In “Why Have Democrats Failed in the State Where They’re Most Likely to Succeed? Massachusetts should be a model state for liberal public policy, but instead it is one of the country’s most unequal” for The Nation, adapted from his new book, Listen, Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Thomas Frank discusses the rise of Uber, dry-erase walls in the Innovation District, and Elizabeth Warren as a “great exception.”
The answer is that I’ve got the wrong liberalism. The kind of liberalism that has dominated Massachusetts for the last few decades isn’t the stuff of Franklin Roosevelt or the United Auto Workers; it’s the Route 128/suburban-professionals variety. (Senator Elizabeth Warren is the great exception to this rule.) Professional-class liberals aren’t really alarmed by oversized rewards for society’s winners. On the contrary, this seems natural to them—because they are society’s winners. The liberalism of professionals just does not extend to matters of inequality; this is the area where soft hearts abruptly turn hard.
Frank is a co-founder of The Baffler periodical (“We … pioneered the cyber-skepticism that suddenly seems so urgent and necessary.”) which started in Charlottesville, Virginia, moved to Chicago, and is now based in … Cambridge. He will speak about his book on Friday, April 8, at 7 p.m. at First Parish Church in Harvard Square. You can read another excerpt from the book here on The Baffler’s website.
(I have not read the book, but am responding to the excerpt above, and not directly)
I once refused to hire a person because she said she wanted to ‘help’ my clients. I told her we didn’t help clients – we provided services to them, but we were not interested in helping them.
We wanted to enable them. Because they are adults, capable of making their own choices, and just because they needed services did not mean they lost the ability to make decisions and be treated as adults.
So much of modern services is based on a ‘help’ model. It is intrinsically unequal and often condescending. I think that is what is meant by ‘society’s winners’ in the excerpt above. The Roosevelt attitude cited was about enabling; hence, the WPA, CCC, etc. Exemplars of modern progressivism are very top-down – as I sometimes call them, Those Who Know Better and Best. These ‘professional-class liberals’ as they are called lack empathy, partly because they have been softly conditioned to look down on those who work with their hands or need help by the Academic-Industrial Complex, who have a vested interest in helping those beneath us, not enabling them (perhaps without degrees!).
Their hearts aren’t hard – they just don’t know how to relate to those not in their class with anything other than noblesse oblige.
differently-winged compatriot’s indictment–modern progressivism is not top-down, quite the opposite–there is a bad attitude among some of the Democratic elite. These elite are not progressive or particularly Democratic. They are also part of my generation–Andrew Cuomo, Rahm Emanuel, Arne Duncan, and to a lesser extent, Barack Obama and Deval Patrick. Their liberalism tends to extend more to social issues. They tend to be more conservative when it comes to the economy. Thank the 1980s and 1990s, big business, and movement conservatism. We are all victims of history. They jerked the Democratic Party to the right. At last we’re jerking it back. When I was a young man, rather than the semi-decrepit middle-aged man I am now, I tacitly believed that people who didn’t make good money hadn’t made good choices. That was the gospel that was preached in the 1990s, which Frank documented so well in “One Market Under God.” It took several years and Noam Chomsky to disabuse me of the notion. It was until recently that I completely understood that how much we pay people depends not only on the market, but on our ability to fight for it. Why shouldn’t McDonald’s employees make $15? Because stock holders and owners want more money for themselves and would rather charge customers more than take less.
This Democratic elite attitude is most apparent in the field of education in which elected officials work in conjunction business elite to decide the shape and direction of public education. The academic elite leave their very selective schools, dabble in public education through TFA, charter schools, and other educational philanthrocapitalist endeavors. The idea is to drive teacher wages down and create a managerial class (new positions continually appear) to carry out the orders of those elected who choose to serve the elite.
In my polisci classes they were described as “post-industrialist liberals”. With prosperity apparently assured, the fights for liberals were on gay equality, the environment, and other social justice models. I see this in our president, but also in local liberals who would rather ban plastic bags than certify a union.
But it is short on solutions. The thing Sanders and Trump both get wrong about trade is, we aren’t going to suddenly bring these jobs back to the United States and restore a Fordist economic model. That model is dead.
We are living in an economy where more and more jobs, even white collar ones, can be done either by automation or overseas for cheaper. Some jobs are coming back here because we are actually cheaper than other places now. So the key is to invest in the health of a regional economy.
Frank is right to point out the forgotten enclaves like Fall River and Fitchburg have been left behind by Republicans and Democrats alike, and we have to connect those regions to jobs and capital. This happens with a better T, but also with ensuring that community colleges and other regional centers of education can become engines for training and growth.
College education more broadly she be based on economic mobility outcomes as a metric, while the liberal arts education and critical thinking component should become high school curricula as we eliminate high stakes testing.
There will still be some folks who aren’t employable and we will have to expand the safety net to cover them, start bringing down health costs now that we have near universal coverage, end corporate welfare, raise progressively indexed revenue, and encourage smart growth.
It’s a lot, but it’s doable. We just need to elect the right people to get it done.
The Ford model is not dead and can be restored in part by returning to tariffs. It may not be exactly the same, but we’d certainly bring a huge number of jobs back to the country since corporations would be forced to manufacture locally to avoid those taxes, at least if they want to be competitive with US-based manufacturers.
Automation is not an issue. Germany has automated much more than the US and lost far fewer manufacturing jobs. Why? Because they have VAT taxes that act as tariffs. They still have a state of the art tool and die industry and their auto workers make $50 an hour. And yes, the country is 80% unionized so there’s that too.
You are still stuck in the presumption that education will, at least in part, fix the economic problems we face. They won’t. Just ask the millennials that have graduate degrees that have minimum wage jobs. We’re being fed this idea that education will allow you to prosper. It’s just not true any more without major changes to other policies.
Yes, we need to expand the social safety net to include a guaranteed minimum income. It’s the best way to hedge against a largely jobless future if we continue our current trajectory. But trade policy is a good place to start to fix what ails this country.
Most people, myself included, would probably see providing services as a way of helping clients – very much a distinction without a difference. I suspect that if I were looking for work in a service-providing outfit it would be because I want to help people, but that says nothing about their own abilities or lack thereof.
“What do the people of America want more than anything else? To my mind, they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it; and with work, a reasonable measure of security–security for themselves and for their wives and children. “
It was true in 1932 and remains true today.
People want to work. The canard that people want to be lazy “takers” is just a way to shame the poor and admire the wealthy.
Is the way that he assumes that economic innovation, if bad for some working people in the short term, will be bad for all working people into the future. The example of cab drivers and Uber that he provides is a perfect example. He laments that Uber is putting blue-collar cab drivers out of business, but this elides the fact that the cab industry and its restrictive licensing regime favored certain groups over others, effectively shutting out people from making a living in the industry. It also ignores the jobs created by new “innovative” firms that are both white-collar and blue-collar and wouldn’t exist with a static economy.
It’s similar to lamenting the invention of the combustion engine because it put horse-and-buggy carriage makers out of business. Or lamenting the invention of PCs because typewriter manufacturers and printing presses had to downsize. Not only were these and other innovations good for society generally, but they ended up creating jobs tied to the new industries.
In short: I really don’t see Frank’s point here. “Stop promoting innovation?” “Create static economies so that nobody loses their jobs?” I’m on board with things like investing in transportation, improving health care access, and raising the minimum wage, but what Frank seems to be saying is that promoting economic innovation is somehow “elitist” and wrong and against Democratic Party principles. Count me out on that point.
Have adequate health insurance and the odds of a secure retirement?
… the same thing?
is that the meritocratic achievement crap we’ve been fed is bull. The people who believe this are usually the wealthy who justify their own position in society and their own disdain for those who haven’t made it. The idea that innovation will solve society’s problems is as ridiculous as the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves.
… getting any illumination?
In other words, wait, you mean there are poor people in MA? All the evidence suggests we are a well-run state that would have if not none of that, at least quite a bit less than elsewhere.
hardening.
Most people, I think, are decent, but it’s easy for them to not to know and not care enough to know. It’s easy enough to let prejudice and half-baked popular opinion substitute for concerned thought.
And more education is not one of them. In the past 40 years, high school and college graduations rates have risen as the wealth gap has widened. The right and far too many on the left keep saying we need “more job training and more education”. For what? How many of us are going to be working at the labs at Genzyme? How many of are are needed to be vascular surgeons at Brigham and Women’s? Even if we all got those jobs, who is going to be handing out the iced coffees at the drive up windows, cleaning the restrooms after a Celtics Game, working the registers at the super market, and washing the dishes at the four star restaurants?
Telling those of who who are struggling that we just need more education and training is supposed to make us feel inadequate and uneducated, blaming ourselves and not the rigged economy for our plight. It makes the wealthy on the right AND the left make a legitimate claim to their wealth in the face of others poverty because, well, they are just smarter than us.
We need a base wage that will support someone on 40 hours of work. Hell, we need to throw out the 40 hour week and make it a 32 hour week.
And that’s just for starters.
As an educator, I strongly believe in education, but it won’t overcome the supply and demand of the labor market.
Education has also been used as a “meritocratic” excuse to pay working-class people less money. The idea is that if people can’t be bothered to go to college, they should get paid less.
An education has to be admired as more than just a way to make more money. As a educator, I would assume you agree on that as well. I hope our schools are doing much more than putting put better cogs for the industrial machine. When education is seen only as a way to make money, communities feel justified in cutting out music, art, and so on.
I’m an English teacher, and teach a fair amount of applied psychology, philosophy, and politics (though not my personal politics).
As a I guy from a working class community, I also believe the vast majority of people have the intelligence and ability, aside from the right, to make good decisions about their community. It’s the responsibility of elect officials (I’m one) to make sure they have the information and reasoning to understand all sides of an issue and then decide, not for me, but for themselves and their community, what is best.
Despite the best efforts of our governor, his secretary of education, and their flunkies.
I don’t know that A) education necessarily equals ‘go to college’ or 2) that ‘inequality’ (an as-yet undefined term) doesn’t also affect education, at all levels: I worked as a carpenter and in a concrete pipe factory between high school and college and my experience with others in those jobs suggested that a functional illiteracy might be the norm; in my undergrad days I had a robust sideline tutoring fellow students… mostly teaching them to read. That’s right. You read that correctly. They got through grade school and into college without really learning to read. Consequently, they were often poor at writing also. I’m not putting them down, and I admire a lot of them for the hard work they put in, and yet I know that education system is full of cracks. That creates a gap in equality also. And for all the problems of illiteracy, from what I’ve seen, innumeracy is even more widespread.
All that was almost 30 years ago, and I hope and pray things have improved since, but I think it’s a problem that we have both an education system and a labor market that tolerates any illiteracy and any innumeracy. Nor do I think it a co-incidence that union membership peaked about a generation after child labor laws were fully abolished (paving the way for universal education)… All this is to say that education, at all levels, can be made better and with a better education at every level, people will have a better chance of thinking their way out of the problems, whether or no they learn thinking skills in college or on the job…
Hard work has merit and should be part of any “meritocratic” practice. Going to college is hard work but so is being a plumber, carpenter or electrician. I’ve also known many brilliant people who went to college and breezed through… while they are certainly making more money than those who didn’t go to college they, nevertheless, are still making much less than those who went to college and worked hard at it.
You’re describing “smart work”, not “hard work”. Going to college requires brains. Learning to be a plumber, carpenter, or electrician requires brains.
Working hard means moving boxes around, or digging with a shovel, or doing actual labor. There are few of those jobs left, but we seem to believe that the state is teeming with them, many of them unfilled. We frequently hear about how we don’t want to help “able-bodied men”, because presumably they can just go out to the local factory and land themselves a job, right? Wrong – that factory is long-gone.
A wiseass (Leslie Nielsen) once said, “Doing nothing is hard work. You never really know when you’re finished.”
I know people with genius level IQ’s who did the absolute minimum amount of work to get by in college. I also know people far less generously endowed with ‘brains’ who put their heads down, went to work and graduated summa cum laude. The difference was a work ethic. I’d hire the work ethic over the natural genius any day.
IF you want to draw the distinction at ‘manual labor’ versus ‘knowledge work’ I’m still not sure I’m with you: driving a car is actually a demanding intellectual challenge well beyond simple motor skills and the larger the vehicle the more is the intellectual challenge, right up to 18 wheeled tractor-trailers. I think even the ‘lowly’ Dunkin Donuts cashier has to be both literate and numerate: if enough of them are not, just the mistakes they might make in giving change may amount (cumulatively) to millions of dollars yearly.
Part of helping ‘able-bodied men’ is, as I noted earlier, to make sure they can read and write — and thus think — well enough so that a factory gig isn’t their only option. A lot of people in Michigan went right from high school to the auto factory and didn’t bother to learn anything else. I’m not blaming them, they were encouraged to do so by some very good times and the belief that the boom times would never go bust. I can’t say that I would have made a different decision in their stead… but the fact remains that when the auto industry imploded in America they were left high and dry. Now Detroit, for instance, has a lot of people who want to work and a lot of buildings and other infrastructure designed for people to work in them. And yet the people are doing (relativel) nothing and the buildings are empty. A more intense focus on education and bottom up innovation (as well as a less adversarial detente between labor and management) might have led workers to think more creatively and make use of both the people who want to work and the buildings and infrastructure waiting for work to happen in them…
I’m sorry, I don’t buy your premise that everyone is intellectually identical and that the only difference between people is the education they receive – that every one of us could be a lawyer, a doctor, a physicist, a CEO, a politician, and that we just weren’t trained the right way.
I think a better approach is to understand that there is a wide spectrum of both intelligence, skill, and ability, and that we need jobs that are compatible with that spectrum of people. Insisting that people should “skill up” and then cutting them loose when they don’t is what we are currently doing, and it is not working.
… so you are under no obligation to purchase. In fact, what I think I was saying, perhaps obliquely, is the conjugate: everyone (barring an actual disability) is physically and intellectually capable of performing ‘manual labor’ on a factory floor but barring appropriate training those who enter that career choice (sic) have their horizon narrowed extremely.
While, yes, the spectrum is pretty wide, the vast majority of people occupy a fairly easily encompassed — and, in comparison to the whole, narrow — band on that spectrum. And I think that particular band along the spectrum can encompass both literacy and numeracy.
I, first, don’t think it is unreasonable to have a fairly low tolerance for both illiteracy or innumeracy. Secondly, I think a population that doesn’t tolerate illiteracy and innumeracy has a much better chance at full employment than a population that tolerates these things.
It is not enough to simply be literate and have basic math skills to be employed at good wages in the modern economy that suburban-professional liberals tout. Our college graduates are increasingly underemployed these days, working for low wages despite that advanced education everyone told them they needed. It is baffling to me that the prescription for people to get out of poverty being pushed is to simply “educate themselves” when so many educated people are struggling.
Yes, it certainly increases your chances when you have a college degree, but the deal is looking worse and worse – instead of a reasonably priced college degree being a virtual lock on a good salary, now an expensive college degree becomes a chance in the good salary lottery (though it is less a lottery and more tied to your actual abilities), a lottery that you can’t afford to lose.
I think that the path which many Democrats think is a good path is not the correct path. It coincides precisely with the subject of this book – that many Democrats have bought into the “meritocracy” belief and ignore the plight of those who are not successful because they deem them “not worthy of help”.
… but you continually A) keep attempting to put words in my mouth and 2) shift the grounds of the debate. Please stop.
We were (I thought) debating factory jobs, the disappearance of the factories and potential ways to help those factory workers deal with the loss of the factory. You have now swung full round to college grads and underemployment and then boomeranged to ‘people get[ting] out of poverty” Underemployed college grads and actual poverty are two very different problems. You also used the term “advanced degree” which, to me, means masters, Ph.d’ and/or Sc.D and post-doctoral work and not a four year undergraduate degree.
I don’t think that every unemployed factory worker needs to go to college, which is what you seem to be assuming about what I’m saying. I merely say that they need to be able to read, write and do maths. I don’t think our present secondary education does this all that well. Nor did I ever suggest that anyone ‘educate themselves.’ I have long been a proponent of the government educating everyone. If I was magically made dictator of this here CommonWealth my very first act would be to tax the wealthy (progressively) at up to 50 percent on the marginal rates and dedicate every last penny of that extra money to education. I would hire enough teachers to bring the average classroom size, across the CommonWealth, down to 12 students to every teacher and then hire a teachers aide for every three or four teachers…
We always have scads of well educated unemployed people.
Yup,
If one has great wealth while one is surrounded by poverty, as is the case in much of Massachusetts the “meritocracy” belief shields one from guilt or responsibility. Again, when I attended the most recent State Convention, the central theme was Income/Wealth Inequality. Well, that was promoted as the theme. A few speakers used those words while on the stage, and there was one (only ONE) breakout session that focused on this “central theme” and even it told us that “education and training” were keys to solving this problem.
We’re pretty far from solving this problem and it looks like we’re getting farther away.
…but I do hope we would generally pay people more who have advanced credentials.
solutions are difficult with economic realities. Every local economy is going to have it’s rich and poor, generally in close enough proximity to interact on a daily basis. Those wages are specific to that area though.
In Cape Coral Fla the average welder gets $20 an hour, a semi-skilled position. Business is booming and positions are not getting filled. Overtime is abundant. You can live well there. In Boston a welder can make twice that and struggle to pay bills.
Local economies will grow and collapse on themselves when the disparity between the top and bottom reaches unsustainable levels. You would have to pay me $200,000 a year to work in Boston. I have no skills worth that. The rich in Boston create enclaves of poor people (through “affordable” housing, rent control) to serve them, but the poor would serve themselves better if they left the area and found new pastures where they could flourish.
There’s no denying the law of supply and demand. As long as we have a capitalist society, even a Scandinavian-style one, there will be inequality. The goal is not eliminating inequality, it’s narrowing the gap between rich and poor.
One reason the poor have been in cities is cheap housing (not always the case with gentrification), but also public transportation. A coherent plan for affordable housing that is carried out would actually help.
are simply what those in power want them to be. Not to mention that we all can’t be welders and even the welders want o be able to go to the drive through to pick up their iced coffee. The person working at that window needs to be paid a wage that will support them without government aid. If they cannot, it’s just another example of “free market capitalism failure”.
..lawyers, activists, computer programmers, or artists either.
Know what we have a real shortage of?
CNA’s, LPN’s, and direct care workers for the elderly. Pay is far better than being a realtor or bank teller, but you won’t find college grads taking these jobs. The Academic-Industrial Complex told them they were better than that.
… of nurses. Similar to doctors, the field is becoming more and more specialized and the certification requirements can be grueling… and it is a position in which a mistake can indeed be fatal. On top of all that while the perception that doctors are strictly male has, by and large, gone the way of the dodo, similar perceptions about nursing being solely the province females persists to an inveterate degree
I don’t think the ‘Academic-Industrial Complex’ (some which confer degrees in Nursing and health care administration…) has much to do with scaring people off the field.
I loaned out the book with the hard numbers, so you’ll have to trust me on this. General Practitioners are making about $20K less a year than they were 30 years ago, and they are seeing twice as many patients. My wife is a nurse, works part time and has not had a raise in eight years. She is also required to do a lot of the paperwork on her own time, not “officially” but there is no time given during the shifts and without the paperwork, she does not get paid. My personal GP tells me he gets “20 minutes’ per patient and must see eight patients a day, five days a week or he’s in hot water with the company.
Nine Out of 10 Physicians Unwilling to Recommend Health Care As a Profession.
I’m not talking about RN’s or administrators – I’m talking about the underpaid people who actually bathe and feed people, not chart the results.
The ACA has huge reporting requirements in real time, meaning that physicians must be doing computer entry instead of talking to the patients.
Yes, PCA and CNA are low wage positions, the same one we see ads for on TV to “get a job in the medical field” and go into debt at our for profit school.
It’s also not just the ACA that piles on the paperwork for the government, the ACA is based on private corporations who really run the show. Each corporation has its set of rules and forms. Each corporation has individuals on staff who manage the client base, cutting out med and procedures that were recommended by the doctor. I’ve had my asthma meds changed several times by the insurance corporations.
American doctors are spending about 21 hours per week dealing with insurance paperwork, while Canadian doctors are only needing to spend about 2.5 hours per week on those tasks.
Met the wifey (well she will be in May!) at U Chicago and Waubonsee Community College in Suburban Illinois is getting her a much better job than U of C ever would’ve.
Great line. I think this piece might be the best thing Frank has ever written.
Although not sure I agree that Massachusetts is a place where elected Republicans are “highly unusual” — for 28 of the past 35 years, our Governors have been Republicans. But he’s definitely right about the Lege.
If Deval Patrick “understands the plight of the poor,” he never showed much interest in acting on his understanding (and Frank is not suggesting he did). As in: it was Charlie Baker who secured an increase in the state earned income tax credit, something Patrick never even proposed. And that’s just one example.
Harris Gruman, who’s quoted as disparaging innovation liberalism, is one of the RaiseUp Massachusetts folks, who are succeeding in bringing back FDR liberalism here through the initiative petition process (paid sick leave passed last time; this time they’re advocating for the constitutional amendment to increase taxes on the wealthiest Massachusetts residents). We’ll see if UIP can make some additional liberal headway in the electoral realm.
Happy to be interviewed for your blog anytime. We can do email so I can keep your scandalous persona intact.
Above, Scott12Mass says this:
That is wrong. Massachusetts is highly segregated by income, and most rich people do not have to interact with poor people very much. Most towns fight very strongly to keep poor people out of their communities – I’m talking about the truly poor people, not the people who live in only a 900 s.f. house in your town and drive a late 90s car. Spend a little time at either an urban medical facility or the DMV and you’ll get a better flavor of what you don’t usually see. Live among them for a couple of years and you may gain some empathy.
I agree with the premise of this post very much. Massachusetts Democrats are aligned mostly on social issues, not economic issues. That is why most of the discussion on this very site tends to swing back to social issues when there is a lull. Either that or issues about government services typically used by wealthier people, such as the MBTA. Hence the prevalence of the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” Democrat in our state. “Gay marriage is great, but just don’t raise my taxes, and hey, can you do something about those people using those EBT cards?”
Poor people are seen as undeserving; poor communities are also seen as undeserving. A community like Springfield, or Lawrence, or Fall River is in rough shape because it is their own damn fault! “Must be corruption, must be the fault of the voters voting for the wrong people. It can’t be the economic system, because I’m able to do well, so anyone should be able to do well. Get a job!”
All we hear in this state are Democrats griping about the “Cadillac benefits” that our poor people get, how “they” are all just partying on the taxpayer’s dime. Free health care! (though no one would choose Medicaid if they were offered the same deal). Free housing! (though no one would live in the low-income housing if they were offered the same deal). Money for not working! (though I doubt very few people know that the maximum TANF payments for 1 adult, 2 children is $7,416 per year).
Education? “Great, everyone should have one, but it isn’t right that some communities are getting all the funding. We can only provide equal opportunities, not equal outcomes”. “Poor people have a better chance to go to college than my kids, there are plenty of scholarships for those inner city kids, they just don’t use them”.
Very little has been done to stem the effects of the massive deindustrialization that have occurred over the past 30 years. Our housing situation is set up so that the people affected very quietly fade away into certain communities, hidden from most. And then we complain on a daily basis about how those communities suck.
the general manager of a business will use the same Dunkin drive thru as the plumber who is on the way to his house to fix something. And they are waited on by the counter person who might go to Mcdonalds for dinner and sit next to the busboy from the ceo’s country club.
and you’re right, the truly poor are nowhere in sight.
You don’t seem to appreciate the broad range of poor people are in this state, nor do you understand how various retail outlets are staffed.
When I go to the grocery store in Longmeadow, a wealthy community, the workers there are mainly retirees who live “in town”. At night, they are teens who are working after school or parents looking to supplement income. When I go to the grocery store in Springfield, the workers there are mainly in their 30s, they live “in the neighborhood”, and that is their primary job. The same pattern exists across all those businesses. Service businesses in wealthier communities have a much higher percentage of workers who do not rely on that income as their sole income.
A major reason for this is that many poor people do not have cars, and there is no public transportation to the wealthier communities. There is almost no multi-family rental property in those communities, and the “affordable housing” they have is largely senior housing. Those communities have enacted policies which ensure that they don’t have to interact with the poor on a daily basis – and when people are put in a situation where they might have to (for example, the emergency room, or the DMV), they get really, really angry about it – no empathy, they view the poor as sub-human.
While poor, those people are not the majority of the poor in our urban communities. Springfield’s unemployment rate is almost 9% (and will go higher since the state has decided to lay off 57 employees at the unemployment office call center for “cost savings” – allowing a Boston call center to absorb that work) but its labor force participation rate is fairly abysmal. According to the Boston Fed, Springfield’s low-income neighborhoods had a participation rate of 54.2% in 2012, and the city overall is at 57.6%. Compare that to national average of 63% at that time, and you can see how that would greatly impact the poverty rates.
Great in theory, horrible in practice(0+ / 0-) View voters
You have to realize that when you have a city of 150,000 primarily poor people, those people are not poor by happenstance. They are poor because they don’t have the background, they don’t have the energy, they don’t have the skill to not be poor.
The beginning of the thread highlights the Dems have let the people down. (I don’t think the GOP would have been better). Good luck getting 30,000 rich to move to Springfield. I went to Atlantic City when resorts opened, and now it is essentially an episode of “Cops” in the making. I don’t think the casino will work well.
I live near an area that had a factory making arms for the govt and developed stores and was growing. The downside was the Civil war ended, the swords were no longer needed and Lelandville Mass died out. As I said local economies grow and collapse, maybe it is inevitable that Springfield
go the way of Lelandville.
Based on our conversations I know you are stuck in the property tax death spiral that affects so many lower income communities. What solutions would work to improve the area? Certainly not the damn casino. I worry since guys like my other Salem roommate would have helped that city prosper and are never looking back now that they got out. Same with friends from Pittsfield.
I was really struck by all the activists I’ve been in touch with in Fitchburg and think that community has a strong chance of rebounding, but more needs to be done. We are well aware the UIP did twice as good in Western MA as the rest of the state and I’d rather we do more to win them over before they abandon the politics of reason for Trump.
If you want a simplistic answer, take about 30,000 of our poorest residents and replace them with upper middle class residents. That will fix Springfield.
If you want to go deeper, then look at every state policy that makes the opposite happen, from “conservation land” bills that takes away developable land from wealthy communities at the state’s expense, to our current method of only developing “affordable” housing in poor communities.
We still have, I believe, the nation’s lowest teen pregnancy rate. This is while having some of the best access to women’s health services.
A quick snip from Google.
He wants to solve income inequality? Great. But bashing the Commonwealth isn’t helpful.
I’m really tired of the “What’s wrong with liberalism?” genre.
Frank, but he is somewhat of a polemicist.
“To think about it slightly more critically, Boston is the headquarters for two industries that are steadily bankrupting middle America: big learning and big medicine, both of them imposing costs that everyone else is basically required to pay and which increase at a far more rapid pace than wages or inflation. A thousand dollars a pill, 30 grand a semester: the debts that are gradually choking the life out of people where you live are what has made this city so very rich.”
… not so much as a critique of Boston, but as a statement that describes an enormous issue facing the country.
My freshman year tuition only at BC was $3,600 in 1978. That is about $13,100 in today’s dollars based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics online cpi calculator. Current tuition at BC is $48,500, an incredibly absurd 370% above inflation over 38 years. There is no possible justification.
Regardless of what system you want to put in place to pay for college and health care, we MUST address their absolute costs, otherwise the economy will continue to choke on them and good jobs will remain scarce.
I agree that the explosion in college expenses is a huge issue. I think it has few, if any, easy answers. I think it’s far easier to attack the symptoms than to provide ANY guidance towards solving the problems. I also think its deceptive to lump “big learning” and “big medicine” together. There are very few people making big money in the former. There a great many people doing so in the latter.
A significant cost driver in “big learning” is that the costs of running a modern university — especially a research university — have been expanding much faster than income, regardless of inflation. For example, a modern research university must be staffed by highly skilled professionals. Those salaries are paid almost entirely by some combination of research grants and alumni contributions. Neither has come close to keeping up with inflation. Salaries, even of the men and women who clean the glassware and sweep the floors, go up. Income does not. The difference has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is tuition.
Similarly, for whatever reasons, the physical plant of universities is becoming more and more expensive. While parents and students rightly complain about skyrocketing student debt, they still choose to attend colleges and universities that have newer and more spacious dorms, newer and more modern classrooms and labs, new and more modern dining halls that offer menus that are increasingly specialized (gluten-free, vegan, etc).
There is a long list of other cost factors (real estate and taxes or tax-equivalents, physical plant costs, recruiting expenses, etc). Don’t even get me started about college sports.
All this costs money (well, except sports, sort-of).
Yes, the cost issues of “big learning” are daunting. No, scapegoating the industry is not constructive.
in the last 10 years are what they once were...
If you believe the Silicon Valley sloganeers, we are in a “gig economy,” where work consists of a series of short-term jobs coordinated through a mobile app. That, anyway, is both the prediction of tech executives and futurists and the great fear of labor activists.
But anyone who cares about the future of work in the United States shouldn’t focus too narrowly on the novelty of people making extra money using their mobile phones. There’s a bigger shift underway. That’s a key implication of new research that indicates the proportion of American workers who don’t have traditional jobs — who instead work as independent contractors, through temporary services or on-call — has soared in the last decade. They account for vastly more American workers than the likes of Uber alone.
Most remarkably, the number of Americans using these alternate work arrangements rose 9.4 million from 2005 to 2015. That was greater than the rise in overall employment, meaning there was a small net decline in the number of workers with conventional jobs.