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Notes -
American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:
The article notes one reason why:
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.
None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
Y'know, I scrolled down fast and didn't see the author's name on this post, but when I hit this bit:
I went "Oh! Alexander!" and scrolled back up and whaddya know, I was right!
Friend, mate, old buddy, old pal - learn a new song? "Righties are dumb and smelly and low-class and have too many bastard kids and are way too sympathetic to the low-grade low-IQ blacks and browns who have too many bastard kids" is getting boring now. The pure despite and contempt you have for those who make it possible for you to live a comfortable life is astounding. Oh, you don't like the grubby proles who work the cash registers? Don't worry, supermarkets are working fast on self-checkout so now you can do the job of being the grubby prole who works the cash register for free!
Even for those Elite Human Capital who are going to waltz into whatever high-status white-collar job you think most desirable will do better if they have some experience of summer work. Granted, it'll probably be an internship with a company of one of Dad's golf buddies, but some experience of "this is what work looks like" is much better than none. Otherwise you end up hiring people who have all the right qualifications on paper but need to be hand-held every minute of the day since they have no idea what to do on their own (I see plenty of smart people who haven't a clue about "okay this is my first job, how do I sort out my tax?")
You really do want all the low-class (by your metric) people, regardless of colour, to just disappear so you don't have to interact with them, don't you? No more manual labourers. No more people on the tills in shops. No more unsuitables that can be confused with you, the striving wannabe, by the elites you so desperately want to belong to.
My post says nothing negative about low-class people. I'm taking issue with lower-middle-class conservative policy wonks who fetishize manual labor. As to being a one-trick pony, I've written much else, see:
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/the-flat-earth
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/the-garden-of-eden
You go on about "fetishing" manual labour, but what work are people who are not senior AI developers going to do, Alexander? Right now if we had way more construction workers (ugh! icky manual labour!) our housing problem could be solved, because we need to build way more houses (yeah, issues of planning etc. are also involved, but if you don't have the brickies and the sparks, no houses are gonna get built).
You see why I think you have a bee in your bonnet about class? That use of "fetishising" where you don't use an equivalent term about your dream of middle class white collar status for all (providing the "all" meet your criteria for being recognised as humans).
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Indeed. We need to reclaim manual labour from the lower classes. I like (some types of) manual labour, it gives the mind good rest after a hard day of work. I'm not unique in this either and nor is this a new thing: the elder Count Bolkonsky in War and Peace was an impassioned wood worker.
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Ok come on now. @AlexanderTurok is biased against many right-wing folks as he has admitted, just like 80%+ of us here are biased against the left, progressives, wokes, etc etc. The entire point of this site is to allow us to discuss across ideological divides.
Personally I think this post was fine and shows a willingness to take the feedback from the mods he was given earlier.
While it's a bit of a personal attack, I do think this is a interesting frame - should the elites not care about the working class? So far in America they have (at least nominally), seems like folks nowadays are sort of turning against that. I am curious to see where elite consensus moves on this.
It's not that he's biased against 'the right', it's that he has a demonstrable animus against those he considers lower-class, and that includes people who would work for a living (see his snobby remarks about manual labour).
That's anywhere from 30-46% of the American population, depending on definition and self-identification as such. That includes people who do the kinds of things that support Alexander in his lifestyle as Elite Human Capital:
Alexander may well think Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous but what are you going to do, when you dismiss 30% of your working population as beneath notice or dignity? The AI serfbots are not quite here just yet. Have you any right to be surprised then, when the people you have mocked vote for a demagogue and a populist? Will you take any responsibility for driving people away?
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And the monkey's paw curled a finger hard on this one.
I've long though that people abuse that Twain quote about travel being fatal to prejudice and bigotry, and that travel- especially if it's only a limited exposure- has about a 50/50 shot of reinforcing it instead. Likewise here; if your exposure across the ideological divide is limited and of... particular quality, it only reinforces just how obnoxious/stupid/evil/whatever "the other" really is.
Did he say that, really? Innocents Abroad is a very funny monologue of an American studiously refining his bigotry and moving his judices from pre- to post- as a factor of travel. The French have terrible barbers, the Catholics are Mary-idolators, the Turks are subhuman, and the Arabs are sub-Turk - is the very clear sentiment arising from that book. And, of course, that Americans (especially the Evangelicals) are greedy, pompous, idiot looters, but at least they’re civilized.
What an unexpected thing for him of all people to say, excepting of course that he may have been saying it with his trademark irony…
It is indeed somewhere in Innocents Abroad, so it was likely intended ironic but modern readers take it as literal.
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This seems low-charity. @AlexanderTurok doesn't want the government to encourage people to take up low-class jobs or to make policy that increases rather than decreases the number of such jobs.
Specifically he seems to think that the Right is full of people who haven't done such work and fail to see just how awful it is - his knowledge seems to be more hands-on than most of us here and most twitter commentators, so I take him seriously on this note even though I don't necessarily agree.
Now, frankly I have no idea how he does want these necessary but awful (by his lights) jobs to be done, and would very much appreciate hearing that directly from him. I would also, honestly, really like him to make a top level post where he lays out his own, explicit, positive ideas about how he wants the economy and culture to work.
No, he doesn't. He doesn't mention "I worked such jobs/older family members worked such jobs, I know how shitty they are", he just goes on about "fetishing" working with your hands and makes little to no mention of the left fetishing the trash culture of people of colour or the like. And if he did talk about "black trash culture" there are plenty who would hop on him for that.
I wish, once and for all, Alexander would give a clear statement of his exact position, because all I'm left with is the impression overall that "ugh, poor people, how disgusting; they have too many babies as it is, they should all be contracepted and aborted into extinction so aspiring strivers like myself can ascend to our proper place on the socio-economic class ladder and not be confused with the mudblood milieu out of which we unfortunately arose; those damn pro-lifers are getting in the way of exterminating the eugenically unfit".
Yeah, I was getting him confused with Tree, who has mentioned a couple of times that his family comes from that background and didn’t get much joy out of it.
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Over the short term, by people who have no better option, which is how they're done in any society. Over the long term, economic and technological growth will allow more and more of those jobs to be eliminated.
I see, thank you. Would I then be correct in saying your position is broadly that long-term economic growth will eliminate the vast majority of these jobs in a reasonable timeframe (let's say 30 years) so that long-term tradeoffs (demographic change, long-term transfer of whole economic stacks to other countries, overproduction of elites, socioeconomic resentment, etc.) are not really relevant and we can focus purely on short-term plans to minimise immediate (<30 years) disruption whilst maximising economic growth to the levels required?
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