Class Issues
drorzel | October 20, 2008the New York Times Magazine has a cover story this week about Barack Obama's efforts to reach working-class voters. The headline writers did it no favors by tagging it "Will gun-toting, churchgoing white guys pull the lever for Obama?," which makes it sound like the worst sort of demographic electoral college nonsense. The actual article, though, is much better than the title suggests.
It's not perfect-- it's still got a lot of pundit-class chin-stroking about whether Obama is actually connecting with working-class whites, written in a manner that suggests that these elusive creatures are…
drorzel | September 25, 2008At my 15th class reunion this past June, I agreed to become the class secretary for the next few years, writing up little news updates for the Cult of the Purple Cow Quarterly, so my classmates can read about the achievements of their fellows. In that spirit, I feel I should note an accolade that won't be likely to appear in the next Alumni Review:
Yes, that's right, William Bennett (Class of 1965, and a rugby player, to boot) was dubbed "Alpha Dog of the Week" by Stephen Colbert, for having the balls to mock intellectuals. This, from a man with a BA from Williams, a Ph.D. in Philosophy, and…
drorzel | September 21, 2008... at least, that's the only reason I can think of for ABC News to run a story on the effects of the financial crisis containing the following:
"A lot of those people will have to sell their homes, they're going to cut back on the private jets and the vacations. They may even have to take their kids out of private school," said [Robert] Frank [of the Wall Street Journal]. "It's a total reworking of their lifestyle."
He added that it's going to be no easy task.
"It's going to be very hard psychologically for these people," Frank said. "I talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet…
drorzel | September 4, 2008Fade in on an Old, Balding White Man reading the paper at the breakfast table.
OBWM: I don't know. I'm really worried about the economy. Rising fuel prices, increasing costs of everything...
Cut to his Younger Blond Wife, sipping tea
YBW: I know. And the mortgage crisis, all these home foreclosures. It's terrible.
Cut to his Perky Teenage Daughter, eating cereal
PTD: Don't forget the rising cost of college.
Return to OBWM, in a wider shot showing that he is alone at the table. A plasma tv on the wall shows YBW and PTD, having breakfast in the kitchens of two of his other houses.
OBWM: And if…
drorzel | August 14, 2008As much as I complain about the relatively low status of science and science writing, it could be worse. As Kevin Drum reminds us, media treatment of economic issues is even more toxic:
Question for the folks who populate our newsrooms: Why is it that a 0.8% rise in inflation, the biggest since 1991, is huge, headline news, while a 0.8% decline in wages, the biggest since 1990, is only barely worth mentioning? In a newsroom with some connection to the normal world, wouldn't it be the other way around?
So, um, I guess it could be worse...
drorzel | July 18, 2008Yesterday, I had an appointment at the local orthopedic associates to get my dislocated thumb looked at. The receptionist escorted me to a curtained-off corner of a big room, where I got to spend ten or fifteen minutes listening to the physician's assistant on call dealing with other patients. One of them, a women distressingly close to my own age, was all but begging for medical clearance to go back to work. The PA refused to provide it, saying that it was out of the question until next week, when she removed the stitches from the surgery the woman had just had a day or two earlier.
In…
drorzel | June 18, 2008A bunch of academic bloggers have been talking about the American Scholar essay by William Deresiewicz. The always-perceptive Timothy Burke offers some insightful comments about the general problems of elite education.
Burke is also a lot kinder to Deresiewicz than I'm inclined to be. Because, frankly, the piece pisses me off, from the very first paragraph:
It didn't dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I'd just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a…
drorzel | May 18, 2008Continuing the morning's theme of "crushingly depressing stories from the New York Times," there's also a downer article about cities where there are more deaths than births:
What demographers call a natural decrease has been occurring for years in tiny rural towns and in some retirement meccas in the South. But the phenomenon is relatively new in metropolitan areas in the Northeast, the Rust Belt of the Middle West and Appalachia.
Hospitals are closing obstetrics wards and converting them to acute care. Local governments and other social service providers are adjusting to the emergence of…
drorzel | May 5, 2008Jake Young points to a Bloggingheads conversation between Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle about, among other things, whether academics are bitter and why. This mostly comes out of a post Megan wrote (link is a leap of faith-- the site is down as I type this), and serves as a lead-in to a discussion of John Yoo.
I found this somewhat annoying, for a couple of reasons, chief among them that I just don't like videoblogging very much. I could read a transcript of this conversation in about a fifth of the time that it takes to watch it, and that would also enable me to quote it accurately. As it is…
drorzel | April 28, 2008Lawrence Watt-Evans is reposting some old Usenet essays on the subject of class, which regular readers will recognize as a hot-button issues for me. So far, he's up to part four of six. The list:
Defining Terms
Who I Am
Attitudes & Money
On the Job
It's excellent stuff. A sample, from Part 4:
Work -- what's it good for?
For the lower class, work is one way of getting money and keeping the Man from hassling you. It's not necessarily the best way, but it works. Taking pride in one's work is not likely. Jobs are transitory. Work is an option. Your job is no part of your identity.
For…
drorzel | April 23, 2008As I may have mentioned in the past, we at Chateau Steelypips have benefitted greatly from Yale Law School's loan forgiveness program for graduates taking public service jobs. Since Kate shattered my dreams of a self-funded basement lab by deciding to use her pricey law degree for good rather than racking up billions as Evil Corporate Scum, the funds they provided to help pay off her loans were a crucial element of our finances for the first few years of our marriage. In fact, you could argue that they're the reason there's a physical Chateau Steelypips in the first place-- even in 2002, I…
drorzel | April 3, 2008Via Matt Yglesias, the Quick and the Ed offers an absolutely terrific article about the effect of class on access to college, using AJ Soprano as an example. On The Sopranos, AJ was a delinquent, who nevertheless got sent off to college because of the tireless efforts of his mother, and the family's money. Drawing on new data from the Department of Education, the authors show that this is all too real:
The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores…
drorzel | March 27, 2008The Dean Dad posted an interesting article about "national service" programs yesterday. He's against them, for class reasons:
The message that national service programs send strikes me as dangerous. The implication seems to be that rich kids can just jump right into higher ed and start moving up the ladder, but the rest of us have to do our time first. It's a sort of penance for not having wealthy parents. I know our society worships money, but there should be some kind of limits. It implicitly defines higher education as a purely private good, which I reject out of hand. (This isn't just the…
drorzel | March 25, 2008EurekAlert provides the latest dispatch from the class war, the the form of a release headlined " Family wealth may explain differences in test scores in school-age children":
The researchers found a marked disparity in family wealth between Black and White families with young children, with White families owning more than 10 times as many assets as Black families. The study found that family wealth had a stronger association with cognitive achievement of school-aged children than that of preschoolers, and a stronger association with school-aged children's math than with their reading scores…
drorzel | February 26, 2008On the subject of silly things said about academia, Matt Yglesias does a quick pass over "assessment,", and in the process recommends Alan Kruger's research that claims the benefits of elite colleges are all from selection effects. He links a Newsweek article on the topic, which contains this paragraph:
Dale and Krueger then compared graduates who had been accepted and rejected by the same (or similar) colleges. The theory was that admissions officers were ranking personal qualities, from maturity to ambition. Students who fared similarly would possess similar strengths; then, Dale and…
drorzel | February 11, 2008Via Inside Higher Ed, the Boston Globe reports that the Pentagon opposes increasing GI Bill funding. Why? Because if they gave them full tuition, eligible soldiers might not re-enlist:
Now, five years into the Iraq conflict, a movement is gathering steam in Washington to boost the payout of the GI Bill, to provide a true war-time benefit for war- time service. But the effort has run headlong into another reality of an unpopular war: the struggle to sustain an all-volunteer force.
The Pentagon and White House have so far resisted a new GI Bill out of fear that too many will use it - choosing…
drorzel | January 4, 2008Over at the Whatever, Scalzi has some acid comments for Prof. Will Barrat's Social Class on Campus diagnostic tools, particularly the step forward exercise (I've linked the Web version-- John refers to the Word file):
[F]or the purposes of this exercise -- showing indicators of privilege and class -- this list is not actually useful, and indeed counter-productive. In this exercise, it's entirely possible for someone of a lower social class to appear more "privileged" than someone who is of the "rich and snooty" class. This doesn't create awareness of privilege; it does, however, create…
drorzel | December 6, 2007Kevin Drum looks at the latest story about American students lagging the world in science test scores, and notes that this has been going on at least since he was in school. This leads him to wonder whether it's really as bad as all that:
I still wonder about this. If American kids are getting mediocre educations, and if they've been getting these mediocre educations for several decades now, shouldn't this have long since shown up in the business world, the tech world, and the financial world? And yet, it hasn't. So what's the deal? Makes me wonder if maybe American kids don't actually suck…
drorzel | December 4, 2007Over at Inside Higher Ed, they have a piece looking at the state of college football as we enter bowl season. This is dominated by two large tables of numbers, one good, and one bad.
The first table is the good one, as it explains why the college football "championship" is so messed up. It lists the 32 bowl games that will be played over the next month, and the per-team payout for each. The five major BCS bowls pay each team $17 million, which neatly explains why the college football elite are unwilling to put in a playoff-- in any real championship system, they might end up having to share…
drorzel | November 28, 2007I generally listen to ESPN radio in my office in the morning, because I like the Mike & Mike show. Unfortunately, they're followed by Colin Cowherd, who is a world-class pinhead.
He's currently holding forth on the death of Sean Taylor, with his basic position being that Taylor had it coming because he had a checkered past. If you were reading back in April, you can probably guess how happy I am to be hearing this line of argument.
In support of this brilliant insight, he's just touted his track record in correctly assessing high-profile public legal cases by noting that he didn't believe…