by Chris Bertram on December 3, 2010
Frank Field, the Joe Lieberman of British politics, “has been advising the ConDem government”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/03/frank-field-welfare-sacred-cows on welfare reform. Here’s a sentence to contemplate:
bq. This goal of changing the distribution of income will be achieved by ensuring that poorer children in the future have the range of abilities necessary to secure better paid, higher skilled jobs.
Of course, I can see a way in which that might work. The newly educated poorer children, frustrated at the stultifying low-wage jobs on offer to them, rise up and change the income distribution by expropriating the expropriators. I doubt that’s the mechanism that Field has in mind though.
by Belle Waring on December 3, 2010
Some feel we should take a more active approach to managing comments. I think we do pretty well on the whole (although the Lord love you, you are a grumpy lot). Question of the day: is the unremitting, permanent badness of Matthew Yglesias’ comments the result of intentional sabotage, or can it be chalked up to his policy of utterly ignoring them at all times? I favor the former explanation, because he’s influential enough that I can imagine some testy Republican or two taking it on as a volunteer project to wreck it up constantly. There was never a time when they were good, either, even in the early days. He was assigned what I consider to be, in John Emerson’s formulation, an Al-bot; a rotating crew of people commenting as “Al” day and night there and at Kevin Drum’s and Ezra Klein’s with the result that every single thread was derailed. Final note: why has Digby never been promoted to the big leagues, despite her obvious rightness and acerbic wit? Sexism, or a lust for mindless contrarianism that she will never satisfy?
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