Reality breaks through the Overton window

good reasons to think that the image of the US as a land of opportunity was valid in the past

Maybe. Or just that we only hear of the Edisons and Fords, and not (in that respect) of the people that went bankrupt, died of TB, etc.

I think that upward mobility was always a comfortable myth. Lots of people still believe it now, when the numbers show it is false. Why wouldn’t they have believed it before there were such numbers?

Here’s Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five from 1969:

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

…and Louis Jordan, singing Walter Bishop Sr., from maybe 1950:

Hershey started with a chocolate bar
Wrigley with a stick of gum
Planters took his peanuts and travelled far
Now tell me – what’you doin’, chum?
I’ been hearin’ all about all your big ideas
Since you started. What’s the hitch?
You never made ten dollars yet
You say you can balance the national debt
If you’re so smart,
How come you ain’t rich?

Slaughterhouse V is the source of the quote. Page 129 according to Google Books.

Two thoughts about the OP:

1) Although the myth of opportunity underlies a lot of conservative rhetoric historically, there’s also a strain that runs from William Graham Sumner through Charles Murray that has emphasized the cold, hard, and supposedly necessary fact of “natural” inequality. I’m not convinced that the potential reemergence of this rhetoric as a more dominant strain on the American right is an automatic triumph for the “left” (let alone the left).

2) The slow collapse of the myth of higher education as a panacea for all of the structural inequalities of our society poses real dangers for higher education (especially public higher education), as well , since higher-ed-as-social-equalizer has become the overwhelming basis for popular and political support for higher ed.

As Hildari @2 suggested, Repubs (and some Libertarians) admitting to growing inequality has become part and parcel of their anti-Democrat talking points. They argue that that the Democrat agenda is to make as many Americans dependent on the government as possible by increasing welfare and other social programs and discouraging them from finding work. By doing so (they argue) Dems will guarantee success in future elections, since a vote for a Repub is a vote against their continued government support. The recently-retired Neal Boortz was a particularly vocal proponent of this theory (http://www.boortz.com/weblogs/nealz-nuze/2012/nov/07/its-not-always-great-being-right/), but I hear it from others, too.

John: “Still, I’m an incurable optimist. When the hired gun occupying the most prestigious single position in the right’s intellectual parallel universe accepts growing inequality and social immobility as uncontroversial background assumptions, we have at least won the battle of ideas. The 1 per cent have entrenched power, but even they can no longer pretend to believe that their huge wealth benefits everyone else.”

I’m seconding Ben, and adding on – the obvious next step is to assert (without proof, of course) that inequality and immobility are good things. As you noted with Alex (member of another, perhaps less notorious intellectual br*thel).

As for the AEI, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s that hacks and wh*res stay that way, with painfully few exceptions. I know where I’d bet my money about the path of the intellectual br*thels of the right.

University teachers are in a seriously conflicted position. Just a year ago, the surest way for a commenter to be pelted with the posting equivalent of rotten fruit and vegetables on CT was to suggest that there was a likely shift away from the $100,000 ivy-covered-halls baccalaureate. Then came the MOOCs and the Shirkey article signalling a shift in the conventional wisdom. Instructors in economics and the social sciences now have the delicate task of explaining how dismantling the bricks and mortar higher education model that sustains their careers is desirable reform that will reduce inequality and restore prosperity.

My impression was always that a lack of social mobility has long been accepted and justified by appitude differences:

Something like this:

a) It is ok when people with higher aptitude make a lot more money, since this just reflects their value to society

b) Since society was so equal opportunity for such a long time, ones parents icome level perfectly reflects their aptitude

c) aptitude is almost solely based on inherited genetics

—> no need for social mobillity

This is was Sarazin did and my impression was he copy pasted American authors.

@9
Social Darwinism, though, never foregrounded a lack of social mobility. In fact, often Social Darwinism was seen as promoting social mobility: from the working class to the poorhouse, especially.

And Murray, from what I gather, emphasized assortative mating as much as assortative hiring as a mechanism of mobility that’s facilitated by universities, one that’s not much discussed in the economic literature, to be sure.

Page xvii:

In summary, there were initial positive impacts from having access to Head Start, but by the end of 3rd grade there were very few impacts found for either cohort in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices. The few impacts that were found did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children.

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/resource/third-grade-follow-up-to-the-head-start-impact-study-final-report

I’m sure all of the partisans of “reality” will now call for Head Start to be defunded.

Head Start has actually shown robust success.

I think what you’re talking about is a shift in the spheres of consensus, controversy and deviance, as theorized by Daniel Hallin, discussed in this class Press Think post: http://archive.pressthink.org/2009/01/12/atomization.html

Always keep ahold of nurse / For fear of finding something worse. Sorry, I’m not ready to embrace reactionary liberalism that defends every existing institution precisely as it exists now because I’m afraid of the right. Public opinion is not on their side and neither is time.

@26 and @27: No, you’re confusing a difference of ideology with a difference of strategy. I’m no liberal, let alone a “reactionary” one. And no one is defending existing institutions “precisely as they exist.” Passion cannot substitute for a realistic grasp of the distribution of power and how to get it and use it. In any case, I was disputing Steve’s singular focus on higher education. Its deeper and wider than he allows.

The ‘Overton Window’ is essentially a bowlderized version of the work of French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s, ‘Theory of Practice” based on his work with tribal structure and authority. British Econ writer Gillian Tett (Fool’s Gold) is a big fan of his work in understanding Wall Street tribal behavior, and how elites manipulate society’s cognitive map. For more discussion and links to Bourdieu’s comments on media, please see “Our Half of the Deal” at: http://somewhatlogically.com/?p=472

Of equal interest are the stats and links in the recent OECD piece, http://oecdinsights.org/2013/02/07/college-or-something-like-it/ Which points to the decline of the US love affair with higher education because of cost, and the potential negative impacts.

No one has thrown a brick through the Overton Window…yet.

I’ll probably regret it, but I agree with SLB @10 and Wilder’s assertion @18 that too much higher education is an invitation to debt and believe that some part of the solution (if there in fact is one) lies with MOOC as @15.

There probably haven’t been 7 things I fully agree with Mr LaBonne on, but in this case he’s right near the center of the bullseye – the U.S. higher ed system needs a serious enema….billions of dollars with no accountability have clogged up the pipes.

Don’t flatter yourself, Joe. You’re full of crap as usual. Higher education is receiving insufficient public support, and at the same time the existing support is directed in ways that are not good for non-wealthy students. I realize this may be a bit too complicated a picture to fit into your simpleminded worldview.

Are there really prestigious positions in the right’s intellectual parallel universe?

As Roger Ailes says, there on only ratings on the right.

Wingnut Lady Gagas and Nicki Minajs belting out there idiocies.

I think the right’s recognition of social immobility is likely to be entirely opportunistic and part of the weird critique of “crony capitalism” we heard so much of in the Republican primaries. The idea is that Obama and Pelosi are funneling money not only to lazy degenerates, but to politically friendly (ie, morally toxic) businesses. Once they get the White House back, the inequality problem wil mysteriously disappear.

Once they get the White House back, the inequality problem wil mysteriously disappear.

As will concern about “the debt crisis.”

“I got undergraduate degrees the traditional way, at the Australian National University (except that I was mostly part-time), but my PhD was done long-distance at the respectable, but less prestigious University of New England.”

Of course, since JQ’s PhD we are marginally MORE prestigious…

Hey John Quiggin et al I have noticed that CT often hosts debates between the radical and Liberal left inadvertently, I think it might be cool to have a Symposium especially for that. Thoughts?

Sancho, re #9
Steinbeck has it wrong, as all cultural theories as to the virtual absence of socialist politics in the US. As a social movement socialism did take root in the US but it did not survive the transition (which it had to make in all the industrial democracies) from social movement to electoral institutions and organizations. This is because the US does not have political parties (it has loose electoral coalitions which have no “party discipline” and for which the ideological differences are peripheral to the political process).

Indeed, you can chart transnationally how the weakness of the Left increases with disproportionality of party systems (though the US political system has a wide range anti-majoritarian structural features – it is really quite breathtaking) After the US, the Brit derived systems and France (and Japan – a sprawling corrupt mess of system for the Japanese can thank the Americans) have the most problematic political institutions. In general, these systems are bad both for the democracy in general and for the Left (I wonder why that is?)

It’s often supposed that America is suffering from structural unemployment, that jobs are going unfilled because of a lack of qualified applicants, and that greater educational attainment for all is the way to the jobs of the future. This doesn’t seem to have been the case for the postwar generation, and it remains questionable now.

A college degree is still an advantage to anyone looking for a job, as far as I know, so it retains considerable appleal: I upped my income, up yours! Whether it’s worth its burgeoning cost or whether it’s more than a marker of class membership I have no idea. Vocational training may actually be more valuable to many.

Apart from the destruction of unions and the restructuring of the tax code, in which the electorate largely acquiesced, the drift of wealth from the many to the few was accomplished in the U.S., and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries, largely outside public discussion (Graef Crystal’s been yelling but no one’s been listening). We have this crazy idea that superstar executives deserve the lion’s share, not of profits, which as often as not aren’t there at all, but of changes in stock prices.

So is the strong form of the efficient markets hypothesis the culprit, or hero worship? (Both probably, because they’re nearly indistinguishable.) Preferential capital gains taxation is the symptom, not the cause, and the proof is that it always gets reinstated or enhanced. Our heroes have always been pirates.

oops
….always interestING Chris Dillon…

“Get the workers into college and they will all get nice white collar jobs in the public sector or corporations and everything will be fine. And almost everyone has believed this since roughly the mid ‘sixtıes. Thatcher believed it but so did Harold Wilson. Blair believed it. Brooks clearly believes it. And Krugman clearly believed it.”

Amazingly, this is one of the points where I think Polly Toynbee is actually correct. Not an observation I expect to make very often.

There was indeed a huge move from blue collar to white collar jobs from the 50s to the 70s. The children of those blue collars of the earlier generation become the white collars. But how much of this was due to education, or policies to increase social mobility, and how much to the simple change in the economy, from manufacturing to services? If there is some vast generational move from working by hand and working by brain then how much of the perceived social mobility (which is largely measured by moving from working by hand to working by brain) is due to any policy that was being followed or simply that generational movement?

That social mobility rose everywhere after WWII and has declined everywhere more recently is at least a vague indication that it might not be due to specific policies in any one country. Unless one wants to say that all countries have been following the same policies in each time period. Which I’m not sure is really tenable. For example, there was a very large expansion of access to higher education from 1980 to 2005 or so in the UK: but social mobility went on falling.

“I upped my income, up yours!”

A better right-wing slogan than the author appreciates! (You have to be British to get the joke, I think).

“There was a very large expansion of access to higher education from 1980 to 2005 or so in the UK: but social mobility went on falling.”

Precisely.

I’ll testify. I’m part of the demographic that comes from a lower middle class background. I went to the flagships campus of a big ten state U. My first year was paid for with inheritance money after my grandmother’s death. After that I was on my own and worked when I could and took out loans. I graduated. These loans and other debts will follow me around for the rest of my life. I will probably never own a house. My credit will always be damaged. I will probably never be solidly middle class. I know that I will never retire. Its pretty much a law to most social scientists that you’re born into the class that you occupy and you stay there. Classes reproduce themselves.

Who cares about ACCESS to higher ed. I probably would have been better off not going to school.

Tim Worstall,
there is another alternative theory – the one that Chris Dillon obliquely refers to – from the book “The Rise of the Meritocracy”. The idea that a success for meritocracy was a disaster for the working class as they lost their spokespersons and lost their role models.

I agree with Seth. “Social mobility” is a ponzi scheme, and it’s been successful in the west for 20 years because poor people from low-income nations are coming in to fill the jobs that the socially “mobile” are doing, and/or the increasingly vulnerable temporarily-employed are doing those jobs. There is no “up” because the 1% control the ultimate destination of “up”. We need to go back, restructure the economy so that a single-income manual labourer can raise a family and be happy. That is our task, and if that damages the wealth of the socially “mobile” university graduates and business leaders, they just have to suck it up.

@64

I agree with you in that the rightwing successfully implemented their program of deregulation and the upward redistribution of wealth during the 1980s-2000s. It blew up the economy. That is partly what the AEI scholar is reacting to. The right is “losing” because their ideas did not create widespread prosperity as advertised. That’s partly why Obama won back to back elections.

We can agree on the lameness of Democrats, but they did raise taxes on the wealthy and health care reform is moving in the right direction at a glacial pace. Obama did stare down the Republicans over the debt ceiling clown show. We’ll see how sequestration and entitlement “reform” play out. But my sense is that the tide has turned in some ways. Organized labor however seems to be in a death spiral, with defeats in Wisconsin and Michigan.

@64

“Top Ten Surprises of the Brennan Hearing on CIA Torture and Drones

The confirmation hearing for John Brennan allowed the country to grapple with many issues that had been swept under the rug and seldom discussed in public. While few to none of them were thus resolved, it does seem to me positive that they were brought up in public.

Surprises?

1. The LAT reports that “Republicans largely focused on whether the CIA should be capturing more terrorists, rather than just killing them.” Let’s get this straight. The GOP is pressuring a Democratic administration to be less bloodthirsty?”

It’s true that Obama is slightly to the “left” of the Republicans on some issues. But it’s only fair to point out that he is also to the Right of them in others.

http://www.juancole.com/2013/02/surprises-hearing-torture.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+juancole%2Fymbn+%28Informed+Comment%29

Malcolm Gladwell is trustworthy why?

Capitalist win, Soviet commie’s lose! The Individualists have defeated the Collectivists. So the capitalist’s offering in the marketplace of ideas has been modified in response to a competitor’s failure. No pensions, no cheap education, no unions (collectivist loosers all,) no income growth below the 80th percentile, and much less mobility. What good is it to garner superior positional goods for your children if they are going to have to share them with children who’s parents didn’t do it for them.

By the way, I just finished some new shorties:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT-vY3f9uw3ADgyYqUVo2R8kxM4Agc3aw

Next up will be the difference in the hydraulics between supply shock inflation and demand shock deflation.

Would love to know what anyone thinks about the central bank and monetary policy snowflakes

Sorry, the Minneapolis Fed agrees about Head Start being a failure. The interventions they believe work are much more intensive: they note the Perry Project as an example. If you actually bother to read the report you will see that no long-term well designed studies have been conducted of Head Start specifically, and the followup that does exist is discouraging showing exactly the washout effect that the Heritage Foundation cites. Could the defenders of Head Start please give studies that neither I nor the Fed know about?
here is the report

pjm: In Germany the SDP is competing with the CDU over who will screw Greece harder. The idea that the problems of a post 73 world are unique to the US is not one I have seen shared by members of the Lefts of other countries. Germany also has high unemployment, declining social mobility, and complete depoliticization.

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~deming/papers/Deming_HeadStart.pdf

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers suggests that any successes from Head Start was due the parents involvement

Let’s run with this. How could we go about soliticiting parents’ involvement, in some organized and guiding way? Creating some sort of social structure seems essential; mere advice or written guidelines tend to get ignored, and participating as part of a social organization gets us past that stumbling block. So we have parents and their kids enroll in some kind of structured program, through which parents and kids receive not only guidelines for working with one another productively, but also a support network of parents attempting to do likewise along a common trajectory with the same tools. Since it might be hard to coordinate parents’ time and schedules, have the kids meet as a group periodically and socialize through activities that resonate with what they’re doing with their parents. Having someone able to evaluate progress, notice stumbling blocks, and bring the kids together as an educationally minded social group fulfills the need for this, and reinforces the childrens’ understanding of what they’re doing as encompassing. (This is certainly reasonably true even if that someone, by themselves, would not have all that much success leading that group of kids without parental support.) Voila, we just recreated the core of HeadStart from scratch via a Gladwellian ‘hypothetical’ thought trajectory. Voomph. Fun times. If you push yourself to get through the entire (re)construction process in sixty seconds or less, it’s actually kind of an invigorating exercise. So, what were we talking about again?

“I agree with you in that the rightwing successfully implemented their program of deregulation and the upward redistribution of wealth during the 1980s-2000s. It blew up the economy.”

Which economy? The economy of the actual poor, as opposed to that of the relatively so, seems to be going gangbusters. We’re in the midst of the greatest reduction of absolute poverty in the history of our species. Heck, even global inequality is falling.

Assume, for a moment, that everything that has happened in the global economy since 1980 is indeed the result of that right wing. Given what has actually happened, doesn’t that mean that right wingery is pro-poor? Billions, yea billions, have moved from peasantry to petit bourgeois.

I’d say it was bonzer myself….

If you want to look at an educational program that produces overwhelmingly positive outcomes, consider education and access to birth control. Please see ‘Polluted, Political, Pregnant or Profitable’ at http://somewhatlogically.com/?p=674 which contains a description and links not only for the environmental impacts of endocrine disruptors from birth control entering the aquatic systems but the Contraceptive Choice Project, a @10,000 woman cohort study across all ages and ethnic groups by Washington University of St. Louis. If you want to understand how to avoid the social and economic costs of unwanted pregnancies, especially in teens, the program show the huge beneficial results from providing education, counseling and choice.

Error correction: My father “retired” in 1970 rather than “died.” As a psychotherapist, I’m not sure I want to look too deeply into that typo and flawed proofreading and will rely on the all-purpose rationalization about cigars.

My work requires a degree. Any degree. If you’re asking for ANYTHING it’s just an employment tax.

@Harold: Thanks for the link! The big question is why these gains exist: the obvious suggestion is that behavioural changes, rather then increases in intelligence are responsible. This would explain why examinations of academic progress show a washout effect.

I am as interested as anyone else in any studies that have been done of Headstart, but I’m also a bit curious as to why a kindergarten program whose positives can be traced into the third grade should be regarded as a disappointment.
Also, re parental involvement, my anecdotal experience with a rural Headstart group that we tried (and failed) to get our child in to, was precisely that it did involve parents in its program.

Sorry to keep harping, but, I should have written: “Head Start may be regarded as “an academic washout” in that its academiceffects, all other things being equal, did not persist beyond third grade.”

But its positive affect on life outcome (outside of academics) in adulthood was significant.
This is very important in itself. We want all citizens to finish school, hold a job, and stay out of jail.

Obviously, academic success is cumulative and cannot depend on input given at ages three and four alone.

Doesn’t that seem like rather small potatoes? We’ll just be satisfied if you can avoid committing violent felonies, let alone read Cicero. Then again I’m much more convinced that the Perry intervention is a better model then the Head Start model. We shouldn’t let the good be the enemy of the perfect.

Subjects stay out of prison. Citizens participate in the deliberations about the formation of society. I want a nation of citizens, not a managerial state of subjects.

“Tim W, I really think you should give this point a rest. To encourage you, I’ll concede that China’s economic policies are better now than under Mao, and that the same is broadly true of India and Africa. Your insistence that this tells us something important about economic policy in the developed world is getting tiresome. I’ll give you one right of reply on this,”

So that one reply. Globalisation.

We would expect it to increase in country inequality in the developed world. We would also expect it to reduce poverty in the developing world.

We can also note that the last 30 odd years has seen an increase in developed country inequality and a reduction in developing world poverty. As globalisation has advanced.

The link to developed world economic policy is that it’s the same darn policy. Let the $1 a day folks into the global economy, trade with them. This has both effects, moving the $1 a day people to more than that and also limiting the pay rises of those they are competing with in the developed countries.

There’s nothing heterodox about such a theory, it’s what we’d expect to happen from the actions taken.

I don’t claim that it’s all of it either: only that it is the explanation for some of what is being seen.

And a great bargain I take it to be too.

Harold at 162 – are we talking about the Perry project that started in 1962?

Many countries have done better than the U.S. and the U.K. in promoting equality and prolonging life and enhancing happiness. It may be that we can’t get there from here, that America’s legacy of slavery and genocide makes the goal of universal community inconceivable and thus unachievable, but for the sake of argument it would be nice to have operating instructions for the unthinkably horrible socialist hellhole my country might be, just because it could work.

It’s tricky to the extent that every other economy leans up against the U.S. economy, and every military faces the U.S. military, and so on, but it’s a more credible fantasy than the impossibility of universal health care, the imminent debasement of the currency, the explosion of debt due to low interest rates, or [your joke here].

It seems intuitively obvious that we could make things a lot better by doing XY and Z, at least in terms of socioeconomic equality, since a lot of other countries can. When it comes to energy policy, where I actually know a little bit about the technology, I’m more cautious, deeply pessimistic, and grateful that I won’t be around to see the consequences. Here, there and everywhere, we can do the right thing and won’t.

Alan said @98, “I read this blog to learn stuff – and I must say I’ve learned quite a bit.”

I’m learning a bit too. About just how ideologically polarized (between left and right, and between the moderate and extreme left) debate about politics and economics has become, amongst other things.

The tribalism is what bothers me. Isn’t there some way, somewhere, big political and economic questions can be discussed without the mocking and hyperbolic rhetoric?

Granted, by comparison with many other sites, Crooked Timber is a haven of intelligent and civilized discourse. Even here, however, there are signs of tribalism.

Look at the curious mismatch in John Quiggin’s little piece between the hyperbolic rhetoric (about the recent “intellectual collapse of the political right”, for instance) and claims to a fact-based approach.

In any case, the general impression given, as I see it as an infrequent visitor, is that ideologically alien comments are tolerated rather than welcomed, and that this is “our” website (note the “we” in “we have … won the battle of ideas”), and we have not set it up to have our fundamental assumptions questioned.

I see the logic of this approach, but I also see it as a symptom of a much larger problem: a shrinking space for serious discourse across ideological boundaries.

Focusing on the reality of what university education is, its primary function is as a class identifier for the middle class. The actual learning is, for most people, secondary. Apart from specialised careers such as medicine or engineering most people dont use what they learn at college. And in any case pure knowledge aquisition works fine in a distance learning scenario.
A 4 year college degree tells the world you are reasonably intelligent, capable of basic timekeeping and deadline meeting, and most importantly, that you know how to fit in and interact with other middle class people. This is why people are willing to spend so much on it, and why so many jobs insist on it even though there isn’t usually any direct connection with the actual work that is done.
It wouldn’t be able to fulfill this function if it wasn’t by its very nature exclusionary, but by tying that exclusivity more and more closely with wealth and/or exceptional intelligence it becomes a barrier to class mobility instead of a boon.

I may be wrong about the number of kids who participated in the Perry Project study, my info came from a cursory google search quoted from memory — another search said the number was more like c. 123 of whom half were controls — not a very big group.
http://www.highscope.org/content.asp?contentid=219

There is no indication that the Perry Program is better or different in its results than Head Start.

According to the program’s own press release: Larry Schweinhart, HighScope’s current president, and author of many articles touting the program, states:

“These [positive] findings can be expected of any Head Start, state preschool, or child care program similar to the program HighScope coordinated and then studied.”

It is my impression that in the study in which the Head Start program was pronounced a “failure” included abbreviated, underfunded afterschool programs that did not offer truly high quality care.

Why, that is a useful identifying phrase! I do do that, actually. Mind runs one track, and certain words sticks to the wheels, making a click, click, click. I sometimes peek out the engine room and edit the phrase so I don’t repeat words, but a more global sticky phrase in the superhighway of my mind is a new perspective!

Mark English @ 109: The tribalism is what bothers me. Isn’t there some way, somewhere, big political and economic questions can be discussed without the mocking and hyperbolic rhetoric?

It’s a bit like quicksand, isn’t it? The mocking and hyperbolic rhetoric — an attempt to break free from the suck of the conventional wisdom and/or of the cant of the ideologues — just seems to drag one deeper into the muck. (shah8 take note: suck-muck, click-clack-one-track, this could get out of hand really fast)

Every phrase quickly becomes laden with emotional resonance, in the context of the partisan dialogue, and it becomes really difficult to even identify what the big questions actually are, when the answers to which we cleave come pouring forth in the Ping-Pong rally, to which we are accustomed.

Mark English: the hyperbolic rhetoric (about the recent “intellectual collapse of the political right”,

I have to admit that I read that rhetoric in the OP as projection. The political left collapsed long ago. As an historical matter, the emergence of co-ideologies of libertarianism/neoconservativism on the one hand, and neoliberalism (American dialect) on the other, in the late 1970s, reflected a debasement of the foundations of the intellectual houses of both conservatives and liberals/social democrats, establishing a weird symbiosis between the two, which keeps reality at an apparently mutually agreed, great distance, for left, right and center.

I think JQ’s determination to embrace reality, and look for factual truth, is sincere and genuine. If I didn’t respect his integrity, I wouldn’t bother to comment. That’s not the issue — stated, just so we’re clear.

Mark English: . . . ideologically alien comments are tolerated rather than welcomed, and that this is “our” website (note the “we” in “we have … won the battle of ideas”), and we have not set it up to have our fundamental assumptions questioned

The principals at CT should get more credit than they do, for undertaking the work of moderation. It is one thing if frequent commenters sometimes disdain an interloper, but it is the posters, who must exercise judgment in truncating pointlessly provocative and repetitious thread hijacks, to keep the whole place from falling apart. It requires a lot of unrewarding work by the principals.

That said, just stopping the ritualized, runaway action-reaction cycles isn’t enough.

JQ in the OP, uses the metaphor of the Overton Window to stand in for the stale dialectic of libertarian-neoliberal discourse, and suggests that facts might subvert the alternate reality manufactured by this dialectic. It made me think of Neo in the first Matrix movie; does he take the red pill or the blue pill?

It seems to me that Arthur Brooks is offering the blue pill of trollish concern about inequality, alongside a ritualized acknowledgement of the pieties of the neoliberals about the role of education in legitimizing inequality (see Brad DeLong for abundant examples). So, my judgment on this differs from JQ’s more optimistic take. I see it as well within bounds of the established dialectic. That Brooks is making this concession, while selling the latest phase of the plutocratic plan to cash-out of the public goods investment in education, just confirms me in my view, for what little it’s worth.

If some — left, right and center — together took the red pill, and slid from our behind-the-looking-glass world of mutual projection, into reality, and started talking from there, what would that look like? Really try to imagine that discussion, outside the ideological boundaries of our accustomed, virtual-game partisan contests. Try to imagine mutual observation of the structure of power in action, without the fierce, compulsive effort to narrate the spin.

I think political economic reality, right now, is really ugly and depressing, and that, more than anything, keeps most of us reaching for this brand or that of blue pills. That’s what the stale ideological battles are about — beyond the wish of the plutocrats to keep the sheep in separate pens, that is — we’re arguing about which brand of blue pill is to be preferred, which set of illusions to cling to.

Factual, objective reality is impinging on our shared, cultural consciousness in movies and television shows about political conspiracies and vampires-werewolves-zombies and the impending apocalypse. Reality is coming to us in waking nightmares of popular culture and the gun violence of the news cycle, not the smarmy sales tactics of a professional grifter like Arthur Brooks. When the Looking-Glass/Overton-Window breaks for real, screams will follow the tinkle of broken glass.

EqualToJake @116

It seems to me that it is deeper than status considerations. The new industrial state of the 1950s and 1960s really did need technical and managerial expertise. That demand was an extension of the needs of an ever more organized industrial, mass-economy, for a literate, numerate and technologically savvy populace, stretching back into the 18th century. Progress was public education. And, upward mobility was not a zero-sum game; it was an expanding middle-class, satisfying the aspirations of parents to send their kids to college and a better life. The core, though, was that increasing productivity was tied to the increasing use of expertise in bureaucracies, public and private. There was a need for people, at a range of middling levels, who could make the great machines of a decentralized industrial economy work, who could make law, science, municipal regulation, the bureaucratized economy and technology work. It wasn’t about certificates. As Henry Ford purportedly said, the question of who should be boss is like the question, who should sing tenor in the choir; the answer must be, the one, who can actually sing tenor. It wasn’t about status, per se. The automobile industry could explode across the American landscape, because there were lots of people, ready to be competent auto mechanics or traffic cops, gas station managers or insurance agents. It was possible to organize licensing and registration and traffic laws and highway construction.

Sometime in the 1980s, the American economy passed some sort of inflection point, and the demand for middling expertise began to dry up. The concern at the top to ensure that the Great Machine was run competently was attenuated. Probably it had something to do with the explosion in CEO compensation. A pattern of disinvestment/deregulation emerged, public and private, and gradually accelerated. Debt peonage and certificates is just the end-game, of a broad process of disinvestment, which has been blithely unconcerned about whether the economy qua machine worked well, or worked at all, for 50% or 80% of people.

In the U.S., it is conventional wisdom that public education, even at a primary level, is, increasingly, an abject failure. Some of this is plutocratic propaganda and some is the age-old belief that the youth are going to hell in an handbasket, but some is real enough. I don’t know where to look for objective measurement. In the 1950s or 1960s, many ambitious people could expect training in corporate or government jobs, where they might spend most or all of a career. That investment complemented secondary and tertiary education, which could, therefore, be generalist in its focus; public education prepared someone to be trainable, to acquire and exercise expertise inside the bureaucratic, marketplace, or professional machinery. It seems to me that for-profit issuing of certificates is just an attempt to profit from short-circuiting both sides of that scheme of investing in what we know call, human capital.

The problem is that this thirty-year policy of disinvestment is running the economy off a cliff, where Wily Coyote looks down and sees no superstructure under him anymore. And, it won’t just be the lights going out at the Superbowl.

Treating politics as a conflict between different factions seems to seriously ignore the broad social factors at play. Conservatives got more powerful within the Republican Party because of the post-civil rights realignment of politics, then the Republican Party won a bunch of elections because of the convenient timing where Carter oversaw a very unpleasant economy (and foreign policy events) and then Reagan was able to take credit for the recovery. After all that the Democratic Party was more inclined to swing to the right to try to “adjust” so the Overton window got shifted to the regardless of what rich people happening to think about it. That rich people were happy about it certainly didn’t hurt things, but there are a lot of other factors at play. (Of course the simplistic summary I just gave isn’t particularly complete either.)

It’s always been possible to look at the world and to assess it in a genuinely different way. The problem with doing it in fact is that even under the most favorable social and political circumstances, you have to develop your own language to do it, and if you’re not careful, you’ll wind up being labeled a solipsist, or a schizophrenic — not always inaccurately, and almost never without good reason, the limitations of human faculties being what they are. People willing to pay that price select themselves for all sorts of reasons, both respectable and otherwise. Sometimes it works out for them — and for us — but often it doesn’t.

This is the principal reason why it seems fair to me to call David Broder or David Brooks a moron. It’s not that either of them is (or in Broder’s case, was) actually a moron; it’s that they’re stupidly comfortable wearing the medals that other people have earned.

William Timberman @ 123

Consider for a moment the Broderization of CT’s bête noire, Matthew Ygelsias. I can remember when I read his blogposts with frequent pleasure at having my IQ boosted a point or two by his thinking aloud. Now, he just spins out neoliberal rationalizations for various complacent attitudes and pet peeves, just like the brain-dead denizens of the Post and Times op-ed pages.

JQ, in the OP, was optimistic about an acknowledgement of inequality from one of the professional libertarians feeding at the wingnut welfare trough at a conservative Washington think-tank. I was made pessimistic this week, by conservatives accusing liberals of hypocrisy for the failure to criticize Obama’s architect of murder-by-drone as state policy. It doesn’t require a new dictionary or new language, to recognize that Mr. Lesser Evil is evil — just the stomach to tell the truth in the plain old language, even if that means falling out of cadence, or facing a harsh reality.

You guys are reinventing the concept of what John Kenneth Galbraith termed the “conventional wisdom” in his book, The Affluent Society (1958). The description and dynamics of the thing are all there — the book has not aged a day.

a challenge that started with the appropriation by the left of the “reality-based” label pinned on us in Karl Rove’s famous interview with Ron Suskind…

A slight correction. The article was about Karl Rove. The phrase in question came from an interview with an anonymous Bush administration insider. This matters because it wasn’t approved messaging of the kind that Rove would have condoned, it was the uncensored thinking-out-loud of a Bush conservative.

That at least is my recollection; if I’m mistaken, please let me know.