More diversity, less equality: why the tradeoff?

During the past 30 or 40 years ago, the United States has come closer than ever before to equal opportunity, not only for African-Americans and women, but also GLBT folks and the physically handicapped.

At the same time a huge gap has developed between a tiny elite, who gather a greater share of American wealth and income year by year, and the vast majority of Americans, who are either falling behind or struggling as hard as they can to keep even.

Samuel Goldman, writing in The American Conservative recently, said this is no paradox.  He wrote that the tradeoff between diversity and equality is a result of a tacit grand bargain between the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and corporate America.

… The stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are far from “unrelated”.  Rather, social inclusion has been used to legitimize economic inequality by means of familiar arguments about meritocracy.   According to this view, it’s fine that the road from Harvard Yard to Wall Street is paved with gold, so long a few representatives of every religion, color, and sexual permutation manage to complete the journey.  Superficial diversity at the top thus provides an moral alibi for the gap between the one percent and the rest.

via The Spiritual Crisis of the Bourgeois Bohemians.

Rod Dreher, also writing in The American Conservative, put it this way.

From a contemporary progressivist point of view, non-rich social conservatives who vote Republican do so out of false consciousness, or mindless bigotry.  But how many liberals would vote for a politician who proposed to stick it to the banks and the oligarchs, and who endorsed a broadly progressive economic agenda, but who openly opposed gay marriage and abortion, and endorsed religious piety?  (Basically, your pre-1970s Catholic Democrat).  Very few, I would imagine.

The culture war is in some ways class war by another name. Whenever you see some middle or upper class person gabbing on about the importance of diversity, you shouldn’t expect that they mean actual diversity — because then they would be eager to include, say, white working-class Republican Pentecostals — but rather diversity as what Goldman calls a “moral alibi,” which entails one’s ability to conceal one’s own real motivations from oneself.

via Culture (War) Is Everything.

I think there is a lot of truth in this, and it explains a lot.

It explains how Silicon Valley billionaires can avoid taxes, export jobs to some low-wage Third World country and shrug off the problems of middle-class and working-class Americans, and still be considered liberals and good friends of President Obama.

And it explains how President Obama can still be considered a liberal as he tries to undermine Social Security, attack teachers unions and negotiate trade treaties that lock in the corporate agenda.

When I worked for Gannett, CEO Al Neuharth ostentatiously promoted the advancement of African-Americans, women and gay people, which made him bullet-proof against criticism for offering sub-standard pay and benefits and crushing labor unions.

Our “diversity training” sessions always seemed to me to be part of a policy of divide-and-rule. I remember that at one session, a gay white man got up and said that gays, African-Americans and women in the newsroom should unite against the straight white men—not a view that would improve morale or teamwork.   He was not rebuked, and was later promoted.

The tipoff as to management’s aims was in the fact that they refused to agree to a clause in the union contract calling for non-discrimination based on sexual orientation.  The company wanted GLBT people, as well as African-Americans and women, to look to management, not to fellow workers, for their rights.

Of course acceptance of diversity is a good thing, not a bad thing.  It is a good thing that Ursula Burns, a black woman, can become CEO of Xerox, but not everybody can be a CEO or wants to be one.   Some people are content with an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, and what’s wrong with that?

Nor is there any logical reason why diversity and equality should be tradeoffs.  The U.S. labor union movement has long ceased to be a movement primarily of native-born white men.   Trade unions recognize that they can’t win unless they stand together, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or anything else.

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Mexican border as secure as it is going to get

Apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants at the U.S.-Mexican border, which is the only way we have to measure illegal immigration, are at the lowest level in more than 40 years, according to the Washington Spectator.  Deportations of unauthorized residents meanwhile are at their highest level in more than a century.

I don’t say that this is a solution to the unauthorized immigration problem in the United States.  I do say this is as close as we’re going to come to solving the problem through enforcement alone.

Click on The Border Hasn’t Been This Secure in 40 Years for the full article in the Washington Spectator.

Click on The Wrong Kind of Immigration Spending for a report and charts from The American Prospect

Click on Immigration Enforcement In the United States for a PDF of the Migration Policy Institute’s report.

Click on Migration Policy Institute Topics for a menu of recent news items about the Institute from USA Today.

25 handy words that don’t exist in English

Here is a list of words that don’t exist in English, but ought to—especially arigata-meiwaku, gigil, manja and tingo.

1. Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut
2. Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude
3. Backpfeifengesicht (German): A face badly in need of a fist
4. Bakku-shan (Japanese): A beautiful girl… as long as she’s being viewed from behind
5. Desenrascanço (Portuguese): “To disentangle” yourself out of a bad situation (To MacGyver it)
6. Duende (Spanish): A climactic show of spirit in a performance or work of art, which might be fulfilled in flamenco dancing, or bull-fighting, etc.
7. Forelsket (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love
8. Gigil (pronounced Gheegle; Filipino): The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute
9. Guanxi (Mandarin): In traditional Chinese society, you would build up good guanxi by giving gifts to people, taking them to dinner, or doing them a favor, but you can also use up your gianxi by asking for a favor to be repaid
10. Ilunga (Tshiluba, Congo): A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time
11. L’esprit de l’escalier (French): Usually translated as “staircase wit,” is the act of thinking of a clever comeback when it is too late to deliver it
12. Litost (Czech): A state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery
13. Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan): A look between two people that suggests an unspoken, shared desire
14. Manja (Malay): “To pamper”.  It describes gooey, childlike and coquettish behavior by women designed to elicit sympathy or pampering by men. “His girlfriend is a damn manja. Hearing her speak can cause diabetes.”
15. Meraki (pronounced may-rah-kee; Greek): Doing something with soul, creativity, or love. It’s when you put something of yourself into what you’re doing
16. Nunchi (Korean): The subtle art of listening and gauging another’s mood. In Western culture, nunchi could be described as the concept of emotional intelligence.  Knowing what to say or do, or what not to say or do, in a given situation.  A socially clumsy person can be described as ‘nunchi eoptta’, meaning “absent of nunchi”
17. Pena ajena (Mexican Spanish): The embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation
18. Pochemuchka (Russian): A person who asks a lot of questions
19. Schadenfreude (German): The pleasure derived from someone else’s pain
20. Sgriob (Gaelic): The itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey
21. Taarradhin (Arabic): Implies a happy solution for everyone, or “I win. You win.” It’s a way of reconciling without anyone losing face. Arabic has no word for “compromise,” in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement
22. Tatemae and Honne (Japanese): What you pretend to believe and what you actually believe, respectively
23. Tingo (Pascuense language of Easter Island): To borrow objects one by one from a neighbor’s house until there is nothing left
24. Waldeinsamkeit (German): The feeling of being alone in the woods
25. Yoko meshi (Japanese): Literally ‘a meal eaten sideways,’ referring to the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language

via So Bad So Good.

The stupidity factor in organizations

Stupidity in big organizations is not a bug.  It’s a feature.   So say two scholars, Mats Alvesson of Lund University in Sweden and Andre Spicer of City University in England, in their recent paper, The Stupidity Factor in Organizations.

They say organizations need “functional stupidity,” which is a willful lack of recognition of the incompleteness of knowledge and a willful refusal to question the organization’s goals and policies.  This builds confidence and loyalty which helps the organization to function smoothly.

Alvesson and Spicer discuss how managers use vision statements, motivational meetings and corporate culture as “stupidity management” to develop loyalty and suppress critical thinking.  They discuss how employees use “stupidity self-management” to suppress doubt and get with the program.

In Herman Wouk’s novel, The Caine Mutiny, a recruit decides that the U.S. Navy as an organization designed by geniuses to be operated by idiots.  When in doubt, he asks himself, “What would I do if I were a idiot?”   That is a gross exaggeration, but an exaggeration of truth.

Managers want employees who are intelligent enough to carry out orders competently, but not so intelligent that they question the orders.   Critical thinking creates friction that prevents the organization from running smoothly.  Over time the organization’s tendency is eliminate that friction, and become more disconnected from reality.

You can see this in how Washington officials and journalists understand.   They treat the processes of government, such as the 60-vote rule in the Senate or the revolving door between corporate and government employment, as if they were objective and unchangeable facts, like the laws of thermodynamics.  They treat actual problems, such as unemployment or global climate change, as if they were matters of personal preference.

The trouble with ignoring reality is that sooner or later it catches up with you.  Then crisis generates what Alvesson and Spicer call the “How could I have been so stupid?” syndrome.

Click on A Stupidity Based Theory of Organizations for a PDF of Alvesson’s and Spicer’s paper. If you read it with close attention, I think you will see the dry humor beneath their social science jargon.

Click on Understanding Organizational Stupidity for Dimitri Orlov’s summary of their paper and his comments.

The story of my life

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The facts about U.S. wealth and poverty

This video strikingly illustrates the concentration of wealth in the United States and the gap between the rich and the masses, which is greater than most Americans realize.  I came across it on the occassional links and commentary web log.

If you see nothing wrong with the degree of inequality described in this video, I would ask if there is any degree of inequality that would bother you.

Books on paper are here to stay (I hope)

Double click to enlarge.

The other advantage of books on paper is that they can’t be deleted at the push of a button by Big Brother (in the form of Amazon, Google or Homeland Security).

Source: Daily Infographic.

Upton Sinclair on Christmas shopping

The above video shows Wal-Mart customers fighting over telephones that were on sale Friday with the start of the Christmas shopping season.  They probably weren’t typical, but neither were they unusual.  Click on Wal-Mart’s Black Friday 2012 for more examples.  I don’t know who coined the term “Black Friday” for the first shopping day after Thanksgiving, but I’m sure it must have been a department store employee.

Long before there were Black Friday sales, the reformer Upton Sinclair had this to say about the shopping season.

Upton Sinclair

Many friends of mine regard the Christmas season as, not exactly an ordeal but a stressful time they have to get through, rather than a time of rejoicing, let along a Christian religious feast.  What went wrong?  Was it when Santa Claus and his presents displaced the baby Jesus in the manger as the central Christmas figure?

Or is there something about Black Friday and the Christmas shopping scene that I misunderstand?

The Democratic and Republican coalitions

This chart from the New York Times shows the support of various demographic groups to the Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates in 2004, 2008 and 2012.  Barack Obama got more support from most groups in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004.  Obama’s support decreased in 2012, but remained strong enough to win.

The big exceptions were Obama’s surge of support among Hispanic and Asian-American voters.  Republicans ought to be asking themselves why this is.  Hispanic culture is based on respect for church, family and work, which are all values that conservatives affirm.

This is a highly informative chart, and an effective use of graphics to present statistical information.

Hat tip to The Big Picture.

Inside the minds of the global financial elite

During the first year of the U.S. economic recovery, 93 percent of the gains from growth went to the top 1 percent of income earners, and 37 percent went to the top 1/100th of 1 percent.

Bill Moyers did a good show a few nights ago about the mentality of this elite of wealth—how they regard themselves as Ayn Rand characters who are carrying the rest of the world on their shoulders, their limitless sense of entitlement to their special privileges, and their isolation from ordinary people and their conerns.

Moyers interviewed Chrystria Freeland, editor of Thomson Reuters Digital and author of a new book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Superrich and the Fall of Everyone Else, and Matt Taibbi, who reports on high finance and politics for Rolling Stone.

As Freeland and Taibbi noted, the wealthy elite do not think of themselves as plutocrats.  They sincerely think that they are absolutely entitled to their wealth and privileges.  As a group, they are smart and hard working, and have risen largely through their own efforts.  As a result, they think they owe nothing to anyone else.  They think that they created the world’s wealth by themselves solely through their own efforts, and that they are carrying the rest of the population, especially the American middle class, are parasites.

Both Freeland and Taibbi got their start in journalism reporting on Russia in the 1990s.  They saw the rise of an oligarchy of wealth, which got control of resources based on their connections in government, and who lived lives of luxury behind guarded walls, cut off from the struggling majority of the population.  Now they see the same thing happening on a global basis.

Income inequality is rising everywhere, not just in the United States, but in France, Canada and other countries.  The elite of each country feel they have little in common with ordinary people in their own countries, but much with the rest of the global elite.

Freeland talked about “cognitive capture”—how politicians and intellectuals have come to accept that the plutocracy deserve their privileges, and how even poor people in the United States (not necessarily in other countries) believe they deserve to be poor.

On the other hand, Taibbi and Freeland said, there is class conflict within the upper 1 percent of income earners.   Millionaires resent the way government gives preferential treatment to billionaires.  Silicon Valley entrepreneurs resent Wall Street bankers.

My response to all this:

• The fact that someone is highly intelligent and works very hard does not mean that person deserves to be rich.  I know smart, hard-working people who are barely making it.  You deserve to be richly rewarded if you make a contribution to society of great value.  Some members of the global elite do make a positive contribution.  Others do not.   Some are no better than thieves.
• Many members of the global elite have determined that a prosperous middle class and a well-paid working class are not needed.  They can get along very well without  us.   But that is not the issue.  The issue is whether working people and middle-class people need the global elite.
• The global elite think of themselves as “job creators.”  Another way of putting it is that they are gatekeepers who determine access to gainful employment.  There is a lot of work that needs to be done—in the United States, repair of aging water and sewerage systems, for example—that does not necessarily enrich the elite.   They shouldn’t have a veto over whether it is done.
• It is a misnomer to label the plutocracy as “libertarian.”  They are libertarians or statists depending on what is to their interest at the time.  What is constant is their sense of entitlement.
• I think the complaints of the millionaires against the billionaires, and the Silicon Valley elite against the Wall Street elite, probably have some merit.  There are many bankers who have operated on sound banking principles, and been overshadowed by bankers who’ve grown by gambling recklessly and then being bailed out by the government from their losses.

Click on The Rise of the New Global Elite for an article by Chrystia Freeland in The Atlantic.

Click on Plutocracy Rising Transcript for a written transcript of the show.

Click on Chrystia Freeland | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters for her blog.

Click on Matt Taibbi | Taibblog | Rolling Stone for his blog.

Click on Moyers & Company for Bill Moyers’ home page.