“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.
@rowborg/@kbog, this is a great thread, and I’m only going to dip my toe in, here, minimally, to +1 this point that rowborg has made. Employment isn’t just about exchanging labour for a wage, it’s a major source of meaning in people’s lives. The assertion that standards of living in the US have risen is probably correct, even for people at the bottom of the income distribution. But this standard of living increase can’t explain the incredibly sour mood of a huge chunk of people. Obviously it’s going to take a lot of time for researchers to unpack that, but the meaningless-employment story seems like a pretty plausible component: if people feel what they do doesn’t have any meaning, and particularly if they feel their children don’t have prospects for meaning-ful employment then despair and anger seem like totally to-be-expected reactions.
@rowborg/@kbog, this is a great thread, and I’m only going to dip my toe in, here, minimally, to +1 this point that rowborg has made. Employment isn’t just about exchanging labour for a wage, it’s a major source of meaning in people’s lives. The assertion that standards of living in the US have risen is probably correct, even for people at the bottom of the income distribution. But this standard of living increase can’t explain the incredibly sour mood of a huge chunk of people. Obviously it’s going to take a lot of time for researchers to unpack that, but the meaningless-employment story seems like a pretty plausible component: if people feel what they do doesn’t have any meaning, and particularly if they feel their children don’t have prospects for meaning-ful employment then despair and anger seem like totally to-be-expected reactions.