It’s Not Jobs They Want
Thursday 3 November 2011 - Filed under Uncategorized
One of the big complaints from OWS protestors around the country are that there are no decent paying jobs which require a college degree to be had. But it’s not that they want a job, it’s that they feel entitled to a specific kind of job. Volokh:
The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing — and by the fact that it is actually, two distinct strands, a privileged one and a semi-privileged one. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google.
[. . .]
In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.
[. . .]
The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been. It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction. The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem — they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state. Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage. The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide. But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.
In short, it’s not college graduates mad that no jobs are available; it’s English majors and philosophy majors and women’s studies majors and history majors and political science majors mad that high paying, white collar jobs organizing benefit functions for the social elites to donate money for Team BLUE politicians or The Poor™ aren’t available. It’s not a well paying job that they want; it’s that their sense of entitlement dictates that they have the right to a specific kind of job, and since those jobs are not available, they’re throwing a fucking fit. One that the market (hundreds of millions of individuals voting with their wallets) simply doesn’t feel is worth sustaining. They’re mad not that they can’t find work, but that the vast majority of people don’t see economic value in one’s ability to analyze Milton from a deconstructionist perspective.
That’s why the Occupy Movement can fuck the fuck off. Because if it were about jobs, they’d go to North Dakota where there is a jobs boom right now. But they don’t want those jobs because they are somehow beneath them. They didn’t go to school for X years and get a degree to drive a truck or work on an oil rig; they did that so that they could get more noble work to remain part of the elite.
It isn’t about work or capitalism or the “banksters”, but maintaining their elite status. They simply can’t keep their elite status without that white collar job, because the things required to be an elite, an elite education from an elite school, an apartment in “the city”, the new, ultra-expensive hybrid, etc require more money than your average job. And since they can’t get those white collar jobs in their field of choice, they have resorted to a full scale attack in the culture wars because separating themselves culturally is the only way that the lower New Class can separate themselves from their similar income, yet uneducated brethren in the lower class. The Atlantic:
Obviously, the cultural markers do not map perfectly onto the divide between elite and semi-elite in the US, especially today. We have no hereditary aristocracy; all fortunes originated, fairly recently, in “trade” [so] the class markers are mostly different. But there are still all sorts of hidden cultural signifiers that tell us, yes, we’re still in the elite, we know that Formula One is cool and NASCAR isn’t (unless you’re watching it ironically.)
[. . .] The almost-elite is very concerned for securing to itself the things that the elite pays for rather easily, especially the “good” schools that reinforce your position in the elite. But those things are expensive. Income insecurity threatens people who are already barely maintaining their position. And the more money the upper elite has, the harder it is to procure those things that maintain your precarious elite status.
Orwell goes on to point out that it is the anxious lower-upper-middle-class who have the most venom towards those below them–precisely because to preserve their status, they have to keep themselves sharply apart from the workers and tradesmen. And I think that that does apply here as well, at least to some extent. One of the interesting things about going back to my business school reunion earlier in the month was simply the absence of the sort of cutting remarks about flyover country that I have grown used to hearing in any large gathering of people. I didn’t notice it until after the events were over, because it was a slow accumulation of all the jokes and rants I hadn’t heard about NASCAR, McMansions, megachurches, reality television, and all the other cultural signifiers that make up a small but steady undercurrent of my current social milieu, the way Polish jokes did when I was in sixth grade.
Some of my former classmates now live in flyover country, of course, but mostly, I think, they just didn’t care. No one seemed very interested in the culture war.
So why does that same culture war seem so important to so many of the people that I know in New York and DC?
[. . .]
It’s not entirely crazy to suspect, as Orwell did, that this has something to do with money. Specifically, you sneer at the customs of the people you might be mistaken for. For aside from a few very stuffy conservatives, no white people I know sneer at hip-hop music, telenovelas, Tyler Perry films, or any of the other things often consumed by people of modest incomes who don’t look like them. They save it for Thomas Kinkade paintings, “Cozy cottage” style home decoration, collectibles, child beauty pageants, large pickup trucks***, and so forth.
In part, obviously, this is a reaction to the politics of it, since uneducated white people of modest means vote (and attend church) very differently from the hyper-educated but modestly remunerated people in New York or DC. A group of people who are quite empathetic, even tender, in writing about the financial difficulties of lower-middle class whites as workers, can also be quite vicious about them as voters and consumers.
And they’re worse when it comes to the tastes of people in successful-but-not-intellectual people like sales(wo)men. The vehemence makes it seem, at least in part, like a way to say “I may have their incomes, but I’m not like them. I’m better.”
Having inhabited an institution of hyper-educated individuals for many years, graduate school in an English department, I can attest to the constant venom spewed towards the “proles”. And being in one of the proverbial flyover states, Kentucky, the venom is often stronger and more plentiful in order to separate themselves not from some mythical white hunter in some backwoods southern state, but from the guy wearing camo in front of them at the grocery store checkout counter. The hatred for the uneducated is surreal, as if education is necessarily correlated with intelligence. Coming from said institution surrounded by hyper-educated individuals, I can also assure you that being educated is NOT the same as being smart.
And the Occupy movement should convince the rest of you who haven’t the benefit of having first-person encounters with them of that too.
But how their venom towards who they perceive as the cultural lower class pertain to money? McArdle explains:
I do think that at least some of the anger comes from the fact that many people in the lower-upper do not perceive many of their consumption choices–attending an elite private college, living in a desirable urban area–as fundamentally consumption choices, not basic human endowments that you are supposed to be able to choose without regard to cost. An income which would be very comfortable in Omaha requires real sacrifice in New York or Los Angeles, and if you don’t perceive the choice to live there as a choice, it’s apt to seem very unfair.
Living with the uneducated masses where living is generally affordable (in comparison to living in large metropolitan areas) is akin to being one of them. The New Class simply can’t imagine not being able to wake up in their Manhattan apartment and spend their time in the elite circles they feel a part of, and bitch because the jobs they can get don’t pay enough. An Occupier writes:
I am a senior at a top fashion school in New York City. My dream job is to do editorial at a major publication like Vogue or Elle. Even though I am qualified, I can’t afford my dream because it only pays $30,000/yr (or even less starting out). Because girls from very affluent families want to work at magazines, Daddy continues to pay her bills and expenses (even though they aren’t all necessarily qualified for the positions) and magazines don’t need to increase their salaries. My parents have “white collar” jobs, but based on principle, won’t pay for anything after I graduate. Living in new york is expensive: my box (apartment) is $1,700/month and to dress like I belong at Vogue is too. I’d have to waitress to make ends meet (and have no life) or (ironically) date a Wall St guy (the norm), but I’d rather OCCUPY WALL ST than date it.
I cannot afford to work in my industry.
I am the 99%.
occupywallst.org
A question and a couple of observations. Since when the fuck does ANYONE get their “dream job” right out of college? I went to college and graduate school. I know a lot of educated people, and not a single fucking one of them got their dream job right out of college. Your expectation that you should, and that is somehow this fucking tragedy reveals your entitlement, not some inherent problem with the industry. You entitlement is even further revealed by your little screed on how your “dream job” can’t allow you to afford your expensive lifestyle, and that it is directly attributable to rich people supporting their, in your estimation, unqualified children. And why the fuck need you live in New York? There are plenty of publications or employers that might use your skills that are located in more affordable locales. Your $1700 a month apartment would pay for a VERY LARGE HOUSE in Lexington, KY. Nice, spacious apartments can be had for as little as $625 a month (probably less). And do you really NEED those fancy clothes? Or are you feeling like you can’t belong to your elitist club if you don’t have them?
Every complaint she has is directly attributable not to some perceived greed of Wall Street bankers, but in her insistence on getting a near useless degree, living in the fancy locale, and wearing the fancy clothes. Surely she has many iThings that certainly aren’t cheap. She can’t imagine life any differently because she’s been conditioned to think that because she has an elite education that she’s entitled to the things to which other elites have access. The social and intellectual elites to which she aspires have those things, therefore so MUST she. She needn’t work for them and earn access; she’s entitled to them right out of the gate. Living elsewhere or perhaps taking a job that isn’t her dream doesn’t even enter in to the equation. It’s not even an option. It’s beneath her.
And she and all of the other OWS protestors can fuck off because of it. They claim to represent the 99%, the part of the population being trampled by Wall Street bankers because of their greed. I’ll tell you what: they sure as fuck don’t represent me.
2011-11-03 » madlibertarianguy