meritocracy
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see ~ nepotism
see inequality
see hierarchy/racism
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aha omg: koch, mercer, kushner, trump, musk all inherited money!
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12 24 vivek musk vs loomer fight on hi visa? vivek says immigr have work ethic
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SEE MERITOCRACY BS from trust fund nepo babies
AN 1 25
Trump issued an abundance of executive orders after returning to the White House, some of which aggressively attack DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs in the federal government. This marks a major reversal from the Biden Administration, which ended when Trump was inaugurated on Monday, January 20.
Two days later, according to NBC News' Megan Lebowitz, federal government employees received an e-mail "warning that they could face repercussions if they do not report on co-workers who work in diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility positions that might have gone unnoticed by government supervisors."
A January 22 e-mail, Lebowitz reports, read, "We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language."
READ MORE:'It's a free country' — but some White House staffers are facing these new rules: report
Government employees were also warned, "There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information. However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences."
Meanwhile, reporting from Washington Post journalists Julian Mark, Taylor Telford and Susan Svrluga details the extent the Trump Administration is going to in its anti-DEI, anti-affirmative action efforts.
"The flurry of executive orders was meant to put a hard stop to diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI) throughout the federal government," the Post reporters explain in an article published on January 23. "The (Trump) Administration ordered U.S.-run diversity offices to close and scores of their workers to be put on administrative leave by Wednesday. It also suspended dozens of contracting programs aimed at minorities and women, some of which have been operating for decades."
Mark, Telford and Svrluga continue, "But the orders go far beyond the federal government. Trump also directed agencies to draw up lists of public companies to investigate over their DEI policies — a move that legal experts said could send chills through the private sector."
READ MORE:'I don’t care': Trump ripped for ignoring economy to rant about Biden during Hannity interview
The Post journalists note that that Trump even revoked a 60-year-old executive order from the late President Lyndon B. Johnson.
In 1965, LBJ directed federal contractors to take "affirmative action" to end discrimination in their firms.
Noah Feldman, who teaches constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School in Massachusetts, told the Post, "The Trump Administration is trying to give the death blow to diversity in legal and in political cultural terms."
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TRUMP INAUG SP ANTI-DEI BS
an 1 25
The World Economic Forum begins its 54th annual confab of CEOs and billionaires this week in Davos, Switzerland. Among its attendees are some who attended Trump’s inauguration yesterday to kiss his derriere, and then promptly private-jetted to the Swiss Alps.
Since its inception, the Davos confab has justified itself — and thereby sought to justify global corporate capitalism — by embracing “corporate social responsibility.”
The basic idea is that big global corporations can — and should — be good for everyone. Sure, they may make a few CEOs and big shareholders fabulously wealthy. But they can and should also protect the planet and spread their financial gains.
Hence, Davos attendees’ annual commitments, in myriad sessions and presentations, to “ESG” (environmental, social, and governance — that is, sustainability), “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and global and social responsibility in general.
In recent years, Davos has become a choice venue for splashy corporate announcements of such commitments.
In 2020, Marc Benioff of Salesforce issued a goal to plant a trillion trees. The same year, Larry Fink of BlackRock (which manages more than $10 trillion in investments) announced a series of initiatives to invest in ways that better protect the environment. The CEOs of JPMorganChase and Goldman Sachs trumpeted their Net-Zero Banking Alliance.
Other corporate poobahs have used the venue to make grand promises to share profits with their workers, their communities, and the less fortunate around the world. Jamie Dimon, then head of the Business Roundtable, touted his and the Roundtable’s pledges to their workers, their neighborhoods, and the nation as a whole.
But wait. These are exactly the goals Trump and MAGA have railed against, calling them “woke” capitalism.
Now that CEOs of the largest corporations in the world are demonstrating cringe-worthy cowardice when it comes to all things Trump, what’s to become of corporate social responsibility?
Presto! Davos has gone through an ideological cleansing. This time, few if any sessions will be devoted to ESG or DEI. The perennial theme of “corporate social responsibility” has almost vanished.
The CEOs who used to trumpet their corporate social responsibility won’t be doing so this year. (BlackRock’s Fink has already expressed regret over becoming the face of ESG). JPMorganChase and Goldman Sachs have departed their Net-Zero Banking Alliance.
Instead, after years of calling for “responsible” global corporate capitalism, the CEOs gathering in Davos are now openly focusing on their bottom lines.
In other words, the jig is up. The pretense is over. The blather about corporate social responsibility is revealed for what it really is and always has been — PR designed to make the public believe that big global corporations care about anything other than making as much money as possible, as soon as possible.
I, for one, think this is a good thing.
All the artifice about corporate responsibility, echoed year after year at Davos and by the Business Roundtable and in business schools, gave lawmakers who wanted one an excuse to sit on their hands, because, they’d say, big global corporations can be trusted to do what’s right.
The truth is, they can’t. They never could. They won’t sacrifice shareholder returns to tackling climate change or social injustice.
Anyway, these are jobs for governments responsible to the people, not for corporations responsible to shareholders.
The Trump regime won’t do a damned thing about these problems, of course. If anything, it will take us and much of the world backward. (Trump is expected to appear at Davos via videoconference, and god knows what he’ll say.)
But at least we will know where the blame lies. And we will have the chance in future years — I fervently hope — to elect governments that tackle them head-on.
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no lnx
What’s Wrong With the Meritocracy
By Arlie Russell Hochschild
Published Sept. 15, 2020
THE TYRANNY OF MERIT
What’s Become of the Common Good?
By Michael J. Sandel
In an eighth-grade math class at Pacific Palisades junior high in the late 1960s, Michael J. Sandel’s teacher seated students in precise order according to their grades. As their G.P.A.s shifted with the dramatically announced results of every quiz, so did the seating. “I typically shuttled between the second desk and the fourth or fifth,” Sandel recalls, and at age 14, “I thought this was how school worked.”
“The Tyranny of Merit” is like a brilliant response to that misguided but well-meaning math teacher from the viewpoint, as it were, of a kid in some back-row seat of any classroom in a Rust Belt, prairie town or inner-city school in America. What do grades and degrees tell us, Sandel asks, about the widening gap between rich and poor, proud and humiliated, trusting and suspicious, opponent and devotee of Donald Trump?
Some have called Sandel a “rock star moralist.” Without guitar or shiny shirt, the soft-toned but hard-hitting Harvard philosophy professor has packed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Sydney Opera House in Australia and a 14,000-seat outdoor stadium in Seoul, South Korea.
One reason, perhaps, is that many of us need what he does so well: help us grapple with the unexpected and uncomfortable questions that history delivers us. Is it OK for parents to try to make a genetically perfect child (“The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering”)? Is it OK to pay your kid to read (“What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets”)? Now, in his new book, he asks: Is it OK to claim that our fine grades and degrees are all our own doing, so that we owe little or nothing in return?
What, he wonders, if the highly educated harden into a hereditary aristocracy? And what if this occurs under a flag of fairness, during a time when B.A.s and higher degrees are ever more closely tied to income and prestige? Let’s set aside the case of rich parents who bribe corrupt officials or donate huge sums to get their child into a good college. Let’s focus instead, Sandel writes, on the inequity that creeps in without breaking any rules. At Princeton and Yale, for example, more students come from families in the top 1 percent of income than from the bottom 60 percent. Two-thirds of students in all the Ivy League schools come from families in the top 20 percent. This is very largely because of the head start woven into upper-income life itself: engaging dinner conversation, better schools, private tutors, foreign travel.
Sandel is not about guilt-tripping anxious parents of front-row kids; they’re suffering too, he says. But the credentialed have come to imagine themselves as smarter, wiser, more tolerant — and therefore more deserving of recognition and respect — than the noncredentialed. One reason for this, he suggests, lies in our American “rhetoric of rising.”
Both rich and poor parents tell their kids, if you try hard enough, you can achieve your goals. For the upper strata, things may work out, but for the downwardly mobile blue collar and poor, there’s a Catch-22. If they fail to reach their goals — which a torpid economy almost guarantees — they blame themselves. If only I could have gotten that degree, they say. Even the poorly educated, Sandel notes, look down on the poorly educated.
Donald Trump has reached out to this group with open arms — “I love the poorly educated.” He has harvested their demoralization, their grief and their shame, most certainly if they are white. But, Sandel notes, two-thirds of all American adults lack four-year degrees. And in the wake of automation, in real wages, the white man without a B.A. earns less now than he did in 1979. The dignity of his labor has steeply declined. And since 1965, high-school-educated men in the very prime of life — 25 to 54 — have been slipping out of the labor force, from 98 percent in 1965 to 85 percent in 2015.
Of all Americans whose highest degree is a high school diploma, in 2017 only 68 percent worked. And with rising deaths of despair, many are giving up on life itself. So you who are highly educated, Sandel concludes, should understand that you’re contributing to a resentment fueling the toxic politics you deplore. Respect the vast diversity of talents and contributions others make to this nation. Empathize with the undeserved shame of the less educated. Eat a little humble pie.
But we are left with an important issue Sandel does not address: the targeting by the right wing of colleges themselves. This isn’t new: Running parallel to the rise of the meritocracy in America has been a suspicion of the egghead who can’t skin a rabbit, build a house or change a tire. As the historian Richard Hofstadter observed in “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” and Tocqueville before him, many Americans have valued not simply the cultivated intelligence of heroes in a culture of merit but also the creative genius of the “common man” in a culture of survival.
Today this has taken a shockingly partisan turn. For the first time in recent history, the less education you have, the more you lean right and distrust higher education itself. In a 2019 Pew survey, 59 percent of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) agree that “colleges have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country these days,” whereas only 18 percent of Democrats (and those leaning left) agree.
So now’s a good time for both sides to sit down for a very serious talk, with “The Tyranny of Merit” required reading for all. And invited from inner-city, suburban and rural schools across the land should be those who warmed seats both in the front row and in the back.
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s most recent book is “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.”
THE TYRANNY OF MERIT
What’s Become of the Common Good?
By Michael J. Sandel
288 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 22, 2020, Page 19 of the Sunday Book Review
WARRIOR BD DOD purity /loyalty test --> fascist klepto caci-
omfg desantis would pick
an 11 24
If Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is confirmed as President-elect Donald Trump's next secretary of state, it could open the door for Trump's family to get an even deeper foothold in the federal government.
Any Senate vacancy in Florida has to be filled by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) until the next election, which wouldn't happen until 2028. And MAGA is now pushing for Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara, to be appointed senator in Rubio's place should his seat become vacant. The Daily Beast reported that Lara Trump herself is now actively offering herself as a replacement for Rubio.
"This is my home state now and has been for three years," the Republican National Committee co-chair told Fox News' Sean Hannity, adding that she would "love to serve the people of Florida." Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) also endorsed the idea of Lara Trump's appointment. And CBS News' Scott MacFarlane posted to the social media platform Bluesky that Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is also reportedly on board.
READ MORE:**GOP senator suggests Trump's daughter-in-law take Marco Rubio's Senate seat**
Ric Grenell, who was Trump's acting Director of National Intelligence in his first administration, was thought to be a front-runner to helm the State Department before the news of Rubio's appointment was made public. Tara Palmieri of Puck News tweeted that DeSantis was not in the loop, and learned about Florida's senior U.S. senator being nominated as the nation's potential next top diplomat while he was on vacation in Italy.
Trump tapping Rubio to head the State Department is particularly noteworthy given that they were bitter rivals in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. In a debate, Rubio took a jab at the size of Trump's hands, implying that the billionaire reality TV star was small elsewhere. This led Trump to say there was "no problem" with the size of any of his body parts.
Political strategist and columnist Cheri Jacobus, who is a former communications staffer for the RNC, offered one potential explanation for Rubio's appointment to one of the most high-ranking Cabinet positions — "to open the seat for his daughter-in-law."
"I think that may be the main reason Trump picked Rubio," Jacobus wrote on Bluesky.
READ MORE:**Lara Trump says Project 2025 has 'productive' ideas that would be 'great for this country'**
However, not all Republicans are as enthusiastic about the prospect of Lara Trump joining the Senate. Conservative columnist Scott Morefield called it a "bridge too far" in a post on X.
"Yes, Donald Trump should get his Cabinet picks, but the Senate pick is DeSantis’, not Trump’s," Morefield wrote. "And it would be a bad idea because it would make the seat vulnerable when election time rolls around."
Like Rubio, DeSantis is also a former Trump rival, having run a short-lived campaign for the Republican nomination in 2024. The two-term Florida governor went all-in on the Iowa Caucuses, only to come up short to Trump. He suspended his campaign shortly afterward and endorsed Trump.
Click here to read the Daily Beast's report in full (subscription required).
READ MORE:[All in the family? How Marco Rubio's Senate seat could go to a DeSantis or a Trump
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aha used as rationale for pluto oligarchy, darwin fittest:
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/wannabe-aristocrats/
Yesterday, I left you thinking about centibillionaire Warren Buffett's contempt for democratic morality. The sixth-richest person in the world paid 0.10 percent in federal income taxes over the course of four years, according to an analysis by ProPublica. The nonprofit news group obtained 15 years' world of tax returns for thousands of the country's richest people, including the top 25, which includes the Sage of Omaha. He said it's OK for him to pay virtually nothing, because he's giving his fortune away.
That's contempt. In saying philanthropy is better than paying a fair share for a national government of, by and for the American people, Warren Buffett is saying, though of course without saying it out loud, that he's separate from and unequal to American citizenry—on account of normal people paying more than their fair share for a government serving him more than it does them. But there's another layer of contempt I want to draw your attention to today. That's the contempt for work.
The Republicans Party has for decades been successful at portraying the poor (read: nonwhite people) as those who do not work. Because they do not work, the poor look to the government for things they won't provide for themselves. Republican-controlled states still use work as a requisite for the accessing of relief. This requisite amounts to proving one is a worthy enough American citizen. If you can work, you can get help. If you don't work, you don't get help, because only worthy Americans are deserving of help. Anyone who is not worthy of citizenship is someone who is worthy of contempt.
The thing about being poor, however, is that it's work. Hard work. This is so plainly true, I'm not going to bother proving it. The poor are rarely idle, because to be idle is to flirt with death. (That's how close to the bone a chronically impoverished existence is.) Obviously, the poor do not earn incomes with the nonstop labor that comes with being poor, but let's not confuse earning an income with work. If we accept the Republican view that working is a requisite for being a worthy citizen, the poor are the worthiest of all. The poor are deserving of state relief by simple dint of being poor.
But we shouldn't accept the Republican view, because it does not apply equitably or universally. The very obscenely rich are exempted. Always. Yet they are idle. Yet they are unproductive. Yet they sure as hell take more than they give. As the ProPublica expose revealed, the income of the 25 wealthiest people is not derived from labor but from "the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property." The Republicans Party idolizes them as models for us to emulate. Tyler Cowen said that taxing capital gains (the stuff making the very obscenely rich so very obscenely rich) would be un-American. He said that instead we "should prioritize" the "valorization of wealth."
No, the US should prioritize the valorization of work. (In this I mean any kind of work, whether it's compensated or not.) And taxing capital gains is totally American. To be clear, being wealthy isn't the problem. The problem is political. The very obscenely rich of the 21st century are the wannabe aristocrats that Americans feared in the early 19th century. As aristocracy threatened everyone's liberty back then, the wannabes threaten everyone's liberty now. But before we get to the point of using government policy to break their choke-hold, we must demonstrate a depth of contempt for the very obscenely rich that's at least as robust and enduring as their contempt for us.
Again, it's not because the very obscenely rich are so very obscenely rich.
Judith N. Shklar, author of American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion explained Andrew Jackson's view of an aristocracy as
...any group that by its use of its wealth "exercises more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs." It was not wealth as such that was reprehensibly aristocratic, but wealth either gained through governmental favor or used to buy political power and influence. All monopolists and holders of license and charters were aristocrats because they owed their wealth to government grant, and had not earned it by their own efforts. They enjoyed unearned advantages. [my italics]
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
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- Is the Rolls Royce Cullinan for the modern-day aristocrat or the new ... ›
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rww Joel Webbon Says That If You're Poor In America "It's Because You're Lazy" | People For 11 24
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trust fund baby?
Ricketts is also the father of former Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, who was appointed by his successor to the U.S. Senate on his way out the door due to the early resignation of Sen. Ben Sasse to take a position as president of the University of Florida.
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sonali an 1 23
https://www.alternet.org/nepotism-babies-myth-american-meritocracy/
There is a common feeling that many of us have experienced in professional or academic environments, especially when we struggle against gender or racial bias. It’s called “imposter syndrome”—the feeling that one doesn’t deserve one’s position and that others will discover this lack of competence at any moment. I felt this way as a female graduate student in a science field in the 1990s. I felt it as a young journalist of color in a white-dominated industry.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
The rich and the elite among us appear to feel the opposite—that they are deserving of unearned privilege. A recent series of stories in New York Magazine headlined “The Year of the Nepo Baby” has struck a chord among those who are being outed for having benefited from insider status. Nepo babies are the children of the rich and famous, the ones who are borne of naked nepotism and whose ubiquity exposes the myth of American meritocracy. Nepo babies can be found everywhere there is power.
The New York Magazine stories have predictably generated defensive responses from nepo babies. Jamie Lee Curtis, actor and daughter of famed Hollywood stars Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, wrote a lengthy post on Instagram defending her status. Although she admitted that she benefitted from her parents’ fame—“I have navigated 44 years with the advantages my associated and reflected fame brought me, I don’t pretend there aren’t any”—she also clapped back at critics, saying she was tired of assumptions that a nepo baby like her “would somehow have no talent whatsoever.” Curtis went further in claiming that the current focus on people like her was “designed to try to diminish and denigrate and hurt.”
Curtis is clearly a talented actor, of that there is no doubt. But, in defending her privilege from critique, she reveals just how deserving she considers herself. It is the converse of imposter syndrome—the insider syndrome.
The act of calling out nepotism doesn’t necessarily imply that nepo babies are not talented. (Nepo babies are sometimes talented—and sometimes not.) It means pointing out that some talented people are able to benefit from family connections and fame that other equally talented people are not able to.
The critique is intended to call out elitism, not “diminish,” “denigrate” or “hurt,” as Curtis accuses journalists of doing. Journalism that exposes power and its corruptive influence among elites punches up, not down. Curtis is hardly a disadvantaged person whose well-being will suffer from such coverage. Rather, stories pointing out her parental advantages could potentially help to even the playing field so that it is unacceptable in the future to consider family connections in film and TV auditions.
Recall the college admissions scandal of 2019 when it was revealed—again through good journalism—that wealthy parents like TV star Lori Loughlin used all the power and money at their disposal to bend the rules of elite school admissions for their children. Many of those children may well have deserved to get into the schools they attended. But, in the face of stiff competition, untold numbers of equally deserving youth who did not have powerful and wealthy parents willing to break rules were not admitted. Now, many of those same nepo babies’ parents who were tried and convicted are using their money and connections to win shortened prison sentences.
But Hollywood celebrities, however much they enjoy prestige and privilege, are an easy target. Nepotism is rife in all the halls of power—in the world of art, sports, and even journalism, and especially in corporate and political circles.
Billionaires (especially those in tech) may propagate the myth of the merit-based American dream, but some of the most dramatic success stories began with a parent using their wealth or connections to give their child the upper hand. Take Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, who became one of the world’s wealthiest people in his 30s. Gates’s early success was largely due to the well-documented connections that his parents flexed on his behalf to get his fledgling company off the ground. Other tech nepo babies include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose father loaned him $100,000 to start his company, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose parents were early investors in his online retail business to the tune of nearly $250,000.
Nepotism is part of the fabric of capitalism. For centuries, unfair advantages were available to those who have historically faced fewer hurdles, through the sheer luck of being born into a family with wealth, connections, or respect within their field. Indeed, in order to beat back the imposter syndrome, many advise channeling the unearned confidence of a mediocre straight white man.
Our economy is rigged to encourage nepotism by ensuring that the already wealthy pass their wealth—and by extension the power that their money buys—to their children. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) pointed out how the tax code is written in order to benefit the moneyed classes. According to a CBPP report, “High-income, and especially high-wealth, filers enjoy a number of generous tax benefits that can dramatically lower their tax bills.”
Nepo babies who defend their status reinforce the notion that wealth, fame, and privilege equal brilliance, talent, and genius. The reality is that the privileged among us simply have the means to cheat. The rest of us are sold the lie that working hard will bring rewards—rather than unearned wealth.
This, in turn, encourages cheating among those who cannot rely on nepotism to gain power. One well-known example of the “fake-it-till-you-make-it” approach is Anna Sorokin, a woman whose fabricated lies about wealth and power landed her in prison and made her the focus of a Netflix show. Sorokin faked being a nepo baby—a German heiress—in order to live a lavish lifestyle. Sorokin learned that to gain the edge that moneyed elites have, one must internalize the insider syndrome.
Republican Congressman George Santos, who was recently exposed as a fraud for lying about his work experience, wealth, and even ethnicity, is another prime example. His political party has made a habit of encouraging (real or fake) nepo babies like Donald Trump, who openly admitted to tax avoidance in a debate and whose company was convicted of criminal tax fraud.
The GOP has for years led the charge to protect the interests of the wealthy while insisting on means testing and drug testing for the rest of us to receive benefits.
In truth, the emperor has no clothes. The meritocracy of American capitalism is a myth built on smoke and mirrors, on lies and false confidence. The current long-overdue conversation around nepo babies may help to further class consciousness among Americans who may see a bit more clearly now just how scantily clad the emperor really is.
Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.
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salon 11 22
"He really is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect," a friend responded in a group text over the weekend. We had been sharing stories about the bouts of dumbassery on display, as Elon Musk :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{starts his ill-advised reign of Twitter. And hoo boy, there was plenty to share. Did you see the one about Musk telling software engineers to print out 30 days of code, only to tell them to shred it when he likely realized this exposed how he doesn't know what he's doing? Or how he plans to take a bazooka to the content moderation team, even though doing so will likely send advertisers packing? Or how he thought carrying a sink around was a hilarious joke? Or how he tweeted an asinine conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack, only to delete it hours later?
None of this should be surprising. From day one, this entire saga has been a story of a man with far more money than brains. After all, this all started when Musk stupidly offered to buy Twitter at a price way over its valuation, for no other reason than a fit of trollish pique. It was only after he realized what a foolish idea it was to set $44 billion on fire that he started coming up with disingenuous excuses to escape the deal, only to discover that it was too late, legally, to back out.
Yet, somehow, much of this still feels surprising. The idea that Musk is "smart" has persisted through years of very public evidence to the contrary. Even now, many of his critics offer pre-emptive caveats that they don't think he's stupid, before explaining why the latest of his endless string of idiotic choices is a bad one. This notion of Musk's intelligence clings to the discourse around him for one simple reason: He is very, very rich.
The myth of the American meritocracy is a stubborn one. Americans can't help but believe that someone as rich as Musk must have something going on for him beyond dumb luck. To imagine otherwise is too unsettling. So many people block out what should be an obvious truth: You probably would have never heard of Elon Musk if he wasn't a white man from a wealthy family that literally owned an emerald mine in South Africa.
To be fair, it's entirely possible that, at one point, Musk wasn't a total birdbrain. His resume suggests there was a time when he was relatively competent at computer science, though there's no reason to think that such skills mean fluency in any other higher-functioning tasks. But regardless of what some IQ test from back in the day might have said about Musk, it's clear that in the past couple of decades, his brain has turned to total mush.
The irony is that the very wealth and privilege that tricks people into thinking he must be a genius likely contributed to the current state of affairs. Being surrounded by nothing but flattery makes it hard to distinguish between thoughts you have that are smart and useful and thoughts you have (such as right-wing conspiracy theories) that are idiotic. Either way, the people in your life — and for Musk, his legions of fanboys on Twitter — are swooning over what a super genius you are. The lack of meaningful feedback would damage most people's capacity for critical thinking. Musk's narcissism renders the diagnosis of his rational capacity terminal.
One can only hope the daily updates on Musk's antics will put some dent into the American myth of meritocracy. But then again, having to endure four years of a Donald Trump presidency didn't seem to make much difference, even as he shared moments of Trumpian wisdom like telling people to inject bleach into their lungs to cure COVID-19 and trying to "correct" a weather map drawn by actual meteorologists because he felt it would better serve his ego for a hurricane to make landfall in Alabama. Trump was elected in no small part because he had convinced large numbers of Americans that he was a successful businessman and therefore smart. In reality, he was a historically terrible businessman whose wealth exists because other rich white guys spent decades bailing him out of his self-inflicted financial woes.
The insidious nature of the meritocratic myth is on full display this week, as the Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit over affirmative action at Harvard University. Unfortunately, polling shows that 63% of Americans oppose universities considering race in their admissions process, naively believing that ending affirmative action means some objective measure of "merit" will be used instead. In reality, the opposite is true: Far from being meritocratic institutions, Ivy League schools are largely devoted to elevating rich white kids at the expense of people who have more talent. As Mark Joseph Stern at Slate explains, "Harvard has a preference for four specific groups of applicants known as ALDC: athletes, legacies, those on the dean's list (frequently because of family donations), and the children of faculty." He continues:
In theory, ALDC preferences are colorblind. In practice, they operate as a massive affirmative action program for white applicants. Over a recent six-year period, 2,200 out of 4,993 admitted white students were ALDC—a figure significantly higher than the overall number of admitted students who are Black (1,392) and Hispanic (1,283). White ALDC students are not overrepresented because they happen to be more qualified; to the contrary, about three-fourths of them would have been rejected without the ALDC boost.
The existing race-based affirmative action program is mostly an attempt to make up for the diversity that is lost giving such a massive advantage to white applicants. And yet, somehow, you hear no complaints from most conservatives about the ALDC preferences. That's because they don't actually want a meritocracy. They want a system where white people can get twice as far while being half as talented. Or where the richest man in the world keeps getting called a genius, even as we can all see — if we're willing to look — that he's just another privilege-addled idiot who lost his capacity for critical thinking many billions of dollars ago.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scientists-explain-why-the-wealthy-struggle-with-empathy/
matt r salon
a new study reveals that people from higher income backgrounds struggle with certain aspects of empathy when compared to individuals who have lower incomes, who are better at reading people’s emotions.
The research paper, which was published in the “Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,” asked individuals from different class backgrounds to infer others’ emotional states by looking at images of their eyes and to attempt to assume the visual perspective of other people.
The findings suggest that our socioeconomic status may affect the way we see and interact with other people.
Researchers know that there are many things can make it difficult for one person to effectively empathize with another, including neurological conditions like autism and psychological illnesses like schizophrenia. In their study, researchers Pia Dietze of the University of California, Irvine and Eric D. Knowles of New York University attempted to better understand how social class specifically influences Theory of Mind.
"[Theory of Mind] encompasses a range of competencies that together enable people to solve problems in a world full of other minds,” the authors explain. “Examples of ToM include our ability to infer people’s emotions, understand others’ visual perspectives, trace behavior to actors’ underlying intentions and desires, and grasp the fact that others’ beliefs might misportray reality. We focus on two facets of [Theory of Mind] in this work: emotion perception and visual perspective taking.”
The authors concluded, both from their research and by analyzing previous research (some of which they felt was unreliable), that “higher social class is associated with attenuated [theory of mind] performance,” with individuals from higher income backgrounds struggling more to ascertain the emotions and empathize with the visual points of view of other people. One possible explanation for this is that “lower-class individuals—owing to their greater levels of cultural interdependence—may appraise other human beings as more relevant to their goals and well-being than do higher-class individuals.”This would also help people from lower classes to “spontaneously calculate other people’s perspectives.”
Dietze and Knowles also point out that their conclusion “stands in clear contrast to the common discourse concerning neurocognitive deficits among the lower classes.” They also note that “decades of research documents that lower-class individuals are more likely to exhibit attentional deficits and display impaired working-memory performance. The evidence provided here suggests that these deficits may be domain-specific. Indeed, we show that lower-class performance outcomes are reversed in the social realm.” The term “domain-specific” refers to the theory of learning which holds that there are multiple forms of intelligence rather than a single way to assess where one has cognitive strengths and/or weaknesses.
This is not the only new research which sheds light on how being wealthy can lead to harmful psychological behaviors and personal habits. In July a different study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that individuals from affluent backgrounds would often deny their class privilege by “increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover [their] privilege in a veneer of meritocracy.”
“Flying in the face of meritocratic prescriptions, evidence of privilege threatens recipients’ self-regard by calling into question whether they deserve their successes,” the authors wrote in their study. “Evidence of class privilege demonstrates that many life outcomes are determined by factors not attributable to individuals’ efforts alone, but are caused in part by systemic inequities that privilege some over others.”
Another study, this one published in June in the journal Nature Communications, argued that the consumption patterns of the affluent are so egregiously unsustainable from an ecological standpoint that only a concerted effort by the wealthy to consume less can prevent catastrophes like global warming, pollution and biodiversity loss.
“The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions,” the authors wrote, adding that “existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change.” They advocated “a global and rapid decoupling of detrimental impacts from economic activity,” pointing out that “the world’s top 10% of income earners are responsible for between 25 and 43% of environmental impact” while “the world’s bottom 10% income earners exert only around 3–5% of environmental impact.”
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aha 820 entrepreneur as CONCEPT/GOD TERM: sparked by rnc convention: entre is also a GOD term, ties into Yankee ingenuity/ am exceptionalism sil valley garage mystique: affirms meritocrisy [sic] that racism will fix itself when AA POC start small biz that expand (cain godfather pizza 999 RIP?] overlooking the fact that redlining by gov't and banks deprived of capital for decades; but of course you have to get rid of burdensome regulation/red tape that stiffle [when in fact corps/amazon will use data to steal your idea/product and crush you or buy you out. small biz and gig economy means own boss thus in control thus = freedom --> fix for INEQUALITY THUS RACISM
but of course to be an entre you must have skills/a good education but socialist dems want to trap poor kids in failing public/gov't schools to serve big corrupt union bosses, so devos waNts FREEDOM TO CHOOSE/SHOP voucher/charter b/c free mkt will create better schools [vs suck/extract from big part of public budget/ schools are the COMMONS THAT MADE DEMOC AND PROSPERITY POSSIBLE; --> scam online virtual classes [jail the blk girl who refuses pointless jumpthruhoop fill in the blanck
aha: concept of control = freedom, loss of control = slavery
commies want to control your mind, your actions, your energy use (as a way of controlling your behavior)
control is also law and order, which the strict father must impose/ punish transgression because children / POC do not have discipline (or intelligence) to control their own actions/base impulses
order is enforcement of hierarchy; the job of the strict father is to instill discipline in sons who can handle it and marry off daughter, outsource/delegate the job of control/disc of women
eg
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/rnc-review-speakers-described-an-alternate-reality-in-which-chaos-and-violence-of-the-trump-era-is-joe-bidens-fault/
no lnx twt
RNC review: Speakers described an alternate reality in which chaos and violence of the Trump era is Joe Biden’s fault
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 25, 2020 Commentary
The first night of the Republican National Convention featured a diverse lineup that defended President Donald Trump from charges of racism, even as other speakers sought to stoke racial fears and push conspiracy theories.
The convention, largely consisting of a mix of live and pre-taped speeches before an empty auditorium, appeared to take place in an alternate reality where Trump had successfully beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, and where the protests, violence and racial division seen during Trump’s presidency would only get worse Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected. It was a wildly dishonest night, with the New York Times fact-checking team counting at least 30 false and misleading claims.
“This one half-night of Republican programming so far has been exponentially more dishonest than the entire four nights of the Democratic convention,” wrote CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale.
While Republicans insisted that their convention would be optimistic, and headliners like former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina delivered speeches on the promise of America that could have taken place under any other Republican president, the tone of the night was dark and the theme was racial fear-mongering.
The night kicked off with a speech by Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, who described Trump as a “bodyguard of Western civilization” — a common white nationalist dog whistle — who is defending America against a “vengeful mob that seeks to destroy our way of life, our neighborhoods, schools, churches and values.”
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio gave a speech riddled with falsehoods accusing Democrats of stoking “crime, violence, and mob rule.” Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of Trump’s most loyal followers in Congress, bizarrely warned that Democrats will “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door.”
Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who threatened Black Lives Matter supporters with guns, delivered a gloomy, downbeat chat accusing “radical Democrats” of trying to destroy the suburbs.
“They are not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning,” Patricia McCloskey said. “This forced rezoning would bring crime, lawlessness and low-quality apartments into thriving suburban neighborhoods.
“These are the policies that are coming to a neighborhood near you,” she added. “So make no mistake: No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”
These divisive speeches were interspersed between people of color who insisted that neither Trump, the Republican Party nor the nation had a problem with racism.
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Former NFL player Herschel Walker — who once played for the New Jersey Generals, a long-gone USFL team owned by Trump — said it “hurt my soul” to hear people call Trump “racist,” noting their long friendship. Haley, speaking of her own experience as the daughter of Indian immigrants, said that “America is not a racist country” but a “work in progress.”
Scott, the night’s keynote speaker, [heh appt by nikki] delivered a powerful speech on the promise of America and his own experiences with racism. Scott urged viewers to “not look simply at what the candidates say” before listing a number of remarks made by Biden to suggest that he, and not Trump, would ignore minority communities. Scott repeatedly insisted that Biden wants to turn the U.S. into a “socialist utopia,” which would be news to Biden and the progressive primary challenges who repeatedly criticized him for being too conservative.
But while the headliners tried to ignore the division stoked by Trump since long before he launched his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, stole the show with stunningly dark and loud diatribes that prompted viewers to question whether cocaine was involved.
Guilfoyle, who earns $180,000 per year from the Trump campaign, shouted an amped-up speech into the empty auditorium comparing Democrats to socialistsin Cuba and Venezuela. Guilfoyle, who was formerly married to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, claimed that Democrats (including her ex-husband, apparently) had turned California into a “land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets and blackouts in homes.”
“They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live,” she warned. “They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.”
“Biden, Harris and the rest of the socialists will fundamentally change this nation,” she continued. “They want open borders, closed schools, dangerous amnesty, and will selfishly send your jobs back to China while they get rich. They will defund, dismantle and destroy America’s law enforcement. When you are in trouble and need police, don’t count on the Democrats.”
Donald Trump Jr. gave a speech touting his father’s response to the pandemic, albeit one that was entirely detached from reality.
He claimed that the president had “acted quickly,” even though Trump spent the crucial early weeks downplaying the threat, and that the administration had delivered supplies to “hospitals that needed them most,” even though the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general found rampant shortages of vital supplies. Six months into the pandemic, such equipment remains in short supply.
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The night also featured segments in which Trump hyped hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has repeatedly been found ineffective in treating the coronavirus, and a video that touted Trump’s “rapid policy changes” in the face of the pandemic.
MSNBC broke away from the broadcast to fact-check the claims.
“To say that 170,000 souls lost in our country up to now is a success by any measure is fantasy,” Dr. Vin Gupta, a disease expert at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said during the segment. “It’s disrespectful to the families who lost loved ones, to frontline clinicians who put their lives at risk. It’s just fantasy. It’s propaganda.”
During another segment, Trump spoke with a group of Americans who had been freed from overseas prisons, including pastor Andrew Brunson, who was arrested by Turkey during President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s purge following an unsuccessful coup attempt.
“To me, President Erdogan was very good,” Trump told the pastor, who was detained for two years.
Though all of the major news networks break away during portions of the convention for analysis and ads, Fox News host Sean Hannity warned his viewers that “the media won’t cover large parts of the RNC that we’ll be showing.”
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Twitter users couldn’t help but notice that Fox News actually aired fewer segments from the convention than CNN and MSNBC. Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tweeted his complaints at Fox News.
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“Can’t believe I have to watch the convention on @CNN,” he wrote. “Unbelievable.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-americas-wealthiest-are-profiting-in-the-time-of-the-pandemic/
American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Michael Strain wrote an op-ed in the New York Times recently explaining how “The American Dream Is Alive and Well,” and that in his opinion this nation has, “bigger issues than inequality.” Strain’s piece is part of the paper’s new pandemic-era series called “The America We Need” and engages in a set of impressive mental gymnastics to conclude that it ought to be of no concern that the rich are getting richer and that it would be better to focus instead on, “the relatively slow rate of productivity growth,” or “the long-term decline in male employment.”
Michael Strain is incredulous over our fixation on the concentration of wealth at the top, asking, “Do Americans really care as much about inequality as the attention by media and liberal politicians suggest?” He adds, “Given that income inequality has been stagnant or declining over the most recent decade, the timing… is odd” for a conversation “about whether inequality suggests that capitalism itself is broken.” However, inequality continues to steadily rise—a fact it seems the pro-free-market American Enterprise Institute is hoping we ignore.
In his op-ed, Strain chants a mantra that he and other proponents of capitalism want to realize through sheer repetition: “Capitalism isn’t broken. The game isn’t rigged. Hard work does pay off.” Most insultingly, he maintains that: “American workers are resilient and are accustomed to facing—and overcoming—economic challenges.” In other words, because American workers are used to being screwed over by the economy and most have seemingly managed to survive it, they will continue to do so in the face of ever-increasing hardship.
Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) during a Senate hearing on May 19 questioned Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, asking, “How many workers will die if we send people back to work without the protections they need, Mr. Secretary? How many workers should give their lives to increase our [gross domestic product] by half a percent?” Mnuchin responded, “I think your characterization is unfair,” but the Trump administration he attempted to defend has in fact forced people back to work, namely in the meatpacking industry. President Donald Trump invoked theDefense Production Act—not to direct the commercial production of much-needed medical and protective equipment, but rather to provide cover to the meat industry as it seeks to force workers back into a dangerous environment.
Thousands of workers have become infected in recent months. But if meatpacking workers contract the disease and die, it is their fault as per Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who recently claimed that it was the “home and social” conditions in the lives of meatpacking plant workers that were responsible for their COVID-19 diagnoses.He even went as far as suggesting more law enforcement surveillance of those communities where meatpacking workers live in order to police social distancing.
Making clear just how little Republicans in particular care about workers, Trump has opposed extending unemployment insurance for laid-off workers. His Labor Department has encouraged companies to snitch on workers so that their unemployment benefits are cut off if they are too fearful of returning to work. And, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to protect corporations from liability in coronavirus-related lawsuits by workers.
Republicans have also refused to take up any more stimulus bills even as more than 38 million Americans have lost jobs in just nine weeks. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, showing just how blind he is to the pain of workers, said, “I don’t see the need right now.” Senator McConnell echoed this, saying, “I don’t think we have yet felt the urgency of acting immediately. That time could… [come], but I don’t think it has yet.” Time and again conservative politicians, in shilling for the rich, have indicated that American workers, rather than being essential, are simply expendable. This is their version of a class war.
The White House’s latest idea for helping workers is to cut corporate taxes in half as a way to incentivize overseas jobs to return to the U.S. Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economic adviser, touted a payroll tax cut as a way to put more money into Americans’ pockets. He failed to mention that cutting payroll taxes meant a cut in payroll-tax-funded programs like Medicare and Social Security—programs many Americans rely on that the class warriors have wanted to cut for years.
Amazingly, the stock market appears to not care that there is record unemployment as week after week even with skyrocketing unemployment, the Dow Jones and Nasdaq indices remain buoyed. Indeed, the indicators that are announced with much fanfare every day on the popular radio program Marketplace have never had a real bearing on the well-being of American workers, no matter how much enthusiasm host Kai Ryssdal musters during his announcements. To his credit, he has admitted as much, explaining that the “wealthiest 10 percent of American households own 84 percent of all stocks.”
Before the pandemic, Trump bet his reelection on a low unemployment rate and the buoyancy of the stock market. Now, with official unemployment figures so incongruent with the stock market’s growth, he has a harder time making a claim of widespread economic prosperity. In fact, there was no prosperity even before the pandemic. The official unemployment rate was low, but that did not indicate how many people had quit looking for work or how poor quality those jobs were. The pandemic has exposed the fact that Trump’s claims of financial triumph were always more of a mirage than a miracle.
As the anguish of millions of American workers remains irrelevant to the corporate profiteers and their political benefactors, we are expected to rejoice in the fact that JeffBezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, could become the world’s first trillionaire in a few years. It would be convenient for Michael Strain and the American Enterprise Institute if we are convinced to ignore such obscenity and focus instead on workers remaining “resilient” as the rich wage their class war.
The only rational response to the absurd state of the U.S. economy is to insist that billionaires (and especially trillionaires) are simply not allowed to exist. After the first $100 million, there is no need to continue to amass any more wealth. Congress could easily enact laws to tax billionaires heavily enough that they remained more than comfortable for the rest of their lives while funding necessary services that huge numbers of Americans could benefit from: paid sick leave, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and so much more. There is no justification for individuals to hoard so much wealth compared to the rest of us. But they will never give up that wealth voluntarily. They will instead fight tooth and nail, lie and cheat, to preserve and expand their inconceivable riches. Against such a class war there is only one option.
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520
aha: small biz
lip service from rt, entrepreneur hero and all, but amazon bookseller no sales tax; corps get most covid bill $, must be tight w/ bank to get;
along w/ educ said to be the great way to move up/ meritocracy ,but up against walmart, outsource factory, walmart is front end for china imports
no big corp loopholes subsidy like amazon warehouses new rich prime customers
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-why-the-tormented-conservative-mind-is-so-drawn-to-the-dangerous-allure-of-miracle-drugs/
no lnx
Here’s why the tormented conservative mind is so drawn to the dangerous allure of miracle drugs
Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 3, 2020
In one of the oddest developments of the coronavirus crisis, there’s been a run on a pair ofantimalarial drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which are used primarily in the U.S. to treat arthritis and to prevent organ damage from lupus. The drugs are being sucked out of pharmacies at an alarming rate, thanks to Americans who have convinced themselves these drugs will save them if the develop COVID-19, and thereby leaving patients who actually need these medications in danger.
This is happening in the face of only thin evidence that these drugs work against the novel coronavirus, and plenty of evidence that they don’t work. At one Paris hospital that used the drug heavily — on the recommendation ofDidier Raoult, a climate change-denying French doctor with a shady reputation— the results suggest these drugs are not effective at all. Chinese doctors also concluded they were useless. These drugs are known to have some scary side effects, including sudden cardiac death in some patients. They are also notorious for psychological side effects, such as paranoia and nightmares. At least one person in the U.S. has died from swallowing aquarium cleaner that contains a similar chemical compound.
So why are so many people so eager to get their hands on drugs that are clearly dangerous and may do no good?
The most immediate reason is simple: The people rushing the pharmacies are Republicans, and both Donald Trump and numerous Fox News personalities have told them these drugs are a “game-changer” that can save them from the coronavirus.
But there’s a reason these false or unproven claims are resonating with the ordinary citizens of Trumpistan. The hope that there’s a hard-to-get miracle cure that will save them speaks directly to the poisonous social Darwinism that guides modern conservatism. It reflects deep hostility to the very concept of a shared public good and a fierce attachment to a racialized ideology of individualism that treats public goods such as health care as things to be hoarded by those with the privilege, money and status to do so.
Conservative ideology simply doesn’t allow for the possibility that anything, including pandemic management, is best managed with a “we’re all in this together” mentality. Instead they’re drawn to this fantasy that there’s a Platinum Member COVID-19 status that can be purchased, which will allow them to opt out of the suffering of the plebeian class that has to quarantine or risk sickness and death.
There’s no question that Trump and other right-wing figures are pushing this hydroxychloroquine angle hard. Trump has talked about these drugs several times during his daily propaganda-dump “press briefings,” as well as on Twitter.
Laura Ingraham of Fox News has been hyping this stuff heavily, hosting a doctor who misleadingly argued that “this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic” Wednesday night. She’s also had tweets removed by Twitter for promoting medical disinformation.
Sean Hannity of Fox News has been urging his millions of viewers to grab this stuff up as well, saying “I love the idea of off label use” and arguing that even if it doesn’t work, people have “right to try”— completely ignoring that these drugs are dangerous.
There are many other examples, carefully collected here by Media Matters. This kind of repetition works, and goes a long way towards explaining how enthusiastically right-wing audiences have latched onto these drugs as a possible miracle cure.
But hydroxychloroquine mania also flows from the rigidly hierarchical view conservatives hold of society, one where even basic necessities like health care should be differentiated along class and race lines. Public health measures like quarantine and vaccine are viewed suspiciously precisely because they involve everyone on an approximately equal basis. They long for a special kind of medical care, one that’s just for the people they see as better than everyone else.
This attitude has manifested in many ways before this crisis, most notably around the debate over health care policy. For progressives, the conservative resistance to a single-payer health care system is baffling, even viewed from the perspective of pure self-interest. Private insurance is expensive and unreliable, and since your plan is constantly changing, it can makes basic things like keeping a steady relationship with a doctor nearly impossible. A single plan for all Americans that covers us all in the same way would be cheaper and more efficient and take a lot of pain out of seeking medical care when you need it. That seems obvious.
But that’s just what conservatives don’t like about it: They don’t want a single plan for all Americans.The very idea of having the exact same health care plan as people they see as beneath them, especially lower-income people of color, causes an angry reaction. That’s what all the right-wing hysteria over “rationing,” in response to both Obamacare and the possibility of Medicare for All, is ultimately about.It’s not that you might have to wait in line for something like knee surgery, because that’s already happening under our patchwork private-insurance system. It’s that people you deem unworthy, due to skin color or class status, also get to wait in line and — heaven forbid — might be ahead of you.
(This attitude also explains the longstanding right-wing desire to police the food purchases of people on food stamps, to make sure they are sticking with “their” food and not buying conservatives feel are reserved for true and upstanding Americans. It also explains the often-hysterical levels of right-wing hostility to public transportation, which can be traced back to the end of the practice of sending black people to the back of the bus.)
In this worldview, certain kinds of health care are for grubby commoners, while the well-off white homeowner class should have its own elite status. This is also part of the reason that the anti-vaccination movementhas taken off in this country. Vaccinations, after all, are an unpleasant reminder that disease has no respect class or race, but sees all humans as basically equal, which very much does not fit with conservative ideology.
Unsurprisingly, then, anti-vaxxer attitudes have taken hold on the right, especially in the religious right, which has long been tightly intertwined with a hostility to the government defining and controlling public goods, and has favored widespread privatization of everything from education to welfare.
A lot of people believe that anti-vaccination attitudes are most common among New Age-style leftists, but in reality, Republicans are more likely to oppose mandatory vaccinations than Democrats. It’s largely Republican elected officials who are trying to roll back laws requiring vaccinations, and the religious right has increasingly promoted the idea that it’s better for kids to simply get diseases like the chicken pox than to vaccinate them.
It’s true that anti-vaccination ideology started off in lefty circles, but that happened largely among well-off white people who may vote Democratic but tend to live in highly segregated communities and tend to embrace reactionary ideologies like “attachment parenting” that prevent women from having employment outside of the home. Ultimately, the logic of anti-vaccination comes down to a belief that an elite lifestyle of organic foods and helicopter mothering precludes the need for sharing the same health care common people use, including universal vaccination. That this mentality would leap to Republicans, who would lean into it even harder, isn’t really a surprise.
The irony of the anti-vaccination movement is that the “elite” form of health care — organic food, a mother’s unwavering attention, chicken pox parties — is less effective than the universal policy that’s under disdain, which is vaccination. But that kind of logic, where reactionaries turn up their noses at the common good since it also benefits the proletariat, is hardly limited to health care. It’s also evident in everything from rejecting the local taco stand to thinking that hip-hop isn’t “real” music.
That tormented way of thinking is what’s driving the conservative enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine. The drug probably doesn’t work, and the side effects are scary. But getting a prescription for it helps set one apart from ordinary working people who are doing the stuff public health officials prescribe, such as washing their hands a lot and staying home (even though, for many, it’s meant the loss of jobs and steady income).
Even if a coronavirus vaccine is developed relatively quickly, don’t be surprised if many conservatives prefer the fantasy of hydroxychloroquine over having to submit themselves to the same jab that janitors and hamburger flippers will line up for. Most working-class people can’t afford to turn their backs on effective, preventative health care when they can get it.
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extraction scam grift basis:
aha extraction, but special cat: dereg makes big public taxpayer $ vulnerable for extraction (via uber myth corps good/effic and gov't bad/bloated/collectivist)
//charter
aha2: pvt // deregulation; afr and latix ppl of color mos need education, but cn last afford, least prepard for it; fed loans (and maybe student/family savings) are a big target to extract from; online fior profit college biggest grift/profit attractor b/c can do in "spare" time. betsy devos dereg accredidation
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aha 1/20 new pension tag:
RWI is a [target-] rich ecosystem [JOK seeks targets proxy?]; ideological entre look for niche; revolving door part of this system, also incubator which might expose young ppl to ideas and opportunities/funding otherwise not; pension plan also signals to ideol entre new incubator recruits that it's a hood/smart bet because fail does not matter, we got your back / gig; [fe given mktpklacemeritocrisy BS]
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fit?
an 1/20
How colleges can help reverse regional inequality
Most of us know by now that the richest Americans are getting even richer. What’s less well known is that America’s richest places are getting richer too. From 2005 to…
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an 1119
The fifth way to be a billionaire is to get the money from rich parents or relatives.
About 60 percent of all the wealth in America today is inherited, according to estimates by economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues. That’s because, under U.S. tax law — which is itself largely a product of lobbying by the wealthy — the capital gains of one generation are wiped out when those assets are transferred to the next, and the estate tax is so tiny that fewer than 0.2 percent of estates were subject to it last year.
If unearned income were treated the same as earned income under the tax code, America’s non-working rich wouldn’t be billionaires. And if capital gains weren’t eliminated at death, many heirs wouldn’t be, either.
Capitalism doesn’t work well with monopolies, insider-trading, political payoffs, fraud, and large amounts of inherited wealth. Billionaires who don’t like Sanders’s and Warren’s wealth tax should at least support reforms that end these anti-capitalist advantages.
Robert B. Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley
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aha:recall family foundations were formed in the 1st place as a tax shelter and their primary/initial purpose was to undermine the estate tax (eg mars); kochs weaponized/politicized $; at odds with self made man free mkt MERITOCRACY BS
kochs built a shadow GOP (then rented out trump admin, more progress in X years than y years;)
waltons #1 in charter schools, // devos: public schools the great equalizer, source of meritocrisy); betsy supports scam colleges and stops debt relief.
mercers gave us trump and brexit (the end of the brit empire?!)
scaife gave us crooked hillary
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-end-of-the-american-myth-of-meritocracy/
:{...:{So, in a way, there is a twisted form of meritocracy in America. But it’s not the one we were all raised to believe in, the one that rewards hard work and intelligence. It’s one where the most overt sociopathy wins the day, where the person who cares least about others will come out the winner. In a country where a man with no discernible talents or redeeming qualities, whose entire personality is a disregard for others, is president, it’s hard to quarrel with the dark view of America “Succession” portrays... ===}:
Wolff’s recent article “Grades Are Capitalism in Action. Let’s Get Them Out of Our Schools’ has taken flight and has even gotten Prof. Wolff an entertaining 7 minutes on Fox Business in which pundits were caught off guard by his reasoning.
https://truthout.org/articles/grades-are-capitalism-in-action-lets-get-them-out-of-our-schools/
For those of you who like going further into the ideas presented in Prof Wolff’s writing, we are proud to offer you Discussions with Wolff. Working with d@w, Prof Wolff writes discussion questions to accompany his articles, which then we offer for free on our website.
The capitalist economic system has major failures. It generates extreme, socially divisive inequalities of wealth and income. It consistently fails to achieve full employment. Many of its jobs are boring, dangerous and/or mind-numbing. Every four to seven years, it suffers a mysterious downdraft in which millions of people lose jobs and incomes, businesses collapse, falling tax revenues undermine public services, and so on. If these failures were widely perceived as the inherent failures of the capitalist system, the desirability and thus sustainability of capitalism itself might vanish.
How, then, has capitalism survived? Its persistence can best be explained in terms of ideology. The system produces and disseminates interpretations of its failures that blame these problems not on capitalism itself, but on other altogether different “causes.” Institutions have developed mechanisms to anchor such interpretations widely and deeply in the popular consciousness.
One key example is the concept of “meritocracy.” Schools are a key institution that teaches and practices meritocracy via the mechanism of grading. From primary school through the completion of my doctorate, I suffered the imposition of grades (A, B, C, etc.). Since becoming a professor, I have constantly been required to assign grades to my students for matters such as papers, exams and class performance.
Grading takes up much of my time that could be better spent on teaching or otherwise directly interacting with students. Meanwhile, grading has little educational payoff for students. It disrespects them as thinking people. And finally, it chiefly serves employers — but often in ways that are not much good for them either. In short, grading remains an immensely wasteful, ineffective and largely negative aspect of education at all levels: primary education, secondary education and higher education.
Let’s start from the teacher’s perspective as grader. When I read a paper or exam, I can see when a student presents a reasonable version of what I intended in my lectures or what I found worthwhile in the assigned readings. But of course, I cannot be sure whether the student is simply demonstrating their short-term memory and repeating whatever I stressed in class, or whether the student has genuinely understood — in the sense of grasping and internalizing — key points, as part of the student’s own intellectual formation. Without much more time and interaction with the individual student than schools enable or allow in 99 percent of cases, I cannot know which it is when I assign a grade.
When I see that a student has not understood the concepts that were taught, the possibilities become more numerous. Did the student understand the material differently from me in ways not reducible to matters of right and wrong? After all, every piece of verbal or written material is subject to perfectly reasonable multiple interpretations. Education is not well served by insisting on one answer as right and alternatives as wrong. Such insistence is more like indoctrination than education; it undermines creative, critical thinking.
Grading has little educational payoff for students. It chiefly serves employers.
Alternately, did the student’s lack of understanding reflect poor teaching more than poor learning? Education in schools is, after all, a relationship between people: a relationship to which both persons contribute. Grades reflect and represent the power of one side in that relationship over the other. Grades students get from teachers affect their intellectual development, their school and work careers, and major dimensions of their self-esteem. Most students never assign grades to their teachers. The few that can know full well how much less power their grading of teachers wields than the grades imposed on them by teachers. Moreover, teachers and students disagree over their relative responsibilities for “poor performances” by either. I was present in countless faculty meetings where teachers defensively blamed students entirely for the poor grades they “had achieved” (i.e., teachers had given them).
Should teachers have the compensated time to carefully read, listen to, or watch multiple presentations and responses by each student? Should teachers have the compensated time to explain to each student how they have approached and evaluated their work? Would not education be best achieved if students and teachers together were able to discuss, compare and debate their respective interpretations of questions, answers, issues and analyses? If all that were done — a very rare scenario in the U.S. educational system today — why also assign a grade? It would add little of substance.
Today’s economic system precludes teachers engaging so carefully, repeatedly and thoroughly with students. Capitalism’s enterprise organization — a small minority of employers (owners and their top executives) directing and controlling a large majority of employees — is replicated in private and public educational institutions. That organization and its financial constraints combine to preclude the interactions among teachers and students that real education requires. Beyond docile acceptance of the second-rate education they can offer, most schools shy away from efforts to hold the system responsible for fear of antagonizing university donors or officials.
Education in schools is a relationship between people: Grades reflect and represent the power of one side in that relationship over the other.
While capitalism’s imposed limits help explain the practice of grading, they do not excuse it. It is a very poor substitute for far superior educational practices thereby foregone.
Grading is not only a mechanism designed to save money spent on “education.” Grades also function as a major foundation and support for the meritocracy. The merit ideology functions as a crucial defense mechanism for capitalism given its failures. The U.S. idea of meritocracy asserts that one can quantitatively rank individuals’ qualitative capacities. Each individual’s work skills, production capabilities, contributions to output — as well as their intelligence, discipline, social skills, and much more — can be ranked. This framework holds that there are some individuals who best or most possess such qualities; some who possess the worst or least of them; and many who occupy positions between those two quantitative extremes.
Within the framework of meritocratic ideology, employers seek to hire the “best” employee and are willing to pay such individual workers more than they pay workers with “less” merit (ranked lower on some scale of productivity). In meritocratic logic, those offered no jobs can only blame themselves: They must assume they have too little merit. Workers learn in school to seek to accumulate merit and achieve higher rankings along the scales that count for employers. Coalitions of educators and employers have inserted the educational system into this merit system as an important place to acquire and accumulate merit that employers will recognize and reward. Better jobs and rising pay reward rising merit acquired through more education as well as “on-the-job” training.
Meritocracy redirects the blame for capitalism’s failures onto its victims.
Schools not only enable the consumers of education to acquire and accumulate merit; their operations also exemplify the merit system they support. Harvard University conveys more merit, per credit, than Kentucky State University. Schools that signal more merit can charge students more money. Among schools, within each school, and within each classroom, merit rules.
Meritocracy and the educational system’s key place within it are important because capitalism’s survival depends on them. The merit system organizes how individual employees interpret the unemployment they suffer, the job they hate, the wage or salary they find so insufficient, the creativity their job stifles, and so on. It starts as schools train individuals to accept the grades assigned to them as measures of individual academic merit. That prepares them to accept their jobs and incomes as, likewise, measures of their individual productive merit. Under this framework, unequal grades, jobs and income can all be seen as appropriate and fair: Rewards are supposedly proportional to one’s individual merit.
This paradigm leaves little room for any systemic criticism. Inadequate educations are not blamed on an inadequate educational system unable or unwilling to fund high-quality mass schooling. Unemployment, bad jobs and insufficient incomes are not blamed on the capitalist economic system. Had they been so blamed, both systems could well have come under criticism and opposition and died off long ago.
Meritocracy redirects the blame for capitalism’s failures onto its victims. Schools teach meritocracy, and grading is the method.
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inequality ~ cowen Koch libtard BS
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TC is full of shit:
no lnx
Lately, one argument that’s been making the rounds is that people should worry less about inequality and more about opportunity. Arthur Brooks, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said, “I don’t care about income inequality per se; I care about opportunity inequality.” Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio believes that inequality is but a symptom of immobility and constrained opportunity. Tyler Cowen argued in the New York Times that what matters is not the fact that the top 1 percent is capturing a much larger share of total income growth than they used to, but that the poor are stuck in poverty.
These individuals have identified a worthy goal. Unequal access to opportunity offends deeply held American values, and poverty is not only a matter of near-term material deprivation—too often, it also robs low-income children of the chance to realize their intellectual and economic potential.
But it’s not possible to effectively address either poverty or inadequate opportunity if America hives off its opportunity concerns from the broader problem of inequality (nor, as Senator Rubio intimates, can America reduce inequality by focusing solely on increasing mobility). Boosting mobility will require reductions in wage, income, and wealth inequalities.
For many in the opportunity-not-inequality camp, the relationship between the two concepts is an inconvenient truth. Concerns about inequality smack of “class warfare,” of “going after” the top 1 percent and Wall Street.Cowen is revealing in this regard: “The inequality focus tends to draw us to redistribution, whereas a mobility focus is more conducive to ideas for wealth creation.”
Many politicians and analysts would rather not address the power imbalances that have channeled so much of our economic growth to the highest-income families. They are much more comfortable focusing on the benign-sounding theme of “wealth creation” or insisting that economic growth alone can improve mobility without any redistribution of resources or political power, as if “a rising tide can lift all boats” matters when a few people are in yachts and many are stuck in dinghies.
But a growing body of research shows strong links among inequality, poverty, and opportunity. For example, new research by Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute reveals that of the factors most commonly cited as driving poverty in America—education, family structure, race and more (see chart below)—the number-one factor by far is the growth in inequality, which added seven percentage points to the poverty rate since the late 1970s.
So why is that? How is it that inequality reduces mobility and deepens poverty?
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The relationship between childhood family income and life outcomes is well-established. Socioeconomic status is unfortunately the strongest predictor of a child’s academic achievement, as decades of social science research have found. A child’s income rank—her family’s income relative to the household income of other families—makes a difference for that child’s future adult-income rank as well. Research by Raj Chetty of Harvard and his colleagues links every 10-percentile-point gain in childhood income rank with a 3.4-percentile-point gain in income rank as an adult. Since inequality by definition means that less income will reach poor and middle class Americans for any given rate of economic growth, these facts alone highlight inequality’s relevance to mobility discussions.
In addition, a large and growing body of evidence, recently reviewed by Katharine Bradbury and Robert Triest of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, directly connects inequality of outcomes to inequality of opportunity. As shown in the figure below, Bradbury and Triest find a significant, negative relationship between living in an area with greater income inequality and children’s expected upward mobility.
The Relationship Between Inequality and Mobility
[no grafs]
Commuting zones with greater inequality have reduced expected upward mobility for low-income children (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)]
It’s critical to understand the fundamental difference between these findings and the Cowen, Rubio, et al. view that America can address poverty without addressing inequality. As just noted,rising inequality implies that the income and wealth generated by GDP and productivity growth increasingly flow to those at the very top of the scale. As a result, relatively fewer resources reach everyone else. One thus would expect to see low-income families less able (relative to the wealthy ones) to invest in children’s futures, more indebted if they tried to go to college, more likely to be stuck in neighborhoods that lack opportunity, and more likely to experience the stressors that do permanent damage to children’s later educational and earnings outcomes.
And that’s exactly what happens.
Research indicates at least three causal pathways via which inequality constrains opportunity for those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.
First, inequality is driving increasing residential segregation by income. The shares of families in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and neighborhoods of concentrated wealth both more than doubled between 1970 and 2009, while the share of families in middle-income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent to 42 percent. Those high-poverty neighborhoods—where more and more families are living—create lasting disadvantages for many who grow up there: If a family with young children (less than age 13) relocates from a high- to a low-poverty neighborhood, the kids achieve better academic and economic outcomes later in life, as new work by Chetty et al. indicates.
Second, inequality leads to unequal access to quality educational experiences throughout a child’s lifetime. Over the period of growing inequality, these disparities have increased. In 1995, for example, families with education debt in the bottom half of the net worth distribution (a broader definition of income, including assets minus liabilities) had a mean debt-to-income ratio of around 0.26, meaning that for every dollar of their income, they owed 26 cents in college debt. For families in the top 5 percent, that ratio was eight cents on the dollar. But by 2013, the debt-to-income ratio had more than doubled to 0.58 for the bottom half (some of whom are poor but many of whom are middle class) while remaining unchanged for those at the top.
Third, and most importantly, inequality directly undermines equality of opportunity, likely through a variety of mechanisms.As the gap between the rich and poor widens, lower-income families have less ability relative to their rich counterparts to invest in enrichment goods for their children. Children from families with less income have relatively less extensive and privileged social networks and, compared to their rich peers, are more likely to experience the type of "toxic" stress that can hamper brain development and long term academic, health, and economic outcomes.
In short, inequality entrenches immobility not just by enabling increasingly unequal transfers of wealth from one generation to the next, but also through a number of more subtle pathways that affect opportunity on a daily basis. It may not yet be possible to explain all of these subtle pathways with great certainty, but the fact that “rich and poor children score very differently on school readiness tests before they enter kindergarten” should be viewed as an unsurprising consequence of the high levels of inequality American society currently tolerates.
Members of the “don’t-mess-with-the-rich-to-help-the-poor” crowd also ignore the political dimension of inequality. While Rubio, Paul Ryan, and others are professing their concern for the poor, they’re busy trying to repeal the estate tax (at a cost of $270 billion over 10 years) and writing budgets that gut the safety net. These policies restrict mobility at both the bottom and top by exacerbating the burdens of being poor, increasing the privilege of being born into riches, and eliminating revenue sources for investments that might begin to reverse the inequality of opportunity. Why do politicians pursue such policies? Because they are nudged along by the interests of wealthy donors. Inequality begets greater inequality.
In other words, disadvantages faced by children in low- and middle-income families and advantages held by their wealthy peers are two sides of the same coin. The lack of opportunity for those in poverty is not some separate problem from the unequal distribution of wealth and income across society.
* * *
Boosting mobility therefore requires directly addressing residential segregation, educational access, and other barriers described above. Here are some ideas that hold promise:
One conclusion that stems from the Chetty et al. findings regarding the benefits of moving from high- to low-poverty areas is to improve the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) program. Housing analysts Barbara Sard and Doug Rice recently detailed a number of specific, straightforward changes that could eliminate barriers for voucher recipients to move into low-poverty areas, including tying voucher subsidies to rent in specific zip codes instead of entire metropolitan areas. Importantly, such a change could be implemented without significant funding or even congressional action, and HUD has just announced that it is considering doing so.
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Gapminder site graphically illustrates that vast inequalities exist, but not tight correlation between money and well-being
corroborated by "Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett which shows that most social problems are worse in more unequal societies and that inequality lies at their root."
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" Well tested and independent evidence shows that: · Beyond a certain point, increased national income does not improve the quality of life in a society, but greater equality does. Inequality within a country is what matters, not differences in average income between countries.
- Inequality harms us all in many ways. Early studies showed how it affected health, but there is now much evidence showing the negative effects on all sorts of issues. Although the poorest fare worst, a massive gulf between those at the bottom and those at the top harms everyone, whether they are rich or poor.
- In rich countries, a smaller gap between rich and poor means a happier, healthier and more successful population. The most unequal countries, the US, the UK, Portugal and Singapore have much worse social problems than the most equal countries of Japan, Sweden and Norway.
- If the UK were more equal, we’d all be better off as a population. For example, the experience of more equal countries shows that, if we halved inequality here, murder rates and obesity would halve too; mental illness would reduce by a third; imprisonment rates and births to teenage mothers would decrease to a fifth: and social mobility and levels of trust would greatly improve. ..."
" · Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, says that increasing inequality is bad for business 6 . Our current Prime Minister and 75% income tax 11 leaders of the other main parties have supported the idea of greater equality. The right wing press has also attacked increasing inequality, particularly the gap between the well to do and the extremely rich. Inequality is rightly seen to have bad effects on everybody, not just the poor.
- The International Monetary Fund has published evidence that inequality led to the huge debts behind the 2008 bank crisis and that more equal incomes can be a better solution than bank bailouts 7 .
- Banking insiders have criticised the current system, whereby the greatest rewards go to those in finance, often for unproductive money shuffling, and at the expense of production of real goods and services 8 . For poorer countries, increasing the national income is crucial so that its citizens have basic necessities. But for developed countries, where living standards are much higher, having more and more of everything makes less and less difference to well being and quality of life. What is much more important is how wealth is shared. However, if growth is the aim, more equal societies are well placed to achieve it...."
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Spirit Level?
The picture that emerges from the statistics is that inequality damages social relationships. Measures of trust and social cohesion are higher and violence is lower in more equal societies. And similarly, studies show the reason that rates of imprisonment have increased in more unequal countries and US states owes much more to harsher sentencing than to rising crime rates. Even small differences in inequality seem to make a huge difference to our quality of life. We’re not examining the effects of some imaginary egalitarian utopia. We’re analysing the effects of existing differences in the amount of inequality among advanced market economies....
The reason why almost everyone benefits from greater equality is that more equal societies are more collaborative, with less status competition. With bigger material inequalities, people become more worried about how they are seen and judged, more vulnerable to status anxieties. So much so that more unequal societies become more consumerist—people work longer hours, save less of their income and are more likely to get into debt. Greater sensitivity to how we are valued or respected explains why violence is more common in more unequal societies. Disrespect, humiliation and loss of face are common triggers to violence. Perhaps the reason why rates of mental illness are so much higher in more unequal countries is because the quality of social relationships and feeling valued have always been crucial to human well-being.
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Inner Level is followup to SpiritLevel book, loons at individual/psychological effects:
"The problems scrutinised in the book – self doubt, social anxiety, stress, and fear of how we are seen by others – have an impact on day-to-day emotions for individuals, but also a wider impact on relationships, our ability to build functioning communities, and the health and wellbeing of entire populations. These issues are massively exacerbated by inequality, and a belief in meritocracy means that any failure is deemed a personal failure, the book argues. “The reality is that inequality causes real suffering, regardless of how we choose to label such distress. Greater inequality heightens social threat and status anxiety, evoking feelings of shame which feed into our instincts for withdrawal, submission and subordination: when the social pyramid gets higher and steeper and status insecurity increases, there are widespread psychological costs.”
The stress of poverty also influences the cognitive development of babies and children. Measuring the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in infants found that poverty, and the amount of time spent in poverty, can hamper the mental development of children. Pickett and Wilkinson find that “family income is a more powerful determinant of cognitive development than being brought up by single parents, or maternal depression”, and that if children are enrolled in support services like Sure Start and their equivalents in other countries, some of the effects of poverty are offset, and children’s educational and psychological performance improves....
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inequality --> ? debt --> instability
Why Elizabeth Warren thinks the ‘warning lights are flashing’ and a new financial crisis is looming
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the uber lie: darwin invis hand meritocracy
univ supposed to be great equalizer, but poor get screwed by pred student loans, online trump U scams
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/13/cheating_bribes_lies_doj_charges_dozens
Operation Varsity Blues. That’s the name of a sweeping federal probe into what the Justice Department calls the biggest college admissions scam the agency has ever uncovered. On Tuesday, 50 people, including 13 college coaches, were arrested for taking part in a scheme where wealthy parents paid exorbitant bribes to secure spots for their unqualified children in elite schools, including Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, UCLA, USC and Wake Forest. Prosecutors have charged 33 parents, including Hollywood stars Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin; Loughlin’s husband, the fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli; and Bill McGlashan, a founder of TPG Capital, one of the largest private equity investment firms in the world. We speak with Ivory Toldson, professor of counseling psychology at Howard University and president of Quality Education for Minorities. His new book is titled “No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People.”
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GOODMAN: So, that’s the FBI special agent talking about this scandal. No actual schools were charged, though people within the schools, like, you know, the head of soccer at Yale, for example. You had these pictures sent in of athletes with their heads photoshopped to be a student who didn’t even play the particular game, in cases like water polo. What message does this scandal send to black and brown children, to white not wealthy children, who believe that higher education is a meritocracy? What do you say to them?
IVORY TOLDSON: Yeah, yeah. Well, I hope it’s a wake-up call for people who have bought into the system that people become wealthy because they have worked hard. It’s a deception that’s pervasive in our society. Among the wealthy, their objective is passive income. You know, they talk actively about making money without working.That’s what they talk about in their own social networks. But yet, when they’re talking to people who may work for them, they try to make it seem like it’s all about working hard. In reality, it should be about working hard. Everybody should work hard for what they have. But there are people in this country, unfortunately, who wouldrather manipulate the system so that some people work hard to get enough, and other people work not at all and get more.
And I think it also does a disservice to their children, because their children will grow up feeling a false sense of entitlement, believing in unearned privilege, believing in inherited wealth and all of the things that will lead to certain types of predatory behaviors, whether it be predatory lending,manipulating markets, predatory landlords—you know, different aspects of society that we’ve all grown to loathe. All of this is cultivated in these types of environments.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/how-our-public-schools-are-still-separate-and-unequal/
Desegregated busing still exists—only the children have changed. This transferring of children outside their local districts has grown even stronger. Instead of Black children being bused in, there’s an increase of White children being bused out in order to attend schools in less-diverse areas.
As we approach the 65th anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka—where the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” and therefore is unconstitutional—we are now more than ever dealing with the repercussions of separating children by race.
Decades later, this continued practice proves the lengths people will go to separate their children.
I work in a public middle school that is over 90% students of color. It’s located in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and yet many of the people living here choose to send their children to schools outside of the neighborhood. Ours is a reputable school, with a competitive arts program, regents’ classes, and children who get into specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant. Yet the parents would rather take buses, scooters, or SUVs instead of having their children attend their zoned school.
I can’t help but think that if our population were 90% White, parents would be scrambling to get their children in, maybe even bribing their way in.
Meanwhile, a mere zip code away, hundreds of parents are fighting for coveted seats to higher-achieving schools. Many of those families are relocating, thus forcing rents to increase to exorbitant prices—thereby taking away homes and spots of deserving families who can no longer afford to live there.
Not only do these schools have students entering their system with higher test scores, but having wealthier parents allows them to raise hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of dollars to pay for special programs and materials that schools in lower economical standing cannot afford to do.
Hence, separate and unequal.
Furthering this already yawning gap between schools is the influx of charter schools. Some sing their praises without considering their effects, claiming they give underserved communities the chance for a better education. Charter schools are not only cherry-picking top students, but they are also siphoning off the money that had once been traditional public school funds. In addition, they make it so that local children and active parents have to move to other locations—further depriving local districts.
Public schools need strong parental involvement to succeed. We need families that live in the community to go to schools in the community. And we need the funds that have been siphoned off for charters to be redirected back to public schools.
Otherwise, these schools cannot remain equal.
The biggest target for inequality is the middle schools. Next year begins a new initiativeto integrate middle schools in two popular regions in New York City. Instead of this opportunity being embraced to finally balance the schools, the result for many is more busing—more distance. I’ve met a number of families who have left the city altogether in fear that their children won’t get into a “good” school. Believe it or not, some have even left the country. A privilege many don’t have.
People walk around wearing T-shirts and paraphernalia espousing their pride in Brooklyn, but few are willing to allow their children to experience the learning that comes from mixing races and backgrounds. One experience I believe to be the best part of city life.
While there may have been small gains in access to education for some students of color, it hasn’t been enough to rid us of the separate and unequal status in our public schools.
If we truly want that change to happen, we all must take part in the process. Parents have to stop taking their kids away from the communities they live in and instead see what they can do to make them better.
We need to carefully review leadership and integrate our schools from the top down. We need to bring back the premise behind public education, that all children are entitled to a free and fair education.
Separate but equal has no place in our public school system. We need to put an end to transporting students away from their zoned schools and start working together as communities to make them better—for all students.
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From Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Kirsten Gillibrand to … lots of others, Democratic candidates in 2020 seem to have plans to lower the cost of education and make it possible for more Americans to attend college without drowning under a mountain of debt. Democrats recognize that education is critical to obtaining a good job, and that the cost of education in 2019 means that students are often saddled with loans that can not only erase the benefits of that education for years, but take those new college graduates out of the market for homes, or restrict their ability to move. In short, high costs for college not only means misery for graduates, it harms American companies at every level by depriving them both of workers and consumers.
So, naturally, Donald Trump is making it worse.
While Trump’s tax break for billionaires is just that—a plan that awards Trump himself tens of millions in tax breaks and means that some of the largest, most profitable companies in the country pay no tax at all—it punishes working class and middle class students. As The New York Times reports, students attending college on scholarships or financial aid packages are being taxed at a rate higher than Trump pays on his eight-figure income, with rates going up to 37%. That means that some of the students who most needed the money the most, but who made it into college on academic or athletic scholarships, or those who assembled an aid package that let them barely climb over the cost hurdle … are finding their mailboxes full with bills from the IRS. And, unlike Trump, they can’t get away with ignoring tax law.
Somehow, when they were crowing about this tax plan, Republicans failed to brag about how it was going to sock low income and middle class students for tens of thousands so that billionaires and corporate CEO’s could take home maximum benefits. It it seems like skimming from students wouldn’t make much of a difference, this isn’t just a slap on a few. This Trump tax hits about 1.3 million undergraduates and 15,000 grad students. And that’s not all. This “mistake” by Trump and the Republicans in designing their tax plan, is also taxing tribal funds paid to Native Americankids to help them get an education … or simply to live. That’s quite a mistake.
But was it a mistake? The reason all these students are being hit is because the Republican law didn’t just include the special “kiddie tax” rate that was originally established to punish wealthy parents who tried to avoid taxes by hiding money under the names of small children, it expanded that tax. The new law increased the age limit from 14 to 23 and removed language that limited the application of the tax. That makes punishing low income and middle class students seem a lot less like an accident, and more like a plan.
Democratic Representative Elaine Luria is leading an effort to roll back the expanded “kiddie tax.” Republicans may claim that the fact that low income students are finding financial aid packages taxed at the same rate as the maximum paid by wealthy toddlers whose parents try to hide a few million under their blankets is a mistake—just something they overlooked in their headlong rush to express mail trillions to the wealthiest people in the world—but somehow getting them to agree to fix this mistake is “not far along.”
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/mistake-in-republican-tax-plan-taxes-1-3-million-scholarship-students-more-than-millionaires/
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https://YYY.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/19/the-myth-of-meritocracy-who-really-gets-what-they-deserve
no lnx
Michael Young was an inconvenient child. His father, an Australian, was a musician and music critic, and his mother, who grew up in Ireland, was a painter of a bohemian bent. They were hard-up, distractible and frequently on the outs with each other. Michael, born in 1915 in Manchester, soon found that neither had much time for him. Once when his parents had seemingly forgotten his birthday, he imagined that he was in for a big end-of-day surprise. But no, they really had forgotten his birthday, which was no surprise at all. He overheard his parents talk about putting him up for adoption and, by his own account, never fully shed his fear of abandonment.
Everything changed for him when, at the age of 14, he was sent to an experimental boarding school at Dartington Hall in Devon. It was the creation of the great progressive philanthropists Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, and it sought to change society by changing souls. There it was as if he had been put up for adoption, because the Elmhirsts treated him as a son, encouraging and supporting him for the rest of their lives. Suddenly he was a member of the transnational elite: dining with President Roosevelt, listening in on a conversation between Leonard and Henry Ford.
Young, who has been called the greatest practical sociologist of the past century, pioneered the modern scientific exploration of the social lives of the English working class. He did not just aim to study class, though; he aimed to ameliorate the damage he believed it could do. The Dartington ideal was about the cultivation of personality and aptitudes whatever form they took, and the British class structure plainly impeded this ideal. What would supplant the old, caste-like system of social hierarchy? For many today, the answer is “meritocracy” – a term that Young himself coined 60 years ago. Meritocracy represents a vision in which power and privilege would be allocated by individual merit, not by social origins.
Inspired by the meritocratic ideal, many people these days are committed to a view of how the hierarchies of money and status in our world should be organised. We think that jobs should go not to people who have connections or pedigree, but to those best qualified for them, regardless of their background. Occasionally, we will allow for exceptions – for positive discrimination, say, to help undo the effects of previous discrimination. But such exceptions are provisional: when the bigotries of sex, race, class and caste are gone, the exceptions will cease to be warranted. We have rejected the old class society. In moving toward the meritocratic ideal, we have imagined that we have retired the old encrustations of inherited hierarchies. As Young knew, that is not the real story.
Young hated the term “welfare state” – he said that it smelled of carbolic – but before he turned 30 he had helped create one. As the director of the British Labour party’s research office, he drafted large parts of the manifesto on which the party won the 1945 election. The manifesto, “Let Us Face the Future”, called for “the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain – free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organised in the service of the British people”. Soon the party, as it promised, raised the school-leaving age to 16, increased adult education, improved public housing, made public secondary school education free, created a national health service and provided social security for all.
As a result, the lives of the English working class were beginning to change radically for the better. Unions and labour laws reduced the hours worked by manual labourers, increasing their possibilities of leisure. Rising incomes made it possible for them to buy televisions and refrigerators. And changes, partly driven by new estate taxes, were going on at the top of the income hierarchy, too. In 1949, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Stafford Cripps, introduced a tax that rose to 80% on estates of £1m and above, or about £32m in contemporary inflation-adjusted terms. (Disclosure: I’m a grandson of his.) For a couple of generations afterward, these efforts at social reform both protected members of the working classes and allowed more of their children to make the move up the hierarchy of occupations and of income, and so, to some degree, of status. Young was acutely conscious of these accomplishments; he was acutely conscious, too, of their limitations.
Just as happened in the US, college attendance shot up in Britain after the second world war, and one of the main indicators of class was increasingly whether you had been to university. The middle-class status of meagerly compensated librarians reflected a vocational requirement for an education beyond secondary school; that the better-paid assembly-line workers were working-class reflected the absence of such a requirement. Working-class consciousness – legible in the very name of the Labour party, founded in 1900 – spoke of class mobilisation, of workers securing their interests. The emerging era of education, by contrast, spoke of class mobility – blue collars giving way to white. Would mobility undermine class consciousness?
These questions preyed on Young. Operating out of a community studies institute he set up in Bethnal Green, he helped create and nurture dozens and dozens of programmes and organisations, all attending to social needs he had identified. The Consumers’ Association was his brainchild, along with its magazine, Which?. So was the Open University, which has taught more than 2 million students since Young founded it in 1969, making it the largest academic institution in the UK by enrolment. Yet education mattered to him not just as a means of mobility, but as a way to make people more forceful as citizens, whatever their station – less easily bulldozed by commercial developers or the government planners of Whitehall. Late in life, he even set up the School for Social Entrepreneurs. Over the decades, he wanted to strengthen the social networks – the “social capital”, as social scientists say these days – of communities that get pushed around by those who were increasingly claiming a lion’s share of society’s power and wealth.
What drove him was his sense that class hierarchies would resist the reforms he helped implement. He explained how it would happen in a 1958 satire, his second best-seller, entitled The Rise of the Meritocracy. Like so many phenomena, meritocracy was named by an enemy. Young’s book was ostensibly an analysis written in 2033 by a historian looking back at the development over the decades of a new British society. In that distant future, riches and rule were earned, not inherited. The new ruling class was determined, the author wrote, by the formula “IQ + effort = merit”. Democracy would give way to rule by the cleverest – “not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy of talent.” This is the first published appearance of the word “meritocracy”, and the book aimed to show what a society governed on this principle would look like.
‘Education mattered to Young not just as a means of mobility, but as a way to make people more forceful as citizens, whatever their station.’
‘Education mattered to Young not just as a means of mobility, but as a way to make people more forceful as citizens, whatever their station.’ Photograph: Getty
Young’s vision was decidedly dystopian. As wealth increasingly reflects the innate distribution of natural talent, and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they deserve. He imagined a country in which “the eminent know that success is a just reward for their own capacity, their own efforts”, and in which the lower orders know that they have failed every chance they were given. “They are tested again and again … If they have been labelled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering reflection.”
But one immediate difficulty was that, as Young’s narrator concedes, “nearly all parents are going to try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring”. And when you have inequalities of income, one thing people can do with extra money is to pursue that goal. If the financial status of your parents helped determine your economic rewards, you would no longer be living by the formula that “IQ + effort = merit”.
Those cautions have, of course, proved well founded. In the US, the top fifth of households enjoyed a $4tn increase in pretax income between 1979 and 2013 – $1tn more than came to all the rest. When increased access to higher education was introduced in the US and Britain, it was seen as a great equaliser. But a couple of generations later, researchers tell us that higher education is now a great stratifier. Economists have found that many elite US universities – including Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, and Yale – take more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%. To achieve a position in the top tier of wealth, power and privilege, in short, it helps enormously to start there. “American meritocracy,” the Yale law professor Daniel Markovits argues, has “become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.”
Young, who died in 2002 at the age of 86, saw what was happening. “Education has put its seal of approval on a minority,” he wrote, “and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.” What should have been mechanisms of mobility had become fortresses of privilege. He saw an emerging cohort of mercantile meritocrats who can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side. So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves.
The carapace of “merit”, Young argued, had only inoculated the winners from shame and reproach.
Americans, unlike the British, don’t talk much about working-class consciousness; it is sometimes said that all Americans are, by self-conception, middle class. But this, it turns out, is not currently what Americans themselves think. In a 2014 National Opinion Research Center survey, more Americans identified as working-class than as middle-class. One (but only one) strand of the populism that tipped Donald Trump into power expressed resentment toward a class defined by its education and its values: the cosmopolitan, degree-laden people who dominate the media, the public culture and the professions in the US. Clinton swept the 50 most educated counties, as Nate Silver noted shortly after the 2016 election; Trump swept the 50 least. Populists think that liberal elites look down on ordinary Americans, ignore their concerns and use their power to their own advantage. They may not call them an upper class, but the indices that populists use to define them – money, education, connections, power – would have picked out the old upper and upper-middle classes of the last century.
And many white working-class voters feel a sense of subordination, derived from a lack of formal education, and that can play a part in their politics. Back in the early 1970s, the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb recorded these attitudes in a study memorably titled The Hidden Injuries of Class. This sense of vulnerability is perfectly consistent with feeling superior in other ways. Working-class men often think that middle-class and upper-class men are unmanly or undeserving. Still, a significant portion of what we call the American white working class has been persuaded that, in some sense, they do not deserve the opportunities that have been denied to them.
They may complain that minorities have unfair advantages in the competition for work and the distribution of government benefits. Nevertheless, they do not think it is wrong either that they do not get jobs for which they believe they are not qualified, or that the jobs for which they are qualified are typically less well paid. They think minorities are getting “handouts” – and men may feel that women are getting unfair advantages, too – but they don’t think the solution is to demand handouts for themselves. They are likely to regard the treatment of racial minorities as an exception to the right general rule: they think the US mostly is and certainly should be a society in which opportunities belong to those who have earned them.
A still from an Open University maths lecture, first broadcast in January 1971.
A still from an Open University maths lecture, first broadcast in January 1971. Photograph: Open University/PA
If a new dynastic system is nonetheless taking shape, you might conclude that meritocracy has faltered because, as many complain, it isn’t meritocratic enough. If talent is capitalised efficiently only in high tax brackets, you could conclude that we have simply failed to achieve the meritocratic ideal. Maybe it is not possible to give everyone equally good parenting, but you could push more rigorously for merit, making sure every child has the educational advantages and is taught the social tricks that successful families now hoard for their children. Why isn’t that the right response?
Because, Young believed, the problem was not just with how the prizes of social life were distributed; it was with the prizes themselves. A system of class filtered by meritocracy would, in his view, still be a system of class: it would involve a hierarchy of social respect, granting dignity to those at the top, but denying respect and self-respect to those who did not inherit the talents and the capacity for effort that, combined with proper education, would give them access to the most highly remunerated occupations. This is why the authors of his fictional Chelsea Manifesto – which, in The Rise of the Meritocracy, is supposed to serve as the last sign of resistance to the new order – ask for a society that “both possessed and acted upon plural values”, including kindliness, courage and sensitivity, so all had a chance to “develop his own special capacities for leading a rich life”. Even if you were somehow upholding “IQ + effort = merit”, then your equation was sponsoring a larger inequality.
This alternative vision, in which each of us takes our allotment of talents and pursues a distinctive set of achievements and the self-respect they bring, was one that Young had learned from his schooling at Dartington Hall. And his profound commitment to social equality can seem, in the mode of schoolhouse utopias, quixotic. Yet it draws on a deeper philosophical picture. The central task of ethics is to ask what it is for a human life to go well. A plausible answer is that living well means meeting the challenge set by three things: your capacities, the circumstances into which you were born, and the projects that you yourself decide are important. Because each of us comes equipped with different talents and is born into different circumstances, and because people choose their own projects, each of us faces his or her own challenge. There is no comparative measure that would enable an assessment of whether your life or my life is better; Young was right to protest the idea that “people could be put into rank order of worth”. What matters in the end is not how we rank against others. We do not need to find something that we do better than anyone else; what matters, to the Dartingtonians, is simply that we do our best.
The ideal of meritocracy, Young understood, confuses two different concerns. One is a matter of efficiency; the other is a question of human worth. If we want people to do difficult jobs that require talent, education, effort, training and practice, we need to be able to identify candidates with the right combination of aptitude and willingness and provide them incentives to train and practice.
Michael Young in 1949.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Young in 1949. Photograph: Getty
Because there will be a limited supply of educational and occupational opportunities, we will have to have ways of allocating them – some principles of selection to match people to positions, along with appropriate incentives to ensure the necessary work gets done. If these principles of selection have been reasonably designed, we can say, if we like, that the people who meet the criteria for entering the schools or getting the jobs “merit” those positions. This is, to enlist some useful philosophers’ jargon, a matter of “institutional desert”. People deserve these positions in the sense in which people who buy winning lottery tickets deserve their winnings: they got them by a proper application of the rules.
Institutional desert, however, has nothing to do with the intrinsic worthiness of the people who get into college or who get the jobs, any more than lottery winners are people of special merit and losers are somehow less worthy. Even on the highest levels of achievement, there is enormous contingency at play. If Einstein had been born a century earlier, he might have made no momentous contributions to his field; a Mozart who came of age in the early 20th century and trained on 12-tone rows might not have done so either. Neither might have made much use of their aptitudes had they grown up among the Amazonian Nukak.
And, of course, the capacity for hard work is itself the result of natural endowments and upbringing. So neither talent nor effort, the two things that would determine rewards in the world of the meritocracy, is itself something earned. People who have, as The Rise of the Meritocracy bluntly put it, been repeatedly “labelled ‘dunce’” still have capacities and the challenge of making a meaningful life. The lives of the less successful are not less worthy than those of others, but not because they are as worthy or more worthy. There is simply no sensible way of comparing the worth of human lives.
Put aside the vexed notion of “merit”, and a simpler picture emerges. Money and status are rewards that can encourage people to do the things that need doing. A well-designed society will elicit and deploy developed talent efficiently. The social rewards of wealth and honour are inevitably going to be unequally shared, because that is the only way they can serve their function as incentives for human behaviour. But we go wrong when we deny not only the merit but the dignity of those whose luck in the genetic lottery and in the historical contingencies of their situation has left them less rewarded.
Yes, people will inevitably want to share both money and status with those they love, seeking to get their children financial and social rewards. But we should not secure our children’s advantages in a way that denies a decent life to the children of others. Each child should have access to a decent education, suitable to her talents and her choices; each should be able to regard him- or herself with self-respect. Further democratising the opportunities for advancement is something we know how to do, even if the state of current politics in Britain and the US has made it increasingly unlikely that it will be done anytime soon. But such measures were envisaged in Young’s meritocratic dystopia, where inheritance was to hold little sway. His deeper point was that we also need to apply ourselves to something we do not yet quite know how to do: to eradicate contempt for those who are disfavoured by the ethic of effortful competition.
“It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit,” Young wrote. “It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.” The goal is not to eradicate hierarchy and to turn every mountain into a salt flat; we live in a plenitude of incommensurable hierarchies, and the circulation of social esteem will always benefit the better novelist, the more important mathematician, the savvier businessman, the faster runner, the more effective social entrepreneur. We cannot fully control the distribution of economic, social and human capital, or eradicate the intricate patterns that emerge from these overlaid grids. But class identities do not have to internalise those injuries of class. It remains an urgent collective endeavour to revise the ways we think about human worth in the service of moral equality.
This can sound utopian, and, in its fullest conception, it undoubtedly is. Yet nobody was more practical-minded than Young, institution-builder par excellence. It is true that the stirrings of Young’s conscience responded to the personal as well as the systemic; dying of cancer in a hospital ward, he worried whether the contractor-supplied African immigrants who wheeled around the food trolleys were getting minimum wage. But his compassion was welded to a sturdy sense of the possible. He did not merely dream of reducing inherited privilege; he devised concrete measures to see that it happened, in the hope that all citizens could have the chance to develop their “own special capacities for leading a rich life”. He had certainly done exactly that himself. In the imaginary future of The Rise of the Meritocracy, there was still a House of Lords, but it was occupied solely by people who had earned their places there through distinguished public service. If anyone had merited a place in that imaginary legislature, it would have been him.
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That was far from true of the House of Lords he grew up with, which was probably one reason why his patron Leonard Elmhirst declined a peerage when offered one in the 1940s; in the circles he moved in, he made clear, “acceptance would neither be easy for me to explain nor easy for my friends to comprehend”. So it is more than a little ironic that when Young, the great egalitarian, was offered a peerage in 1978, he took it. Naturally, he chose for himself the title Baron Young of Dartington, honouring the institution he had served as a trustee since the age of 27. As you would expect, he used the opportunity to speak about the issues that moved him in the upper house of the British parliament. But there is a further, final irony. A major reason he had accepted the title (“guardedly”, as he told his friends) was that he was having difficulties meeting the expense of travelling up to London from his home in the country. Members of the Lords not only got a daily allowance if they attended the house; they got a pass to travel free on the railways. Michael Young entered the aristocracy because he needed the money.
This article originally appeared in the New York Review of Books. See nybooks.com
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