Thomas Frank is well-known for his earlier book What's the Matter With Kansas?, which contained, among other things, the unforgettable image of
the peasants armed with their pitchforks storming the castle and shouting, in a
furious rage, "We won't take it anymore!
We demand cuts in the marginal tax rates of the rich!" Now Frank has published a new book, Listen,
Liberal, or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People. I have ordered it
[the publication date is actually next Tuesday], and will say more about it
when I have read it. What motivated me
was a very interesting review in the Washington
Post
The reviewer, Carol Lozada, writes in part:
"Bill Clinton was often described as the
leader of his generation,” Frank writes, “but it’s more accurate to say he was
the leader of a particular privileged swath of his age group — the leader of a
class.” He ran as a populist alternative to George H.W. Bush, but once in
office, Frank complains, he bowed to financial markets, globalization, and the
professional class and self-serving meritocracy that this Arkansas boy had
joined at Georgetown, Oxford and Yale.
For that class, Frank argues, income and wealth inequality is
not a problem but an inevitable condition. Those who reach the top ranks of
academia or Wall Street — or even Democratic Party politics — fully believe
that they’ve earned their perch. “For successful professionals, meritocracy is
a beautifully self-serving doctrine, entitling them to all manner of rewards
and status, because they are smarter than other people,” Frank writes. “. . . For
those who have just lost their home, for example, or who are having trouble surviving
on the minimum wage, the implications of meritocracy are equally unambiguous.
To them this ideology says, forget it. You have no one to blame for your
problems but yourself.”
There is much more, and, as I say, I shall
write about it after I read the book.
But just this much prompted me once again to write about something I
have returned to on this blog on several occasions, namely the fallacy, fully
embraced by so many "serious" people, that the scandal of income inequality
can somehow be addressed by improving the educational attainments of those
at the lower end of the income hierarchy.
This, as I have often pointed out, is an
example of what we in Philosophy call the Fallacy of Composition -- the mistake of inferring,
from the fact that something is true of each member of a group, that it is therefore
true of all members of the group together.
[Example: From the fact that each
member of a concert audience could be the first person to leave when the concert is ended, inferring that therefore all
members of the audience could together leave first.]
It is certainly true of any particular person
in the American workforce that improving his or her educational credentials
[not at all the same thing as learning
more, of course] is a good way of improving his or her employment chances and
probable income. There is a really cool BLS chart illustrating this.
But, as I have frequently observed on this blog, if all the
unskilled laborers in America go to night school and earn MBAs, employers will
not respond by eliminating the jobs now held by the unskilled workers and
instead create millions of new upper and middle management positions in their
firms.
I am reminded of my experience in the army at Fort Devons in
1957. Here is what I wrote in my Memoir:
"When I got to Devens, I discovered that I had been
placed in a training platoon of six monthers lodged within a regular Army
Company. My platoon mates were all
members of the Mass National Guard, and many of them were college graduates. Our first sergeant was Dooley, a
bullet-headed by-the-book lifer who actually was a college graduate
himself. When he heard that I had a Ph.
D., he set me to work typing passes for the men in the platoon. Josephs came in and asked to help, telling
Dooley that he had an M. A. Dooley was
unimpressed, and told him to sweep the floor."
More on this topic when I have read Frank's book.
