Half Truth
“a statement that conveys only part of the truth, especially one used deliberately in order to deceive someone.”
There are quite a few half truths out there that anger me. Here’s one that’s in the news lately. We hear that wages are low and the wealth gap is widening because we’ve lost the manufacturing jobs that once supported the middle class. That’s half true. While we lost a lot of manufacturing jobs, what we really lost were jobs that were protected by labor unions. We lost union jobs. When was the last time you heard anyone in the news or anyone running for office say out loud that we need to bring back labor unions to help support America’s working families? I can’t recall hearing it at all with one exception. Don Berwick mentioned bringing back union jobs in his convention speech. That was it.
We hear that we need to increase the skill level of America’s workers and that will be the panacea for all that ails our work force. Nonsense. Skilled workers can be exploited just as easily as unskilled workers if they can’t bargain collectively . All one needs to do is visit China where large numbers of skilled workers assemble highly technical electronic devices, working long hours and living in dormitories. Here we have skilled manufacturing jobs and low wages. What’s missing? Unions. The notion that we need to increase the skill level of America’s work force has resulted in so many of us spending more time and money trying to gain an edge over other laborers by getting that one special skill, that golden ticket that will propel us into the comfortable middle class. The middle class is still shrinking and it’s not because we are losing manufacturing jobs and it’s not because we’re losing skills.
In 1970, the average inflation adjusted income of general practitioners was $185,000. In 2010 it was $161,000 despite a near doubling of the number of patients that doctors see today. Should we tell these doctors that if only they increased their skill set, they would see a rise in wages? In a way, we do and that explains why we are losing general practitioners as many turn to higher paying specialties just to break even with their wage loss. Of course this has led to other problems with our health care, making it less effective and more costly.
In 1973, I graduated from high school and got a job at a local factory where, adjusted for inflation, I made about $45,000 a year. I was at the bottom of the pay scale, an assembly line parts supplier where other workers assembled copy machines. We were union workers at Xerox. Across town at Kodak, they were non-union but their pay was close to ours and that’s what happens when there are union workers in an area, all labor wages go up. All wages go up, even managerial positions at the same facilities and even doctor salaries in the same town.
I know it’s not that simple and there are other factors to consider, but I know that union jobs and union membership is a far better panacea for health care, women’s wage gap, family leave, education, and so much more.
So please, the next time you hear that we need manufacturing or skill sets or “job creators” to being back the middle class, know that what we really need are worker’s unions and the jobs that go with them.
It would be better, IMHO, if our diarist inveighed against actual people whom he actually quoted with links. For example,
It would surprise me to find someone so simple-minded who’d say that there’s a single panacea that’d solve our employment or inequality problem.
How about from the State of the Union Address where President Obama said, “Second, to make sure folks keep earning higher wages down the road, we have to do more to help Americans upgrade their skills.”
I could also point you to the editorial of my local paper this week (Franklin Country Gazette) that pushes for “job training programs for workers who want to acquire new skills” under the title of “Middle Class economics”.
Highly skilled hard working people built the pyramids and got squat in return. History repeats.
Tell me again how highly skilled hard working people in the USA will share in a growing economy under the present system, a system without collective bargaining AKA unions.
where President Obama said, “Second,…”
A commitment to education would seem not to be a bad thing, and, if it came second, it is clearly not the only thing.
I get that you are unhappy with the presentation and arguments.
I wonder if you agree or disagree with the substance. Do you challenge the premise that organized labor is being attacked from both parties? Do you challenge the premise that middle class is effectively dead? Do you challenge the premise that skilled workers like doctors, engineers, and information workers need unions?
I wonder where you’re coming from here.
Well, I generally agree with the post, but I think it lacks substance. No links. Facts come from who knows where. The diarist’s salary history is unverifiable.
The growing gap between productivity and wages can be seen in almost every Western country right now. That includes France which has rather robust unions.
.
By Piketty, you’ll read that the wealth disparity is greatest in the Anglo Saxon nations. While it does exist in France, it is most pronounced in the USA, the UK, and Australia. Do you need a link to the Amazon site where you can purchase the book, or will a link to your nearest library to borrow the book? I can help with either if need be.
And I will smile.
Maybe John is just working a general philosophical angle as it all works that way as a bit of writing.
Nothing is stopping you from showing us all how its done, especially since kicking a straw man is an improvement over kicking an actual one.
A song lyric from a band called X is probably a good bet.. “This is a game that moves as you play.”
May a fine frozen Saturday night find all well.
As liberals (and perhaps as Democrats too), we believe that government can and should make things better for people. Our ideological adversaries have a different approach: except for defense, government should be small. Their approach is simpler to implement, easier to carry out.
That’s why I think it behooves liberals to maintain a level of intellectual fastidiousness and to avoid a bunch of feel-good, ideological ranting. Reading this diary and a predecessor reminded me a bit of listening to speeches by Gov. Palin which frequently string together resentments at a whole host of unnamed liberals holding preposterous views. Here too there’s a whole host of adversaries holding preposterous views.
Now, if you read economists, there has certainly been a debate as to whether the recent rise in unemployment and, worse, the fall in employment is due to structural unemployment or not. One solid argument against that is available herehere. So this is certainly not an unimportant topic, so why not treat it as an important topic rather than as rant material?
Finally, we don’t know whether the facts quoted are true or fictional because there is no link. Again, I think liberals should be fastidious about this kind of stuff. If you care about your intellectual hygiene, your first response to seeing unsourced facts that agree with your prejudices should be skepticism. You should catch yourself believing things you want to believe early and often.
Here the $161,00 and $185,000 are unsourced. A conservative or a neo-liberal making some kind of contrary argument would be met with demands for sources. You don’t want to offer liberals the license to make stuff up; you want liberals to look stuff up and prove it.
Because there is no “link”. My good man, have you not heard of Google? If you doubt me, do your own damn research. The $161 and $185 can be found on page 12 of “Doctored, The Disillusion of an American Physician” by Sandeep Jauhar. Copyright 2014. If you send me your address, I will drive by and show the actual text.
If you do not trust me, please, do me a favor and do not read what I post. It will save us both a lot of time.
You are, in this case, exchanging views with a woman (kbusch).
Thanks for the update
After all, neither gender has a monopoly on scolding, purity anxieties, humorlessness and delusions of significance about the regional impact of a blog.
… because that’s how you allow your own, often very specific, … aah… anxieties and humorlessness… to shine through…
You don’t have ad-hominem privileges.
It lacks the pizzazz of a Limbaugh bellow or the sparkle of a Rickles put down.
As ad hominems generally go, it’s kind of like minor acid reflux in search of Tums.
… “hysteria is not compelling as argument” might be a personal attack but it is not ad-hominem. Especially in the context of a reply to an attempt to hide behind a generic smugness in which chris-rich (rather passive aggressively) attempts to impugn the motives and thought process of kbusch… which is ad-hominem… Or did you not read that part? Isn’t your outrage at my personal attack rather ill-timed and altogether too specific?
… I do not think kbusch was postulating a distrust. Rather, she seems to have taken the time to point out that the half-truth sometimes comes with filler to round up to the purported whole: that filler is the emotions we might feel about it that can allow us to lie to ourselves as we attempt to convince others of our truths. A sage once termed this, ‘truthiness’, and you –like Palin, and like me and like kbusch — are not immune.
Vigilance is a truth also: and that truth includes being watchful against our own worst impulses.
I’d be curious to hear that .
Everything Reagan said was anecdotal and based around folksy stories that wove an ideological tapestry appealing to a wide swath of the American populace. Many of these anecdotes from his fighting in WWII to the welfare queen driving a Cadillac were outright lies, proven to be lies at the time, and indelible political trademarks for the conservative movement. Even today liberal historians concede he is a “Great Communicator”.
John tells a very compelling story that weaves together nostalgia for a better past-something Reagan did well, with hope for a brighter future-ditto. Failing to have these narratives prevents us from being good canvassers, good campaigners, and appealing to folks turned off by politics and overwhelmed by too much information.
I strongly feel both of you bring valuable insights to our discourses here-and often find myself recommending your posts, uprating your comments and looking forward to what you both have to say. If I can act as a referee-I would say we need the data based argument to formulate fact based solutions to real problems. The Al Gore approach from Reason or An Inconvenient Truth. But your speech to a union hall on Labor Day has to rally the troops and look like Johns-Osama Dead/ GM Alive is a far better approach to campaign rhetoric than a reading list on middle eastern policy and lie charts showing how many jobs were saved.
The policy has to be factually right and we gotta back it up-but the voter has to feel our politics are their politics in their gut.
All smart and no heart makes life a dull joy.
I’m happy to do so, when asked. That said, I’d rather not have to provide documents, foot notes, and twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against me.
I don’t mind a couple of links, especially if they are not too far down in the writer’s browser history.
We do need to consider the readership and purpose of a blog when deciding what to link. This issue came up for me back in the casino debate, when someone was attempting to overwhelm the argument by posting a lot of links to scholarly articles (mostly gleaned from web sites promoting casinos, it turned out). If you had online access to the scholarly literature (as I do) you could follow up on these sources to determine their strong and weak points. However, we can’t assume the general reader here is in that category. What’s more, I don’t like the power dynamic between academic and non-academic writers that this differential access to journal articles creates in public discourse. I have always wondered if in some vague way that’s what Aaron Swartz was trying to get at by hacking the JSTOR database.
By the way, I am a woman too, in case anyone ever needs to pick a pronoun to refer to me . . .
I noticed that I can hover over a phrase or word with my Chrome browser and right click to a search query that opens its own tab.
Query skill can often find a lot of that material or the secondary material that is generated by it. I usually leave important links in clear so a user can decide instantly if they accept the provenance of the source.
I get to do plenty of tidy content craft on my own platforms.
I’ll do a text link on something fun like a you tube of X doing The Have Nots, especially since You Tube url is hopelessly cryptic anyway.
…a half-truth nation.