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.

"Souls of Black Folk", Chapters 1 and 2

Chapter 1 is a summary of the book. At the top of the second page he mentions the question that white people pose: "How does it feel to be a problem?" Like Baldwin discussed, black people are never just discussed as people in the US. They're a problem. Even the most sympathetic seeming see only problems. Problems to solve, solutions to fund, outcomes to assess and study. I can see the influence on Baldwin. I also see some echoes of this chapter in Fanon, when du Bois discusses the feelings of inferiority in a people whom du Bois saw as still very "underdeveloped."

Much of the second chapter concerns the roots of the under-development in the Freedmen's Bureau, which tried to protect African Americans during Reconstruction, but ultimately failed on so many levels. There's the aspect of the task that could never be done in a manner beyond reproach--taking millions of people and trying to help them join a new society while that society is being (hopefully) transformed in the aftermath of bloody war--and then there's the part that is fully deserving of reproach: The decision to end it.

I won't recount all the many failures, I'll just note one anecdote: Tthe New England school mistresses who headed south to introduce the idea of universal elementary education, and along the way introduced it to white and black alike. The whites of the south were kept in as feudal a state as the slaves were, because it was a feudal society.

Next read: The Souls of Black Folk by du Bois

I finished McWhorter's Woke Racism. A lot of it is stuff I've heard before and agreed with before, and thus it didn't jump out as blog-worthy. I'm now reading The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. du Bois, which I read a while ago but didn't write about and hence didn't retain. Let's see what he has to say.

Current read: Woke Racism by John McWhorter

I'm currently reading Woke Racism by John McWhorter. It's a critique of "wokeness", the latest name for political correctness. I won't blog the whole book because much of it is unsurprising to me. Gratifying to read, well-stated, but not new or surprising.

But I have to talk about pages 104-105. McWhorter is discussing college admissions and argues that there's nothing wrong with attending a less selective school. One intriguing thing he delves into is the difference between a general education course at Columbia (where he teaches) and some less selective school. At Columbia every student is assigned to read all 300 pages of Plato's Republic. At a less selective school students might read ~50 pages of carefully curated excerpts. McWhorter notes that most people (aside from diligent philosophy majors) will not recall much of the Republic beyond the Allegory of the Cave, so what's the harm in just reading that excerpt and really delving into it? They'll still be prepared for thoughtful examination of the world around them.

There's much that one could say in defense of reading the entire book. (Disclosure: I read the whole thing nearly 20 years ago, but I don't remember much except the part about the cave.) And obviously philosophy majors should read the whole thing, as well as more theory-oriented political science majors. Even those who aren't philosophy majors might benefit from reading the whole thing and discussing other parts besides the cave. There are always good reasons to read all sorts of things. And surely students at other schools could read the whole book, if the reading assignment were spread out over a couple weeks and the discussion were more gradual.

But we shouldn't get too hung up on the particulars of this one text. McWhorter's main point is that at Columbia the courses will go into more depth than an analogous course elsewhere, because the students are prepared for it.

But one might turn it around: Why does Columbia make everyone read the whole thing? Why do they aim their program at the level of kids who were privileged to get the sort of k-12 education that would prepare them for a very intense general education program? Why shouldn't Columbia admit students with great potential but less preparation and Meet Them Where They Are At, to use a common phrase in education? Do you really want to deny a kid with great potential the chance to study at a great place just because they weren't prepared for a certain pace of assignments? Why not take them and groom them and lift them up?

The short answer is that you can't do that AND simultaneously challenge the other kids at the level that they're ready for. At least not in the same class. And as soon as you have different tracks like that we're back to all of the same dilemmas. It's not so different from trying to teach physics to a group in which some students are struggling with high school algebra and others have mastered differential equations.

But some people would push back and say that the kids who can handle long reading assignments or hard math problems or whatever don't need our attention. And I guess the question then is whose attention? Obviously the Columbia-ready kids won't be coming to me, so there's no need to deliberate over whether they need, deserve, or get my attention. But the more fundamental dilemma is about how to handle different levels of preparation, and I know and work with people who would say that in every case we should prioritize the least-prepared. From a religious perspective, well, Jesus said that we need to serve the least of His people. 

The question, though, is whether the least prepared are actually well-served by being pushed along paths that aren't working for them and can't really be made to work for them via any means plausibly available to me. There's also the Parable of the Talents to consider. Should the well-prepared twiddle their thumbs or develop their talents?

This is very much a Rohrschach test.

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.

Two quick notes

 First, a Texas legislator is trying to purge schools of books that address racial issues in ways that might make students "uncomfortable." He's coming at it from a right-wing perspective, but it is very much cancel culture, building on the exact same foundation of "We must drive from the public square anything that might hurt feelings."

Second, a Liberties article by Mark Lilla makes the point that Americans romanticize youth to a greater and longer extent than any other culture, and so we strive mightily to not disabuse people of the delusions that we (rightly) inculcate in youth. I think this helps explain some of the STEM Pipeline mania. Children need to believe that they can do anything if they try. Adults need to cut their losses and focus on what they can realistically do. We refuse to admit that some kids should try something else.