21 January 2017

This is a Fascinating Perspective on Hillary and Trump Supporters

Frequently the analysis is about how the winners and losers in an increasingly interconnected and technical worls engage in her.

Using the example of the opoid epidemic, Lambert Strether makes another point, that the professional and credentialed class (Hillary's base) has benefited from the losses of the working class:
That said, can we think of any reasons beyond despair why rural voters might vote red (and not blue)? I think we can, if we look at the role that urban credentialed professionals and institutions play. In “Credentialism and Corruption: The Opioid Epidemic and ‘the Looting Professional Class'” I wrote:
CEOs, marketing executives, database developers, marketing collateral designers, the sales force, middle managers of all kinds, and doctor: All these professions are highly credentialed. And all have, or should have, different levels of responsibility for the mortality rates from the opoid epidemic; executives have fiduciary responsibility; doctors take the Hippocratic Oath; those highly commissioned sales people knew or should have known what they were selling. Farther down the line, to a database designer, OXYCONTIN_DEATH_RATE might be just another field. Or not! And due to information asymmetries in corporate structures, the different professions once had different levels of knowledge. For some it can be said they did not know. But now they know; the story is out there. As reader Clive wrote:
Increasingly, if you want to get and hang on to a middle class job, that job will involve dishonesty or exploitation of others in some way.
And you’ve got to admit that serving as a transmission vector for an epidemic falls into the category of “exploitation of others.”
And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that red-shift voters would identify Clinton’s base in the urban, professional classes with the very same people responsible for the opioid epidemic that was killing their families. Consciously? I don’t know. Viscerally? I’d bet on it.
It isn't just the opiod crisis.

You see it in healthcare price increases (Doctors and administrators benefit), the skyrocketing cost of education (Administrators and tenure track professors), finance ('nuff said), etc.

The professional, college educated class needs to understand that they are not spectators to the destruction of  working class lives and livelihoods, they actively benefit from this destruction.

To fix this requires sacrifices on our part.

5 comments :

Stephen Montsaroff said...

Some of this is pay back for the Vietnam war suppor of organized labor.

Asking for sacrifices will only make sense if there is value in it.

You need to make a case why it is valuable to the professional classes to support the working classes, who are viewed in many areas (such as abortion, LGBT rights, race) as not supporting the same goals.

Matthew Saroff said...

Because if you don't then the rent seekers take most of it, and you end up with Donald Trump as president.

Matthew Saroff said...

I would also add that it is just the right thing to do.

Stephen Montsaroff said...

I never try to sell something on the basis of the being the right thing to do.

It is logically problematic, and is an appeal to the irrational.

Your other argument falls apart as a) you have to prove having the rent seekers in control is bad, and b) the second is equivalent to asking protection money.

You can't win on the other basis. Considering the narrowness of the margin, other plans will present themselves.

Stephen Montsaroff said...

Therefore, you need to appeal to that which makes the soundest of friendships -- mutual interest.

Actually, it isn't too hard.

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