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Thursday, January 26, 2006

If Brooks is right, then Americans are idiots
Posted by Jill | 6:55 AM

And if Americans are idiots, then is Billie Joe Armstrong a prophet? Oy vey.

Brooks accuses Democrats of overestimating economic displacement:

Last year, the liberal economist Stephen Rose posted an essay on the Emerging Democratic Majority Web site in which he observed, "It is an occupational hazard of those with big hearts to overestimate the share of the population that is economically distressed." Rose concluded that only 19 percent of males and 27 percent of females are poor or working poor — a percentage that is "probably much smaller than most progressive commentators would estimate."

Furthermore, he wrote, the percentage of Americans with reasonably well-paying corporate jobs has expanded over the past few decades: "Contrary to what some on the left might think, the share of bad jobs fell significantly as more workers with postsecondary education moved into an expanding set of managerial and professional jobs."


OK, let's take a closer look at this. Interesting that Stephen Rose should write that the percentage of Americans with well-paying jobs has expanded over the past few decades. I'd be interested in knowing the timeframe of this data. It was certainly true that more Americans found well-paying jobs during the Clinton years, but I'd want to see how many of the people who joined the ranks of the well-paid during the tech boom of the Clinton years are still in these ranks -- and how many of them are now running from one three-week consulting gig to another. And this is the same Stephen Rose who wrote in the article "Overworked and Underemployed" for The American Prospect in 1997:

Based on a new analysis of the data, we have found that Americans are indeed working longer than they once did, if not quite as much as Schor would have us believe. But, more importantly, we have also found that many Americans are both overworked and underemployed. Because of growing job instability, workers face a "feast and famine" cycle: They work as much as they can when work is available to compensate for short workweeks, temporary layoffs, or permanent job loss that may follow. What's more, while American families as a whole are putting in more time, that work isn't producing significant increases in living standards. For the typical two-breadwinner household, having both parents work longer hours may not mean an extra trip to Disney World or nicer clothes for school; more likely, it means keeping up car payments or just covering the costs of food and housing.


Methinks Mr. Brooks is cherrypicking the work of Mr. Rose.

More Bobo:

But over the past year the Democratic polling firm of Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner has noted that voters don't separate values issues from economic issues. They use values issues as stand-ins and figure the candidates they associate with traditional morality are also the ones with sensible economic policies.

In the current issue of The American Prospect, Garance Franke-Ruta also notes the interplay between values and economic issues. "Traditional values have become aspirational," she writes. "Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle-class people they want to be like."

With these sentiments, Democrats seem to be moving away from materialistic determinism. In past decades, Democratic political campaigns have been based primarily on appeals to economic interests. But especially in the information age, social values and cultural capital shape a person's economic destiny more than the other way around.

If you are a middle-class woman, you have more to fear from divorce than from outsourcing. If you have a daughter, you're right to worry more about her having a child before marriage than about her being a victim of globalization. This country's prosperity is threatened more by homes where no one reads to children than it is by big pharmaceutical companies.


If you are a middle-class woman who has chosen to stay home with your children (which is the right-wing dream society, after all), yes, you do have more to fear from divorce than from outsourcing -- unless you are a divorced woman with no recent job skills whose ex-husband's job is outsourced, in which case you are not going to get blood from a stone. But if you are a professional woman whose husband has decided to delude himself that he's still a kid by leaving you for a 25-year-old, then you have a lot more to fear from the outsourcing of your own job -- especially now that Mr. Midlife Crisis has started a new family with Miss Trophy.

If you have a daughter, and you can have an open, honest dialogue with her about sex and contraception, and she knows that she is loved and valued, then you have more to worry about from globalization than from premarital pregnancy. After all, you're planning to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send this kid to college; you'd kind of like her to be able to find a decent job after she graduates.

Conservatives, especially evangelicals, have had free rein to offer their own recipe for social renewal: churches that restrain male selfishness, decency standards that check hedonism, social norms that discourage childbearing outside wedlock.

Middle-class Americans feel social anxiety more acutely than economic anxiety because they understand that values matter most. Democrats are beginning to understand this, too.


Perhaps middle-class Americans feel social anxiety more acutely than economic anxiety because they have a sense that social factors are something they can control, whereas economics are in the hands of multinational corporations and the politicians whose favors they buy. What's interesting is that this social anxiety, and the efforts to impose some vague concept called "morality" on the larger society (morality usually being synonymous with female sexual restraint) are drawing attention away from the very real threats being posed by an economic policy which rewards inherited wealth and punishes work, which regards corporations as people and people as fungible. If Americans can point fingers at those they deem unworthy -- pregnant women, television screenwriters, actors, and non-Christians, they don't have to pay attention to the erosion of their own economic lives.
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