David Wessel: Why the Job Market Is Sagging in the Middle

On average, it's bad to be average:

Why the Job Market Is Sagging in the Middle, by David Wessel, WSJ: You don't need to be a Ph.D. economist to know something big is happening in the job market. The salaries of Wall Street's financial engineers are surging while wages in industrial companies stagnate. Manufacturers complain about "skill shortages" while cutting payrolls. ... Computers seem to have infiltrated every job, yet demand for unskilled, low-wage immigrants doesn't abate. ...

There is still strong demand for high-end workers -- the stars of finance, software, law, sports and entertainment -- as well as for the highest-skilled factory workers. The only news is the intensity of that demand, which is pushing up pay for those at the top.

But ... demand is [also] increasing for some workers at the low end of the pay scale: the ones who wipe brows in hospitals, care for kids, clear tables at bistros and stand guard in office-building lobbies. In 1980, about 13% of workers without any college education were working in such personal-service jobs, according to calculations by David Autor... In 2005, 20% of them were.

The losers? "The sagging middle," says Princeton University economist Alan Krueger.

As Harvard economists Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin put it recently, "U.S. employment has been polarizing into high-wage and low-wage jobs at the expense of traditional middle-class jobs."

Here's the hypothesis evolving among these and other academics. Technology and globalization are boosting demand for the most-educated workers, those prized for abstract or conceptual skills. Top hedge-fund managers aren't being replaced by computers; they're harnessing them, to their great profit.

By contrast, technology and globalization are eroding demand for workers who do routine tasks in factories and offices, many of whom are high-school or even college grads. The voice-mail system does away with switchboard operators; back-office software eliminates bookkeepers; robots replace assembly-line workers. Or the work is shipped overseas to a foreign factory or an office linked to the U.S. by fiber-optic cables.

But technology and globalization are not eroding demand for personal-service workers. Those tasks can't be done by computer or shipped offshore. The services have to be delivered here in the U.S. -- and in person -- either by natives or by immigrants.

Indeed, as the folks at the top make more money, more of them want nannies, gardeners, personal trainers and gourmet chefs. These workers are indirect beneficiaries of the upward flow of wealth. Their wages have been rising while those of midlevel factory and office workers, though still higher.., are stagnating. ...

So what, if anything, should the U.S. do about this? That's a harder question.

Economists warn that shoring up the middle by shielding manufacturing industries from imports or otherwise meddling with the market would cost consumers heavily. Some, certainly not all, suggest letting the market be, and using the tax code to transfer money from the biggest winners. Others suggest "professionalizing" personal-service jobs, perhaps encouraging unionization, to boost wages. Unlike factory jobs, advocates reason, these jobs can't be moved offshore or automated if employers have to pay more.

The more popular solution -- at least among economists -- is a familiar one: Educate all workers so they are better at interpersonal or abstract skills (the jobs of the future) as opposed to dial-turning or keyboard-pounding (rapidly disappearing jobs of the past).

I was thinking today that when I was a little kid, my mom worked in a Del Monte peach factory running one of the slicers. I was seven or eight, I think, and she had to wear a white dress, hair net, gloves, a whole factory costume when she went to work in the late summer heat. She didn't much like it, especially the 3-10 p.m. shift she had for awhile. We didn't live too far away and the smell of peaches in the late summer was overwhelming, almost as bad as the smell from the prune dryer we lived close to when I was a bit older. I don't much care for canned peaches in heavy syrup - the product they made at the factory - because of it. Prunes either, but maybe the smell isn't the whole reason for that.

Anyway, it's all a bit vague now after so long, but I can remember that at some point there was a strike and a big picket line out in front of the factory, and I can distinctly remember how angry my mom was when someone crossed the picket line. It was different then. I can't imagine the workers at a peach canning factory going on strike now, but it was fairly routine at that time (early 1960s) for workers to picket. It seems like there was always one group or another marching with signs announcing unfair business practices and demanding better wages or conditions, and I was taught as a kid to respect those lines.

There was also a difference in the employee-employer relationship, at least as I observed it growing up in a working class family (my dad worked at a parts counter at a tractor store at that time). There seemed to be an understanding that workers had families to raise. Somehow, my parents - a worker at a parts counter and a peach factory worker - owned a house in a decent neighborhood and while it was tough some months, we had health care through my dad's job and most of the middle class trappings (even if we did get a color TV much later than the neighbors). He didn't work at a great big place or anything, probably ten to twenty employees total, but they still had health care, etc. It's hard to imagine two workers my parents age (in their later 20s) working at those jobs and being able to afford those things today.

I know the empirical evidence doesn't give a lot of weight to the union story for preventing inequality, but looking back it's hard not to believe that the evidence somehow misses an ethic that was present then, something larger than unions alone, something that is less present today, a social relationship between employers and employees that kept employers from pushing wages as low as they possibly could go. Things weren't all rosy and wonderful then, far from it, and there's some chance I'm remembering "good old days," but I do believe society's expectation of what an owner is obligated to do for workers has changed.

Whether that's good or bad depends upon what comes next. Our social institutions are clearly in upheaval as the obligations I felt as a kid are being shed in the name of global competition and other forces of change. Perhaps we'll replace our old institutions with newer ones, with health care systems that are even better than we had before, systems that serve everyone instead of just those lucky enough to work in the right firms or be part of the right social groups. Perhaps we'll find schemes to share the gains broadly, to provide retirement security, access to education, protection from job losses, and so on - that's a process that is currently unfolding. I'm hopeful, and we seem to be collectively aware that change is needed on a variety of fronts, but change is never easy and, if it comes at all, it is often frustratingly roundabout and slow. I don't expect this time to be any different.

Comments

[dissent]

All these changes you describe so eloquently have been sold to us as the price of progress. Flexibility, new skills, new jobs and opportunities were supposed to appear like fairy dust after we joined the "ownership society", left those stultifying unions behind, and embraced being 'consumers' before being workers or citizens.

But it is seeming now that for most people this is the price of decline. We changed and we lost.

I read recently a comment that Sweden's bottom 25% is poor but they are well educated. America's bottom 25% is pretty much ghetto. White ghetto or brown ghetto: same difference. And it is where the middle class is headed.

There was a horrifying story the other day in the LA Times about the California university system (in which I teach). to wit that we spend triple on prisons what we spend on the universities. At the point some of the stubborn hope I've had for California just drained away. I'm so sad!
link http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-compact7oct07,1,3349297.story

We really have been sold a bill of goods: these changes were never meant to benefit us, they were only ways to increase corporate profits. Duh.

The problem is this picture absolutely discredits globalization. I simply can't support it. I used to. Now I feel it's just been a scam, a way for Wall Street and WalMart to leverage away the American middle class.

[SotT]

I have this theory that the reason "free markets" have worked reasonably well for a century or two is that people were coming out of villages and towns and brought to the free market a sense of community obligation to each other. I just have this sense that there are things happening that people weren't capable of doing to each other before. Events like Enron make me wonder whether the unfettered free market system isn't changing our sense of self -- and with that change creating a system that is so fundamentally corrupt, it is unsustainable.

[cm]

SotT: Certainly difficult to formalize as many "group dynamic" type phenomena, but immediately plausible.

[Icarus]

What I take away from this story is that we were once paying too much for peaches.

[cm]

"Indeed, as the folks at the top make more money, more of them want nannies, gardeners, personal trainers and gourmet chefs"

Not to suggest I'm in any sense "at the top", but I want neither of the above, I want a lifestyle (mostly in terms of "spare" time) where I don't depend on other people's services to run my own life.

Well, to the extent that the services are replacing things that I can as well do myself; I probably could consider a personal trainer to fill in some subject-matter competence that I lack, e.g. designing an effective exercise routine so that something actually comes off lifting those weights.

[James Killus]

This is not a phenomenon that is limited to manufacturing. If you look at what has happened to hospitals in the past couple of decades, the general pattern is clear: hire administrators to work out methods of reducing the skilled nursing staff.

"Working in retail" has become a catchphrase for high stress, low pay work. "Customer Service" in consumer devices such as consumer electronics has been basically destroyed by building disposable devices. Has anyone here ever had a television repaired? Cheaper to buy a new one.

Corporate managers are never interested in a new technology that requires greater skills to operate it; they reflexively resist "being held hostage" by the skilled workers. The only technologies that get their interest are those that trade high skilled jobs for low skilled jobs, or more accurately, jobs where the skills are plentiful (and hence commodified). So, for example, bad programming languages crowd out good ones--provided there are plenty of programmers available for the bad ones.

[paine]

"U.S. employment has been polarizing into high-wage and low-wage jobs at the expense of traditional middle-class jobs."

this is very very very old news pal
obviously
you missed the latest three or five year turf war

outsourcing and off shoring up the va pole
means higher up jobs go too

and then there's the cheap smart and energetic import jobsters

the toyota's of today
are two legged and featherless air breathers

[paine]

why i love mark's blog

this is its iron strong heart showing

"It seems like there was always one group or another marching with signs announcing unfair business practices and demanding better wages or conditions, and I was taught as a kid to respect those lines "

[paine]

"the evidence somehow misses an ethic that was present then, something larger than unions alone, something that is less present today, a social relationship between employers and employees that kept employers from pushing wages as low as they possibly could go. "

the class struggle raises its savage head here

very mildly put
and containing
polite reasonable expectations of a return to fair play
--- maybe even
a little fuzzed over in the wording department ----
but t'is a call for
intensified class struggle none the less

mark
are you suggestinng
the higher wage movement
go job site vs staying ballot box ???

or
maybe is that
too much to ask

how do you factor the contributions to this lost ethic ??

as polar extremes we have
corporate paternalism vs jobster demands of
" fork it over or we'll take it over "

[paine]

jk

yes indeed the workings of surplus value extraction
are endemic to the wage profit system

first the capital geist
takes over a sector
then re creates that sector's means to its ends
in the geist's own higher self image

and when the morphing is done
the geist doesn't rest
doesn't cry
"it is good "
the geist starts on morph 2.0

[Wagner]

Mr. Matthews:
Congressman Paul, I think you have questions and concerns about the bonanza in the hedge fund industry. Do you?

Mr. Paul:
Yes. I think this is not a consequence of free markets. What's happening is, there's transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy. This comes about because of the monetary system that we have. When you inflate a currency or destroy a currency, the middle class gets wiped out. So the people who get to use the money first which is created by the Federal Reserve system benefit. So the money gravitates to the banks and to Wall Street.

That's why you have more billionaires than ever before. Today, this country is in the middle of a recession for a lot of people. Michigan knows about it. Poor people know about it. The middle class knows about it. Wall Street doesn't know about it. Washington, D.C., doesn't know about it. But it's because of the monetary system and the excessive spending. As long as we live beyond our means we are destined to live beneath our means. And we have lived beyond our means because we are financing a foreign policy that is so extravagant and beyond what we can control, as well as the spending here at home.

And we're depending on the creation of money out of thin air, which is nothing more than debasement of the currency. It's counterfeit. And it is a natural, predictable consequence that you're going to have people benefit from it and other people suffer. So, if you want a healthy economy, you have to study monetary theory and figure out why it is that we're suffering. And everybody doesn't suffer equally, or this wouldn't be so bad.

It's always the poor people -- those who are on retired incomes -- that suffer the most. But the politicians and those who get to use the money first, like the military industrial complex, they make a lot of money and they benefit from it.

[Farrar Richardson]

Mark Thoma -

Before I read any of the other comments, I want to thank you and thank you again for posting your own comment. This is the most eloquent statement of the today's predicament that I have read. A statement of faith by a true Oregonian.

[Farrar Richardson]

Icarus -

"What I take away from this story is that we were once paying too much for peaches."

It appears that a very long time ago you flew too close to the sun and have never got over it. Even if you make statements like that every morning, the powers that be will still send that bird to tear your liver out before the day is over.

[GeorgeNYC]

I grew up in Ohio in the 60's and my father also worked at a factory. I have many of the same memories.

Without that union job and benefits I wonder if I would have been able to do well in school and ultimately afford a good private education. I often think what my life would be like if I was born now instead of then to the same father from the same class. I certainly knew that other kids had "more" but the differences were so inconsequential. Now the differences are staggering.

But I also remember all of the steel mills in my hometown closing down because the "unions" supposedly were pushing up the costs so much that we could not compete with the Japanese. That was my "economic" education. Intellectually I could understand what was happening as simply the "market" at work. But the real human pain and suffering that was hidden by those dry concepts was stunning.

Somehow when a hedge fund manager is simply grabbing for all he can get that is "capitalism at its finest. When a bunch of poor workers try to "grab" what they can by unionizing they are the epitome of evil socialism.

There is truth in each of these views. Economics is just math. It can describe behavior and determine where equilibrium will lie. But it can allow for many different outcomes depending on our assumptions. The interesting thing is that it is often used as an argument to justify non-intervention. However, it should be utilized as a tool to allow us to obtain the outcomes we desire.

[ken melvin]

Very good comments, all. If I may add an aspect of the changes: There was always a war between finance and engineering/technical and, as we know, warfare requires denigrating ones enemy , so long had we engineering types heard their distaste for us and what we did though in our minds their very existence depended on us. Until then, we were somewhat in charge of industry given that they had to have us. Late seventies, early eighties, it became apparent that they were winning. As industry moved offshore, there was an ever increasing surfeit of lots of types of engineers so now they, as part of management, could offer us ever decreasing salaries (wages) for our labors. Though, during those years, I owned a small industrial controls engineering company the effect was the same - less work for less money.

[Meh]

There's something in this debate that I find very frustrating. There's an equation of greater incomes at the top end with greater jobs.

The number of "top managers" in "investment finance" has not grown out of proportion with the growth in the industry at all. All the "top managers at hedge funds" came out of existing companies and who have mostly not increased headcount at their hedge desks.

We can see this pattern in the legal industry and others. They are making much more money than before. They are using a lot more computers than before and employing a lot of lower level "skilled functionaries." Hedge funds run off physics students who do the computer programming and modeling, law firms off ambitious graduates who hope to "make partner."

As such, education may be of value in that you can be one of those physicists or ambitious law graduates. But they are not being paid commensurate with the profits in the industry. They certainly are not employed in the kind of numbers that would make up for the job losses in other industries.

There is no real evidence to suggest that the "abstract skills" portion of the economy needs a lot more workers, certainly not on the scale of the unemployment we're seeing. The whole point of the abstract skills revolution is to keep automating things. Likewise, the limited number of the "super-rich" only need so many yoga gurus etc.

[demisod]

Much truth in Mark's ruminations. I think the shared experiences of WWII and the depression fostered a sense of the common good that has been lost in today's atomized society.

Regarding the change in mindset of today's managers: recall that IBM did not lay a single worker off in the great depression. Or consider HP's original mission statement regarding employees:

5. Employees. To provide employment opportunities for HP people that include the opportunity to share in the company's success, which they help make possible. To provide for them job security based on performance, and to provide the opportunity for personal satisfaction that comes from a sense of accomplishment in their work.

There is a difference in treating people as ends in themselves or as means to an end. In that sense, today's corporations have become deeply immoral.

[kharris]

In the same sense that the shift in ethos that our host desribes has influenced domestic labor arrangements, I suspect that a shift in ethos has been significant in the course of globalization and of the uses to which technology is put in the workplace. More powerful computers and cheaper transport were coming, one way or another. What we have done in response to those developments could have been different. This, I think, is just my repetition of the point made by James Killus. Corporate managers try to avoid technology that makes them captive to workers. That is not the inevitable result of more powerful technology. That is the result of an effort to shift power to owners and managers, and away from workers.

The post-WWII social contract has been overthrown. Lower and middle-class guys have not been called on to save the world as we know it since WWII, and the cohesion and sense of obligation and fear of populist demagoguery that WWII bred is gone.

The rejection of "class warfare" is foisted on the lower and middle-class by people who are themselves still engaging in class warfare. They just want to make it seem illegitimate for their opponents to fight back.

[Meh]

Further, the increased demand for "interpersonal skills" is largely increased demand at the current price level. Since we know that the current price level for entry-level service sector jobs (wiping brows etc.) is not commensurate with the pay levels of manufacturing jobs being lost, are we just getting poorer as an economy?

[kharris]

demisod,

I swear I wasn't plagarizing. Check the time stamp on each of our comments. Like your thinking, though.

[me]

Excellent article and comments all.

"Educate all workers so they are better at interpersonal or abstract skills "

Right. educate at what? IBM fires 50,000 US workers and replaces them with 50,000+ Indians. educated at ;what? What do we learn that Indians don't do for 10 cents on the dollar? When they have no environmental or social or infrastructure or war expense, how do we compete?

And calling us losers than have been screwed by the IBMs of the world doesn't help. Trust me, 4 years of grad school but if you have been fired you are toast, especially in your 50s.

[paine]

" The interesting thing is that it is often used as an argument to justify non-intervention. However, it should be utilized as a tool to allow us to obtain the outcomes we desire. "

yes indeed

like a science of medicine
devoted solely to debunking
magical cures that actually were worse then doing nothing
and then one bright day
coming to the final step
and declaring a dogmatic conclusion

"all medicine is magical hocus pocus
and harmful ....
when it comes
do nothing about your ill health folks
it can only make matters worse "

[ScentOfViolets]

I wave my wand of Power . . . just so. Now everyone has the equivalent of three college degrees. They speak and read three languages fluently, they program in c++, java, and cobol, they can do mutlivariate calculus and statistics. And, to boot, their average intelligence has jumped twenty percent. Question: will this enhance their job prospects?

Answer: probably not. Even if everyone is superbly educated, someone - several someones will still have to do the basic scutwork. There will always be hewers of wood and drawers of water. And empiraclly, more education has not helped. It appears that what has happened is that the people who traditinally make more money by virtue of their education have been artificially lumped with those in the highest earning categories. Iow, Bill Gates walks into a bar . . .

Will these observations have any impact on basic price theory? Have there been any important papers written that people take notice of? Is Galbraith being taught again? I always thought his 'countervailing powers' theory, the one that made him such an iconoclast, made the most sense.

[save_the_rustbelt]

The political backlash is growing (see Ohio 2006).

I think much of the backlash will be led by disgruntled 50-somethings who worked hard, played by the rules, and then got screwed.

On another note, during the NAFTA debate of 1993 and 1994, both politicians and economists seemed very confident of our transition to an economy full of high value service jobs. Oops.

[save_the_rustbelt]

"...the ones who wipe brows in hospitals..."

A rather 1950s view of hospital care. Duh.

[The Baron]

Throughout the 50's and 60's my grandfather was the Chief Editor for a newspaper strike breaking team. The paper he normally worked at over-hired and when a strike happened they left a skeleton crew behind and went across country to run the newspaper being struck until it was over. Two months before I was born he was murdered by the mob, leaving my grandmother to have to find a job and earn a living for the first time in her life.

I grew up with my father working as a low-level tech in the Navy, and my mother having to work full time. I had to work full time to put myself through college and it took a decade to pay off my college loans. Yet today, I earn six figures as an engineer and have all of my retirement and much of my savings in stocks and yes, even some hedge funds.

If my hedge fund manager is getting me great returns, I have no problem paying him well for it. If his salary is going up faster than my returns, that is what I would find deeply immoral... and my response would be to change funds. How many of you hold stocks? I'll wager the majority, if not all, at least in some form of retirement fund.

Are each of you encouraging your fund managers and the companies you are part owners of to reduce your value and your income in order to maintain inefficiencies and support less efficient workers and their families? Remember, if you own stock, or have a retirement fund, then you are the 'evil' owner that gets railed against and hammered flat so often on this forum.

I've said before, the great equalizer, and the thing that can save the middle-class, yea even the poor, is ownership in the companies, especially with dividend returns.

[calmo]

So many touching comments (this B the 3rd one remarking on the fine bouquet here...tisnot narcissistic, tis pride).
I can see that Icarus bounced off Mark's contemplation of the role of unions providing workers with some power by noting that despite Iccy flying way to close to the sun, this also provided higher peach prices...meaning that their empowerment meant that non-union workers esp, and peach eaters in general, would be paying them a royalty, some entitlement, something extra and well, let's just come out an say it: something inefficient. [I just love this Cheshire cat smilin line from the Profit Maximizers, you?]

Still standing?
Ok, only because you're strapped to the chair, maybe.
I shall wave Scent0's magic wand...like this and reduce you to an inglorious heap on the floor.
I tol ya it wasn't narcisisstic...I tol ya.

[cm]

James Killus: "Corporate managers are never interested in a new technology that requires greater skills to operate it; they reflexively resist "being held hostage" by the skilled workers."

I mentioned this probably a few times already, but I once saw the latter in the unofficial (management) version of a "process model" slide show that somebody managed to share with me, specifically SEI-CMM.

The basic idea in all process models is to transfer the know-how and project/product specific knowledge from the workers' heads on to paper, from where the "process" can be executed by anybody with a skill set sufficient to fill in the inevitable blanks of carrying out the "minutiae". Basically taylorization of "knowledge work".

It works wherever the dumbing down of the work/product by removing the creative factor doesn't make it useless, or unsellable.

[kroniks]

"What do we learn that Indians don't do for 10 cents on the dollar?"

There is no way to compete with those countries in terms of labor cost. I believe those country's labor surplus alone outnumbers America's entire workforce. Even if American labor goes down to 10 cents, they can and probably will compete by going down to .o1 cents.

I'd say move away from the labor game. Produce something besides labor that is competitive. After all, is there really a choice?

[Callahan]

The losers? "The sagging middle," says Princeton University economist Alan Krueger.

For one, I am glad to have this acknowledged now and again as I'm in the saggin-ist (saggier or whatever) part of the middle. If this keeps up, maybe politicians will acknowledge as well, and even better maybe they will find a way to stop the g.d. sag.

I'm certainly no XPURT, but I'm of a mind that cutting taxes for the g.d. filthy rich, and increasing CEO (and the like) pay AIN'T the answer.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Kroniks: and what would that be?

Callahan: has this changed your politicl outlook voting patterns?

[Winston]

Considering the laziness and incompetence coupled with high costs that I see in the unionized companies that I have to work with, all I can say about the decline of unions is good riddance! I think that the new ethic - employers demanding and getting the most work for the minimum price - is far better for producing wealth and is also better for the character of society. Then again, I come from an ethnic group that was excluded from many unions in the 1950's, so that's how my family has always had to compete.

[Spiegel]

Seems to me, in the near future there will be only "green zones" and "read zone". Better work hard to be in the green one :)

[paine]

line for the record books

"Produce something besides labor that is competitive"

from the minds of .....

this one's worthy
of
jonathan swift
or
at the very least
yogi

[Callahan]

Save_the_rustbelt say's "Callahan: has this changed your politicl outlook voting patterns?"

No, I'm a (now) a Indeependant/Libertarian/Populist/Middle of the road conservative of sorts who tends to lean to the left a little, ... looking for some real honest to goodness great leadership of any kind or manner no matter which way he/she leans.

[Denis Drew]

Europe has faces the same technological and globalization factors we do but workers over there are immensely better off. That is because Europeans never fell for the misguided idea that the free market has built in checks and balances and that it is just as powerful a counterbalance to ownership for labor to go down the street to work for someone else as it is to have effective unionization and populist legislation.

Most of this "adoption" may be pegged to our "self-reliant pioneer" outlook in turn pegged to a better paid American labor history in the nineteenth century. We may finally be waking up to the race to the bottom default program on the free market OS -- the "hidden hand" is not universally beneficial post the relatively "perfect competition" of Adam Smith's pre-industrial era.

I am not comparing us to Europe's welfare -- as in taking care of emergencies -- state. I am talking about higher pay which should come first.

It would add all of 3.5% to the cost of GDP output to go from a $5.15/hr minimum wage to a $12.50/hr federal minimum wage (last figures I have worked out). That is about how much we grow every 2/3 years per capita. Would be the end of most poverty with a raise for 40% of American workers.

Illinois recently moved to a $7.50/hr minimum wage and (guess what) the nearby McDonalds is now overloaded with customers on some days but (guess what) it is a very third world overload. Could the higher minimum wage have recirculated enough money to the lowest paid pockets? Hint; before the wage increase, no American born workers could even seen behind the counter of any McDonalds around here.

says...

Mark: "a social relationship between employers and employees that kept employers from pushing wages as low as they possibly could go"

It's tough to press your boot on someone's face when you will have to see them in church on Sunday (or the next PTA meeting, whatever).

Consider how many basic, un-spoken bonds existed between your neighbors during your childhood, bonds of blood, faith, values, etc.

Today we get nuance -- as for an example, Obama's recent comment about not wanted to wear a lapel flag.

Now, no one will agree that we need to agree on ANYTHING, so it is all reduced to a game, where we economists, attorneys, etc. try to substitute CONTRACTS for what were previously smoother-running social relationships.

[paine]

"I think that the new ethic - employers demanding and getting the most work for the minimum price - is far better for producing wealth ..."

who's wealth Win ??

"....and is also better for the character of society"

CHARACTER ????

" I come from an ethnic group
that was excluded from many unions
in the 1950's
so that's how my family
has always had to compete "

what as line crossers ???

the proprietor of my own soul alone

once a great notion in yeoman times
now
makes for a mere scabitude

proud superior self made self reliant
self respecting ..... but none the less ....
laughed at .....jeered even

prepare to get eaten too fine fellow
or trampled under foot

come the great class
collisions ahead
unless types like you winston
run under one or other
of the two big class flags
yup
unless you run with a big herd ......

am i right in guessing
you'll side with el blanco mr management

[paine]

"I've said before, the great equalizer, and the thing that can save the middle-class, yea even the poor, is ownership in the companies"

"even the poor "

lets all try to find a way
to end up above the middle ....shall we

[paine]

"I'm a (now) a Indeependant/Libertarian/Populist/Middle of the road conservative of sorts who tends to lean to the left a little"

another prize winner
what a bramble ..but real in its satire ....
as real as rain

[Callahan]

real as rain, but mainly on the plain from paine.

Know any GREAT leaders?

[Winston]

Paine,

Since you asked, yes, as strike breakers and then as owners of non-union businesses. Realizing that they couldn't depend on unions or the goodwill of employers for their well-being the last generation of my family worked their butts off to get enough money to found their own bushinesses or buy an education that got them to the top of the middle class. It's my generation's duty to advance beyond that. Were unions that ensure good pay for little work available to us, we would have been much less successful.

[Peter Schaeffer]

"I can't imagine the workers at a peach canning factory going on strike now"

Quite true and Open Borders are the reason why. The workers mostly don't speak English, but understand all too well how quickly they would be replaced if they tried to go on strike.

Anyone who doubts this should read one of the many articles about how immigration destroyed the once middle-class, unionized meat packing industry (the workers that is).

For one sad example, see At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die; Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race. For another, check out Teddy Kennedy’s recent remarks denouncing the very idea that meat packing workers (“chicken pluckers” according to TK) could by paid $10-15 an hour.

[Horatio Parker]

...looking back it's hard not to believe that the evidence somehow misses an ethic that was present then, something larger than unions alone, something that is less present today, a social relationship between employers and employees that kept employers from pushing wages as low as they possibly could go.

It was called fear of communism. Remember in those days the Soviet Union was a global superpower and a considerable portion of the planet was red. FDR wasn't a populist because he loved the workers; he was afraid of what they would do ie revolt.

If you go further back, before the depression, the labor situation more closely resembles current conditions.

As someone who also grew up in a factory town where a person could graduate from HS, get a union job and immediately get married and buy a house and two cars, the idea that altruism or a sense of justice was responsible for conditions then appeals to me greatly, but I fear it ain't so.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Callahan:

If you find that great leader sign me up - after 35 years I have come around full cycle....

"The establishment sucks!"

[Peter Schaeffer]

"The more popular solution -- at least among economists -- is a familiar one: Educate all workers so they are better at interpersonal or abstract skills (the jobs of the future) as opposed to dial-turning or keyboard-pounding (rapidly disappearing jobs of the past)."

What nonsense. Anyone with a trace of familiarity with the NAEP data knows this isn’t going to happen. High school “graduates” with below basic reading and math skills aren’t going to become hedge fund managers in any version of the real world. And remember, 30% of kids dropout.

Indeed, the skill levels of the US labor force will decline over the next few decades. Take a look at Coming US challenge: a less literate workforce A larger share of workers will have minimal reading skills in 2030 than today, according to a report released Monday. For a shock, check out the chart in the article.

The US needs to provide a way for ordinary folks to earn enough to support themselves and their families. Unfortunately that means challenging the fundamental tenets of elite globalization.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Paine - keep up the good work. Refreshing..........

[Callahan]

Oh tee la tee dee, tee la tee dum, ... tis Autumn: "Fred Sanford" circa the good ol 70's. Ah, Autumn, makes one think of leaves falling at my door, and pumpkins and little goblins, and the undead. And the UNPOOR, yes that's my new fangled class name for the ever sagging middle of the middle class. We are unpoor (barely) God helps us, because we may not be able to hang onto that lofty status very long.

Anyway being among the unpoor, I'll try not to make any more of those disparaging remarks against income inequality any more, as you never know, one day one of those overpaid underworked a-hole ceo's may be my boss.

[cm]

Winston: I can assure you laziness and incompetence is everywhere. In most places advancement and dismissal is while somewhat correlated with merit, not very highly so. More so with perception management and back-scratching ("interpersonal skills"), and the plain luck of making the right move at the right time.

Usually the lazy and incompetent are not worse off than the diligent and competent when it comes to finances and quality of life.

[cm]

Denis Drew: Even in "Europe", we are seeing safety net "reforms", and the emergence of an underclass as well as stunted prospects for the traditional concept of middle class, while not being entirely new phenomena, are increasingly being acknowledged and become a fixture of public discourse.

[The Baron]

paine, yes, we all need to strive above the middle. We will know we have succeeded not by everyone migrating to the middle (Communism), or even by narrowing the gap between the top and the bottom (Socialism), but by moving the middle tomorrow equal to the top yesterday, and the bottom to yesterday's middle (rising tide floats all boats Capitalism).

Note that the current Libertarian, corporate-oligarchy Capitalism is not a rising-tide model, and not what I am suggesting.

[calmo]

Callahan's Unpoor speak out: we might relinquish the former modest title 'Middle Class', but not without a scrap, and not without the dejected resignation that comes with 'The Unpoor'.
No, we demand something more befitting our education...if not that then our traditional entitlements...if not that then our accustomed, if somewhat dated, role as drivers of this economy which has turned into a sagging morass of lazy good-for-nothin-hard-on-grubs (the poor).

So we cannot be them, or like them or even associated with them...even in contrast.

We, the Unpoor, lament the choice not chosen: the degentrified, the Nearly Rich.

[anne]

Mark Thoma:

"I know the empirical evidence doesn't give a lot of weight to the union story for preventing inequality, but looking back it's hard not to believe that the evidence somehow misses an ethic that was present then, something larger than unions alone, something that is less present today, a social relationship between employers and employees that kept employers from pushing wages as low as they possibly could go. Things weren't all rosy and wonderful then, far from it, and there's some chance I'm remembering "good old days," but I do believe society's expectation of what an owner is obligated to do for workers has changed.

"Whether that's good or bad depends upon what comes next. Our social institutions are clearly in upheaval as the obligations I felt as a kid are being shed in the name of global competition and other forces of change. Perhaps we'll replace our old institutions with newer ones, with health care systems that are even better than we had before, systems that serve everyone instead of just those lucky enough to work in the right firms or be part of the right social groups. Perhaps we'll find schemes to share the gains broadly, to provide retirement security, access to education, protection from job losses, and so on - that's a process that is currently unfolding. I'm hopeful, and we seem to be collectively aware that change is needed on a variety of fronts, but change is never easy and, if it comes at all, it is often frustratingly roundabout and slow. I don't expect this time to be any different."

[paine]

very interesting herr baron

if capitalism is an expediency
a set of social inventions
justified
not by any intrinsic value
not as a good in itself
not for example
because capitalism from time to time
inflicts
lovely hard knock lessons
in the virtue of greater and greater toil
(as winston notices )

not a sacred socially refining process
but a mere collection of crass means to ends

if so
then when will we not longer need
these mundane
private profit calc
type trifles
this exploitation of man by man
this system of producing
our material existence
only so far and so much
as the process
can be predicated
on one chap buying some
other chap's labor time
just to make "something"
for himself later
off the sale of that labor time's product

a thousand years ????

[Peter Schaeffer]

paine,

I believe you have a lot to say of value, even if I don't always agree with you. However, your elliptical writing style gets the way (in my opinion).

My $0.02.

[The Baron]

paine, it is interesting that you insist that for profit to be made, "exploitation of man by man" is necessary. Myself, I give an honest day's labor for an honest day's pay. I don't feel "exploited", and I can assure you that neither does my employer. The customers continue to come to us, so I suppose they don't feel "exploited" either. Was Mark's mother being exploited in the cannery? Was my grandfather at the press? Does your concept of man not exploiting man only include some magical means of producing everyone's wants and needs, and distributing it with no need for individual effort? Sounds great, but I think it will be far, far longer than 1000 years before we can create and distribute food/goods/comfort with no effort by anyone.

No economic system is an intrinsically valuable thing in itself. End outcomes always have to be the understood goal. Otherwise you are just playing games/god with peoples lives. The end does not justify the means, but the means are not an end in themselves.

If the goal is some reasonable level of comfort for everyone, then that does not exclude some being fabulously wealthy, but does exclude anyone from being truly destitute, even in the face of "lovely hard knock lessons".

[calmo]

I know, before the typo gods moidered it:
"However your e[c]liptical writing style
gets [not in] the way [eclipses at work]".

Ok, I bid at least a nickel Pete...and think you are underestimatin your real worth and that connection to the gods.

[The Baron]

Poor in America means a far different thing than poor in Darfur, or even in China or India.

Are we exploiting the poor in Africa and Asia to support the higher level of 'poor' in the U.S.? For some to be wealthy, is it an absolute necessity for some to be destitute?

[Patricia Shannon]

Peter Schaeffer
Since I have been at odds with you on some issues, I want to make sure you know I think you also have a lot to say that is of value.

Baron,
True, we are better off than many countries, eg., Burma.
But the 90,000 people a year who DIE in the U.S. because they don't have health insurance might not be comforted by that.

Because of conditions in the IT job market, esp. age discrimination, I ended up working as a waitress for four years. The result - no air conditioning, no central heat, no running hot water. A monthly check from my father paid for my car insurance, which is required by law in Georgia. I was one of the very few who had a car. A donation from my church paid for the initial $30 fee at a clinic that charges a sliding fee; it was only $5 a visit after that, but I couldn't afford that first $30.

[billy]

It's far telling of why this problem is not going to be resolved by reading the comments here.

1)To paraphrase Buffet, how would profits in excess of 10% be possible in a capitalist system?
Telling that none here wants to talk about the rigging of markets with patents, copyrights, govt largesses and regulation. More telling is the underlying belief that all this rigging is fine, the problem is that we are not insiders, and all would be solved if we could all get into the privileged circle that benefits form these riggings (via education, stock ownership or whatever). Only if we could all get to be insiders and rip off outsiders ( the fantasy folk who will never complain about getting ripped off)

2)The tinkering with the monetary system, which always seems to benefit the super-rich. The super-rich are too large to fail, so they should be bailed out to prevent a collapse of the system. Just to keep the economy going, so that us poor sods could earn a living, the rich have to be protected.

Can this racket be reformed so that the economy can keep going even if the rich fail? Yeah, but why should it be? Why would you ever want a system where the rich are accountable? Accountability is for peasants.

says...

pete

my typing style is
its like truman capote's lisp

i can't write any other way
not
since i open-ed finnegan's wake
its an aff-lick-tion since age 17

in my other indigitalization
as mad cap enemy of the two party system
my blog partner puts my posts into
regular english

how he does starting
with my usual ring around the ringlish
is beyond me

he's an f'in' saint beghorrah

says...

billy
"Telling that none here wants to talk about the rigging of markets with patents, copyrights, govt largesses and regulation"

i agree
we need to point to this THE IP scam
over and over again

but i hasten to add many here
have this notion in their saddle bag

we be with ya mate

[paine]

"paine, it is interesting that you insist that for profit to be made, "exploitation of man by man" is necessary"

just a definition really
in the world of burg-science
a tautology
a purely logical
and therefore vapid system

call it producer's surplus if you will

but start with the self evident assumption
all systems of commodity exchange
have an embedded value system
which is in substance
based on relative labor time

it gets involuted beyond that point
so i pass by it in normal driving

the point
pure profit is pure rip

[The Baron]

Patricia, your case is exactly the type of reason that I noted that the model of Capitalism as implemented in America (and yes other places), is not what I would consider even close to the type of system I would advocate. billy's comments are good enumerations of some of the most flagrant abuses inherent in the current system.

What depresses me is the instant fall from grace which comes at the end of billy's comment, and is included in far too many comments here and elsewhere. The pervasive inter-class hatred. The 'damn them for not being like me'. The despair of ever being able to achieve lofty heights of leisure and comfort. This comes from the basis as I pointed out in my first post, that the feeling of inter class mobility is being lost. The poor feel they are damned to be poor forever, and the rich don't fear ever losing their wealth. paine's glorification of the moral value of a system that allows people to starve as lessons against bad decisions is far easier to contemplate as reasonable than the sheer class-envy hatred that would damn the world just to spite the rich.

But paine, like Marx you forget the intrinsic value of capital, and the differences in intrinsic labor value. Actually to Marx, Capital was all that had value and the labor time of everyone was equal so therefor valueless. If someone gives me a place in which to labor, his contribution, though not quantifiable in labor time, adds value to my labor time for which he deserves compensation. Beyond that your assertion that all systems of commodity exchange are based on relative labor time I agree with, but I don't see pure profit being pure rip as a logical conclusion. If I am better at growing beans and you are better at raising sheep, sheep have a higher utility value to me than beans, while the reverse is true for you. So we can each trade... my giving up low-to-me value beans for sheep, and you giving up your surplus sheep in order for my high-to-you value beans. We both have a nice dinner, and both feel that we 'earned' a profit on the exchange. Where is the rip in that? Translate the medium of exchange to dollars, and the labor functions to employment types of your choosing, and all it consists of is just abstracting that basic, primitive economic model.

Pure profit can come out of exchanges between equals, allowing both a better living and more comfort than either could achieve alone. That was an early lesson in my Micro Econ 101.

[paine]

"Actually to Marx, Capital was all that had value and the labor time of everyone was equal so therefor valueless "

respectfully herr baron
this is not
my grandfather's karl marx
nor mine
you are like a knife throwing act
that doesn't stop
even after putting one
right thru his target gal's gizzard

far be it from me
at kindly mark T's site
to open a cage by cage epitomization
of marx's
theory of surplus value

after all its
one of my faith's great mystery cults eh ??

its deeper inner highly contradictory
secrets
are
reserved for our high priests' eyes and ears only

[paine]

baron
i suspect we share a theory of exchange dynamics
and price kinematics
then again who doesn't

maybe in some haunted house sense
we may even share
a room with twin beds called
the theory of exchange value
though unlike ish and queee
we sleep in different beds

but clearly
any possible
theory of surplus value
we don't share

in fact i'm not sure
you believe surplus value exists
except in its inert form
as pure economic rent

"If someone gives me a place
in which to labor,
his contribution,
though not quantifiable in labor time,
adds value to my labor time
for which he deserves compensation"

once built it starts to lose
its profits of enterprise value
in the absence of market barriers

and once only
a passively gotten
revenue stream

you seem to still agree
with burger eyed social reality
in seeing
only a righteous source
of ownership reward and compensation

and to that i say

more power to ya

[Patricia Shannon]

Baron,

I would say it's the rich who have declared war on the rest.

[paine]

"If I am better at growing beans and you are better at raising sheep, sheep have a higher utility value to me than beans, while the reverse is true for you. So we can each trade... my giving up low-to-me value beans for sheep, and you giving up your surplus sheep in order for my high-to-you value beans. We both have a nice dinner, and both feel that we 'earned' a profit on the exchange. Where is the rip in that? "

there is none

till you hire a farm hand

[ken melvin]

I think any thinking is in the abstract. Amazing is when someone pretends to believe that employers care about their employers - no wonder the disconnect on illegals. Enlightened daze? When HP made more than they knew what to do with on government contracts, they were very enlightened. Now daze, they compete with Dell and there’ll be no more fruit baskets and floor seminars.

Every rat painter, carpenter, plumber, machinist, … hates the union. None will admit that without they’d be paid diddly.

[paine]

"Pure profit can come out of exchanges between equals"

fair enough use of the word profit
but its not econ 101's use
of the word ...is it ???

to avoid nedless confusion
i'd rather call that "profit"
from simple exchange
a mutual gain

an act of volition
resulting in a gain --an added benefit--
for both parties

and yes
the hiring of the farm hand
is also such an exchange

but here we must leave the ...
oh you know the rest

[paine]

baron i salute you

if you and laff and icarus and many more
did not exist

anne would have to invent you all

[kthomas]

Don't mess with paine.

Not only is he annoying, but usually correct. And witty. You are witty, paine.

[SanFranciscoJim]

This is sort of inevitable, as the wealth of America goes down and the wealth of China goes up. I don't think it is a bad thing at all, personally, that the American middle class gets knocked off its perch on top of the world.

There is no particular reason why we need an SUV in every driveway and a bathroom for every child, which is what American workers believe is their birthright. We are going to have to learn to live in a less energy intensive fashion, and perhaps even, Quelle Horreur, have our children share bedrooms, as was common in the good ole' days Mark talks about.

I don't think the middle class is suffering from a hollowing out, as it is from a frustration at being left behind by the emerging global managerial class. Middle class workers still have homes (except perhaps on the west coast), still own multiple automobiles, have bigger and better color TVs than ever, I don't see what the gripe is, except for the fact that they can see that someone else has even more.

[James Killus]

A strikebreaking newspaper editor murdered by the mob? Really? That should be a famous case, Baron. I'm serious; that would make a great book and movie. Could you point me to the historical record for that?

My mother worked for a newspaper that was sold to a chain in the 1970s. With a little more detail, I could ask her about it.

Funny that I've never heard of this incident, but I'm not an expert in the area. How did they know it was a mob hit? What sort of investigation was there? Did it ever come to trial?

[kthomas]

Jim, i agree with most of what you say.

It's hard to argue that America's middle class is not suffering. It's too obvious at this point.

The good ole days...I like that. Man, those Baby Boomers sure did well...looks like myslef and the next generation will have to learn to live with less from now on.

[calmo]

James, soon to be noteworthier author, do you feel that The Baron needs to invent/embellish his history to market the case for the capitalist crusade against the socialist hordes --the communist sympathizers --the ner'do-wells for ner'do-tryin... --the fatasses?
You callin his bluff...pinko?
You (lover of the narrative) deliberately chasin an autobiographical detail because you think it has no bearing on the argument?
That one's history should not need to be invoked to garnish a position that might otherwise not stand on its merits, but needs to marshall causes (here, our ungrounded sympathy... possibly our unguarded pity)?
You got me chewin the gum...you do.

[billy]

What depresses me is the instant fall from grace which comes at the end of billy's comment, and is included in far too many comments here and elsewhere. The pervasive inter-class hatred. The 'damn them for not being like me'. The despair of ever being able to achieve lofty heights of leisure and comfort.

Does Buffet complain about the racket because he is in "despair of ever being able to achieve lofty heights" ?

This comes from the basis as I pointed out in my first post, that the feeling of inter class mobility is being lost.
See above. Get real.

If my hedge fund manager is getting me great returns, I have no problem paying him well for it. If his salary is going up faster than my returns, that is what I would find deeply immoral... and my response would be to change funds. How many of you hold stocks? I'll wager the majority, if not all, at least in some form of retirement fund.

There, thats the solution. If only we can all get to be the rippers and rip of the "others". Why can't we all become rippers? Better, if that's too distasteful, hire someone else to do the ripping, It's only immoral if the paid henchman takes a bigger cut than you.

[gordon]

James Killus, maybe Baron is referring to Bloor Schleppey.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Here's a shocker....

My wife had Larry Kudlow on in background for noise while I was working. Dudlow was talking about Hillary Clinton and her programs blah, blah.

Then Kudlow said something like this..... (very rough paraphrase).....

Hillary Clinton is addressing middle class concerns and worries, and no one in the GOP is doing so. I wonder why not. The worries seem real, and no one in the GOP is addressing them.....blah, blah, blah

That was a shock coming from Kudlow, maybe he is less tone deaf than the leaders of the GOP.

[paine]

k thomas
i hardly deserve your kindness
as needed
i'll try to up the settings
on my annoy-o-meter

[James Killus]

Thanks Gordon, the Schleppey case is indeed fascinating, though it differs in many details from The Baron's (no editors, just typesetters, no murders or the mob, just companies so intent on breaking unions that they are willing to spend outlandish sums to do it, etc.).

calmo, though I am indeed a tad skeptical of the claim, it's certainly not outside of possibility that an editor engaged in a breaking a newspaper strike might get himself whacked. Certainly some of the unions of the 50s and 60s had mob ties; I'm given to wondering about that. The numerous "red scares" of the 20th Century created a niche for by-god-we-have-no-communists-here unions, and that niche was sometimes filled with those who had previously organized themselves along other lines, which is to say mobsters. Would there have been as many cases of that if "communist" were not considered the very worst thing that a human being could be? Hmm, I've phrased that in a way that points to a conclusion, haven't I? Sorry.

In any case, a family story of why someone's father died before they are born is always an interesting narrative, and I'm genuinely curious, both as to how the story came to be told, and what the real evidence for it is. This really has less to do with the current topic of discussion and more to do with my own curiosities. But I fear that The Baron is not inclined to satisfy my curiosity.

[evagrius]

Anybody here worked in a cannery?

I did while just out of high school in order to get money for living expenses while going to university.

I remember those women working at the peach line. Tough work, sorting those hard peaches, ( yes they're not ripe- they're hard as rocks- except for the Alberta peaches).I had to take huge pans of peaches weighing 35-30 lbs to another line. Dressed in rubber boots, a plastic apron and hair covering.

The day would start at 6 am with steam coming out of the canning machine where the peaches went. By the afternoon, there would be no steam, it was that hot.

Tough work. Women used to faint at the line but the line kept going.

1/2 hour lunch, barely enough to eat and drink something. Couldn't sit down too much, you might not be able to get up again.

The worst line was tomatoes- they stunk to high heaven.

Lots of Mexicans worked there. They were legal, worked two shifts a day in different canneries. They earned enough money to go back to Mexico and be able to support their family while working the low paid jobs there.

There were lots of Portuguese and Italian women. They worked there every summer for years.

I'd go home exhausted. 6 days a week 8-10 hours a day.

I was lucky. I could go to college.

Thanks Mr Thoma for making me remember those days. It was the first lesson I received on how to respect working people. I've never forgotten it.

[Peter Schaeffer]

"That was a shock coming from Kudlow, maybe he is less tone deaf than the leaders of the GOP."

I guess I am as shocked as you. However, with a few notable exceptions (Duncan Hunter on trade and immigration, Tom Tancredo on immigration, of late Huckabee on outsourcing), the Republican candidates are in the death grip of elite globalization. As a consequence, the Republican nominee is already toast in 2008 and probably several election cycles beyond.

Kudlow has apparently figured this out and is terrified of the consequences (higher capital gains taxes presumably).

Of course, the Democrats are no better overall. With a few exceptions they are worse on immigration and better (more protectionist) on trade. However, they have the huge advantage of supporting welfare state expansion. That leaves the Rs out in the cold.

The funny part is that the Republican nominees don’t face any downside in the primaries from attacking elite globalization. Republican voters are strongly opposed to Open Borders and “free” trade (a switch from years ago). Nor does opposing elite globalization cause problems in the general election (given the views of rank-and-file Democrats and Independents).

What’s the problem then? Sadly, the higher echelons of the Republican party are in thrall to Wall Street and the ideology of the Wall Street Journal. Huckabee caught this rather well.

"I am not interested in being the candidate of Wall Street but of Main Street. Wealthy CEOs get paid 500 times what the average worker does, but they are not necessarily 500 times smarter or harder working and that is wrong."

[Peter Schaeffer]

Dissent,

Don't waste your time on the Los Angeles Times. Remember Hollywood is rather close to LA. A quck check of the California state budget shows that funding for higher education is $19.8 billion versus $10 billion for corrections.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Evagrius,

I never worked in a cannery. But I did do heavy landscaping for a while (building walls out of railroad ties). A former girlfriend worked at a cannery in Alaska. She had many interesting stories to tell. The work wasn't particularly dangerous for her. Other crews killed king crabs with baseball bats.

[calmo]

Thanks James for that careful reply and exercising an option I could not bring myself to engage with newbie, 6 figure salaried engineer, client of HFs and for all we know, baldie: The Baron. [As an experienced and accomplished environmental scientist, James, does this sound convincing for an engineer or do you have to stretch that engineer collection bag to fit The Baron in?
btw, go out of your way to kick my ass should I mention my "earned" income.]

ken melvin (moderately "abstract") stirs me to reread the concluding Wessel bit

The more popular solution -- at least among economists -- is a familiar one: Educate [not train] all workers so they are better at interpersonal or abstract skills (the jobs [not careers] of the future) as opposed to dial-turning or keyboard-pounding (rapidly disappearing jobs of the past)[technicians, but I wonder if this is true]

and do we understand, (Think people!), that Wessel wants to distinguish himself from that "more popular among economists" belief...or not?
I'd say Wessel is smart enough to know that we can't all be beautiful or ...abstract...enough to write for the WSJ...even.

But that dishonesty (You figure that's a stretch? that Wessel states this tacitly for the cognoscenti and explicitly (the omission) for the abstract-challenged?) is not what bothers me here.
No, it is not the usual conflation of education and training.
It is the gloss-over of those in Finance (familiar readers of the WSJ) who are neither well-educated nor well-trained when one compares compensation levels with say physicians or any non-finance oriented academic.
The Fortune 400 are not academics, but of course we ignore this spike and defer to making soporific remarks about the middle sag.

[john c. halasz]

Not to interrupt the nostalgia fest and class war/envy food fight here, but that old grey-beard Moor had that prediction/prophecy shtick of the forces of production under capitalism increasingly coming into contradiction with the relations of production, the former denoting not just the broad work "force", but the development of the technical means of production, as well. In other words, the technical development of the means of production would be increasingly constricted and bent into the service of the aims of the capitalists and the (re)production of the capital relation, at the expense of the full range of technical possibilities and the broadest distribution of their benefits. Since some here have noted experiential symptoms of such a tendency, and since, by definition, increases in technical productivity, ceteris paribus, decrease the need/demand for labor and thereby devalue it, especially insofar as commoditized labor loses its share of control of production processes and can be de-skilled, I think that that old nub is worth picking at and thinking about, in terms of its tendential implications and counteractions, (which, er, might indicate not relying on the unregulated dynamics of "free" markets, but require programmatic state policy and public investment). And the consideration of ecological constraints and resource limitations is not the least of the matter. It's not that I would want to return to any teleological metaphysics or unchanging "truth", and any imaginary social compact might be the least of the wreckages. But relying on the machinations and reshufflings increasingly financialized, leveraged, and fictitious capital markets to see us through to a naturally sustainable and socially harmonious- (or even tolerable)- order might be the grandest religious myth of them all.

[cm]

evagrius: I had a few weeks grad school summer job in a nursing home cleaning out beds, helping patients dress, administering meals, cleaning up after messes etc. That was rather instructive.

I guess coming from the "right background" one can easily go through life sheltered from all that and never set foot on a floor where actual labor happens. Makes one the more qualified to pontificate about labor "flexibility" and make judgements about (lack of) low brow skills I suppose.

[evagrius]

Well, after graduating from university with a degree in phiosophy, I had to settle for working in an electronics plant that produced silicon chips for digital watches. This was just at the start of the fabled Silicon Valley.
It certainly was a good learning experience there too. Seeing managers bluster their way through meetings. Talking to bright, obviously, but linguistically inarticulate engineers, ( I'm talking about the native born ones- the Chinese and Indian chaps were remarkably literate and articulate). Trying to get promoted meant doing a lot of sycophancy which I'm terrible at.
The work was illuminating- seeing women, mainly minorities, work with microscopes attaching the chips to boards. Everyone wearing white gowns as if they were surgeons or doctors. "Clean rooms", fluorescent lighting everywhere, ( no natural lighting- you really couldn't tell the time).
Packing little chips into tubes all day long. Counting PC boards. I ended up in the chemical mixing department making the chemical formulas for the chip manufacturing. Nice acids, ( hydrochloric, hydrofloric, I forget which one feels like water and can go through your skin finally dissolving your bones- phosphoric acid was used. Thick as Karo syrup- it's an ingredient in Coca-Cola, makes the sugar stay solvent), nice strong bases to counter the acid etching of silicon, a chemical that was so powerful that if it had dropped to the floor the building would have blown up. The first day on the job, I picked up a gallon jug of acetic acid. The bottom fell off and the acid dropped into the large boots I was wearing, ( had to wear "protective clothing, mainly knee high boots, a plastic coverall, gloves and a plastic face shield), and I could see smoke rising from my pants. Fortunately, my co-worker shoved me into the emergency shower and all I received were yellow stains on my heels. I think I had the first pair of acid washed jeans in the area. All those chemicals were washed down the drain, supposedly into a holding tank.
I've never been impressed by Silicon Valley. Nowadays all those jobs are outsourced to Singapore etc;. I don't know if that's better or not.

[ken melvin]

Calmo, this is what Wessel meant to say (or maybe it was Halasz), I think:

In epistemology, the prefix meta- is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata are data about data (who has produced it, when, what format the data are in and so on). Similarly, metamemory in psychology means an individual's knowledge about whether or not they would remember something if they concentrated on recalling it. Furthermore, metaemotion in psychology means an individual's emotion about his/her own basic emotion, or somebody else's basic emotion.[citation needed].

And, I wanted to let you know because I knew you'd be interested---

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/10/05/state/n133505D86.DTL&hw=de+Cristoforo&sn=002&sc=164

[cm]

"Trying to get promoted meant doing a lot of sycophancy which I'm terrible at."

I prefer we stay with the term "interpersonal skills", will we.

[calmo]

And I was interested.
Thank you, ken, for that reference and guide to my next book purchase.
I'm not sure how meta talk got in here, but good thing eva is here because that was my introduction to things "meta", --the study of Logic (part of eva's Philosophy tool kit I believe) where you start with a distinction between the Object language and the language you use to talk about it, the Meta language...izatstillso eva?
I don't believe Wessel is a meta animal (surely this meta business is copyrighted by philosophy?)...he's a well dressed political animal.
Greetings john...I see all is well with you. Me, I'm slowin down --can't even remember who teleological metaphysics was.
Dang.

[calmo]

cm, multi-linguist and more, I think that preference for the expression "interpersonal skills" over "sychophancy" is accurate (I use my long range brain scanner an just beam into your head. Honest.) and necessary for your gumbootless professional environment which may be a tad more sterilized (I nearly set the gods on me with "civilized") than the more technically aligned and less job-secure production line people.

Peter Schaeffer says...

Evagrius,

Acetic acid is better known as vinegar. Table vinegar is around 5% acetic acid. Pickling vinegar is around 18%. Even at a 100% concentra