People who construe liberty [primarily in terms of political freedoms] are highly privileged: they don’t realize the real constraints on most people’s freedom–poverty and drudgery. In the most fundamental sense liberty is just the absence of physical constraint. Most people don’t have that privilege: work for most means being physically constrained, being confined to a small space–at a desk, behind a counter, at a check-out stand, at best, in a room. You punch in in the morning and there you stay–every day like a long plane flight–until you punch out. Most people have little choice about the work they do. They’re also mentally constrained, doing repetitious tasks that make it impossible to think about anything else–inputting data, dealing with customers, answering phones. […]
The whole aim of liberalism is to see it that people have options–that no one is stuck doing the drudge work I did permanently because they don’t come from rich families. The market won’t make that happen–that is simply an empirical fact. […]
Liberalism is about liberty–real liberty: the provision of real options for people so that they don’t have to do jobs like this if they’re prepared to make the effort to get education and training.
–H.E., The Enlightenment Project
(Curtsy: Majikthise)
Essentially boiling liberty down to how much money you start out with is silly. I personally know dozens of people who started out in “drudgery jobs” and through experience and skill have moved on to higher-paying jobs they enjoy or even love.
>>>The whole aim of liberalism is to see it that people have options”“that no >>>one is stuck doing the drudge work I did permanently because they don’t >>>come from rich families.
So if you don’t come from a “rich family” you’re doing “drudge work”? What planet is this woman from?
The market won’t make that happen”“that is simply an empirical fact.
It’s a tautology, in the sense that “the market” doesn’t really do anything. What she really means to say, I suspect, is that people won’t make that happen unless they’re forced to. This is at best debatable, and it’s certainly not a truth so well established that it can be casually asserted as “simply an empirical fact.”
For example, why do you think people in market economies (or historically market-based economies) have to endure so much less drudgery than people in nonmarket economies?
It is currently necessary in many areas of the country, in order for a person without a college degree to make ends meet, to work two full time jobs, as the old standard of paying a wage that allows the worker to “buy a Ford” has long since been abandoned. The ranks of the working poor are growing in leaps and bounds, while the ranks of the middle class are dwindling.
Add to this that in many industries, full time jobs are not possible to obtain (the retail sector, for instance) and benefits are almost non-existant, and then add that college educations are getting harder and harder for less affluent families to finance as the costs of college soar past the available help, and it is clear that there are many, many people in this country (the US) forced (yes, forced) at a subsistence level with very little hope of advancement. There are always exceptions. People with exceptional talent, intelligence, drive, or all three can often escape — but those are exceptional people. Average wealthy people are in no way “better” than average poverty stricken people, except in their knowledge of the culture of wealth, and in privilege.
What odanu said.
The path from a low-wage job to a middle-income job is more difficult today, because the “assists” that existed in my parents’ day (for example, being able to pay your way through college by working at a factory job—which is how many people in “Limbo” made it through college) just don’t exist anymore. There is also less public money directed towards grants for lower-income students. There’s more of a focus on measures that can realistically only be implemented by the mid-to-upper end of the middle class and higher—college savings plans and home refinancing options are great for those with assets, but out of reach for those without. It’s also worth mentioning that back in the seventies, many women benefitted from programs that combined financial aid for college with access to affordable child care. It takes more than just a dream and the drive to go with it. You need the tools to get there too.
There are always exceptions. People with exceptional talent, intelligence, drive, or all three can often escape … but those are exceptional people.
Tell me about it. See, the middle-income jobs of today focus on being able to communicate effectively, in print and especially in person. Public speaking skills are a must. Being able to “code-switch” is quite helpful (a necessity for those who are transcending class/race/gender borders), and having a natural talent for selling oneself is required. Those are not skills that come easily (or at all) to everyone, any more than musical or artistic ability comes to everyone. Seriously. And we commonly recognize that to some extent (like the stereotype of the “geek”), but we persist in teaching the myth that “everyone” can adapt to the skills valued in today’s postindustrial workplace. What’s worse, we do this without even attempting to formally develop these skills when they are most likely to be effectively learned—in grade school. The “sink or swim” method results in few swimmers.
Still…..something bothers me about the original statement. Maybe it’s the fact that someone has to do the “drudge jobs” (or dirty jobs), and it’s just the (unspoken) matter of “who do we outsource those to, so that “we” can enjoy freedom. Maybe it’s the fact that my job is viewed as a “drudge job” by so many (despite its healthy paycheck), and I truly enjoy it. Maybe it’s the fact that the value of any individual job isn’t really based on its importance to the economy as a whole—-that there are subjective factors that outweigh the objective ones when it comes to that paycheck. Maybe it’s a recognition that “women’s work” is traditionally thought of as drudgery—an observation that is alternately true and incredibly belittling of those who do it. Maybe it’s my Old School bent towards seeing work as intrinsically dignified, and deserving of a Living Wage regardless of whether the middle classes recognize it as being liberating (being able to pay your bills is pretty damn liberating). I dunno.
La Lubu,
I agree with you about the idea of “drudge” work or “dirty jobs” and somehow those jobs are less valuable than others.
Seems as if one of the things going on is that h.e. is combining under liberty from constraint – really, liberty of movement – two things of movement: the literal freedom of movement denied in many of these sorts of jobs, and liberty in regard to social mobility.
Certainly – without overly romantizing work – even fairly strenous and repetitive jobs can provide people with a sense of reward, fulfillment, usefulness , and so on. That is, if the work – and the worker – is seen as valuable, useful, rewarded, etc. Many of the constraints in drudge -as opposed to hard – work are in fact a reflection of this lack of respect. I think?
The social mobility angle – well, can’t really add anything to what odanu and La Luba said.
“. I personally know dozens of people who started out in “drudgery jobs” and through experience and skill have moved on to higher-paying jobs they enjoy or even love.”
Along with the exceptions odanu mentions – and you find them both ways, the folks who suceeded in the face of serious deprivation and disadvantage, and the fortunate sons and daughters who managed to screw up beyond even the ability of class privilege to save them – don’t forget the amazing phenomena of entry level or starter jobs, whereby people with college educations and all actually have to do lesser work for low-ish wagess – the horror! – for a bit!
“For example, why do you think people in market economies . . . have to endure so much less drudgery than people in nonmarket economies?”
If you’re referring to 3rd world economies – well, the interplay of economic and technological factors explain that pretty well, I think! Not only do you not have a tractor, the fact that most people don’t have a tractor means that most of you have to spend your life farming, as opposed to the, what, 2% here? And so on.
I don’t find the drudgery or dirt in a particular job to be degrading. It’s the number of hours that are the problem. I love to be out in my yard in nice weather for a few hours, mucking around in the dirt, rocks, and crawly bugs. Would I enjoy it in freezing rain, six days a week and eight hours of the day ?
No. I feel the same way about tasks like doing the dishes. An hour every other day isn’t going to kill me. It can even be an enjoyable interlude while my mind wanders and I look out the window. Forty+ hours a week ? It’s not so innocuous or pleasant anymore.
Virtually no one, given the opportunity of choosing any career they like, would choose to be mindlessly typing 40 hours a week for 40 years. Because it’s drudgery. And the people who do those jobs are generally doing it because their economic circumstances, class, race, sex, etc., combine to give them less choice about what they do than other folks.
Aadmitting that some jobs suck does not deny the dignity inherit in earning a living, nor does it deny that people who do jobs with a high degree of drudgery should be paid decent wages.
Except for exceptionally creative jobs, it seems like most jobs can become stultifying bores if clocked in at 40 hours or more a week, year after year. It’s called the division of labor.
In The German Ideology, Marx wrote “…the division of labor implies the possibility , nay the fact that intellectual and material activity–enjoyment and labour, production and consumption–devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labor.” Hence his wish that the society of the future would make it possible “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the afternoon, criticize after dinner…without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”
Aadmitting that some jobs suck does not deny the dignity inherit in earning a living, nor does it deny that people who do jobs with a high degree of drudgery should be paid decent wages.
Do some jobs suck? Indeed. I just felt the need to point out the nature of perspective—some people have more “authority” to determine which jobs suck, and for what reasons. And I think that sucks. Many jobs only “suck” because of the pay. For example, there’s nothing inherently demeaning about child care work other than the paycheck and the level of respect accorded to the child care workers by “polite society”. The work itself can be quite enjoyable. (I’ll admit, I’m overly-sensitive to this issue. I was reacting to an anonymous commenter in the original thread who made the following comment: “Digging fossils in a desert or a jungle gave is probably as physically unpleasant as construction work — but it’s fascinating. ” It’s a common perception amongst those who haven’t worked a day of construction in their lives that those of us who do find our work boring, repetitive, and requiring no brains, just brawn. I challenge such folks to follow me around for day—if they can keep up!)
Also, few jobs really have to be inherently drudge work—they were made into drudgery by Taylorism, the scientific method of deskilling jobs in order to achieve better control over the workforce and limit the pay of said workforce.
La Lubu
I have to agree with your above statements. I’d also say that “drudge” can come from really well paying jobs as well. Currently, I work in a factory. I make union negotiated wages and have good benefits. But, aside from my paycheck…the job sucks. It is by its very nature boring, repetitious, and physically taxing. But that is just my opinion on my own job. I work with a good many people that love what they do, right along with their paychecks.
It just goes to show that those in power value what they want to value and either actively devalue or ignore everything else.
Amp,
My sister was offered a job with a fortune 500 company make three times her current salary, and she chose her “drudge” administrative position because she enjoys what she does and she gets to telecommute. For her “mindlessly coding” for 40 hours a week versus traveling 90% of the time was a no-brainer.
It’s about perspective and individual choices. I believe everyone should make a living wage without regard to whether or not their jobs are considered drudgery or not.
It is currently necessary in many areas of the country, in order for a person without a college degree to make ends meet, to work two full time jobs, as the old standard of paying a wage that allows the worker to “buy a Ford” has long since been abandoned.
In 1914, Ford started paying $5/day to workers who had been at his company for at least 6 months. This was for above-average workers, since his high wages allowed him to cherry-pick. Adjusted for inflation, using the BLS data, this was just under $100/day. Of course, there was no health care benefit in those days, and no payroll tax, so it’s less than what a $12/hour worker would be making now. And remember that Ford was the exception; comparable workers got half as much elsewhere.
The ranks of the working poor are growing in leaps and bounds, while the ranks of the middle class are dwindling.
To the extent that that’s true, it’s because of an increase in immigration and single-parent households. See Russ Roberts’ series on inequality over at Cafe Hayek. The whole thing’s worth reading, but parts V and IV are the most relevant ones.
Add to this that in many industries, full time jobs are not possible to obtain (the retail sector, for instance)
The retail sector should consist primarily of part-time jobs. Stocking shelves and manning cash registers are good jobs for students and retirees, but they’re lousy career choices.
[C]ollege educations are getting harder and harder for less affluent families to finance as the costs of college soar past the available help…
Why then, has the percentage of people aged 25-29 with bachelor’s degrees continued to climb?
Also, note that there has never been a time when more than half of the adult (25+) population was college-educated. If, as you say, things have been getting worse for the non-college-educated, this would show up as a decrease in the median income.
Don’t tell me that life’s getting worse for the average Joe. If you want me to believe it, show me. Show me statistics from a credible source, adjusted for things like immigration and the increase in female-headed households, that demonstrate that the general standard of living is not higher now than it has been at any time in history.
The government keeps pretty good statistics on this sort of thing. If you’re right, it shouldn’t be hard to prove it.
I recognize the point LaLubu is making. At least I think I do. It’s just my personal experience that any task done for too long in too much isolation can eventually become drudgery. Sort of like even a favorite song becomes annoying if it’s all you hear all day long, or a favorite food loses its savor if you eat it three times a day every day, etc…
Also, there were some things in H.E.’s story that didn’t make sense to me. She said the other women didn’t want to talk to her because of some political argument. But doesn’t that mean that she was different from them in some significant way? And if getting pregnant was their ticket out, then they didn’t really need to be there in the first place. Staying home without a baby is cheaper than staying home with one.
The idea that everyone will love to work after the revolution is sheer fantasy. There will always be boring and unpleasant things that need to be done, and the only way to eliminate drudgery is to automate it. The irony, of course, is that automation has always been driven by market pressures, and the opposition to it has come primarily from unions.
“The retail sector should consist primarily of part-time jobs. Stocking shelves and manning cash registers are good jobs for students and retirees, but they’re lousy career choices.”
Probably, but this is irrelevent. In reality, lots of folks beside students and retirees end up working in retail, for reasons discussed above.
“[C]ollege educations are getting harder and harder for less affluent families to finance as the costs of college soar past the available help…”
“Why then, has the percentage of people aged 25-29 with bachelor’s degreescontinued to climb?”
Folks getting into lots and lots of debt.
The idea that everyone will love to work after the revolution is sheer fantasy. There will always be boring and unpleasant things that need to be done, and the only way to eliminate drudgery is to automate it.
I wouldn’t expect every moment of every job to be lovable. But I think that diversified tasks and shorter hours of repetition would make it less hateful, certainly. Frankly, even in some kind of anarcho-syndicalist paradise, I’m guessing folks would be doing disagreeable tasks. The ideal, however, is for everyone to take part of the unpleasant tasks, so that one or two people don’t get saddled with them –and the stigma of low status–all the time.
Even with automation, somebody has to maintain and manufacture the machines.
The ideal, however, is for everyone to take part of the unpleasant tasks, so that one or two people don’t get saddled with them ““and the stigma of low status”“all the time.
That’s not ideal. That’s your opinion of what’s ideal. Someone who prefers to (for example) take on better-paid but unpleasant tasks so that they can have a higher standard of living per hour worked, would find your ideal repressive.
That’s the difficulty with economic utopias. They depend on the notion that there are goods and conditions of a non-trivial sort which everyone accepts as being obviously good or obviously bad. This simply isn’t true. There are people who love working in the sewers, and people who would hate it, and (probably a larger group) people who would like it if it paid $200k a year and hate it if it paid $12k.
No system (short of Heaven) can adequately accommodate everyone’s freako personal preferences. The beauty of market systems is that they (generally) give people the power to decide which of their preferences are most important to them, and use their limited ability to fulfill preferences optimally for their own values. If you HAVE to stay home with your kid, there are ways to make a living and still do that. If you’ve GOT to be in a comfy office with no heavy lifting, it can be done. If you MUST earn $120k a year to feed your Hummel figurines habit, there is a route to get there. There are trade-offs for all of these goods, but that is always true under any system; the advantage of the market system is that it generally lets you decide what you want to trade off, rather than imposing some planner’s uniform “ideal” (and its associated tradeoffs) on everyone.
Also, note that there has never been a time when more than half of the adult (25+) population was college-educated. If, as you say, things have been getting worse for the non-college-educated, this would show up as a decrease in the median income.
No, what it’s showing is a wage gap. The rising incomes of the wealthy are skewing the statistics to make it seem as if the income is rising. Look at the statistics in Illinois. Third highest median wage, yet the highest of the eight midwestern states in poverty. The loss of middle-income manufacturing jobs (replaced by poverty-wage service-sector jobs) has a helluva lot more to do with this than “single parent households”. Illinois is unremarkable in both divorce rate and out-of-wedlock birth rate. You can read the full report here. When you say “Illinois poverty” most people think of inner city Chicago, and forget all about the hundreds of thousands who live in cities like this one. Guess it’s easier to blame immigrants and single mothers than corporate greed.
For example, why do you think people in market economies (or historically market-based economies) have to endure so much less drudgery than people in nonmarket economies?
Richard,
I find this an interesting statement. What do we mean by drudgery in this instance and how are we to compare the level of it between non-market and market economies?
If we are to answer that technology is the reason, then this is quite logical. No way or organizing production is better able and compelled to develop technology than capitalism is.
On the other hand, if we are to talk about total hours spent on labor (paid and in the home and childcare) we actually haven’t seen that large a reduction in market societies except to the extent that labor has fought for and recieved legislation w.r.t work hours. To the extent that such regulations do not exist in any market society, hours of labor quickly expand to close to the physical limit (see: the global South). This is particularly interesting in that all the improvements in labor productivity and technology since the advent of capitalism haven’t actually ever served to reduce the total hours of labor except to the extent that regulation has compelled it.
On a third hand,
If we are to instead say that drudgery consists primarily of repetitive hard physical labor (i.e. the labor of realizing a subsistence in non-capitalist agriculture, collecting water, etc.) then it is clear that market societies certainly have that trounced by way of division of labor and technology. On the other hand, are the majority of jobs in market economies intellectually engaging, non-repetitive, self-directed and creative? Certainly this was not true in the age of mass production, nor is it necessarily very true for the majority of people in today’s service economy (in the global North) nor has it ever been true of the vast majority of humanity in the global South…
Then they buy a home with borrowed dollars for a price that is far higher than its’ rent-justified price, from the perspective of an “investor.”
Peg wages to the money supply (including M3) and not the CPI. I shouldn’t have to wax philosophic on this minor point. Real wages relative to the bundle of money floating around keeps getting worse, faster. “Asset inflation” is called good in this era of Animal Farm. It is the same is saying “Wage Deflation is Good,” which wouldn’t sell quite as well.
Robert:
That’s your opinion of what’s ideal.
Really ? Gee, and here I thought I was handing down custom-engraved stone Post-Its straight from Sinai. But thank you so much for clearing that up, Bob.
In other news, water is wet.
Dan:
Why shouldn’t people have to go into debt to get a college education? College is expensive. I don’t mean tuition is high–I mean that it’s inherently expensive to keep young men and women out of the workforce for 10% of their productive lives while also paying a number of highly-educated academics devote large portions of their careers to training these students. If a student can’t justify investing his own future earnings in a college education, then how can we justify forcing taxpayers to foot the bill?
Alsis:
The ideal, however, is for everyone to take part of the unpleasant tasks, so that one or two people don’t get saddled with them ““and the stigma of low status”“all the time.
So you want surgeons, engineers, and research scientists to spend part of their careers stocking grocery shelves and waiting tables, just to satisfy your idea of fairness? Who picks up the slack in the operating room?
La Lubu:
No, what it’s showing is a wage gap. The rising incomes of the wealthy are skewing the statistics to make it seem as if the income is rising.
By definition, the median income can’t be skewed by the rising incomes of the wealthy, unless “the wealthy” comprise more than 50% of the population. I have no doubt that things are getting worse for some people in some regions–the fortunes of individuals and localities wax and wane according to a number of factors–but the long-term national trend is towards greater prosperity. I’ve already pointed to some evidence of this. If you think I’m wrong, I extend to you the same challenge I posed to odanu (see comment 13 above).
Lorenzo:
On the other hand, if we are to talk about total hours spent on labor (paid and in the home and childcare) we actually haven’t seen that large a reduction in market societies except to the extent that labor has fought for and recieved legislation w.r.t work hours.
If I’m not mistaken, Henry Ford was the first major manufacturer in the US to institute a forty-hour work week, and he ran a non-union shop (and went to great lengths to keep it that way). The forty-hour work week would not have been possible without the increases in labor productivity brought about in response to market pressures, and the unions were able to “win” them only because they were already on their way. And, again, the primary source of opposition to automation and the productivity improvements that made these “victories” possible has been unions themselves.
As for housework, a number of labor-saving devices that we now take for granted–washing machine, drier, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, etc.–were all products of the much-maligned consumer culture of the 20th century. If people are doing no less housework than they used to–and I doubt that this is true–it’s because they have bigger houses.
By definition, the median income can’t be skewed by the rising incomes of the wealthy, unless “the wealthy” comprise more than 50% of the population. I have no doubt that things are getting worse for some people in some regions”“the fortunes of individuals and localities wax and wane according to a number of factors”“but the long-term national trend is towards greater prosperity. I’ve already pointed to some evidence of this. If you think I’m wrong, I extend to you the same challenge I posed to odanu (see comment 13 above).
What?!!!
Brandon, do you seriously believe that wages are rising across the board for the entire population? Do you believe that investments and other forms of assets are rising fairly proportionately for the entire populace? Do you believe that the wages of the average Joe (even of Joe College) have risen at a relative same rate as that of CEOs? Do you actually believe that the purchasing power of the average Joe has increased? (*thunks head on the table*)
Brandon, the population of the wealthy doesn’t have to be more than 50%, just their incomes. ‘K? Meanwhile, I’ll refer you back to PDXNAG—wage deflation is what we’re seeing. You see a raise on the paycheck of 2%, and think prosperity is on the rise. I see a raise on the check of 2%, along with a heating cost increase of over 30%, transportation cost increases of 30%, food cost increases of 28%, and electricity and water are up by 8%.
Let’s say a person makes 30 grand a year. How far do you think that 2% raise is going to go? After her average monthly natural gas bill goes from $150 to $195? After her yearly gasoline costs (necessary to get to work) go up by $600? After the yearly grocery (food and sundries—remember, the common folk need to do laundry and wipe our asses too) bill goes up by $1500? What we have here, is the yearly paycheck operating much like those reverse mortgages that are marketed to poor elderly people—folks digging into their assets (like housing equity, if they have it) or debt (credit cards, anyone?) in order to make up the difference. And Brandon? That’s going to get real ugly, real quick.
Did you even follow the links I provided? This isn’t a problem isolated to a few out-of-the-way geographic pockets—I gave Illinois statistics because that’s where I live. This is a nationwide problem. It’s why we’re seeing more food insecurity—costs of housing, transportation and utilities are non-negotiables, so people cut back on the food budget.
Why shouldn’t people have to go into debt to get a college education?
Because it’s an inefficient waste of human resources. You are assuming that everyone has the same access to the kind of debt it takes to get through college. Let me assure you—we don’t. I would rather ask why someone with the intellectual ability to obtain a college education should be denied one on the basis of cost.
I also find it curious that you assume college students are likely to be fresh out of high school, despite the evidence that the college population has been “aging” for quite awhile; the result of older workers and displaced homemakers going to (or going back to) school.
Look, my local union has a hell of a lot fewer assets (unemployment has hit us hard these past few years), yet we maintain our apprenticeship program at no cost to the apprentices (we’re a small local, so class sizes average around twenty—if you take our inside, residential, and VDV classes combined, we’ve probably got around 120 “cubs”). They only have to pay for their books—we provide the training aids and teaching staff. We have to do this; our future depends on it.
I’m saying, if a tiny union hall can do this, there’s no reason in hell why our nation can’t do this.
Just to comment on one tiny aspect: La Luba, Brandon is correct to say that median income cannot be skewed by the incomes of a wealthy minority. (Mean or average income can be skewed that way, but not median income).
However, by the same token, it’s quite possible for the number of poor people to increase substantially without changing the overall median income at all. (I’m not saying that is happening or not, I’m just pointing out limits in what median income tells us).
Do you seriously believe that the standards of living of female-headed households and of immigrant households shouldn’t count towards an evaluation of “general standard of living”? Talk about cherry-picking data! “Aside from the parts of the population most likely to be poor, everyone’s doing great!”
I can see an argument for adjusting for immigration – after all, it may be the case that an increase in immigrants lowers mean US wages while increasing overall material wealth (because the immigrants might earn more in the US than they would have earned had they not immigrated). But there’s no legitimate argument for adjusting for single-mother households when measuring overall well-being. Especially when you consider that it’s quite possible that poverty is a cause of increased single-mother households (i.e., an increase in poverty can cause a decrease in the marriage rate).
Regardless, it’s not likely that immigration is changing median income to any large extent. Immigrants are now something like 15% of the US work force, but I wouldn’t expect that to have a huge impact on median earnings. (It’s possible, I suppose, that immigration is causing a downward pressure on eveyone’s wages, which would have an impact on median earnings – but adjusting for that kind of effect wouldn’t make sense, since that’s a real drop in wages for everyone).
As for the standard of living, it depends on how you measure. Clearly, family incomes in the US have dropped for every quintile since 2000 (pdf link). So 2000 was a time in history when people were doing better.
Over the long term, family incomes have barely budged at all since 1970, especially for the lowest-income 40% of families (see above link). However, keep in mind that two-adult families have avoiding falling behind by a vast increase in female working hours (pdf link). Is that an improvement? I’m glad that more women have independent incomes, but it would have been better if more families had seen an increase in family income proportional to the increase in work hours.
Both in real numbers and as a percentage of population, the number of people without health insurance has been going steadily up (although the trend was briefly reversed during the 1990s boom) – see page 17 (or 24 as adobe counts it) of this report (pdf file). Since health care costs are increasing, this is likely to continue getting worse.
There’s no reason why the % of people with BAs can’t climb even while education gets more difficult to finance. For one thing, the disparity between wages with and without a college degree are increasing (pdf link), meaning that people are probably more motivated to go to college despite it having become more difficult to finance.
Actually, the existence of labor-saving devices arguably raises standards rather than lowering hours of housework. For example, the result of having washing machines isn’t that we spend fewer hours washing clothes; it’s that rather than wearing a shirt four or five times before washing it, we wear it once and then wash it before wearing it again.
Brandon wrote:
So you want surgeons, engineers, and research scientists to spend part of their careers stocking grocery shelves and waiting tables, just to satisfy your idea of fairness? Who picks up the slack in the operating room?
Other surgeons, engineers and research scientists ?
Ewwww…. fairness !! Icky. Somebody get Brandon a box of wet-naps !! Quick !!!
If I’m not mistaken, Henry Ford was the first major manufacturer in the US to institute a forty-hour work week, and he ran a non-union shop (and went to great lengths to keep it that way). The forty-hour work week would not have been possible without the increases in labor productivity brought about in response to market pressures, and the unions were able to “win” them only because they were already on their way.
I believe you may be right in that Henry Ford was amongst the first and that he ran an anti-union (more like totalitarian) shop. However, you missed my larger point that in the absence of regulation on hours of work, always and everywhere those hours of work rapidly expand to 12+ hours a day (see: the entire global South, the majority of workers in all captialist countries before hours of work regulations).
I was merely making the point that, in the absence of regulation on is likely to broadly see hours of work return to that level and remain there indefinitely in any market society.
Amp, I agree that median income doesn’t tell us much, particularly when spread out across a state like Illinois that includes Naperville and the Gold Coast right along with Cairo and East St. Louis. Median income in IL may very well be $45,787…..but in my census tract, it’s around half that—and it’s not like the good folks at the U.S. Census Bureau cooked the numbers when they figured that! The smaller sample gives the more accurate picture. Anyway, I made a mistake—I was thinking about the mean, not the median. Sorry Brandon! (And frankly, I think the mode would even give a more accurate picture of this state; most of it resembles the Centralia example I gave above. If you drive across Illinois as often as I do and see the boarded up buildings, abandoned supermarkets and storefronts—you won’t be left with the impression of a booming economy—even if you follow it up with a trip to the Loop.)
But there’s no legitimate argument for adjusting for single-mother households when measuring overall well-being.
Well, but he didn’t say single-mother households, he said female-headed households. Surely he didn’t mean to imply that every household with both a man and a woman is a male-headed household.
Well, to be fair, I was the one who used the terms interchangeably.
“Female-headed household” is, as I understand it, what the Census calls households that put a woman’s name down when asked who the head of the household is.
However, the Census hasn’t used the term since 1980, when they switched to “householder,” and started saying households had “female householders” or “male householders.” Same deal, though – it’s up to the people being interviewed to name one person as the householder.
In practice, this tends to mean that both single-man and duel-income households have “male householders,” whereas only single-woman households have “female householders,” because most people, when asked by the census, automatically list the male as the “householder” when asked to pick a name.
When it comes to poverty issues, however, “female householders” and “female headed households” are both commonly used to refer to “single mothers” (or so it has seemed to me), and I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I’ve done this myself.
La Lubu:
I didn’t say that the rich and the poor were getting richer at the same rate. I said the poor were getting richer. And they are. Click here for a table showing the 20th, 40th, 60th, 80th, and 95th income percentiles. The first table uses current dollars; scroll down for the inflation-adjusted version. Everyone’s down (in real terms) since the 2000 high, but that’s not the first time it’s happened, and the long-term upward trend has always reasserted itself.
The report you showed me was focused on Illinois, and it was a snapshot. I just skimmed, but I didn’t see anything about whether things are getting better or getting worse. It just says they’re bad. And the numbers in the body of your post are at best anecdotal and at worst simply made up. The link above leads to historical tables based on government data. I’m not personally inclined to trust the government, but I have no evidence that they’re lying here. Do you?
Regarding college, I agree that there may be problems with the student loan system (especially for students who can’t get a co-signer), but I think it’s even more wasteful to give a student tens of thousands of dollars to pay for an education which may not improve his productivity in any meaningful way. I think that an apprenticeship or trade school would be a superior choice for many students, and I think it would probably be a good thing if we as a society moved away from the fetishization of university education as the be-all and end-all.
PDXNAG:
There may be problems with the CPI, but indexing wages to the money supply doesn’t work. We wouldn’t be able to measure increases or decreases in purchasing power.
Ampersand:
I do think that the standards of living of single mothers and immigrants are important. My point is that if wages are increasing for any given category of household, but they appear to be stagnating because of a dramatic increase in the percentage of certain types of households prone to earning low incomes (e.g., immigrant or single-mother households), then it becomes a lot harder to blame things on “corporate greed” or some such scapegoat.
Suppose you have ten people, making $10,000, $20,000…$90,000, and $100,000 per year. The median is $55,000. Then you add a person making $9,000. Now the median’s $50,000. That’s how immigration can change the median.
In the chart to which you link, every quintile was doing significantly better in 2003 than in 1970. I’ll grant that the lowest quintile wasn’t doing that much better, but that’s the mean. If you look at just the 20th percentile (my link above), the picture is a bit rosier. For at least 80-90% of us, things are getting better. And the bottom 10% is a special case, in that most of them are presumably part-time workers and/or new entrants into the labor market.
I’m not sure entirely what the numbers on your “annual work hours” chart mean. Do those include only families in which the wives work, or do they also include families in which they wives don’t work? I don’t know where to find income data that specific, but from what data I do have, it looks as though the increase in income was significantly greater than the increase in hours worked, regardless of whether you exclude married-couple households in which the wife didn’t work.
College education isn’t that tough to finance. In most states you can get through two years of community college and two years at a public university paying about $15,000 total in tuition. Stafford loans will cover about 2/3 of that. I’m not sure about the availability of other loans for students whose parents aren’t credit-worthy enough to co-sign (I imagine they can get Pell Grants), but if you can get them, and if you major in a field that will give you marketable skills, it’s a great investment.
college educations are getting harder and harder for less affluent families to finance as the costs of college soar past the available helpReally? Has there been a drop off of incoming college students (as a percentage of target population)? If college costs are going past the ability of people to finance them, I’d expect to see that the percentage of kids going into college would drop. Has this been happening?
O.K. Asked and answered. Sorry about that, got ahead of myself.
Brandon, the link you cited showed only how incomes have been rising, not how living expenses have been rising. If I got a 2% raise last year, but the dollar amount of that 2% raise isn’t enough to cover my non-negotiable expenses (the expenses I absolutely, positively have no choice about paying, like natural gas, electricity, transportation, housing, and child care—I can cut back on food)—then guess what? I’m not richer at the end of the year! I have suffered a net loss. Capisce?
I based the numbers in my sample on my life. I was unemployed for most of last year, so I had an income of significantly less than 30 grand; I used that as a baseline number because that’s the number where (in my neighborhood), a person can generally meet all their expenses on their own. If I had been going to work every day, my gasoline costs would have increased by $600 this year. My child care expenses would have gone up $250 this year. Get the picture?
I’ve got a good paying job. Even so, the raise from this year did not cover the increase in my non-negotiable living expenses—even if I had been employed all year. Now, I’m a person who’s generally doing well. I’m at the top of the food chain amongst working class folks. And see, that’s the thing—if you’re comfortably middle class with a college education, you probably received a raise commensurate with your cost of living—maybe even more. If you’re working poor, you probably received no raise at all—just increases in your expenses. This is what lack of access to a college education does.
Also, quit assuming that “person attending college” means “high school student with parents to cosign”. Where I’m from, the typical college student is a divorced mother who wants higher education to improve her job prospects. Also, keep in mind that apprenticeships are a great way to go—-if you have the skillsets necessary. I can’t train someone without visual-spatial ability how to be a craftsperson. Meanwhile, college offers courses with a multitude of skillsets—there really is something for everyone there. College offers a far greater percentage of people the opportunity to improve themselves.
So, I ask you again Brandon—why should someone with the ability be denied a college education merely because they can’t afford it?
It’s interesting, from a Canadian perspective, to see how attached Americans seem to be to the world “liberal.” Amongst Canadians on the left, “liberal” is like a dirty word (even when not referring to the big L Liberal political party).
My problem with the quote is that I don’t think it’s an accurate definition of liberalism from a political theory perspective. One of the big critiques of liberalism is that it has a “thin” definition of freedom and equality – as in freedom and equality under the law and that’s it.
why should someone with the ability be denied a college education merely because they can’t afford it
Why should someone who would benefit from having you build them a house be denied that benefit merely because they can’t afford it?
That aside, I have seen no evidence presented that there are any large numbers of people who have the ability being denied a college education. State colleges are quite reasonably priced.
Note that being denied a college education and being expected to repay the economic costs of your college education are not the same thing.
I would like to see something to back up the apparent assertion that people who want a college education can’t get it because there’s no way for them to finance it.
Here in Illinois there are a number of quite reasonably priced community colleges. An AA from one of those will be accepted at the various BS/BA granting state colleges, and you can finish out your degree. Illinios is hardly the only state with such programs. And there are numerous funds and scholarships for middle- and low-income families. What actual data exists to show that the number of people who want to go to college but can’t get the money to do so is increasing?
I clicked through and read H.E.’s post. Apparently she “was a bad girl in high school”, which to me means she blew off studying and got bad grades (among whatever else she did), which closed off some options. After working at a McJob for 6 months, Mom bailed her out and got her into a college with lower entrance requirements. This time, she took full advantage of it. To quote her:
“My mother plonked down her money for tuition so I got out. But that is the only reason I got out–I was no different from any of them apart from simply being richer. … I took that to heart and it made my politics.”
To which I say, bull. There were other alternatives. To quote again about the women that she worked with:
“I was 17–some of the girls who worked with me were not much older, but they were dead. They were married, trying desperately to get pregnant–their ticket out. I listened to their conversation day by day (they wouldn’t talk to me because I’d gotten into a political argument about the war in Vietnam early on). They had no aspirations because there were no options for them–the only career ladder lead to Office Manager, the position of Miss McCauley, an elderly spinster, occupied. Who wanted that? They didn’t even want to travel. They just wanted out. There was nothing to learn, nothing to accomplish, nothing to make, no way to improve or achieve. ”
Nonsense. There were other options for those kids. First, there was the option of deciding that getting good grades in High School was more important than whatever other social or material priorities they had. You don’t have to be a genius to get good enough grades in HS to get into a state school or a trade school. She had the liberty to make decisions on how she would approach HS, and she blew it.
Second, you can try to better your current situation. This post makes it sound as though there was no other option but to go home and cry. Please. One option is to become the best damn clerk-typist you can, and then get a job someplace else that needs a clerk-typist that a) pays more, and/or b) has tuition reimbursement. Another option is to join the military, negotiate for an MOS that has marketable skills, put in your time, and then take those skills outside. Every employer I’ve worked for loves ex-military, because they’ve got an understanding of responsibility and accountability. Not to mention things like showing up on time every day, sober. There are options. You have the liberty to exercise them. Or, not.
This woman and her cohorts all had options. They chose some bad ones to begin with, but there’s always options. You don’t have to be born rich in this country, or even middle-class, to advance yourself. I’ve met way too many of my wife’s immigrant relatives who’ve shown up in America with barely a dime to their name who have made a good living here. Consider the stories you’ve read about illegal aliens who don’t want to be sent back to Mexico or Ireland (yup, just read a posting about the latter) because they’ve established roots here in America. If you have to be rich or middle-class to get ahead in America, how did they do what they’ve done? You know what the biggest growth market in real-estate lending is? Mortgages to illegal aliens. They pay cash and don’t miss payments. How do they do that if they didn’t have the advantage of having a rich mommy to send them to Lake Forest College?
Liberty is the right to make choices among our rights, with no legal constraint. The fact that there may be economic constraints does not mean we are any less free, as long as the law does not prevent us from improving our economic situation.
Brandon:
“So you want surgeons, engineers, and research scientists to spend part of their careers stocking grocery shelves and waiting tables, just to satisfy your idea of fairness? Who picks up the slack in the operating room?”
Alsis39.5:
“Other surgeons, engineers and research scientists ?”
Who are, what? Not busy doing surgery, engineering and research? There isn’t any slack in operating rooms, or engineering firms, or even research labs. You pull surgeons out of operating rooms to stock shelves and the end result isn’t other surgeons taking over their slack; the end result will be operations that don’t get done.
Alsis39.5:
“Ewwww…. fairness !! Icky. Somebody get Brandon a box of wet-naps !! Quick !!!”
So your idea of fair is that someone who’s busted their ass to get though medical school or engineering school or doctoral studies, putting in ridiculous hours to do so (both my kids are engineering students and I got my M.S. at a medical school) should pick up extra hours so that someone else can go to school? How is that fair to them?
Are you going to do a financial history so that an engineer who started out below a certain income level when they were a kid will be exempt? Or are we really taking to heart H.E.’s concept that there’s no way to do that unless you start out “rich” (whatever income level “rich” is)?
Are we going to examine each stock clerk’s history to make sure that they are in the situation they are in because they faced impossible constraints and were not just lazy or foolish or incompetent? Do we really buy off that someone who has a professional job must have gotten it because of “privilege” or advantage?
It couldn’t be because they took advantage of the opportunities they had, opportunities that others had and failed to take advantage of? Do you think that maybe a lot of people who have stultifying jobs have them because they did something wrong? Made a bad choice? Decided that someone “owed” them something?
I actually support more government funding of educational assistance. Not because it’s “fair”, but because it will strengthen America and pay off in the long run in a better educated and more productive citizenry. But saying that people can’t get a good education unless they were born with money is wrong. To say that people don’t have liberty unless they get to take money from people who have it is wrong.
(Yawn.) Brandon, look around you. Under our current system, there are already plenty of necessary operations not being done. The reasons for this are legion, but I don’t feel like mixing it up with you over those because I doubt that we’d agree on them either.
I find it utterly bewildering that you’d work yourself up like this over a hypothetical situation in which we had a collective community in which everyone spent a few hours a week doing scut-work. Stranger still to me is your assumption that inevitably, there would be people capable of doing nothing but scut-work that would be coasting on the backs of the uber-talented and intelligent–wasting their time, in effect. I’m not so sure of that. One of the great drawbacks of repetitive, limited manual labor done over long periods of time is that it’s bad for both the mind and body. You don’t really have any guarantee that the “stupid” folks you resent in this scenario would be incapable of more important labor– were they not laboring under the demands and conditions that they do right now under the current system.
But, hey. It’s your opinion. Just like it’s your opinion that your family doesn’t have any obligations that transcend their own blood-ties. We could argue about that until the cows come home as well, but why bother ? Hang onto yours and I’ll just hang onto mine. Particularly since I’m an educated person whose talents your bottom-line society would probably denigrate as useless if they got a look at them close-up.
Why should someone who would benefit from having you build them a house be denied that benefit merely because they can’t afford it?
Funny you should mention this; we do have subsidized home-ownership programs! Several blocks from where I live, the projects were torn down and replaced by “New Urbanism” type housing—the houses were designed to look like the old Craftsman-style homes in the neighborhood surrounding it. Really sharp. Put a lot of folks to work. The people who bought the homes were lower-income families who qualified for the special low-interest, no-money-down mortgages associated with the project. It worked. Families who used to live in (sometimes subsidized) rental units are now homeowners. A once-dilapidated neighborhood with open-air drug dealing and gang warfare in the evenings is now a thriving working-class neighborhood with kids playing outside. Win/win.
Anyway Ron F, you’re right that community colleges are affordable in Illinois; I attended one. But the amounts available through student loans are much lower than the costs of continuing that college education through four years—and that’s only considering tuition and fees—not textbooks, housing, food, transportation and other essentials. I’d be more impressed if loan programs were available that matched the actual cost of attending college.
I actually support more government funding of educational assistance. Not because it’s “fair”, but because it will strengthen America and pay off in the long run in a better educated and more productive citizenry.
Well! Why didn’t you say so in the first place! I support more government funding of educational assistance both because it is fair and because an educated citizenry is a good thing. I mean, it’s college we’re talking about here, not Spring Break. College is work, and making college easily affordable for all is an investment in our future.
I personally know dozens of people who started out in “drudgery jobs” and through experience and skill have moved on to higher-paying jobs they enjoy or even love.
I personally know dozens of people who didn’t have to start out in “drudgery jobs” before they got to the highery-paying, enjoyable tier, because their families had more money and better access to opportunities for those jobs.
Americans believe that anybody who works hard at honest labor ought to be able to make a living. We also believe that the free market should allow everyone the opportunity to compete for the best jobs. Nobody ever said we were really good at being consistent.
Americans believe that anybody who works hard at honest labor ought to be able to make a living. We also believe that the free market should allow everyone the opportunity to compete for the best jobs. Nobody ever said we were really good at being consistent.
Where’s the inconsistency?
Making a living and having “the best jobs” are not the same thing.
I certainly believe that any person (not laboring under the burden of a handicap) who works hard ought to be able to earn a living; in more than 20 years as employee, contractor, and employer I’ve never seen such a person who couldn’t.
When it comes to the competition for the best jobs being open to merit, there’s a case to be made for oligarchy and privilege putting a spike in the system. The best thing we can do to ameliorate that problem is to remove the governmental regulations that interfere with the market, mainly by giving too much power to large organizations or corporations.
When it comes to the competition for the best jobs being open to merit, there’s a case to be made for oligarchy and privilege putting a spike in the system.
Uh, I should probably rephrase that. There’s a case to be made that oligarchy and privilege DO put a spike in the system.
Much better.
Robert: I certainly believe that any person (not laboring under the burden of a handicap) who works hard ought to be able to earn a living; in more than 20 years as employee, contractor, and employer I’ve never seen such a person who couldn’t.
I guess all those people were invisible to you, since you “couldn’t see them”. Even though you “couldn’t see them”, they were still there, working hard, not able to earn a living.
I have a drudge job. So does my husband. That the pay stinks is certainly one aspect affecting the quality of my working life. But the real problem isn’t the money, or the boredom; it is the respect and the treatment of the higher ups. My drudge job is a work at home, so I can make my own atmosphere. My dh’s isn’t. He is a tech support person for a phone company; and what bothers him most is how poorly he is treated by others, as if he had no brains or no value—just a cog in the wheel.
Even little things can make a difference in how well an employee feels and how much work they will therefore do for the company…I mean in willingness to work hard, rather than do the minimum to get by. If the surroundings are pleseant, the rules are intelligent, if the higher ups treat the workers as if they counted…these are the qualities that will make the difference.
Even though you “couldn’t see them”, they were still there, working hard, not able to earn a living.
Show me their corpses.
Quite frankly Robert, I find your humor lacking and appaling. Earning a living doesn’t just mean being able to survive. It implies a certain dignity to the life. Many people, around the world, but even in the USA, go without basic needs; warmth, decent food, decent clothing, medical treatment, because their wages do not cover the expenses. Moreover, for fear of losing their jobs and not having a roof over their head, they may not be able to take off from work for medical treatment etc.
I remember reading several years ago how toll booth workers sometimes used adult diapers because their freedom to use the toilet facilities was strictly monitored.
The lack of dignity hurts. Yes they may survive, but how healthy are they? They may make it to “retirement age” but where will they live then?
People do work hard, darn hard, to get nowhere. Of course it is easier to conceieve of them as being lazy and therefore getting what they deserve, but conception isn’t reality.
I find your humor lacking and appaling
I’m not trying to be funny. (And apparently I’m hitting that target.)
Earning a living doesn’t just mean being able to survive. It implies a certain dignity to the life.
No. Earning a living means being able to survive materially. Having a certain dignity to life means having a certain dignity to life.
Many people, around the world, but even in the USA, go without basic needs
No, they don’t. If you go without basic needs, you die. That’s what “basic” means. You mean that people around the world, and even in the US, go without things that you think they shouldn’t have to go without.
People do work hard, darn hard, to get nowhere.
True, but immaterial. The question isn’t whether if you work hard, will you get somewhere. The question is, if you work hard, will you earn a living.
All of the things that you are presenting as good things – dignity, progress in life, material comforts – are, I agree, good things. However, adding them as secret codicils to what “earning a living” means is a non-starter. For one thing, it doesn’t go far enough. What about self-fulfillment? What about continual human development? What about spiritual satisfaction? What about the desire to see one’s work be valued by others? All of these are “good things” too. Surely, earning a living should entail all these benefits too. What, don’t you CARE about the spiritual well-being of the workers? You monster!
Except that this approach makes discussion impossible. Words mean things. If you mean “earning a living”, say “earning a living”. If you mean “living a life of fulfilled promise, human development, and dignity”, say that.
Robert, major libertarian demerits for you for forgetting all the government assistance people at the bottom receive.
Robert, major libertarian demerits for you for forgetting all the government assistance people at the bottom receive.
I didn’t forget it. In some measure, governmental and private charitable assistance to the working poor help to make it so that the hard-working person can survive, even if the economic value of their labor isn’t ordinarily sufficient in a purely free market. That’s a good thing, by and large.
It’s mostly the moral hazard aspect of assistance that worries me. That hazard doesn’t apply to the woman pulling down 50 hour weeks at Target, and also hitting the food bank for cheese once a month.
LaLubu:
What do you think “The first table uses current dollars; scroll down for the inflation-adjusted version” means? Yes, I know that living expenses have gone up. But incomes have gone up even after adjusting for this.
Regarding college, the bottom line is that the benefits of higher education are largely internal, so the costs should be as well. Externalizing the costs creates moral hazard. As Robert said, I don’t think that people without the means to go to college should be denied entrance. I just think they should be required to pay for it sooner or later (personally, not through imprecise means like higher taxes).
Regarding single parents who want to go to college, what exactly do you want? For the government to fund their tuition expenses and their entire families’ living expenses through four years of school? What’s wrong with night classes at the community college?
Regarding apprenticeships, I mean that I would like to see them replace college as the way most people get started in their careers. College is extremely overhyped, and the only reason it’s important (for most careers) is that everyone thinks it’s important.
From the Stafford Loans alone, you can get $2600 or so per year, and there are other loans available on top of that. I should know–that’s how my education was funded.
Dorktastic:
“Liberal” generally means something different in the US (although I continue to label myself proudly as a liberal in the truest sense of the word, and I cringe every time a conservative referns to leftists as “liberals”). Back in the early 20th century, it had very positive connotations, so the left hijacked it as a rhetorical trick. Amusingly, it’s lost most of those positive connotations after a century of association with the left, and many leftists are now trying to distance themselves from the label.
Alsis:
That was RonF. I didn’t respond, though I do want to point out that the left doesn’t have a monopoly on concerns about justice. It’s just that mine is based on the concepts of merit and desert, and also tempered by concerns about efficiency and economic realities. In other words, it’s not that I think fairness is “icky.” I just don’t think much of your ideas about fairness and how to achieve it.
Well, I don’t care for yours much, either, Brandon. Not to put too fine a point on it, your family of prestigious engineers, surgeons, and the like, are able to live so nicely on their “merits” precisely because of those able to do the dirty, grubby and/or tedious work of maintaining their environment. (Sounds a little like the inevitable –if appropriate– feminist comeback to the sexist bleat that women lack the “merits” to become great scientists, great philopsophers, and so on.) If your prestigious family is valuable, it means that their support staff is also valuable. So why should so much stigma be attached to what the latter group does, to the point that the former can’t even think about those skills without getting the vapors at the thought of doing them for themselves — even for a short period of time ? Even as a gesture of goodwill disconnected from the pursuit of physical profit ?
Your notions of “efficiency,” “reality,” and the like don’t really acknowledge the inescapable fact of interdepedency, nor the value of empathy and appreciating each other. That’s one reason that I don’t care for your POV. The other reason is that as a creative person currently scuffling for a regular job, I get bored with dealing with people who can’t ever seem to find any way of gauging the worth of citizens apart from how readily we can be used to generate saleable merchandise for others higher up on the totem pole. I may be stuck with this attitude and its consequences, but I don’t have to like it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, your family of prestigious engineers, surgeons, and the like, are able to live so nicely on their “merits” precisely because of those able to do the dirty, grubby and/or tedious work of maintaining their environment.
And vice-versa; the people who do the dirty, grubby work do their work with repaired heart valves and drive to their jobs in engineer-built cars instead of walking. As you say, the people in society are interdependent. But this interdependency is not completely reciprocal. Dr. Johnson can stock shelves, but Larry the gardener cannot repair hearts. Time spent stocking shelves is less time for heart repair, and means – inescapably – fewer repaired hearts. Your egalitarian scenario reduces the well-being of the poor in the name of a very abstract, and humanistically valueless, equality.
You characterize this reluctance to make ourselves worse off as “getting the vapors” at the thought of doing “lesser” work. I don’t think that’s a necessary concomitant to desiring economic efficiency. It’s a cultural choice whether Dr. Jones will find the idea of mowing his own lawn nauseating or simply suboptimal – and I favor cultural choices that permit individual preferences to rule over this decision. If Dr. Johnson wants to mow his lawn instead of repairing heart valves, that’s OK with me.
But I suspect that the poor guy living across town would rather have the job, and have Dr. Johnson get back to the surgery.
Alsis:
My father was a carpenter and my mother a bank clerk. Why would you assume otherwise?
Regarding surgeons and support staff, read this article on the diamond-water paradox, in particular the part about marginal utility. For every person who’s qualified to perform heart surgery, there are many thousands who can sweep the floors.
Besides, do you have any idea what you have to go through to become a heart surgeon? You basically have to put your life on hold until you’re in your mid-30s, and even after that you have to work very long hours, so no one would do it if the payoff weren’t huge.
Robert, I don’t really see the point in pursuing this with you further. You simply have a different definition of “fairness” than I do. You also have an entirely different take how important supposed matters of “efficiency” are in the workplace. How about we just leave it at that. I can point to no exchange we have ever had in this space that didn’t invariably lead to you playing games and playing dumb when I tried to have a concrete discussion with you. I have no reason to believe that it would go any better this time. So please, just declare victory and move on, won’t you ?
Brandon:
My father was a carpenter and my mother a bank clerk. Why would you assume otherwise?
I was referring to how you described your offspring, not your parents, when I said “family.” Are we trotting out our family antecedents now ? I’d rather not bother, to be honest.
For every person who’s qualified to perform heart surgery, there are many thousands who can sweep the floors.
Which has what to do, exactly, to alter the necessity of having somebody sweep the floors ? Or to change the fact that often circumstance as well as ability explains much of the difference between sweeper and surgeon ?
Besides, do you have any idea what you have to go through to become a heart surgeon? You basically have to put your life on hold until you’re in your mid-30s, and even after that you have to work very long hours, so no one would do it if the payoff weren’t huge.
That’s nice. So we can discount any humanitarian urges involved, right ? It’s all about the dough ? That’s something else that surgeons and floor-sweepers aparently have in common. I’d be happy to go into detail about my own sacrifices and risks while attempting to hone my craft and somehow make it profitable, but as it is one I doubt you’d assign any merit to, I think again that it’s better to just not go there. :/
Alsis, what does my definition of fairness have to do with anything? I don’t even believe in fairness as a viable concept. My concern with efficiency translates to a concern for the well-being of human people. You want doctors scrubbing toilets so that society is egalitarian; I want doctors stitching patients so that society has more living people in it. When “fairness” comes at a cost of human life, screw fairness. YMMV.
But I’ll take the victory. Woo hoo!
My concern with efficiency translates to a concern for the well-being of human people.
Well, a few of them known to you personally, at any rate.
Well, a few of them known to you personally, at any rate.
Um, no. Strangers, who I will never meet, see, or interact with.
You know, I’m flashing back on your airy waving away of (for example) Jake Squid’s healthcare posts in past threads and thinking:
A) I certainly hope that you are more compassionate toward strangers than you are to your online aquaintances
and
B) Sometimes it seems a real shame that blogs don’t come with laugh tracks.
Alsis:
I was referring to how you described your offspring, not your parents, when I said “family.”
That’d be Ron again. I don’t have any children.
Which has what to do, exactly, to alter the necessity of having somebody sweep the floors ?
Marginal utility. People qualified to perform surgery are rare, and people qualified to sweep floors are abundant, so the marginal utility of an additional surgeon is much greater than the marginal utility of an additional floor-sweeper.
To put it another way, the availability of qualified surgeons is the limiting factor in determining how much surgery gets done. There are no unemployed surgeons. And there are no surgeons delivering pizzas. Everyone who’s qualified to do surgery is either employed as a surgeon or retired. And most surgeons in the former group are already working overtime. So if a surgeon quits, the hospital can’t replace him except by hiring a surgeon away from another hospital. One way or another, fewer people get the operations they need.
But what happens if the guy who cleans the operating room quits? Do you think the hospital staff just throws up their arms and says, “Well, darn! We can’t do surgeries in a dirty operating room! We’re just going to have to fire Dr. Jones!”? Of course not. Before they stop doing surgeries, they’ll hire any one of the many millions of people who are qualified to clean operating rooms but aren’t currently doing so.
When a surgeon quits, fewer operations get done, and more people die (or suffer whatever consequences follow from not getting that particular operation done). When a floor-sweeper quits, it really doesn’t matter all that much, because virtually anyone can do his job.
A good economics textbook should give you the tools to figure this stuff out yourself—or at least to understand where I’m coming from—and it’s required reading for anyone who wants to remake the world. Even the ones by left-wingers (by economist standards) like Stiglitz and Krugman should be okay.
You’re continuing to miss my point, Brandon– which is not about “utility” or whatever other buzzwords you wish to bring up. I’m gonna’ pass.
As for economics, like so much else, some of it seems reasonable, and much of it seems like inane babble utterly disconnected from day-to-day human concerns. I seem to recall Krugman, the supposed compassionate lefty voice on the spectrum, getting all ga-ga over the internet bubble and carrying on as if it represented the zenith of modern society. No thanks. There is such a thing as being so educated that you don’t know diddly.
It seems to me that, to use the current example, medical doctors don’t have any special innate skills that janitorial workers are lacking. The difference is that medical doctors had both the opportunity & the focus at age 17 or 18 to start on the path through medical school. I know this may come as a shock to some but… like people in any other profession, most doctors are mediocre at best.
So, if we were to follow alsis’ preferred economic path perhaps there enough janitorial workers who would use the newly freed up time & the opportunity that would be provided in her plan to work their way through medical school, become heart surgeons & avoid any possible shortfall in availability of heart surgery.
If you can get over your amazement at the astounding concept that there isn’t anything superior (relative to the rest of the human race) about the potential of medical doctors, that is.
Thanks for cutting to the chase, Jake. It’s hard to have a conversation about privilege vs. merit when everyone wants to play “elephant ? I don’t see any elephant in this room ?” games.
Brandon, I apologize for the spots where I confused your posts with Ron’s, or vice versa.
And I’m still impressed at how thoroughly a lot of the disparaging remarks about manual wage labor echo the customary disparaging remarks made about the SAH wife/mother’s typical unpaid “women’s work.” I shouldn’t be, but I am.
It seems to me that, to use the current example, medical doctors don’t have any special innate skills that janitorial workers are lacking.
Ladies and gentlemen, the explanation for crumbled communist economies throughout time and space, in one sentence.
“Everyone has to equal. It says so, right here on the label!”
Robert, that may be the dumbest & most dismissive thing I’ve seen you right yet. And that is saying a lot. First of all, the fact that you want to brand me as a communist is fuck all idiotic as I am in no way a communist and, if you’d bother to read what I’ve written about economics in the past – on this very blog – you’d know that. The thing is, you probably do know that.
Secondly, you (once again) twist my words. I didn’t say that everybody is equal. Read what I wrote again.
… medical doctors don’t have any special innate skills that janitorial workers are lacking.
Can you see the difference between the two statements?
Thirdly, I don’t think that you can name a single economy on a national level that could properly be referred to as “communist.”
Fourthly, you provide no counter argument. No suggestion of an innate ability that all medical doctors have that the vast majority of janitorial workers are missing. All you can do is shout, “Communist! Loser! Communism doesn’t work.”
If you don’t have anything to add other than to call people names or improperly label them with what amounts to an insult in our society, shut up. Calling me a communist is nearly as accurate as calling you a fascist.
Jake, I’m not calling you a communist. My apology for the confusion.
But the idea you’re promulgating is, in fact, one of the key elements in the communist inability to make an economic system work.
The innate ability that all medical doctors have that the vast majority of janitorial workers are missing is the complex of cognitive skills collectivelly referenceable as “IQ”. (Well, the janitorial workers don’t not HAVE IQ. They just have collectively a much lower median and mean. Along with plenty of outliers on the right-hand side of the curve, of course.)
You’re right, I can’t point to a national economy and call it “communist”. Similarly, I cannot point to any castles built on top of clouds. There’s a reason for that.
Okey-dokey then on the communist thing.
IQ? IQ isn’t really a useful measurement. IQ isn’t even a consistent measure of whatever it is measuring. IQ tests have a clear cultural/class bias. IQ isn’t something that a person possesses, or so I think. IQ is an attempt, a poor one, to measure intelligence. I don’t believe that IQ has much to do with whether or not one is capable of being a medical doctor. Using IQ as a measure of ability is, at the most charitable, problematic.
But the idea you’re promulgating is, in fact, one of the key elements in the communist inability to make an economic system work.
I disagree with that. The key factor in the inability to have a communist economy is that communism is a utopia in which all people believe exactly alike – unlike, say, socialism or capitalism or feudalism in which diversity of economic beliefs is tolerable without destroying the system.
What you’re saying is that you read my statement as “all people are equal in all ways,” and that clearly isn’t what I wrote. Nor is that a necessary element of communism, as I understand it. Communism is not predicated on all people having equal ability – not anywhere that I have read.
IQ? IQ isn’t really a useful measurement. IQ isn’t even a consistent measure of whatever it is measuring.
Uh huh. And yet despite all of IQs flaws (which are real), a guy with an IQ of 160 tends to be really smart and a guy with an IQ of 60 tends to have trouble figuring out which bus to take. Both are human beings, both are possessed of real dignity, both are spiritually equal before the Lord their God.
One of them is capable of being educated into a surgeon, and the other is not.
You may dispute this; I’m not going to argue with you about it. Good luck with organizing your society.
Take a look at the history of the Soviet economy some time. They had a real problem with acknowledging that some people were just more important – more irreplaceable – in organizing an economic system than others were, and in letting that reality express itself.
But again, if you don’t want to believe it, that’s cool. Don’t want to fight about it.
You can’t hold up the Soviet system as an example of (even attempted) communism. It was a socialist dictatorship. Their problems are not the problems that communism suffers from.
Sure IQ is great for distinguishing a genius from a moron. But so are a host of other methods. But I don’t think that you are really saying that you have to have an IQ of 160 (or even 120) to be a medical doctor. I’ll agree that if you consistently score below 60, you probably don’t have what it takes. But, then again, I doubt that most janitorial workers have sub-60 IQs – I doubt that you think that, either.
But again, the problem w/ IQ tests is that in the space of a year people have been known to score between 80 & 120 (w/o the direction necessarily being up). For example. Score 105 in January, score 80 in July & score 120 in November. Is that person capable of being a doctor? We don’t know. IQ testing hasn’t told us anything about how smart or capable that person is.
The thing is, even if you believe in IQ as valid & reliable, it doesn’t take a genius to be a medical doctor. What becoming a medical doctor does require is opportunity, interest & something around average intelligence (what’s that IQ at these days? 85? 100?). What janitorial workers lack, for the most part, that medical doctors have is opportunity. And that is not an innate skill.
That is to say, even if janitorial workers have, on average, a lower IQ (or even less intelligence) than medical doctors, it is not enough of a difference, on average, to say that janitorial workers are not capable of being medical doctors.
Not to mention that being smart doesn’t necessarily make one capable of being a medical doctor – but that is a different discussion entirely.
And yet despite all of IQs flaws (which are real), a guy with an IQ of 160 tends to be really smart and a guy with an IQ of 60 tends to have trouble figuring out which bus to take.
Most people don’t test out as 160s and 60s. Most folks fall within a far slimmer range of IQs. Some of these folks become doctors, and some janitors.
If you really think that only people with IQs of 160 are doctor material, then you have unreasonably high expectations. We wouldn’t be able to meet the needs of folks requiring treatment for strep throat if that were the case, let alone get all these heart surgeries you keep bringing up performed.
This assumption that doctors and other proffesionals have some sort of magical aptitude that cannot be taught is tiresome.
Who is arguing that all people have identical natural aptitude for learning surgery?
Who is arguing that we live in a perfect meritocracy, and social circumstances (poverty, prejudice, chance, etc.) have no relevance on whether a person develops their natural aptitudes?
As far as I can tell, no one has argued for either position. Instead, I understand people to be arguing about the relative importance of natural ability and social circumstance. Without denying the role of social circumstance, Robert emphasizes the role of natural ability. Without denying the role of natural ability, alsis39.5 and Jake Squid emphasize the role of social circumstance.
I also understand alsis39.5 and Brandon Berg to engage in a different argument: Brandon argues that we have a shortage of surgeons but not janitors. Regardless of whether a person gets to be a surgeon through natural ability or social circumstance, Brandon argues, society benefits by maximizing the amount of surgery each surgeon performs. Alsis39.5 argues that society benefits from equality, too, and might benefit from a policy of having surgeons perform janitorial services for a while. Without denying that society benefits from equality, Brandon emphasizes the cost of alsis’s proposal in terms of lost surgery time. Without denying the cost of her proposal, alsis argues the benefit of her proposal in terms of increased equality.
I don’t know whether I see disagreement here, merely differences in emphasis.
Both Brandon and Robert suggest that the supply of surgeons is limited by the supply of natural ability (whether or not you label that ability “IQ”). But alsis, Jake, and the Zenmasterw express some skepticism. Is the natural ability of surgeons really so rare?
I wonder, too. Specifically, what determines the number of people admitted to med school (or to surgery residencies)? Does the number fluctuate depending on the qualifications of the applicant pool? Or is it more or less fixed, governed by administrative capacities and/or budget? If the latter is true, then I start to get suspicious.
Consider pharmacists: Why are they so rare? Sure, once upon a time a pharmacist had to know how to mix medicines, but today they’re just glorified vending machines. In fact, some clinics are installing vending machines to dispense their most commonly-prescribed prescription drugs. (You get a code with your prescription that you type into the machine.) The fact that pharmacists have a monopoly on dispensing prescription drugs looks like a scam to me.
As an aside, Jake tells Robert that
Maybe Jake is unaware of Robert’s prior solicitation of support for his plans for world domination. Or maybe Jake is aware. Who knows, comrade? :-)
Maybe Jake is unaware of Robert’s prior solicitation of support for his plans for world domination.
Yes, but in fairness, I intend to be a constitutional monarch, not a dictator. Sure, I can have people killed – but only one on one, and if it ticks off the nobility too much, I’ll be out on my ass.
Abject apologies, my Liege.
I haven’t decided whether to let you swear fealty to me yet or not.
Yeah, nobody. That’s it in a nutshell. It’s also why the discussion is doomed to not have any resolution, because my notion of what constitutes “value” or what IS most valuable in a given culture is never going to overlap all that much with the notions of folks like Brandon or Robert.
Why shouldn’t people have to go into debt to get a college education?
Pre-GenX in the US, it wasn’t that common–in fact, in real dollars (adjusted for inflation, etc.), tuition for public and private colleges and universities was much lower. And real wages were actually higher (again, adjusted for inflation, cost of living, etc.)
Jake (72):
To the extent that the janitors in question are adult immigrants who were never able to take advantage of the tremendous educational opportunities this country has to offer, I agree. But anyone born in this country, whose parents aren’t so uncreditworthy that they can’t co-sign student loans, has the opportunity to go to medical school. And even those who don’t can get Stafford Loans, need- and merit-based scholarships, and part-time jobs to cover the costs of two years of two years of community college and two years at a state university, so they can certainly do better than janitor.
In the United States, and probably in most other wealthy nations, the primary barriers to escaping poverty are cultural, not material. The poor may be oppressed, but it’s not the upper class that’s oppressing them. The cultural barriers are a real problem, but further subsidizing education isn’t the answer.
Nobody (74):
I do have doubts about the necessity of the long training period that doctors are required to undergo, and it’s probably true that the AMA, which like all unions was formed to suppress competition, is intentionally keeping the bar high to keep doctors’ salaries high. But the way to address that is to take away the AMA’s monopoly power, not to make doctors do menial labor based on some fantasy that it will make life more “fair.”
Sheelzebub (79):
Regarding real wages, this thread has already covered that ground. According to government data I posted above (post 33), real wages for all quintiles have gone up over the last few decades. And that’s before increases in nonmonetary benefits and government handouts, the latter of which, at least, is at an all-time high in real per-capita terms.
Failure of incomes to keep up with tuition is a more complicated issue. Education is in many ways a luxury good, so it’s reasonable to expect that people will spend more on it as their incomes rise.
A big part of the problem is simply that education is a service industry. Prices of manufactured goods tend to fall because productivity increases and you can make more with fewer people. But the only way to do that with education is to increase class size, which is generally frowned upon. As long as students expect smaller classes and professors expect their salaries to rise in real terms, then there’s really no way around it: Expenditures on instruction have to rise faster than inflation.
Actually, though, instruction expenditures have decreased as a percentage of total university expenditures. From 1976-2000, per-student expenditures at public universities increased from $15,999 to to $25,425 (in constant 2000 dollars). The main components of the $9,426 increase were research ($2772), instruction ($2416), administration ($2247), scholarships and fellowships ($971), and public service ($835). I’m not sure exactly what that last one entails.
From 1980-2000, federal and state funding of public colleges increased 26% in real, per-capita terms (the link gives total expenditures; you’ll have to go elsewhere for population and CPI data). Yes, tuition increased even faster, but it’s because college costs more and because enrollment rates are up (so the subsidies are spread more thinly), not because governments are cutting funding. Tuition still accounted for only 18% of public colleges’ funding in 2000 (as opposed to 13% in 1980). And I don’t think this even takes external scholarships into account, so the amount actually paid by students is even lower.
Whatever the reason for the increase in tuition costs, enrollment and graduation rates are in a long-term upward trend, so the increase isn’t keeping people from going to college.