Cause or Consequence?

Why do some polemicists choose to confuse outcome with origin, consequence as cause? It’s hard not to believe it’s intentional. At best, it’s flaccid intellectualism guised as insight. At worst, it’s an ideology. Ideology defined as conformance to doctrine regardless of applicability living in the world.

The recent New York Times Book Review of The Meritocracy Trap, How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (Danial Markovits, Penguin Press) is a classic example of confusing consequence as cause. Leaving aside the questionable choice of the author’s title that reads like its thesis, the reviewer, Thomas Frank comes across as a fellow traveler (pejoratively stated if true). Stating opinion as fact:

“But now comes Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, to tell us that far from solving economic inequality, higher education is one of the central forces driving [emphasis by the reviewer] our yawning class divide. In this ambitious and disturbing survey of the American upper class, he tells us that our elite universities’ sifting and sorting of human beings has helped to herd Americans into a system of rank and status and – yes – caste that is now so clearly passed from parent to child that its most privileged beneficiaries might as well be called an “aristocracy.” Indirectly… the hierarchy thus constructed had drained the promise from middle-class life and sparked a backlash from the vast presumed unexcellent (sic) whom our cult of white-collar achievement has left behind.” [1]

From the New York Times Book Review by Thomas Frank

The reviewer apparently flunked his writing class in mixed metaphors; he and the author, a Yale law school professor seem to have avoided any courses in critical thinking.

Both Markovits and Frank seek to argue that the cause of an increasing divide between privilege and poverty (fairly observed) is the cultivation by elite schools–in their view sounding like cults or fraternities–rather than what it is, the outcome of a collapsed source of lower and middle class income, mainly their jobs! These writers’ conjoined argument is depressing–and specious.

Yes, I’ll agree that if I am educated and ambitious, and have been raised by ambitious, educated parents, surrounded by aunts and uncles, grandparents and others of similar background, I will have an advantage over those who come from less fortunate backgrounds. And I will be more fortunate still if I’m admitted to an Ivy League or other prestigious school.

The economic advantage of a college education lies in having better options to avoid losing jobs to automation or outsourcing. That and you get to stay indoors in bad weather. No guarantee, but it helps.

But what if I am, say the son of a coal miner or a steelworker–or an automobile assembly line worker, who simply wants to continue in their parent’s line of work? When I graduate or not from high school in the hinterland or the rust belt, where do I go to find those jobs in America today that will pay a living wage? Does my desire to work with my hands make me unimportant? (an ‘unexcellent’ in the reviewer’s ungrammatical phrasing.) Apparently so: if I don’t learn computers, I’ll end up at Walmart until the robots take over that role too.

Is the fact that we pay our teachers and caregivers bare, survival wages the result of a conspiracy of elite schools? Or that we buy our steel from China because it’s cheaper in the short run, i.e. makes for better quarterly stock reports? Is that the result of the schools or just human greed and short-sightedness?
Thomas Friedman argues that technology’s evolution is meant to free workers to live better lives. One can take a more cynical view that it really means eliminating the only jobs some people can do–so I suppose that’s the secret goal of the elites? Like the secret handshake for Skull and Bones?

Here at Yale we bow nightly to the evil gods of commerce but don’t let on.

In fact, my father was a coal mine surveyor who nearly died from a methane explosion in his twenties. His brother, William did die in the mines. But my father’s brief time in the mines was while he sought to put himself through Penn State, and after his death from his damaged lungs, my mother pushed their three children to get professional degrees–but more importantly to read widely and searchingly–and she showed them–us–by example. My life today is largely the result of her work in a poor-paying job as a non-degreed social worker.

Trump thinks coal miners love him for letting them dig more coal. They love eating and keeping a roof over their heads, but give them something else to sweat over they’d climb out of those black holes faster than anything.

At the mine entrance. My father is the young man in the middle.

So where the social justice folks in the 60s argued it was the fault of ‘The Man’–then later the fault of men in general– now these two at least want to lump anyone with a degree into the villainy along with the institutes that helped educate them? It’s a very tired trope, this confusing cause with consequence.

Moralists will tell you indifference to fellow humans–and creatures–is ultimately fatal in a society. It seems to be true that indifference is in vogue–if it ever was out. To the degree that the faculty at universities and colleges don’t press social fairness, does that make them the villains any more than the rest of us? Love thy neighbor as thyself. I heard some dude said that once.

Let’s just admit the species is a work in progress.

Here’s what scares me: we Americans are not building the way we should be in the present age. The Chinese are building thousand-mile high speed transit lines–where the hell are ours? After 9/11, why didn’t our President press for a 200-mile-an-hour train so jets no longer needed to take off from Reagan National, fly for all of a half hour before landing at La Guardia?

Take some of the golden horde and put it to work for the future. Smaug didn’t understand that either.

I’ve always appreciated–admired even–those who work with their hands building tangible things. Those thick, calloused fingers that can pick up a brick in one hand, butter it with a swipe of mortar with the other, lay it next to its mates and repeat that until a masonry wall rises. A new brick wall that will outlast the humble mason by centuries. As much skill lies in bricklaying as any professional white collar work, my own included. Walk a steel beam in a freezing gust of wind so the steelworker can lay in the bolts to get it ready for welding, and tell me that doesn’t take mental toughness–and physical guts.

The disparity of wealth today will swiftly be evaporated if we don’t figure this out–that we all need to be about important work–work that tells us we are valuable–work that helps our children. We all can’t be computer geeks; someone needs to be building the next generation power lines. The country might begin by rebuilding its failing transportation systems, replacing coal-fired power plants with renewable energy sources, finding the means to get into space full time where those brawny men and women can throw their shoulders to the wheel again.

It should scare us that we in the present day are squandering the wealth accumulated by the sweat of our forefathers with no visible means of renewing it for all our children. All Our Children.

Something to consider this Thanksgiving.