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Notes -
thesis of a possible effort-post. does this have legs?
Globalization didn’t have to break the working class, but blank slate liberalism did
A few decades ago you could show up with a 3rd grade education and still get a decent factory job that fed your family and gave your life... maybe not meaning, but some dignity. Today, those jobs are gone. Globalization took them, and now America has a surplus class of unemployable and underemployable mopes; people born too late for easy jobs but too early for gay-space communism to take care of them. They're stuck, adrift.
Was there any way to help them? Was the populist backlash unavoidable except for the choice of the form of our destroyer, Bernie Sanders’ classist rage or Trump's MAGA nationalist rage?
Is this a false choice? Yes, but the solution hinges on IQ realism. It hinges on slaying blank slate liberalism.
Countries like Germany faced the same global pressures but came out intact. They kept their working class employed, respected, and connected to dignity. How? By accepting a truth America refused: not everyone is wired for lambda calculus. Germany didn’t chase a fantasy of universal upskilling, or telling freshly unemployed coal miners to learn to code. Instead, they built protected, respected, cottage industries and stable vocational tracks with early sorting, precisely for the millions who weren't destined to debug beta reductions.
America, by contrast, swallowed a comforting lie: that we could escape globalization’s consequences without sacrifice. We embraced blank slate thinking, believing with enough TED talks and vocational bootcamps everyone could become high-skilled, high-status knowledge workers. We decided dignity wasn’t found in factories or plumbing, but in laptops and cubicles. Work that liberals secretly preferred.
But the bell curve didn’t care. IQ didn't budge. And so today, millions of Americans remain underemployed, abandoned, and pissed off.
Globalization didn't have to do this. Our denial of human cognitive differences, our stubborn insistence on the blank slate, did.
Germany got it right. America told itself comforting lies.
I'm pretty sure the American working class gets a better deal than the German one. American plumbers and factory workers probably both earn more and have a higher employment rate compared to their German equivalent.
Instead this is about a few left behind areas. This isn't an issue with blank slate liberalism; Western Pennsylvania didn't have blacks to compete for jobs anyways. It declined anyways. The rust belt is one of the whitest parts of the country.
I want to stop and ask- are German small towns doing that much better? It seems like everyone on earth has an issue with small towns pouring into the metropole due to lower wages. Literally. Gen. Franco couldn't stop it. Chairman Mao couldn't stop it. Donald Trump won't be able to stop it.
Don't you need to be at least a little smart to be an electrician or a plumber? Moreso if you are self-employed doing these things and making a nice amount of money?
I've done my own electrical work and plumbing at home and it requires a non-trivial amount of attention to detail and being able to do some basic computation. I probably couldn't do it stoned. Surely 100 IQ minimum needed to be employable.
An electrician? Yes- even low level electricians need to understand algebra to work unsupervised, making an effective IQ floor. A plumber? Depends on what you do within it. There's plenty of plumbers making a good living in, not really a sinecure because they actually work, but doing things your average handyman or construction worker would be able to do for much cheaper if it wasn't due to regulatory capture.
Moreover, I'm pretty sure that semi-skilled blue collar workers make more in America than anywhere in the EU; it's possible that genuinely low skilled workers make less, but I wouldn't count on it. The part of the American working class that's really struggling is mostly the residents of small towns in the former industrial heartland, and 'small towns in the former industrial heartland suck' isn't unique to the US.
Right, in my (anecdotal) understanding even people without these qualifications or strong brains made a decent living before globalization.
My own father and uncles came to the US in the 70s (illegally!) with a 3rd grade education and no local language skills or writing skills (in any language), got jobs as construction workers and masons and still were able to buy houses and provide for big families.
They're not dumb, as they have started small business since then and have become substantially wealthier, but the work they were doing did not require even electrician or plumber level brain power and certainly not any credentials.
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