Watching MSNBC this morning, as I do most mornings, I heard Stephanie Ruhle , Senior Business correspondent and anchor of MSNBC Live mention the infamous skills gap and ask her guest how the Biden Administration was going to address the “skills gap”, referring to the significant number of working class Americans struggle each day to pay rent, save for retirement, and live with the reality that a serious injury or illness will result in bankruptcy. She asked what skills training and educational programs were being considered to help America’s working poor.
Stephanie Ruhle and her husband, hedge funder Andy Hubbard, reportedly doled out $7.5 million for a four-story townhouse on the Upper East Side back in 2017. She is a graduate of Lehigh University where she earned her bachelor’s degree in international business. Her annual salary at NBC is reported to be $500K per year. That’s $240 an hour, by the way at a time when the national minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. She makes more in one month than the “low skill” people she wants to help make all year as they make sure her packages get delivered, gas gets into her car, shelves get stocked in at her local food market, dishes get cleaned at her favorite lunch spot; an almost endless list of what we have learned are essential jobs that allow her and those like her to work from home during a deadly global pandemic.
Her advice to all those getting paid wages insufficient to sustain them? Get a better job. Get better skills. Improve yourself. The system is fine, look at me! I have skills! Even more important, I have credentials, see them all framed and hanging on my office wall?
By the way, it’s been well documented that the skills gap is a myth. Economic policy is the cause of low wages for certain occupation.
Only it’s not skills that these hard working essential low wage workers lack, it’s political power. How they get political power is the difficult question. So long as Democrats and the “liberal” media continue to denigrate and dismiss them, they remain a large voting block ripe for any politician savvy enough to win their support with promises to get justice and revenge and “own the Dems and the liberal media”.
The Democratic Party has been the champion against racism, sexism, and now it needs to address the last accepted “ism”, credentialism.
The only “discrimination” I see in this piece is a markedly hostile attitude towards a successful woman who is highly compensated. She is not a graduate of an elite institution. If anything, her life story seems to exemplify what you say you want — a society that does not require elite credentials and where a public school graduate from a middle-class New Jersey family can rise to wealth and celebrity.
Ms. Ruhle came to the entertainment world from a very successful stint on Wall Street. She met her husband as a colleague in the same company. They have been married, apparently happily, for more than twenty years and have several children. They have each pursued successful and separate careers in separate industries.
I don’t see any connection between your personal dislike of Ms. Ruhle and your pet peeve.
This piece strikes me as a snarky personal attack on a talking head coupled with an irrelevant cite of a perfectly reasonable pieces from MIT and CEPR.
Those pieces make a compelling case that our failed and misguided economic policies are the primary cause of the economic suffering of most Americans. As the second piece explicitly points out, that is NOT and argument against improving access to education and skills training.
It is instead an argument in favor of a radical change in our economic policies. I enthusiastically agree with that argument.
Stephanie Ruhle has nothing whatsoever to do with the compelling case for changing our fundamental economic policies.
She still pushed the myth of the skills gap. Other than that, I have no beef with her.
I agree with you that our society will be better served if our media influencers pay more attention to actual reality and less attention to media mythology.
Perhaps you’re burying the lead here. It seems to me that the important point you’re making is that we need to radically change our failed economic policies.
That point can be made without connecting it to your personal animosity towards Democratic efforts to promote skills training.
I’m imagining a world where someone tells the late Martin Luther King that his “pet peeve” is racism and that he needs to recognize that blacks will indeed be better off if they just had better job skills…and his hatred of George Wallace is blinding him to that reality.
What bothered me about her comment was how it was presented as reality, without challenge. No one dared say, “How about we just pay people performing these essential jobs higher wages?”
My guess is that the “Liberal Media” would take that person and remove them from the guest list of future shows.
How about an economist being invited to the guest panel on the “Fight for $15” who can simply lay out the reality that up until the late 1960’s the minimum wage kept pace with worker productivity and then it stopped. Had it not, today’s wage would be $25 an hour.
Call out for $25 an hour and we’ll hear a thousand voices in the “liberal media” saying that the economy will grind to a stop…even though it was doing well in the 1950’s and 60’s.
It’s not a pet peeve for me. It’s central to how we support the working class of the USA and prevent another Trump from taking office.
The pet peeve I’m referencing is your peculiar claim that Democrats demean working class men and women by striving to expand access to higher education for them. To stick with your example, it would be as if someone who claimed to be a passionate supporter of MLK asserted, at every opportunity, that programs to explicitly ban racial discrimination were demeaning to blacks.
Do you consider the New York Times part of the “liberal media”? Paul Krugman has been advancing these arguments about national economy policy for years.
It is worth noting that President Biden has already ordered a $15/hour minimum wage for federal workers, a similar provision is in the new $1.9T rescue package, and the Democratic Party has made it a centerpiece of their proposals. MSNBC was making your case five years ago (https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-truth-about-the-minimum-wage-msna725866).
I agree with you that our economic policy has been dead wrong for at least two decades. A majority of Democrats now support the call for a $15 minimum wage nationwide — a watershed change in attitude towards the minimum wage.
Make a case that $25/hour is the right number for today’s economy, and we’ll hear a thousand voices in the “liberal media” repeating that message.
Meanwhile, the primary source of media attacks on Democratic proposals about higher education remains Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and similar voices.
Bravo!
As long as people are able to make ungodly sums compared to other people, there will always be poverty and economic volatility. All the lip service in the world won’t change that, and her hypocrisy is obvious and widespread because the media as a profession is as rife with it as the financial industry, etc.
People don’t want to face it, but the rich create the poor. It has nothing to do with skills, intelligence, work ethic, etc.
She is just another slavemaster preaching to the slaves: “If you can, be a slavemaster.” And the sad truth is, that some liberated slaves did own slaves. It doesn’t change the system to change places within the system.
Wall Street is slavery by proxy, which is why I sold all my stocks 20 years ago. It’s simple math. If you can make money without laboring, then someone is laboring unpaid or underpaid. The degree of the exploitation doesn’t make it any less exploitive. A kinder gentler slavemaster is still a slavemaster.
Need proof? We ended child labor in America. Now things are made overseas, and child labor, and in some cases slavery, still endures. The exploitive relationships continue here as well, obviously, since the whole analysis begins from stating that some are doing excessively well, whereas others barely get by.
I just heard Andrea Mitchell refer to citizens as consumers when referring to new Covid vaccines being approved to fight the epidemic. It’s subtle. Words have meaning. When citizens are reduced to the status of consumer, a degree of dignity is lost. Yes, there is the fear of using the term citizen as it may lead to socialism but the Right seemed okay with “Citizens United”.
Our media is not liberal in the area of economics. It is corporate. It does not want higher wages for the working class. It wants consumers, not citizens. Our media hires talking heads that promote this.
By the way, Massachusetts enacted the nation’s first legislation to outlaw child labor. How sad that its most recent legislation regarding labor and the working class was to eliminate time and half pay on Sundays and Holidays for low and modest wage workers.
An interesting and Chomsky-like inquiry into the use and meaning of words. What would be more accurate? Lemmings, suckers, patients, subjects, peasants.
I agree, Andrea is paid to use certain words. Is there a difference between a prostitute and a mercenary? Of course there is. One is paid to inflict pain, and the other is paid to apply pleasure. And because of doublethink, they can be the same person. It is the nature of fascism to make you afraid, and then promise to save you from the newly created fear.
It is such an odd thing that Trump had no fear of the virus, yet considers himself a germaphobe.
No, our media is not liberal. Heck, even the liberals are not liberal.The brainwashing and self-righteousness are pretty widespread. Hypocrisy rules.The media sows division and confusion because it is the most profitable situation for them. Just like printers (my trade) they want people making signs, etc., that say ‘hooray for my side’ ad nauseam. War is peace, etc.
If there is commonsense and tranquility, then people will just go to the beach or the woods and explore art and enjoy themselves. There’s no profit in that. Isn’t it so much better to be neurotic and spend your entire life worrying about prices and money? …and filling up landfills with meaningless trash.
Our “liberal” media would not know Chomsky or those like him if he walked onto the studio set. Our “liberals” praise the market as primary source of health care when they tell me “health care needs to be affordable”. Our liberals tell the men and women who perform essential jobs in society that do not require more than high school credentials that they deserve to live in near poverty conditions.
I just finished an email exchange with a former co-worker who voted for Scott Brown and Donald Trump. He is a mechanic with a full time job and a part time job fixing the machines that we all depend on. I get it. He’s 50 years old and lived in Massachusetts his entire life and can’t make ends meet with two jobs while he hears Democrats calling for “free college” for those who do to college and make a lot more money than he does.
Even if he went to college and got that Golden Ticket job, who is going to fix the machines that he was fixing? It seems that Democrats have given up on trying to help them out.
“. . . can’t make ends meet with two jobs while he hears Democrats calling for “free college. . .” f
Back in my ivory tower days we used to call that a non sequitor.
How does making college expensive curtail elitism?
Oh come on, Bob, surely you see that making college free demeans families who can’t make ends meet by telling them that only people with college degrees “deserve” to avoid squalor.
This only Ivory this guy is familiar with is the soap he uses to clean his hands at the end of a 12 hour work day. It’s not about making college expensive (and we call that a straw man), it’s about a political party wants to give thousands and thousands of dollars to the kids who choose to go to college but nothing at all to those who do not wish to go to college….and tell them when they struggle to make a living, “well, go to college!”
Rick Santorum made that claim, calling Obama a snob. But it wasn’t true then. Has something changed? Do the Democrats exclude vocational education from government help?
Actually, you are making a straw man argument. “You can’t help A, because B needs help,” as if every act has universal applicability. Don’t build a chair, because it isn’t fair for those who need to stand and won’t get a chair. If this is how you are interpreting your original skills gap argument, then you have something very amiss.
The issue about student debt is only that it leaves all the other debt intact. Why not medical debt, property debt, auto debt, business debt, etc.? The rich (winners) created all these debts through high profits, high prices and low wages.
The division of labor cannot be a division of reward. We are a collective with a semblance of equality, or we are in a state of uncivility. Civilization cannot endure inequality and hypocrisy.
I never said we ought not help those who want to go to college but lack the money. That’s never been my argument. So, no straw.
No, of course not.
You just write polemics opposing such help at every opportunity.
“ it’s about a political party wants to give thousands and thousands of dollars to the kids who choose to go to college but nothing at all to those who do not wish to go to college….and tell them when they struggle to make a living, “well, go to college!””
-that is what you said and it is a straw argument. “Don’t give help to people who need help, because there are people who don’t need help, or excludes other people who also need help.”
You are actually now making a variation of the same dumb skills argument argument that you started off criticizing, that somehow people are the problem for working too hard or not hard enough, for being poor or being rich, for being liberal, too liberal or not liberal enough. You’re talking in circles, and they’re your circles. The initial criticism had validity, but your defense of it has none because it’s your political bias and no longer specific. Unfortunately, hypocrisy is not a monopoly of any one person, class, group or party.
She was wrong because every job needs to pay, whether you are fixing cars or fixing sandwiches or fixing human arteries. When you go into a store, a gallon of milk costs the same for everyone, and so the reward for their labor needs to be roughly the same, so everyone can enjoy milk and honey.
All debt needs to be forgiven. There is little about the status quo worth preserving.
Are you saying that liberals credit the marketplace for advances in healthcare? I’m not sure I would agree.
It was actually government support of R&D, and generous education support to students who became the researchers, engineers, doctors, etc., so we had the time and talent and the resources to solve problems.
All that discovery trickled down into society, and now if you have a heart attack, in many towns, you can be in the hospital within minutes and be getting good care on the way. (For rural areas, not so much).
Sure, many liberals believe in the marketplace. That’s a real problem. They think they are liberal, but are actually conservative. And the problem with conservatives is they have become radical (Jan 6, etc) and have an increasing loose grasp of any reality.
The problem with healthcare is that it is all supported and regulated by the government, not by the marketplace, except the last TINY step where the patient interacts with the care provider. Suddenly, it is the wild west, rationed, criminal deceit, price gouging, exploitation, etc.
And it is the wild west for everyone. A General Practioner may make 150K, but an alleged ‘Specialist’ makes 400K, and the surgeons that make a $Million want to open up an outpatient shop so they can pocket the entire facility fee that the hospitals collect, so they can make $3 Million doing the same amount of work, but claim they will bill the patient 10% less.
The simple fact is that your friend knows how to fix cars, but he probably doesn’t know how to fix the economy, and it is easy for people with lots of money (aka conservative business owners) to tell lots of lies (Trump etc) and they have the ability to repeat them until it almost seems reasonably true. But it is the businesses that set the prices, set the wages, and in general, set the tax rates too. The problem in the marketplace is that the businesses can’t control other businesses, and they quickly discover that boom is bust, because all the volatility that they promote comes back to haunt them. There is nothing more wasteful than the marketplace, but Orwell rules and people think it is efficient. Quite the farce.
I am simply repeating the lines that many liberals use, that we need “affordable” health care. I’m not sure about you, but when I hear the word “affordable”, I think about something I need to buy.
I don’t want “affordable” health care anymore than I want “affordable” national security. In both cases, spend what it needed and fund it through taxes.
Our medical model is rooted in sales and shareholder profits, not preventative care and citizen health.
Actually, you say, “spend what’s needed” and then say “don’t spend it.” For example, paying off college debts would lower the cost of healthcare, since not being in debt the doctors could charge less. But, if in debt for 200k+, they have no choice but to charge more for their services. But, since they can charge so much, why give them a break, right? We can’t fix a problem and at the same time preserve it. That should be obvious.
Other than “Improve your education and/or skills to get a better paying job” does the Democratic Party offer to the clerks at grocery stores, the techs at the Quick Lube, the workers at the child day care and elder care, and all the other “essential” workers in the USA?
Last time I checked, it is the Democrats who are demanding a $15/hour federal minimum wage. It is a Democratic president who put that in place by executive order for federal contracts on his first day in office. It is a Democratic Party — with a majority in the House and Senate and the Oval Office — that is calling for $1.9 TRILLION rescue package. That rescue package includes significant direct relief for essential workers and indirect relief to state and local governments so that those local resources can better fund essential workers.
The fact that you ignore the bulk of what Democrats have said and done for decades does not negate that history.
Those who care about actually doing something about predatory Wall Street behavior should pay attention to the GameStop/Robinhood story unfolding as we speak.
In a nutshell, regular people are using startups like Robinhood to beat Wall Street short-sellers and hedge funds at their own game.
It’s an interesting saga to watch — interesting enough to catch the attention of AOC — and it’s a great example of finding an effective way to ACT.
It certainly appears that a bunch of regular (young) people are taking a LOT of money away from hedge fund sharks — and perhaps rescuing a few companies (like GameStop) from being destroyed by the insatiable appetite of Wall Street.
Yes, but. You can only get listed on Wall Street by playing the game and exploiting and manipulating the greed of others. I’m not sure I would ever consider a public company a “victim” of anything beyond their own avarice.
If Wall Street ceased to exist tomorrow, not only would the world go on, but we would all be better off.
There are plenty of successful businesses that never went public.
I encourage to you learn more about Robinhood and what they’re doing.
They’re not listed on Wall Street (yet). The point is not that anybody saved GameStop, or that GameStop won’t eventually go under.
The point is that hedge fund sharks were destroying their victim by selling it short, planning to profit from the resulting destruction. Instead, regular players on Robinhood drove the stock price up and caused the hedge funds to lose big.
The widespread availability of apps like Robinhood allows regular people to participate in the stock market. Talk about grassroots financing!
I remember not so long ago when racist whites said something very similar about urban blacks — “So long as it’s lazy, shiftless, and immoral n<deleted>rs shooting each other, who cares?”
Your comment sounds like it’s pretty much the same sentiment. Our economy, as well as our society, depends on the primacy of the rule of law. I encourage you to rethink whether or not you seriously desire an economy that makes no attempt to restrain predatory behavior by ruthlessly cynical corporate actors.
If Wall Street ceased to exist tomorrow, we would create its replacement by the day after tomorrow. Nearly all of those successful businesses that never went public were launched with the promise of going public (or being acquired by another publicly-traded company) sooner or later.
The real world is not nearly as black-and-white as your commentary occasionally seems to suggest.
There is a great book called “More Money Than God” by Sebastian Mallaby where he describes and explores the inner workings of hedge funds, Soros, etc. It will make your hair stand on end.
For example, about 11 people in a crappy New York office took control of the bank of Thailand (I could be wrong about the country). Unlike the US, it was a nation with only one big bank, and since they controlled it, they essentially controlled the country.
Or the time when Soros invaded the Bank of England, forcing mortgage payments to soar (because for some reason they are not fixed at a specific interest), he made billions while others suffered. But, it also came back around to bite him. At one point he was having a phone conversation with another hedge fund guy, lamenting how he took a bath that day. The person he was speaking to gave him the bath. These are not men of deep intellects. They are just greedy.
Then there is the super seedy stuff, some of which Timothy Geithner describes in his book, which when during the 2008 meltdown, how one banker refused to work on a Saturday, and instead flew to his house on Nantucket. F-the peasants.
The idea that there is a rule of law is quaint. There are the rules for the rich and powerful, and then there are the laws for everyone else.
Here we are at the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and people have no clue as to why it occurred.
It was Wall Street that created the Great Depression, created the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust, seeded 9/11 and the great permanent security state of mind that prevents us from moving freely and trusting one another, and now it has given us Trump, who rises straight out of an Orwell essay as the Pope of Doublethink, Newspeak, Groupthink and Thoughtcrime.
The world isn’t black and white mainly because the fools live in a gray world, and literally ‘know not what they do.’ We have all been indoctrinated into some version of the absurd. A great many simple truths have been twisted to the point that they are unrecognizable. Everyone has a different piece of the truth, and large chunks of untruths. In general, it makes everyone uniquely wrong, which makes consensus next to impossible, and an intelligent consensus even more rare.
How hard is it to see that everyone deserves to be compensated fairly? That everyone needs clothes, food, shelter, healthcare, an education, rewarding work, leisure time, etc? How hard is it to see that at the beginning and end of life we rely solely upon others? How hard is it to see that a new generation is coming, and they will only know what we teach them? We must reap what we sow.
It is very ironic that the stock is called GameStop, when when we really needs to do is to stop these foolish games. 🙂
I can’t find the link but I heard on the television today, citing Senator Elizabeth Warren and student loan debt, that 40% of those with a student loan do not have a degree.
I wonder, if other jobs not requiring a college degree paid a respectable wage, how many would gladly take those jobs and not go to college, and live a happy secure life in the USA?
I appreciate reading this, and agree that the “skills gap” concept is not based on solid economic research. Young people planning their education and training options, and adults looking at employment and training options should be able to make choices based on unbiased information; not based on a biased analysis that ‘everyone’ needs to get trained for some particular set of fields. I’ve written about the idea of a “mosaic economy” in which there is a need for a wide variety of work and workers; and that it is a myth that ‘everyone’ works in a particular few sectors or that the ‘jobs of the future’ are all in a few sectors.
And I also agree with economic arguments about the need for a higher wages, to appropriately value the work of front-line workers, especially if that is tied to less-extreme differences between corporate executive wages and related business overhead and front-line worker wages.
Thank you for writing this piece!
Your comment appears to reflect both expertise and current research in these questions, I welcome that (and you) to our little community.
I’m curious about your understanding of the strong correlation that continues to exist between educational achievement and lifetime earnings. What do you make of that correlation?
Do you see tension between this observation and the long-standing efforts of Democrats to remove economic obstacles to higher education and skills training?
Do you agree that offering increased opportunities for those who wish to pursue higher education is “discrimination” against those who make a different choice?
Some have argued that explicit programs to address stark racial disparities are themselves racist. If attempting to increase opportunities for higher education is “credentialist”, isn’t an attempt to remove barriers based on race or gender “racist” or “sexist”? I invite your perspective on this perhaps false dichotomy.