in the same positions and working the same hours, women often make less than men on aggregate because many women are in different roles and/or work fewer hours. Also, because of the nature of certain jobs, there are increasing rather than decreasing returns on hours, as certain time-intensive roles cover more complex tasks for which the supply/demand equation produces greater pay.

Pharmacists used to mostly own their small businesses, and small business owners face greater time demands and financial risks, but also make more money as a result. (Or at least they make more money when the financial risks work out.) Even when they didn't own their own business, because they were working in smaller operations they often had to put in more hours to cover evenings and emergencies and whatnot. But with the corporate takeover of pharmacies, work is less differentiated. It's more shift work, fewer risky roles, and so women and men have the same jobs open to them, and pay gaps have shrunk. Yes, there are still higher-paying evening shifts and whatnot that men disproportionately take, but those are predictable (mostly). People are more interchangeable and can fill in for each other rather than being on call because they're unique and needed. With work less differentiated and more predictable, pay gaps have shrunk.

She sees this as progress, and in many ways it is. There's no denying the benefits of working for a large organization, nor the consumer benefits of being able to interact with a big chain that can transfer your prescription to another outlet if you're traveling. There's no denying the benefits to everyone when certain tasks become routinized. At the same time, well, even leaving aside the cliche things that could be said about "giant soulless corporations", there's an inevitable upward transfer of power from people who understand the task at ground-level to a corporate bureaucrat who often doesn't. Yes, ideally the person at corporate HQ setting policy for the person in the local office is someone who used to be in a local office and knows the on-the-ground reality. In practice, well, I work for a university with a metric shit-ton of administrators. I'm just saying.

Equality at ground level is a great thing, but the question we should be asking is if we can achieve it without transferring all control upward. Of course, keeping control at ground level means keeping risk and responsibility at ground level, which produces hectic hours that challenge family life. I get why she's applauding one facet of this, but I think she's given short shrift to other facets.

On the other hand, seeing the very tangible way in which standardization can lead to equality between the sexes does illuminate why corporations have (at least in certain respects) embraced social liberalism.

Next read: Work and Family by Claudia Goldin

 The next book I'll blog is Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by economist Claudia Goldin. She's most famous outside the economics profession for her work on orchestra blind audition, and I'm curious to hear her take on one of the biggest workforce shifts of the past century: Women working outside the home. The only other workforce shift that arguably rivals it is the rise of mass education.