Final Thoughts on The Son Also Rises

 The last few chapters touch on minority groups and then his final thoughts on the bigger picture. He mostly addresses minorities that have been unusually successful, but also touches on Travelers (Gypsies) in the UK. Naturally, these things attract controversy; Clark is careful, and I will try to do likewise. His points are mostly inoffensive, but since he doesn't have surname data to address the full sweep of history as he would like, he gets speculative. But he does make a few good points:

If a minority group persists unusually long in a successful tier of society (e.g. Christian and Jewish minorities in certain Muslim societies), one thing you should ask is whether unsuccessful members of the group disaffiliate. This doesn't necessarily mean that people leave their religion in frustration if they don't succeed as merchants or whatever. But in many Muslim societies there were historically special taxes levied on non-Muslims. An economist would expect this to lead to conversions among people who cannot easily afford the tax. 

It's not necessarily that a Christian or Jew would say "Screw it, God doesn't pay enough." But if somebody lives among Muslims, likes their neighbors, and sees them as good people who worship the same God of Abraham, somebody might decide to assimilate into their community rather than paying a price to remain distinct. On the other hand, people who feel particularly strong bonds with and benefits from their minority group are going to pay the price to remain in their group. This will not only filter out people based on willingness to pay or ability to pay, it will also foster strong in-group ties that successful merchant classes have leveraged. In eras where people didn't have instant communication and bank transfers, long-distance trade required strong bonds of trust, bonds that are easy to foster in close-knit kin groups. And such bonds will be even stronger if people feel deep connections to far-flung members of their tribe, bonds even stronger than bonds with immediate neighbors. But if somebody does not make their living off those far-flung tribal ties, it's not just that they'll say "Eh, I'm no merchant, let's convert", it's that they'll likely feel stronger ties to their immediate neighbors. Their kids will marry into neighboring families. They'll convert. These are not crass transactions but normal human bonds.

So, as data-sparse as elements of his analysis are, I think they also bring a deeply human insight to groups that haven't always been treated well. Both the Jewish and Armenian diasporas in the Middle East have often been particularly successful in the merchant class, and similar things can be said for Parsis and other groups in India, but Clark argues that this is in part because the people who were most successful stayed in the group, and those who were more like their neighbors married their neighbors, as humans do when they connect to people.

One other point Clark makes is that everyone tries to explain the success of prominent minority groups in terms of some unique cultural factor, but every group has successful and unsuccessful people. If a group seems particularly successful, you need to ask if the people who aren't succeeding select out of the group. (The part about long-range bonds of trust is something I've read elsewhere; you'd expect it to matter less in a world where you can communicate and transfer money instantly across long distances.)

He makes related points about prominently successful diasporas in the US today. If you look at the ranks of medical doctors and certain other professions, you'll see disproportionate numbers from certain immigrant groups. Clark notes that much of this is not because some particular group is particularly good at medicine, but because US immigration law makes it easier for doctors for that group to come in and harder for poor manual laborers. He expects to see regression to the mean over generations, unless selection processes keep it so that only certain members can enter and replenish the ranks, while people who marry out of the group lose their identity.

A few other points:

1) If we all face Markovian dynamics in social mobility, nobody can truly feel secure. Obviously it's better to have more money rather than less, but people are loss-averse, and people with more money make bigger investments that can result in bigger losses or gains. So they face remarkably similar anxiety.

2) Adoption studies are all over the map on nature vs nurture, showing some nurture effects but also real nature effects. One thing he does note is that the nurture effects are subject to statistical range restriction: Adoptive parents go through selection processes that birth parents don't have to go through. Yes, there are always bad adoptive parents, but they'll be comparatively less abundant, so the bottom of the range will be under-represented in adoption studies. Combine that with diminishing returns on parenting beyond the basics, and you wouldn't expect huge nurture effects in adoption studies.

Pinker under-emphasized that point. Clark, an economist, is much more open to the idea that parenting matters but has diminishing returns. Sending your kids to a half-decent school and making them do their homework is important. Sending them to the fanciest school imaginable will not matter nearly as much, because of diminishing returns.

3) He disagrees with Charles Murray on the effects of assortative mating. People select for phenotype, not genotype, and phenotypes are heavily influenced by noise. So regression to the mean will keep happening, and with Markovian dynamics. (His disagreement with Murray made me breathe a sigh of relief.)

4) In the 1830's Georgia had a lottery to give formerly Cherokee land to white settlers. The value of the land was about $150,000 per lot in today's dollars, so effectively Georgia handed out a whole bunch of winning lotto tickets. A generation later, outcomes for descendants of the winners were remarkably unaffected by the win. Some people are bad at business no matter how much of a windfall you give them. (America's most recent head of state provides ample evidence for this.)

The Son Also Rises, Chapters 8-12

 The first few chapters in this section look at India (specifically the state of West Bengal), China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Chile. The specific numbers that he finds when looking at England and certain US demographics don't always hold up; I think he's a bit too wedded to the idea that he's found a universal law of class mobility/persistence. Shocks from big events do matter, to some extent. However, a few patterns do hold:

1) If you look at the persistence of families in elite tiers of society, as opposed to intergenerational correlations of income, you see very slow regression to the mean. Income is just a proxy for status, and is imperfectly correlated 

2) Social reforms don't have nearly the effect that reformers were hoping for. Families that know how to navigate society still do fine, for a while at least. This should be deeply dismaying for social reformers who think that we can remedy inequality in the classroom. We can probably have some effects on the margin, but not only are our students not blank slates, they aren't even erasable slates, and large portions of the slate are off-limits to us.

3) When he's able to look at long time scales there are strong signs of Markovian dynamics in many cases, and these Markovian dynamics are as true for upward regression to the mean as downward regression to the mean. While the pace would be dispiriting to social reformers, the fact that each generation has an element of reset should be encouraging for them.

Chapter 12 is the most interesting chapter for me, as a physicist, because he looks at time reversal. He shows that if, instead of starting with people who were high-status centuries ago in England, you start with people who were high-status more recently, and then look into the past, going backwards in time they also regress to the mean. This is consistent with the idea that microscopic dynamics of Brownian motion look the same in either time direction, even if macroscopic dynamics look very different. This is just such a cool chapter that I would seriously consider discussing it the next time that I teach statistical physics. Seriously.

As to the persistence of the upper classes after putative egalitarian reforms, let me just note that upper-class jerks always write the best Diversity and Inclusion Statements. I don't if it's always been that way, or if they learned it after the French Revolution, but the offspring of the upper classes seem to be absolutely amazing at explaining that they're One Of The Good Ones and it's those other assholes who need to face a guillotine.

The Son Also Rises, Chp. 3-7

 I'm a bit less skeptical after reading more, but only up to a point. When examining surnames in England, Clark looks at more than just medicine and law (rather specific professions). He looks at estates and probate cases in English courts, enrollment in Cambridge and Oxford, and even elections to the House of Commons. Perhaps most interesting is that he doesn't just look at common elite surnames (where people might benefit from everyone around them knowing that, say, Montgomery is an elite name), but also rare elite surnames. This is an important way to rule out the possibility that people benefit from name recognition. Interestingly, his patterns hold up through the 20th century, even though the past few centuries saw substantial changes in social policy, educational admissions standards, professional standards, etc.

In the US, he is looking at shorter time periods (his analysis of England goes back to the Middle Ages), and some of his patterns are less convincing, but plausible. Perhaps most interesting is that he looks at both downward mobility (e.g. decline in common surnames of doctors and lawyers) but also upward mobility (rises in surnames from disadvantaged groups). When looking at disadvantaged groups he includes both the obvious ones (African Americans, Native Americans, Jews) and also a less obvious one (French people in the northeastern US). The less obvious one is interesting because totally different mechanisms should be in play. While I have no doubt that families lower on the socioeconomic scale will be known locally, and face stigma accordingly, white people of French descent have some clearly plausible ways to blend in if they move a little ways away. Nonetheless, multi-generational persistence in comparatively lower status shows patterns similar to other situations in both the US and elsewhere.

In the case of the US, the nice Markovian upward regressions to the mean are a bit less obvious. The 20th century saw some pretty clear and significant changes to laws that barred advancement for certain groups, so one would expect upticks, and some of the data is messy. If we take away any message, it's that some of the regressions to the mean have not involved changes as sharp as one would have hoped. We have an obvious explanation: Ongoing discrimination. And no doubt that is part of it. But Clark invites us to consider the possibility that the patterns of adjustment are close enough to other societies that maybe slow progress is sadly inevitable.

There are obvious things that a 21st century college professor must say at that point. Some of those mandatory responses even have some validity! As much as I'm a skeptic of rapid progress, even I hold out hope that we can change more rapidly than the English class system. I mean, there's a ton of room between "We'll totally transform things in one generation" (which some people seem to think is the only goal we can allow ourselves to have) and "Well, we'll improve as slowly as a country that still has a House of Lords."

Clark proposes in chapters 6-7 that families pass on knowledge and skills, which, yeah. It's pretty much what we advanced primates do. He gives much less consideration to genetic explanations than I feared, acknowledging that anything passed from parents to children will show similar statistical patterns whether it involves nature or nurture. That's encouraging. Also, as much as the slow progress is dispiriting, the Markovian nature of the patterns means that each generation is, in some sense, a new start. A start with loaded dice, but at least a fresh dice roll.

There's one other encouraging thing in these chapters (and I note that encouragement about social problems is a rarity from the Dismal Science of economics): He argues that whatever parents are doing to make their kids successful, it isn't (for the most part) about their money. If it were about money, families with more kids would have less successful kids than families with similar financial resources but fewer kids. The per-child investment would differ. But the data he cites doesn't support such a model.

Now, at this point one might say "What kind of idiot thinks rich kids don't have it better?" Of course they do. His point is that it's not JUST the money spent on the kids. It's also the fact that people who have money know how to get money and they know how to teach kids to do the same. That includes connections.

I can't find the reference now, but I vaguely recall reading that after the Communist revolutions in Russia and China, the bureaucracies remains in the hands of more or less the same families. Yes, yes, there were some high-profile punishments of selected upper-class people, but you can't run a complex country without keeping the people who are experienced at running it. You can hand over a few things to the revolutionaries (e.g. punishing ideological crimes), but if you want the public infrastructure to run you keep more or less the same people at the Department of Water and Sanitation. An extreme example is Egypt, where my understanding is that even after successive conquests by Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, the public records continued to be kept in Coptic (the language that evolved from Ancient Egyptian) until at least a century after Arab conquest. Yes, eventually they switched to Arabic, but when the Arabs first arrived the bureaucracy was run by Copts. I imagine that the Copts simply explained that this place only functions if they properly manage all of the water infrastructure projects associated with the annual rise and fall of the Nile, and if the new rulers want to avoid bread riots they'll let the pros continue to handle all of the civil engineering projects.

Finally, if the role of families is as great as Clark suggests, it makes more sense that revolutionaries frequently contemplate (but never succeed at) major changes to family structure. It also makes sense that Rawls would call for massive projects to ensure truly equal lifetime chances (from the earliest stages) for children. You don't really have equal opportunity unless you massively engineer the most influential period of life. Except you can't actually do it, at least not without horrors.

First thoughts on "The Son Also Rises"

 The main topic of the book is a study of last names. He looks at names that were, at some point in the history of a particular society, associated with a high or low status group, and then looks at data on professions and income over subsequent decades or centuries. He makes two points, one of which is inoffensive and the other of which is controversial:

1) While correlations between parental income and children's income can be surprisingly weak (suggesting that there's better mobility than we think/fear), if you look at names there's surprising persistence of certain families in high or low income tiers and elite professions. Nonetheless, the persistence decays, albeit much more slowly than the individual income data suggests.

He notes that the fact that there's a decay of correlation in this data does show a churn, and it's an exponential (Markovian) decay, strongly suggesting that it's hard to entrench certain advantages, but the decay is slow. This I agree with. The slow decay can be a problem from many perspectives, but the Markovian decay gives assurance that parents aren't destiny, that people can rise or fall. In a Markov process each step is a "reset", even if a rest with weighted probabilities.

He suggests that the correlations on single-generation time scales capture short-term random fluctuations, and ignore the longer-term effects, and that tracking names means it's easier to see long-term persistence. This is also reasonable. His attention to professions sheds light on some of this: Suppose that we look at a family of doctors, and a grandparent is a surgeon (high pay) while the next generation has a pediatrician (usually more modest pay), and the third generation has some high-paid specialist. This is a family that isn't leaving the upper tiers of society anytime soon, but a simple income analysis would show large fluctuations, even though those fluctuations are all within a comfortable tier.

Since names are usually patrilineal, a name analysis is leaving out half of the population, but if your goal is to understand control of resources then it's not completely inappropriate to focus your attention on the half of the population that has controlled and, sadly, largely still controls the most resources. Of course, it is still a significant limitation of the data set, and you have to be honest about that. But all real-world data on social phenomena comes with huge limitations, so as long as he is candid about this it's an acceptable study.

2) He argues that since this persistence shows up in many societies, both at the top and at the bottom, and across centuries (I've only read his analysis of Sweden so far), and since it remains unaffected even by major changes to economic conditions (e.g. it shows up both in egalitarian Scandinavia and cut-throat capitalist America), workers' rights, and educational systems, there's probably a genetic component.

This is obviously more controversial and less convincing, partly because parents pass on customs and ideas as much as DNA, and your childhood environment in any society depends on your class position.

Also, thus far his analysis of professions has been limited to law and medicine, two professions that have high barriers to entry (medicine especially). And the barriers have only risen as educational credentials have become more common. Once upon a time some people attended med school or law school without finishing an undergraduate degree. Now you see many people not only do a bachelor's degree but even a master's degree or a few years of carefully-chosen professional or community service experience to polish their applications. It's a lot easier to spend a few years studying for the MCAT and volunteering at community health clinics after college if you have affluent parents. But if your affluent parents are in some other profession, they might say "Why are you wasting your time so you can take out huge med school loans and then work for low pay as a resident? Just go get a job in my field!" It might be that you need a parent who's a doctor to see it as worthwhile to spend a few years further polishing your application.

I'll have to see what else he looks at besides medicine and law.

Next book: The Son Also Rises

 I've been reading some books that I lacked the energy to blog, but the semester is wrapping up, so I have more energy to write. I'm going to read The Son Also Rises by economist Gregory Clark, a study of class mobility in different societies. He looks at family names and apparently draws big conclusions. I'm reluctant to say more than that until I get farther into the book.

Plutarch, more thoughts

I just finished reading about Numa Pompilius, an early King of Rome.  He was supposedly a reluctant ruler, more interested in prayer and contemplation than power.  Supposedly.  Of course, that image just made him even more in demand as a ruler, so he got the throne.  Plutarch regards him as a pretty good King.  It's always hard to be sure with such a long remove and so few reliable records, but one thing he has going for him is that he didn't go to war, which makes him a standout among Roman rulers.  Also, he tried to do something about tribal divides, so he encouraged the Romans to organize themselves along lines of professional guilds and economic classes rather than ethnicity.  Today his embrace of economic class over ethnic identity would make him a right-winger because, hell, I dunno, the modern world is weird.

I've just started reading about Solon of Athens.  Plutarch pays a lot of attention to how Solon and others tried to address disparities between rich and poor.  When I grew up, I absorbed a worldview in which rule by the rich had been traditional (which, yeah, pretty much) and paying close attention to economic inequality was a very modern thing, with a Marxist legacy.  To read a Dead White Male (we'll leave aside whether modern racial labels make sense for ancient people of the Mediterranean, and just stipulate that classical writers are regarded as white and Western by many of their critics and proponents) who approves of rulers paying attention to economic class is...well, it's surprising.  In retrospect it's nothing shocking (poverty and wealth have always been salient to human experience) but the lessons imparted to children are generally the lessons of history's winners (i.e. rulers), and history's winners wanted us to think that paying lots of attention to class (outside of certain charitable avenues) is a modern aberration dating to Marx.  I don't know that anybody ever explicitly told me that older rulers wisely ignored economic inequality, but few told me that they did, and most (on both the left and right) implied that attention to class is a Marxist thing (and God knows Marxism was a shit show).

Until a few years ago I would have said that ignoring classical rulers' and writers' concerns with inequality was a right-wing project. I certainly don't recall any of the "We must pay more attention to our Western Cultural Heritage!" types banging on about it. They're from the political camp more interested in tax cuts, after all. Now, with identity foremost in the minds of many on the left (at least in my professional world), seeing a Classical writer (with a capital C, being a person with a big name) care about economic class and praise rulers who paid attention to the problem feels a bit transgressive. I feel like if I pointed this out too loudly, instead of being the guy who is pointing out truths that rich conservatives don't want you to hear, I'd be the guy saying "All lives matter" in response to a diversity campaign.

The world is weird right now.

Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste

Clarissa has a heresy-ridden response to the College Board's decision to offer an "adversity score" to measure the disadvantage experienced by test-takers. I agree with everything she says here, but the critics of the SAT have two responses:

1) The SAT doesn't actually measure your vocabulary, math skills, etc.  It measures your ability to take this test, and privileged people do better on it. This assertion is not supported by any systematic data, but it is supported by the anecdotes we've all observed of people who do far better or far worse than their SAT scores would have predicted.  They don't get that statistical predictions just tell us averages and ranges, and some fraction of people will fall outside those ranges on either side.

2) OK, the SAT does measure vocabulary, math skills, etc., but colleges have a duty to "meet students where they're at."  On this I have a tiny amount of sympathy--I do think we need educational institutions that will help people who could go far but have not come out of high school well-prepared.  But that's a long road, it will take far more than 4 years of college (let alone 1-2 years of remedial coursework), and what they really need is a "high school do-over" BEFORE a 4-year degree.  (Some might say that that's what an Associate's Degree is for, but the AA/AS degree is supposed to roughly correspond to the first 2 years of a Bachelor's degree.)

If a Bachelor's degree is to be "accessible" to people who start the program with woefully inadequate preparation, and if we are to fit this into the confines of 4 years of courses on the typical academic schedule, then institutions whose Bachelor's degrees "meet students where they are at" will be conferring credentials that employers and graduate schools justifiably treat as different from those offered elsewhere.  And this will just amplify rather than mitigate the class divisions in higher ed.

Even worse, this will actually work against efforts to diversify the academy.  Everyone out there wants to diversify PhD and faculty ranks.  The schools that disproportionately teach people from under-represented backgrounds disproportionately get under-prepared students because disadvantage has consequences.  If such schools must "meet students where they are at" AND do so within the usual confines of 4 years and roughly 120 credits (give or take), then their degrees WILL mean less.  That is an unavoidable fact.  And why should PhD programs take students whose credentials mean less?  Unless those PhD programs must also "meet students where they are at."  Which will either mean that students take longer to finish (and PhD programs face pressures on this front, including but not limited to the financial pressures of supporting students for longer times) or that students come out less accomplished.

And then people who hire PhDs will have to decide how to evaluate accomplishments...

Privilege, class, and diversity

I like this essay from the Hedgehog Review.  The three final paragraphs are the best:

 The concept of diversity first germinated in the corporate world, and was quickly seized upon by academia in the 1990s. It arrived just in the nick of time. The previous two decades had seen the traditional mission of the university undermined, if not abandoned, under pressure from a highly politicized turn in the humanities that made its case in epistemic terms, essentially debunking the very idea of knowledge. The role that the upper-tier university soon discovered for itself, upon the collapse of ideals of liberal learning, was no longer that of training citizens for humane self-government, but rather that of supplying a cadre to staff the corporations, the NGOs, and the foundations. That is, the main function of elite schools is to supply the personnel required to run things in an economy that has become more managerial than entrepreneurial.

The institutional desideratum—the political antipode to hated “privilege”—is no longer equality, but diversity. This greatly eases the contradiction Furet identified, shielding the system from democratic pressure. It also protects the self-conception of our meritocrats as agents of historical progress. As was the case with the Soviet nomenklatura, and the leading Jacobins as well, it is precisely our elite that searches out instances of lingering privilege, now understood as obstacles to fulfillment of the moral imperative of diversity. Under this dispensation, the figure of the “straight white male” (abstracted from class distinctions) has been made to do a lot of symbolic work, the heavy lifting of legitimation (in his own hapless way, as sacrificial goat). We eventually reached a point where this was more weight than our electoral system could take, as the election of 2016 revealed. Whether one regards that event as a catastrophe or as a rupture that promises the possibility of glasnost, its immediate effect has been panic in every precinct where the new class accommodations have been functioning smoothly, and a doubling down on the moralizing that previously secured them against popular anger. We’ll see how that goes. 

The term shibboleth is interesting. Its definitions include “a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons” and “a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.” It is a random Hebrew word that acquired its present meaning when it was used by the Gileadites as a test to identify members of an enemy tribe, the Ephraimites, as they attempted to flee across the Jordan River. Ephraimites could not pronounce the sound sh (Judges 12:4–6). I think it is fair to say that one’s ability to pronounce the word diversity with a straight face, indeed with sincerity made scrupulously evident, serves as a shibboleth in this original sense. It answers the question of whether one wants to continue as a member in good standing of those institutions that secure one’s position in the upper middle class.

It's all about legitimizing the status quo while dismissing class.  An upper class can be diverse in terms of gender, sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc., but by definition it cannot be diverse in terms of class, nor can it be equal to other classes. (And if you're confused about why I would separately list sex, sexuality, and gender in the previous sentence, that just points to another shibboleth that you can't pronounce, you heretic.)

I think it's particularly interesting how diversity is now the concept placed in tension with privilege, instead of equality.  When I was a kid, the privileged kids had affluent parents.  Now the white lower-middle class is deemed privileged, and the men of that class especially so.  That's quite a rhetorical trick.  Equality (whether economic, or of opportunity, or whatever) got pushed aside somewhere along the line, replacing solidarity with celebration of difference.  I'm not a Marxist, but on this one I see their point.  Yes, there are very valid points about the differences in the life experiences of men and women, or white people and people of color, but it's quite remarkable that the word we used to use for rich kids got co-opted to frame those very valid points.  The word may have a new denotation, but it still carries old connotations that sit uneasily with the new usage.

Also, I think there's a very important point in there about the difference between a managerial economy and an entrepreneurial one.  Founders/owners of privately-held businesses (or even businesses that have gone public but still have a very strong Founder presence) are often quite different from people who climbed corporate ladders.  They aren't always self-made people who rose from nothing (Trump built his empire on inherited wealth) but they are people who spent most of their careers making their own decisions (sometimes appropriately bold decisions, sometimes risky follies) rather than answering to a boss.

Corporate managers aren't fans of the regulatory state, but they can often make compromises (even lucrative compromises) with the regulatory state more easily than an entrepreneur can.  A corporate manager has spent his career answering to people, and following rules written by higher-ups who may be several time zones away.  This leads to a different demeanor and ideology than men who didn't have bosses.  And while privately-held companies typically face most of the same PR and HR issues as corporations of similar size, the quirks of founders play can play more of a role in how they respond to those issues (though more on that below), so they may have more room for managerial liberals (with all of their diversity talk) than a company still dominated by an entrepreneur.

One interesting exception to this dichotomy is Silicon Valley.  Large tech companies are mostly young (at least in comparison with other corporations of similar size, though Google just entered its third decade), but they are, for the most part, very socially liberal.  Mind you, I have no doubt that there are plenty of Google and Facebook managers who hate taxes and regulations, but the prevailing cultures of those places are famously liberal (at least on social issues) and unabashedly pro-diversity (unlike most of the right-wing billionaires who rose to power in the pre-internet era).  This has helped them make peace with the same cultural and regulatory issues as older corporations.

So, Trump is, on the one hand, a rich guy who has ripped off many ordinary people, and treated many workers like shit.  On the other hand, in this economy dominated by corporate managerial types (often liberal, at least in their acceptance of rules and certain PR and HR imperatives) rather than entrepreneurial types (who are often right-wing), Trump is an exception, a rich man who doesn't talk like a corporate manager.  That helps me to understand why he has appeal among some (not all) middle class white voters.  It's not the only factor, of course, but it's among them, and helps to make sense of why they see him as different from the other rich guys.

Finally, let's return to this line:

It also protects the self-conception of our meritocrats as agents of historical progress. As was the case with the Soviet nomenklatura, and the leading Jacobins as well, it is precisely our elite that searches out instances of lingering privilege, now understood as obstacles to fulfillment of the moral imperative of diversity.

This helps me understand why so many academic administrators honestly see themselves as "change agents", even while repeating the same slogans and buzzwords as every other administrator out there, and diligently following in the templates taught to them at workshops.  It explains to me why academic administrators from families of administrators see themselves and their advancement as bold and progressive rather than the fulfillment of a status quo destiny laid upon them when sperm met egg.  It helps explain why I, from a family that has grown more educated with each generation, a family that still circulates stories of immigrant roots, feel old-fashioned and traditional rather than progressive in academia:  Because the born insiders are all proclaiming their progressivity, leaving tradition as the only refuge of the outsider.

My only dissent from the above-quoted observation is that I don't see this as a uniquely contemporary thing, an artifact of a new liberalism that replaces economic class solidarity with diversity.  Hofstadter noted that Dewey's disciples, all managerial types, were desperate to find a way to institutionalize anti-institutional ideology.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Yep.

I don't have much to say about it, but this post from education policy blogger Robert Kelchen is well worth reading.  As long as education policy discussions are dominated by people who treat college as a given and state flagships as "backup" schools, we're doomed to insanity.

Finally, some sanity on privilege, college, and jobs

I'm not predisposed to agree with a professor of work-life law about, well, anything.  However, Joan Williams has a great article in the NYT that practically reads like a synopsis of the things I blog about.  To wit, class matters as much as race:

But something is seriously off when privileged whites dismiss the economic pain of less privileged whites on grounds that those other whites have white privilege. Everyone should have access to good housing and good jobs. That’s the point.

Indeed.

And some sanity on college and the job prospects of people who don't go to college:

The second [step] is for Democrats to advocate an agenda attractive to low-income and working-class Americans of all races: creating good jobs for high school graduates. The college-for-all experiment did not work. Two-thirds of Americans are not college graduates. We need to continue to make college more accessible, but we also need to improve the economic prospects of Americans without college degrees.

Accepted wisdom that decent nonprofessional jobs are gone for good lets elites off the hook. In fact, the United States has a well-documented dearth of workers qualified for middle-skill jobs that pay $40,000 or more a year and require some postsecondary education but not a college degree. A 2014 report by Accenture, Burning Glass Technologies and Harvard Business School found that a lack of adequate middle-skills talent affects the productivity of “47 percent of manufacturing companies, 35 percent of health care and social assistance companies, and 21 percent of retail companies.” Middle-skill jobs are important jobs: radiology technician, electrician, modern robot-heavy factory worker, emergency medical technician, wind turbine technician. In some cities, a construction boom is hobbled by a lack of plumbers. We might ameliorate this problem if we stopped talking about plumber’s butt.

I'm just baffled that something this sensible could be published in an elite outlet like the NYT.

Why I am what I am

I went to a decent high school.  Not fancy, not lousy.  Science labs were OK but we weren't putting out national science fair competitors.  Most kids weren't poor but most weren't upper-middle-class either.  Not particularly disadvantaged but not a lot of affluent kids either.  Pretty much in the middle.  Which is fine.  We had college-prep classes but we also had a lot of vocational classes.  It was a decent school in the middle of the class hierarchy.  I was more privileged than a lot of the US but less privileged than a lot of the people I later met in college.

One thing that was repeatedly driven home to me by my teachers was that we would be on our own in college, and that there would be no hand-holding.  It was repeatedly said that we would have to figure it out, that they wouldn't patiently explain to us how much we should be reading and reminding us to study and reminding us to do our homework and turn it in on time.  It would be hard and we would be on our own.  This was repeatedly said to me and my middle-class friends.

And, to a large extent, that was true.  College was a bit more structured and supportive than my high school teachers made it sound, but only a bit.  Ultimately, it was on me.  I accepted that from day one, and it felt utterly unsurprising to me that I was doing well because I studied all the time.  It felt utterly unsurprising when friends and dorm-mates who studied less didn't do as well.  It's the natural order of the world.  Likewise, in grad school I felt a bit more burned out, a bit more interested in my own life, and I didn't do as well as I did in college.  I still got through, but I was not on top, and that was no surprise to me because I didn't put as much in.  Then I became a professor and buckled down more and published more and got decent student evaluations because I put in a ton of prep and none of this seemed at all surprising to me.

So you can imagine how strange it seems to me when people keep saying that we need to do more for students who don't know how to study, how to take notes, how to manage their time, etc.  It baffles me that we are supposed to be responsible for their success.  Why would we be?  Why would it be my problem that people who never put much effort into mastering freshman material are now doing poorly with advanced material?  Why is it my duty to fix this?  It's not like I could actually do anything about it (you only get the benefit of years of effort by putting in years of effort--there are no secret tricks), so why is it my responsibility?

Likewise, it seems strange to me when people say that it's so unfair that we attach weight to grades and test scores.  I got into a college with people who were way above me in the class hierarchy, people whose parents had more money and more degrees, people who had attended prep schools and magnet schools.  I was there because I had done at least as well as they had done on the SAT (among other things).  I got better grades than them in college.  I out-studied them, out-performed them in the academic arena, and moved ahead academically.  Isn't that how it's supposed to be?

I've spent more than two years reading and blogging about the cultural currents that underlie the notions that seem so strange to me, but I'll be honest:  To this day there's still a part of me that thinks "Well, duh, I studied my ass off because my teachers all told me that that's what I'd have to do to succeed in college.  What else were you expecting?"

Make a whole new religion, a falling star that you cannot live without

William Deresiewicz just published a nice essay on political correctness. It is longer than it needed to be, but it still has plenty of good stuff.  I don't have time to frame a single, cohere response, so I'll just address it in bits and pieces.

Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

...

What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern.

This seems accurate, though I think it's important to emphasize (as he does later) that this is to a large extent an elite phenomenon.  The viewpoints he describes go beyond the most elite institutions, but the rigidity of the code, and particularly its power over the wider student body, is not as bad everywhere as it is in the places that he's talking about.

As to this:

The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

The first sentence seems wildly inaccurate.  I can't speak to humanities, but I haven't heard anyone mention Foucault (outside of a few libertarian friends with decidedly non-leftist views on power) since the 1990's.  Frankly, if today's campus identity liberalism were rooted in Foucault it would be a step up--at least Foucault is a hard read!  The writings that matter in identity liberalism on today's campuses seem to be shallow think-pieces at the level of Slate and Huffpo, emotional personal accounts, and egregiously misapplied/misinformed social science, not French intellectuals.  Indeed, the last sentence notes the unscholarly attitude of identity liberalism, further casting doubt on the assertion that it's rooted in thinkers like Foucault.  They don't want thick treatises, they want 3 Quick Tips For Implementing Best Practices!

Also, French postmodernists would have cast a disparaging eye on claims to objective truth, whereas today's identity liberalism holds that privilege blinds one to truth and oppression opens one to it.  There is an objective moral code, an idea of settled questions, as Deresiewicz notes.  French postmodernists would laugh at the idea of settled truths, let alone settled moral truths.

But of course, Scripps and its ilk are only diverse in terms of identity. In terms of ideology, they are all but homogeneous. You don’t have “different voices” on campus, as these institutions like to boast; you have different bodies, speaking with the same voice.

...

 Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogeneous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come from the liberal upper and upper-middle classes, multiracial but predominantly white, with an admixture of students from poor communities of color—two demographics with broadly similar political beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large proportion of the Democratic Party base. As for faculty and managerial staff, they are even more homogenous than their students, both in their social origins and in their present milieu, which tends to be composed exclusively of other liberal professionals—if not, indeed, of other liberal academics. Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands). If you want to find the counterculture on today’s elite college campuses, you need to look for the conservative students.

This I agree with 100%.

And this:

There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize—that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. And the exclusion of class on selective college campuses enables the exclusion of a class. It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white. In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group. 

We don’t acknowledge class, so there are few affirmative-action programs based on class. Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed. The recent presidential campaign may be understood as the return of that repressed—and the repressed, when it returns, is always monstrous. 

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

Here's the most important part:

The culture of political correctness, the religion of the fancy private colleges, provides the affluent white and Asian students who make up the preponderant majority of their student bodies, and the affluent white and Asian professionals who make up the preponderant majority of their tenured faculty and managerial staffs, with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege. It enables them to tell themselves that they are children of the light—part of the solution to our social ills, not an integral component of the problem. It may speak about dismantling the elite, but its real purpose is to flatter it. [Emphasis added]

Exactly.  That's why people eat that shit up like pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's.

Later in the essay, Deresiewicz acknowledges the role that class plays, and the difference between elite private and non-elite public institutions:

But public schools are very different places from private ones. Their student bodies, for the most part, are far more diverse, economically and in every other way, which means these institutions do not have to deal with a large bolus of affluent, sheltered white and Asian kids who don’t know how to talk to black and brown people and need to be “educated” into “awareness” by the presence of African-American and Latino students (who are, in turn, expected to “represent” their communities). When different kinds of people grow up together, rather than being introduced to one another under artificial conditions in young adulthood, they learn to talk and play and study together honestly and unselfconsciously—which means, for adolescents, often frankly and roughly—without feeling that they have to tiptoe around sensitivities that are frequently created by the situation itself.

I'm at a non-elite public institution, and while few of the faculty were first-generation students, some definitely came from more privileged backgrounds than others.  The politics correlate pretty well with the level of parental privilege.

Post title explained:

Another critique of meritocracy

In my previous post I linked an essay on meritocracy that is actually a critique of another essay.  Here's the original essay by Helen Andrews in The Hedgehog Review. I lack the time to dissect it in detail, so I'll just quote my favorite parts:

First, a candid acknowledgment of how hard it is to have procedural, neutral meritocracy without de facto aristocracy:

Others favor the slightly more radical solution of redefining our idea of merit, usually in a way that downplays what Guinier calls “pseudoscientific measures of excellence.”37 She even has a replacement in mind, the Bial-Dale College Adaptability Index, the testing of which involves Legos. (Why are you laughing? It is backed by a study.) This is even less likely to work than fiddling with the equality-of-opportunity end. For one thing, the minority of families willing to do whatever it takes to get into Harvard will still do whatever it takes to get into Harvard. They have adapted to new admissions criteria before, and they will do so again. Furthermore, unless families are abolished, successful parents will always pass on advantages to their children, which will compound with each generation. It does not matter how merit is defined; the dynamic of meritocracy remains the same, its operations inexorable.

If you set up a game, people will play it.

Second, a candid call for the elite to abandon pretenses:

The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy—so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label. By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not. If ethnic balance is important to meritocrats, they should engineer it into the system. If geographic diversity strikes them as important, they should ensure that it exists, ideally while keeping an eye on the danger of hoovering up all of the native talent from regional America. But they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.

I'm not sure that I buy the prescription, but I certainly agree that affirmative action cannot be achieved neutrally, so if you want to integrate the elites then you should do so unashamedly rather than trying to cook up a procedure that will magically but neutrally deliver the desired result.

A good declension narrative and a critique of separating "critical thinking" skills from knowledge of facts:

“How to think bigger” is indeed a fine quality for a governing class to have, but this young man was cheated if his teachers tried to cultivate it as a skill in isolation and not via the discipline of learning “particular things.” It was the meritocratic ideology that paved this road to ignorance. Being open to all comers, with intelligence the only criterion, meant that no particular body of knowledge could be made mandatory at an institution like St. Paul’s, lest it arbitrarily exclude students conversant only with their own traditions. This has predictably yielded a generation of students who have no body of knowledge at all—not even “like about what actually happened in the Civil War.”

Every snowflake thinks that their lack of knowledge is compensated for by their superior ability.

It closes with a good call to action:

The task of reforming our present elite ought to be entrusted to someone with a feeling for what is good in it. For all its flaws, this elite does have many virtues. Its moral seriousness contrasts favorably with the frivolousness of certain earlier generations, and its sense of pragmatism, which can sometimes be reductive, can also be admirably brisk and hard-nosed. What is needed is someone who can summon a picture of the meritocratic elite’s best selves and call others to meet the example. But this process can begin only when this new ruling class finally owns up to the only name for what it already undeniably is.

But how can we do that if we won't admit that we're elites? That's the same problem identified in the Timothy Burke piece that I blogged yesterday.

Meritocracy

I don't have a lot of time to jot down all my thoughts on it, but I like this post on meritocracy.  In particular, I like three points:

First, that our concept of meritocracy motivates people to work frantically but not always thoughtfully, constantly striving for tokens of success.  The most creative advances are often risky, but insecure meritocracy affords less risk tolerance than aristocracy.

Second, she notes that if we completely demolish the idea of meritocracy we motivate even more short-term behavior (in the absence of aristocracy):

What Helen calls "the meritocratic delusion most in need of smashing" - the belief that hard work pays off - is actually a basic corrective for democracy's worst tendencies. Without it, we get not aristocracy, but only a more radical democracy - more short-sighted, impulsive, petty, demanding of immediate gratification (from the state). When the long-term fruits of hard work and achievement are shown to be "delusions," why not just grab what you can while you can, from whoever has it? So, we get got populism. This was not an improvement.

Third, I've noted before that the problem with meritocracy is not that the Ivy League uses SAT scores or whatever, but that we risk moving toward elite monoculture by having only a few ways to get a seat at the table of power.  As the blogger says:

We would never even need to worry about whether meritocrats "represent the country" if it weren't for centralization. Meritocracy was never a principle of representation in the first place. It was a way of determining who is qualified for what task. There is no connection between, say, the work of engineering or medicine, and the task of representing America. It's a recent lefty idea that every institution, profession, and small social gathering ought to be a microcosm of the intersectional identity distribution of the entire country in order to be legitimate. But it's a crazy goal, mathematically impossible to attain, and foolish to pursue. It's only possible to pursue it when there are so few routes to status and affluence that a handful of institutional gatekeepers can collude to very precisely regulate the in-flows, by imposing whatever standards of "merit" they choose. But that is the result of a centralization that co-opted meritocracy, not meritocracy.

Indeed.

What does it mean to be "Establishment"?

I haven't been blogging much lately because I haven't been reading much of relevance to this blog lately.  But I came across a great post by Timothy Burke that reminded me of one of my old posts on what it means to be an insider or outsider. In noting how many liberal professionals identify with the masses and think of themselves as outside agitators rather than realizing how institutionalized they are, Burke writes:

One of our great weaknesses at times has been how some of us have adopted an insistence that virtue can only derive from marginality, a view that speaking from power is always a fallen and regrettable position. Because we didn’t see our ties to the establishment as virtue and we didn’t understand that our forms of power were important for defending what we had already achieved, because we had a reflexive and attachment to the idea that we were in no way powerful, that our share of the status quo could only be found in some future progress, never even partially achieved, we were unready to wake up in the year 2016 and discover that we were not only a part of an ancien regime threatened by a mob, but that we actually wanted to defend that regime rather than rush to join the mob at the barricades. It would have been better if we’d defended it that way long before this moment. But it will help even now if we recognize that this is part of what we’re doing: defending a structure of manners, of virtues, of practices, of expectations, of constraints and outcomes, against people who either don’t recognize that this structure is important for them or from people who genuinely do not benefit from that structure. That we should not be ashamed to defend our loosely shared habitus, because it really is better for the general welfare than the brutalist, arbitrary, impoverishing alternative that the populist right is pushing forward in many nations.

I myself feel ambivalent about my institutional nature, partly because of my roots in Franciscan grade school, partly because I am a contrarian, and partly because the most institutionally respectable thing in higher ed is to position oneself as a Change Agent.  I'm unabashedly traditionalist, which feels like a very anti-institutional stance when everyone is looking for Great! Amazing! Transformation!  I'd feel more comfortably institutional in a musty old library (for my traditionalist side) with slightly uncomfortable furniture and climate control (for my guilty Catholic roots).

This may be the most controversial part of Burke's post:

Some thought that you were only the Establishment if you were wealthy, or white, or male, or held a certain set of specific political ideologies and affiliations. But you can trace the existence and continuation of a great many jobs–and life situations–to a political economy that depended on the civic, governmental and business institutions built up in the United States and around the world after 1945. The manager of a local dance company in a Midwestern city who only makes $40,000 a year and is an African-American vegan lesbian with a BA from Reed is still linked to the Establishment. That dance company doesn’t exist without the infrastructure where small trickles of revenue flow from cities, states, and nations into such organizations, without the educated professionals who donate because they believe in the arts, without the dancers themselves who chase a life of meaning through art but who also want to get paid. It’s not that there wasn’t art–or patronage of art–in the 19th Century or the early 20th Century–but there was less of it, and it was less systemically supported, and less tied to a broad consensus at the civic and social center about the value of art and education everywhere. Some of us are very powerful in the Establishment, some of us grossly misuse and abuse the power of the Establishment, some of us are the wealthy beneficiaries of its operations and others poorer and less powerful at its edges. But even out at the edges, still linked, still reliant on the system, and still in some sense believers in much of what the Establishment entails.

I'm from the middle class, which is above the lower-middle class but at the bottom of the Establishment.  We have comfort derived from norms and continuity but little room for excess.  We fool ourselves into thinking that we're commoners, but we have a level of safety that the lower-middle class doesn't (while they in turn have just enough employability to not be among the truly poor). Nonetheless, we and our compatriots above and below all insist that we're equally middle-class. This American trait of everyone insisting that they're middle class (no matter how high or low they actually are) is of old lineage, as noted by de Tocqueville.

However, when those of us from the middle class move up the ladder, and find ourselves among the children of the upper-middle class, we can see both what we had and what we didn't have, so we are massively turned off when the children of the upper-middle class (and above) put on airs of commoner status:

So you've been to school for a year or two
And you know you've seen it all,
In Daddy's car thinking you'll go far,
Back east your type don't crawl.
Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz,
On your five grand stereo.
Bragging that you know
How the ******* feel cold
And the slum's got so much soul!
It's time to taste
What you most fear!
Right guard will not help you here.
Brace yourself my dear,
It's a holiday in Cambodia,
It's tough kid, but it's life.
It's a holiday in Cambodia,
Don't forget to pack a wife.

There are days when those lyrics run through my head repeatedly.

However, what should be more controversial is this part:

We need to identify the necessary heart of our established systems and practices, whether it’s in a small non-profit, a government office, a university, or a corporate department, and be ready to mercilessly abandon the unnecessary procedures, processes and rules that have encrusted all of our lives like so many barnacles. Those of us who are in some sense part of the larger networks of the Establishment world, even at its edges, can endure the irrelevance of pointless training sessions, can patiently work through needless processes of measurement and assessment, can parse boring or generic forms of managerial prose to find the real message inside. We’ve let this kind of baroque apparatus grow up around the genuinely meaningful institutional systems and structures that we value because it seems like too much effort in most cases to object against it, and because much of this excess is a kind of stealthy job creation program that also magnifies the patronage opportunities for some individuals. But this spreading crud extends into the lives of people who are not primed to endure it, and who often end up victimized by it, and even for those of us who know our way around the system, there are serious costs to the core missions of our institutions, to clarity and transparency, and to goodwill. It’s time to make this simpler, more streamlined, more focused, without using austerity regimes or “disruption” as the primary way we accomplish that streamlining. We don’t need to get rid of people, we just need to get rid of the myriad ways we acquiese to the collection of more and more tolls on the roads we traverse in our lives and work.

I whole-heartedly support it, but many people in my professional class would scream bloody murder.

Re-examine privilege: Not the concept, the word. And its usage.

The concept of "privilege", the idea that some people don't have to deal with shit that other people have to deal with, is an important one with great relevance to many aspects of life.  As I have said before, if I were pulled over by the cops I'd rather be a poor white person than a rich black person.  I think we can pretty much take it as a given that--all else being equal--in America it's better to be white than non-white.

Many educated people use the word "privilege" to describe this relative advantage.  I've said before that I'm not much interested in telling sociologists what sort of jargon they should use when sociologizing.  If "privilege" is the technical term, so be it.  But this word has escaped beyond the confines of sociology and ethnic studies, and into the wider world of the scribbling classes, of think-pieces and op-eds and essays written and read by many educated and managerial professionals.  It's in the zeitgeist.  I doubt that your average swing voter in rural Ohio read the full catalog of privilege think-pieces at Slate, Huffpo, and Medium, but I suspect that many have been made at least somewhat aware that there's a cottage industry of educated desk-workers who think that lower-middle-class white men doing manual labor are "privileged" by dint of their gender and color.

That is so stupid that it verges on being a hanging offense.  In colloquial usage, "privileged" is a word for kids whose parents have money and/or connections.  The white kid whose father lost his job at the steel mill and now works at Wal-Mart is NOT privileged in the conventional usage of the term.  Yes, yes, that kid is privileged in the sense of sociological jargon, but who the fuck gave you the idea that ordinary conversation should be conducted in sociological jargon?  What made you think that the jargon of a social science field would work constructively in the wider political arena?

If the chattering classes describe enough lower-middle-class whites with a word for rich kids, eventually word is going to get out and there will be a backlash.  I believe that the timing of that backlash can be pinpointed to November 8, 2016.

And my complaint here is about more than just connotations and jargon.  Describing the same concept with some word less hackle-raising than "privileged" would be an improvement, but not by much.  Why are liberals spending so much time talking about the advantages of the lower-middle class?  On what planet does that make sense?  It makes sense for conservatives to say "See, the lower-middle class doesn't have it so bad" when arguing against redistribution, but on what planet does it make sense for liberals to talk about the advantages of the lower-middle class?

Finally, even if liberals stopped using the word privilege, and stopped dissecting the alleged advantages of lower-middle-class white people, there's an additional problem with all of the discussion about lower-middle-class Trump voters:  The fact that everyone trying to understand "what went wrong" is mostly talking about lower-middle-class Trump voters.  The lower-middle-class wasn't the only group that voted for Trump--in fact, Trump's strongest support was in the upper-middle class (although I suspect that numbers would look very different if I could find exit polls disaggregated by race and income).  Nonetheless, regardless of how things would look on a finer-grained scale, the undeniable fact is that Trump got support from many different sectors of American society, yet almost all of the post-election analysis has been focused on either blaming or excusing the lower-middle class.  The clear message is that the lower-middle class is some mixture of culpable for what went wrong and pitiable victims who made excusable errors.  Not much dignity in that picture.  People higher on the socioeconomic ladder are spared the indignity of post-election dissection.

I never thought I'd say this, but I kind of want the Marxists back.  I mean, say what you want about the tenets of revolutionary socialism, dude; at least they don't describe unemployed factory workers as "privileged."  In light of everything that's happening right now, I'd give anything for academics to abandon their tedious dissection of intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc., and go back to tedious dissections of class.  A left that cares about class can build solidarity between lower-middle-class whites and the rest of their coalition; a left that cares about identity will splinter.  (I should emphasize that I'm not much of a leftist, but I'm even less of a Trumpista.)

There's a lot of blame to go around here, but certainly much of it belongs in academia. We need to ask ourselves what our implicit assumptions are when socioeconomic diversity gets far less attention than race, gender, etc.

Legitimacy, authority, and diversity

One theme of this blog is pondering why educational elites are disproportionately interested in dimensions of diversity that don't relate to social or economic class.  Certainly there are sound moral reasons for attaching high significance to ethnic diversity (frankly, if I were pulled over by the police I'd sooner be a poor white man than a black man of any class, even a politician).  Then again, there are also valid moral reasons for treating class more seriously than it's currently treated in many academic environments.  Ultimately, it's a value judgment, and the question is why people judge it the way they do.  (I should be clear that treating it as a value judgment rather than a matter of objective fact is not to trivialize it.  Some of the most important issues in human society are value judgments, and the fact that values are ultimately just, like, your opinion, man, does not make the stakes any lower or the moral significance any lesser.)

America's educational institutions are institutions dependent on the patronage of the state and the upper classes (via donations), and a large part of their task is to train people for public service, whether we're talking about people studying criminal justice before going on to law enforcement careers, ROTC students, or Ivy League schools training future Cabinet Secretaries and Supreme Court Justices.  The United States government has many sins to answer for, but in two crucial political conflicts the US government came down on the better of the two sides.  Both of those conflicts involved race, and both involved existential questions for the government's power:  The Civil War and the Civil Rights Era.

In the Civil War the authority of the federal government was challenged in the starkest terms possible, and the root of the controversy was slavery.  Say what you will about state power, or economics, or whatever else, but the state prerogatives in play concerned slavery, and the economic issues concerned the needs of a slave-dependent economy.  The federal government was on the better side there.  There's much to be said about the federal government's failures regarding the rights of African-Americans after Reconstruction, but it is ingrained into the institutional and cultural memory that the starkest challenge to our political institutions concerned race.

The next starkest internal challenge to the authority of our political institutions concerned the ending of de jure segregation (not to be confused with de facto segregation).  Southern states tried to openly defy the feds, resulting in National Guard troops being deployed to desegregate schools, and numerous federal court cases and Department of Justice civil rights actions starting in the 50's and continuing to the present.

Race in America is thus an issue where the existential imperatives of public institutions are intimately entwined with moral imperatives. Seen in that light, it makes sense that institutions that exist to serve (in part) the workforce needs of public institution would prize racial and ethnic diversity over class diversity.  We thus have a mix of sound moral concerns (like I said, a case can be made that race is rightly more important), institutional imperatives (at its core, the state will preserve its own authority), and somewhat hypocritical class sympathies.  Like any cultural fact on the ground, it is neither wholly pure nor wholly tainted.  It is tied into the good and bad of human history.

I said a few weeks ago that in the era of Donaldik Fydorvich Trump academia will no doubt damp down some of its internal political tensions in order to unite against a common outside threat.  While I hope that some sort of sincere effort to improve the lot of the working class in the Rust Belt and small towns might emerge from the post-election soul-searching, this is me recognizing that there are deeper historical reasons for our focus on race, and in the era of an unabashed bigot in the White House it is appropriate for reasons of past, present, and value judgments that racial and ethnic diversity not exist our moral calculus.

A succinct take on the post-industrial economy

I figured out a way to encapsulate a lot of what frustrates me about discussions of the post-industrial economy.  Everyone mouths "STEM" and "college", as though the great thing about the industrial economy was the opportunity that it provided for college-educated STEM professionals.  In fact, the great thing about the industrial economy was the sort of opportunity it provided for everyone else.  Yes, college-educated STEM professionals did their part in maintaining the system that provided those opportunities, but they were just one factor among many.

We've assumed that we can credential our way out of this problem, but that's insanity.  We need to ask what sort of economic arrangement can provide good opportunity for those who don't have college degrees, rather than asking how to get more people through college.

Sisyphusian

This morning's Inside Higher Ed has an essay on the challenges of using higher ed as a path to class mobility and reduced economic inequality.  Most of what's argued in the essay is completely standard, e.g. rising college costs reduce the potential of higher ed to drive class mobility. On the other hand, an excellent point is made by Barbara Piper  in the comments:

The use of higher education to change social class standing in the post-WWII period was a historical anomaly; college (and education in general) had always been part of the reproduction of social class in the U.S. and elsewhere, not a part of any change in social class. The possibility that expanded opportunities for a college education have not produced quite the changes in social class standing that social engineers may have expected is not at all surprising, and might be one more example of the fallacy of assuming that education alone is the determinant of everything about an individual's life.

Indeed.  The US was not only the industrial leader of the world at the end of WWII, but was also the overwhelming industrial leader, because large portions of the world were devastated.  All sorts of things could work well for us then because we didn't face the economic competition that we now face.  Moreover, while educating the population has certainly played  its part in pushing America ahead of the rest of the world, when you educate everyone in the country then everyone benefits, which doesn't necessarily equalize people if they start from different points, and especially doesn't equalize people if the degree to which they are positioned to benefit depends on the advantages that they already have. The last point is related to Kentaro Toyama's basic argument in Geek Heresy.

Education is an important thing, but at some point you will reach a point of diminishing economic returns on educational expansion, and that's the sign that improving the economy will improve education more than improving education will improve the economy.

Culture, Class, Privilege, and the (justifiable?) Aggrievement of the Privileged

A great many people in my educational* and professional class are mystified by the insecurities of the white lower-middle class, especially in the context of national politics and the Trump phenomenon.  I try to avoid using this blog to discuss national politics, but I think this issue intersects with many of the class and educational issues that I've been discussing on this blog, so I will make an exception.

Someone whom I know recently wondered why Trump's supporters feel like outsiders or underdogs in a society that privileges white people above all others.  There are many assumptions buried in that question, because using the word "privilege" in regard to race connotes a certain viewpoint about social justice.  Within the framework of those assumptions, the question is purely rhetorical, because it is almost impossible to give any answer other than "Clearly those ridiculous people are wrong" and still be consistent with those assumptions.  I will have to step outside of those assumptions in order to give some better answer than that, but I will try to stay as close to those assumptions as possible, because the difficulty of communicating between people with different premises is just as great in one direction as it is in the other (to be maximally relativist).

Let us begin by acknowledging that in many (though not all) cases, bigotry is a real factor in the political motivation.  Bigotry is illegitimate.  Full stop.  Nonetheless, it is not the entirety of the motivation, and bigotry thrives most easily in the presence of real fears.

In examining those fears, we go to a central theme of this blog: America has not done a good job of transitioning its lower-middle class to a post-industrial economy.  Inequality of wealth and income bear out that observation. The most aggrieved whites are often either people who have suffered from that, or people whose friends and families have suffered from that. Some are even from families that were too disadvantaged to even benefit from the industrial economy, let alone what has come after.

The other thing that bears this out is the sheer amount of protectionism in Trump's rally speeches.  His comments on immigrants capture the media spotlight, but he has plenty to say about economic protectionism, and the victims of the post-industrial economy are eager to hear that.  If he were only about building walls and kicking out Muslims he would not have made it as far as he has.  He's doing more than just promising to kick ass.  He's promising JOBS.  I think those promises are plainly false, but he's making them, and people like them.

Academia has been particularly bad at responding to the effects of the post-industrial economy.  Some of it is for good reason:  If there's anyone geared to producing "knowledge workers" it's academics.  Good for us.  Nothing wrong with focusing on our comparative advantage (to touch on trade issues again...).  The other reason for the bad response, though, involves values and culture.  Academics are quite comfortable talking about privilege in the context of race/color/ethnicity, sex/gender, sexuality, disability, etc., but a profession disproportionately populated by people whose parents have advanced degrees is curiously uninterested in privileges associated with social and economic class.  Fancy that.  Yes, yes, every university pays some token attention to the concerns of first generation college students, and we all say something about low income as a form of disadvantage, but the fights that get people riled up are far more likely to involve race or gender.

And don't think that low-income whites aren't aware of that.  Don't think that for one second.  They may not read the Chronicle of Higher Education, they may not know (or care) about student government officers facing political fallout for wearing sombreros at a party, but they know what liberals talk about.

Furthermore, economic class is not the only dimension of class.  America has a "high" culture (well, "high" by American standards, probably "middlebrow"--at best--by European standards), and certain subsets of white people are well aware (and often proudly aware) that they aren't in it.  Country music and NASCAR and whatnot may be big business, but many of the bankers who handle that money probably have tickets to whatever is playing at Carnegie Hall.

If this were just about entertainment preferences, eh, to each his own. But it's more than that.  There are cultural differences on many levels, and they matter to people.  Southern whites haven't helped their case by claiming the Confederacy as a cultural point of pride, but there are plenty who don't do that and yet still feel out of place in white "high" culture.  One place where cultural and economic class issues intersect is in the value considerations that we bring to the question "How will we respond to the post-industrial economy?"  For more than 2 decades, the answers of the center-left have been:

1) Social programs.  Social programs have their place, but social programs do not fulfill the very human need to be a provider, and they do produce ill effects that many lower-middle-class whites are witness to.  These ill effects, and the lack of a solution that makes people into providers, offend their moral conscience.

2) Education:  There's nothing wrong with education.  I've devoted my life to it!  Still, one recurring theme of this blog is that it's often easier to improve educational systems via improvements to the economy than it is to improve the economy via improvements to the educational system. 

There have been real benefits to expanding higher education, but it's also been accompanied by credential inflation, and we've been bad at confronting that tension.  The middle class is very aware that there was a time when (at least some) high school graduates could get a "good" desk job without a Bachelor's degree, and they are very aware that that time is gone. Admittedly, those paths sans college were more for the middle class and upper-middle-class than the lower-middle class, but the existence of those paths meant that the climb from the lower-middle class to a desk job did not involve student loans. You "only" had to climb one rung through hard work at a free public high school, plus some (challenging) socialization. But you didn't need to write anyone a check.

3) Diversity: The left will work (or at least talk) tirelessly to improve the color balance of elite professional groups, but what does that matter for anyone else?  Should you feel better if your house is fraudulently foreclosed upon by a bank whose management team includes people of color?  Diversifying the 1% doesn't make the 99% any less screwed, even if it does ease the consciences of the 1-percenters.

"But I want more than that!  I'm working for diversity for everyone, not just the 1%!"  You believe that, and maybe you do work for that, but there's a lot of money at stake here.  Don't fool yourself into thinking that diversity workshops in nice hotel conference rooms, facilitated by expensively-dressed people, are really about the 99%.  That's not how it works.  Ask yourself why the moneyed and respectable, and leaders of government funding agencies and academic institutions talk more about diversity than they talk about the working class in the post-industrial economy.  And then read Class Dismissed by John Marsh and The Trouble With Diversity by Walter Benn Michaels for left-leaning critiques of how elite political and educational cultures largely dismiss economic class in their considerations.  (And note that I've blogged responses to both of those books, and you can find them on the list of tags.)

None of this is to say that the white working class doesn't enjoy certain advantages over people of color.  Of course they do.  That's a given.  But the white working class is well aware of the white people who enjoy advantages over them, and (more importantly) the white working class is well aware that white elites see something virtuous in token efforts to help disadvantaged people of color but not disadvantaged whites. Meaningful reform of the post-industrial economy might threaten business models.  Diversity generates good PR.  Lower-income whites know this, and they thus see themselves as disfavored in the elite consensus.  

And they know that it's "safe" to sneer at them in educated circles.  I doubt that your typical Trump voter reads Inside Higher Ed (though I do wonder about a few people in the comments section...) but they would not be surprised to read this article on racism, in which a professor includes in her venting about students (a time-honored tradition, and one that is not alien to the middle class, since we often have schoolteachers in our families) a derisive reference to poor whites and "Wonder Bread."  Can anybody imagine a writer concerned with social justice making a similar comment about poor people from other ethnic/racial backgrounds and foods stereotypically associated with those groups, and getting it published in a higher education publication?

"But, but, they have privilege!"  Yes, their privilege.  Let's talk about that word.  When I was growing up (in a Midwestern swing state, FWIW), "privileged" was a word to describe the upper class and upper-middle class.  It wasn't a word to describe facets of most people's lives.  That doesn't mean that there isn't a valid concept there; I freely admit that most of the things that people refer to under the social justice term "privilege" are real and important things that we need to confront.  At the same time, though, the connotations of that word are just horrible.  Not being shot by the cops at a routine traffic stop should be regarded as a baseline guarantee, not a privilege.  "Privilege" connotes something above and beyond baseline.  You might reply that for people of color it is NOT a baseline guarantee, and you're right.  Fortunately, we have a term for that, one that is quite accurate, and one that does not try to paint the experiences of low-income white people with the same broad brush as the experiences of rich people, and one that avoids treating "not getting shot" as something that should be considered above and beyond normal.  Do you know what that term is?  "Racist double standard."  It elegantly sums up a lot of things that fall under the banner of "white privilege", just as "sexist double standard" sums up a lot of things that fall under the banner of "male privilege."  And these terms do so without equating the lived experience of the poor with the highly advantageous circumstances of the rich.

Some of you may be objecting that it's sociological lingo, a perfectly fine piece of jargon.  By all means, use jargon in professional circles.  I will never tell sociologists what words to use when they are sociologizing with other sociologists.  And I freely admit that there's nothing wrong with linguistic evolution (hence I'm writing this in English rather than Indo-European).  But when you communicate outside of the circles of people who make a professional study of race and gender and disadvantage, you will be more effective if you consider the connotations that a term carries in the wider society.  You'll also be more effective if you don't view social justice as requiring the masses to adopt the correct academic jargon.

Does any of this excuse Trump supporters, or other instances of supporting demagoguery or bigotry?  Of course not.  What I hope it does do is explain the insecurities that many people carry, and why they feel that their fears are not being addressed by our more respectable elites.  If we do not fashion a genuinely inclusive and progressive consensus that includes a politically significant but economically disadvantaged group, then we will harvest bitter fruits for many years to come.

Finally, some of you might be thinking "You keep talking about the problems with the post-industrial economy, but what do you want to DO about it?"  Beats me.  If I actually knew what to DO about it I'd start a business, solve the most pressing economic problems of our time, and in the process become a billionaire.  (Then I'd go full-on mad scientist and build an underground lair with a doomsday device...)  But the fact that I can't find a solution does not mean that I'll deny the problem.

*I originally began this sentence with "A lot of..." but then changed it to "A great many..." because "A lot of" just sounds too informal, like something that a student would write.  That's educational privilege right there.