All Hollowed Out: The lonely poverty of America’s white working class

This level of inequality makes me sad. Really sad. I know I can&#x27;t be the only working stiff in the valley whose poor siblings and family think they are rich for earning in the $100-150k range. Nevermind that I can&#x27;t afford to buy a house here. I can&#x27;t enjoy my success because of the near-desperate financial situations I see my relatives enduring.<p>My sister gave me a $50 gift for christmas, and it brought tears to my eyes because she&#x27;s a single mother making the federal minimum wage of $7.15&#x2F;hr. That comes out to $290&#x2F;wk, before taxes, if she&#x27;s lucky and gets a full week&#x27;s worth of hours. To earn that pittance, she is physically laboring and might have to work 7 days a week to get enough hours in the schedule.<p>It makes me feel like a douche every time I think about it. Me sitting there in my Aeron chair, eating free snacks while reading code. And making ~10x what she does. When I really think about it, from similar beginnings, only a relatively small number of key decisions separate our two economic outcomes.<p>I try to give generously to assuage my guilt. But I&#x27;ve found that there are limits to what can be given without stirring resentment, or provoking attempts at reciprocity. That&#x27;s how this $50 gift came about... I bought some nice stuff for her kid, and she wanted to show her gratitude.

I will never miss an opportunity to trot out my favorite quote:<p>“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - Ronald Wright<p>Americans are just going to have to get over themselves and figure out how to cooperate with their peers. We will take any opportunity to lash out at the ones we love. Dude&#x27;s wife left him after he lost a job, he must not have been a very likable person.<p>Most everywhere else in the world, living conditions have approximately tripled. People with nothing hold on to what they have. The US is the richest nation in the world, lots of people born here never really wanted for anything. So they fritter away things they really should hold on to, like a rich idiot jonesing for &quot;self-actualization&quot;.<p>Fuck the unions, we don&#x27;t need &#x27;em. Fuck that bitch wife of mine, I have Facebook and Tinder. I&#x27;ll drink and smoke weed every day, that&#x27;s what keeps me sane. These are people that need Sanders but will vote Trump.<p>These people are not middle class. They don&#x27;t have middle class values or sensibilities. They&#x27;re lower-class Americans that rode the success of the 70s-90s up to a degree of stability but never built a real life out of it, frittering away the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity they had.<p>You can&#x27;t tailor policy to them with a prayer of allowing them to maintain their lifestyle. That lifestyle was predicated on a boom time and the party is now over. Unless you want to directly subsidize it, it&#x27;s gone. You can&#x27;t bring unions back because they won&#x27;t join them, it&#x27;s why the unions left in the first place. All you can do is alleviate some of the symptoms.

What is society&#x27;s ideal for the average white working class? What is &quot;success&quot;? Is it better looking houses? More expensive cars? Fresher food? Is it getting to live in a very expensive nursing home when they retire? Is it equality where both husband and wife are responsible exactly 50% in finances, chores and taking care of the kids? Or have the time &amp; money to spend a lot more time with the kids; Will welfare help that cause?<p>Or are the ideals something America&#x27;s white working class is leaving behind? Such as, belonging in religion with compassionate &amp; authentic people; as people no longer believe in religion and the ones who still do are less compassionate and less authentic? Or, is it to be in an marriage with a partner who you can trust will stay with you through thick and thin, until death; as society thinks a marriage where one partner is unhappy should end in divorce, because society thinks that will be better for the children than to be in a unhappy marriage? Or is it to have children who you can trust will take care of you when you grow old; as society says children have the right to do whatever they choose to do and should not be burdened with the responsibility of taking care of their parents, because that&#x27;s the government&#x27;s obligation?<p>Are America&#x27;s white working class ideals in front of them, or behind them?<p>I suggest when as a collective, they finally have clarity to see what they really do want, rather than what other people say they should be wanting, they will move towards their ideals, instead of away from them, and then things will get &quot;better&quot; all on their own.

Not just America, America is just leading the pack. And from an English perspective I certainly wouldn&#x27;t eulogise the Unions in the way this article does either. My father (now retired) was a member of the EETPU (Electrician&#x27;s Union). It was seen as a &quot;right-wing&quot; Union because its constitution banned communists from holding any positions within the Union - but that was because communist activists and their aggressive confrontational policies had almost wrecked the Union. The EETPU dealt with the problem, other Unions, the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) did not. It was their aggressive confrontational policies that wrecked worker solidarity in private industry.<p>The article touches on the breakdown of other social support as well. Marriage for example. And yet doesn&#x27;t touch on why this might be. I have a son and two daughters. I have told my daughters that they must get married, and my son that he should definitely not. Why? Because divorce laws are so anti-male that nowadays it makes no sense for a man to marry. (And yes, I cynically want my daughters to gain this protection).<p>In the UK there used to be a massive culture of socialising in &quot;pubs&quot; (public houses, or &quot;bars&quot;). Legislative changes ranging from allowing the 24 hour sale of cheap alcohol in supermarkets coupled with anti-smoking legislation that makes it illegal to smoke inside pubs have driven away a large chunk of that trade. I am a non-smoker but would prefer an open pub that allows smoking than no pub at all. This is important because pubs are also traditionally where different social classes meet and mingle as equals as well as where young people used to learn to drink responsibly under the watchful eye of the landlord and older drinkers - now they are likely to get totally smashed on alco-pops out of sight.<p>Then there&#x27;s the impact of mass immigration on social housing and the resultant disruption of traditional communities.<p>The traditional working classes (my background) are already under assault even before we add in the coming tide of job losses through automation. These are all good reasons for supporting a move to a Basic Citizen&#x27;s Income as soon as possible.

I think it&#x27;s worth pointing out that education is a filtering mechanism, if a terribly inefficient one. After basic maths and literacy are learned, it imparts little on the average student. A collage degree is a proxy for a reasonable IQ and moderately high conscientiousness. Thinking of education as an inefficient filtering mechanism helps illustrate why our frenzy for more education is misguided. Certainly more efficient filtering mechanisms (like a test-based credentialism where instruction and assessment are separated) would be very useful but they will not increase the amount of people with the mental characteristics (high intelligence and conscientiousness) that are becoming increasingly valuable in the modern economy, nor will it decrease the portion that lack these things. Panning does not create gold.<p>I think a good assumption is this separation was and is a basicly unavoidable result of technology and economics, not any policy or set of policies. We wrestle not with flesh and blood:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;07&#x2F;we-wrestle-not-with-flesh-and-blood-but-against-powers-and-principalities&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;07&#x2F;we-wrestle-not-with-fle...</a>

&gt; For generations, factories provided good jobs to people who never went to college, allowing families [...] to be upwardly mobile [...] unions at their prime helped create a “moral economy” in which wages rose both in firms with unions and those without them, and in which the average worker had a notable voice [...] lobbying on their behalf in Washington<p>This might be overstating the case somewhat. The very term &quot;mass production&quot; wasn&#x27;t introduced until 1926 [1]. Some of the biggest unions were only formed in the 1930s [2] and their activity was largely suppressed during WWII. The golden age of union manufacturing jobs lasted 30 years at best (late 40s to late 70s&#x27; oil shocks).<p>The 50 year old whites are thus at the same time beneficiaries <i>and</i> victims of the success created by the &quot;greatest generation&quot;. Their parents went through the Great Depression, fought WWII, and worked out a great compromise that shared the bounty of mass production equitably between unions and factory owners. The subsequent generation encountered far fewer hardships and inevitably took for granted a status quo that had, in fact, been difficult to achieve (and long in the making). It&#x27;s hardly surprising that, in their middle to old age, many have trouble adapting to the computerization of the work place (a transformation at least as momentous as mass production). In addition, winning the Cold War has proved a very mixed blessing by bringing direct competition with billions who went through their own version of great depression (and possibly warfare) within living memory.<p>Interestingly enough, computerization (with the official end of Moore&#x27;s law) and globalization (with China&#x27;s pathologically slowing growth) are now leveling off. Will this allow a reprieve for downtrodden baby boomers? The upcoming years should make for very interesting politics.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mass_production" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mass_production</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_Automobile_Workers#1930s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_Automobile_Workers#1930...</a>

It&#x27;s been obvious for a decade that the &quot;go to the factory every week for 40 years and retire&quot; job sector is on the decline, a decline which has accelerated rapidly more recently. There is no place in our economy for a bolt turner to earn $25 an hour, end of discussion.<p>This is why I like the idea of at least reducing the cost of a college education, or preferably eliminating it. A regular high school degree is quickly becoming useless to have, if you don&#x27;t have some white collar skill-set to apply after your school, you&#x27;re going to be very hungry. It&#x27;s not fair in my mind to raise the standards of what it means to be &quot;qualified&quot; without giving the various social groups a fair chance to get there.<p>And of course the problem here is that there aren&#x27;t enough service jobs for everyone, which is also why I support basic income so that while we retain the option for people to achieve more if they want to that we don&#x27;t leave everyone else who either doesn&#x27;t have a particular skill (yet) or just doesn&#x27;t want to out in the cold to freeze and die. If nothing else, they&#x27;re valuable consumers.

There is simply not enough &#x27;work&#x27; any more.<p>Here&#x27;s a thought. Why can&#x27;t we as a society ensure that everyone is paid a living wage according to their need.<p>It may take a while, but I believe this will be the only way that we can hold this society* together.<p>* Deep irony here, speaking as one of &#x27;Thatcher&#x27;s children&#x27;.

The problem is, is that &#x27;good jobs&#x27; are hard to find even if you have a good education. If you do, you can look forward to 60-80 work weeks, expensive housing and child care, and of course massive student loan debt. Very few of the things that were available to the middle class 25 years ago are available to the best and brightest today. The question is, is there anything that can be done about it, it was the period between the 1920-1980s so special that it can&#x27;t be repeated for generations.

As a counterpoint, I&#x27;d like to point out that it has never been easier to start your own business and instantly reach a worldwide marketplace. It has never been less expensive to make things to sell. It has never been more practical to work from your home for a company anywhere in the world.

My biggest takeaway is that in 2013 two-thirds of the North American workforce did not have a 4 year degree.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;victortanchen.com&#x2F;educational-attainment-united-states-canada&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;victortanchen.com&#x2F;educational-attainment-united-state...</a>

As a foreigner, I have to ask, is life very different for non-white working classes? Is it better, worse or equally suck in different ways?

It is sad situation but it is true for all races and nationalities. Low skilled work will be valued less and less. A structure of extended family is important which modern society has forgotten.

As a non-american I would like to ask: did the affirmative action go too far up to the point of endangering another group? If so, what correction steps would you take?

The best book on this topic is &quot;Coming Apart&quot; by Charles Murray. I highly recommend it.

&quot;Not lucky enough&quot; - that just gauls me every time I hear it. If someone chooses to slack off (only HS education w&#x2F;o trade and w&#x2F;o entreprenurial ambition)... They are automatically ranked by the willfully ignorant as &quot;unlucky.&quot; Please! There has never been a place and time in the history of mankind when a man with a will could not make something of himself as today! A man with an idea can easily and quickly form a company of one... And can hire overseas to build his idea... Get it shipped to any market he chooses, advertise his idea in any way he chooses, and make a profit in any way he chooses. Today, the world is open to any individual that chooses to work.