Solidarity in the Knowledge Economy
In a thoughtful piece by Richard Sennett in the Guardian a couple of weeks back he argued:
It’s become a journalistic cliche to divide America into red and blue states. The red states: southern and western, Republican, godly, abortion, gay and feminist unfriendly, militaristic. The blue states: eastern or coastal, Democratic, secular, identity-friendly, diplomatic. The country thus appears divided exactly in half. What these clichés don’t get at is something red and blue share, America’s confused, fear-inducing experience of class.
In a book that has come into its own this autumn, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank ponders how poor people in that heartland state, threatened with loss of work, lack of health insurance, or mounting family debt, address these woes. Preventing abortion or gay marriage seems some sort of solution; economics gets translated into culture. Like the retired union organisers in Fanelli’s who yearn for the working-class politics of New York in the years after the Great Depression, Frank invokes “false consciousness” to explain what’s happening now.
Translating economic into cultural insecurity is nothing new. Nearly 40 years ago, when we researched The Hidden Injuries of Class , Jonathan Cobb and I found white workers in Boston blaming drop-out hippies and black ghetto culture for their own, unrelated labour and communal problems. And as an ideal, the cultural conservatism of the working classes idea stretches back into the 19th century and across the ocean, as in Disraeli’s famous image of “angels in marble”, the working classes whose everyday solidity awaits the sculpting hand of conservative leadership.
What is new is the class map. Ironically, the British conservative Ferdinand Mount has drawn it in his new book, Mind the Gap. In the last generation, large numbers of people have come to feel excluded from the “skills society” or “meritocracy” of Blair’s Britain and Clinton’s America. These are people whose beliefs in self-discipline, hard work and family sacrifice do not yield much control over their own lives. As Mount points out, they feel left out and treated by the more agile with - at best - indifference. At Spiegelman’s talk, he got a good laugh by saying he didn’t know anybody in the American heartland.
Loss of control is an economic fact, but a subtle one. More than in Britain, the wealth of America’s middle classes has stagnated as the upper 10th has dramatically improved. To counter this stagnation, the middle class has taken on consumer debt it can barely manage, as Robert Manning has recently documented in Credit Card Nation. People have tried to spend their way into status, and now the bills are coming due, as personal bankruptcies have taken off.
The same loss of control appears, famously, in the shrinking number of jobs. The familiar villain is outsourcing of work to Mexico, China or India, but the familiar villain misleads. Auto-mation has finally arrived in America, shrinking white-collar service jobs and manufacturing alike. In the past 20 years, for instance, the US steel industry increased its productivity by four per cent while cutting its labour force from about 212,000 to 79,000 - a transformation due mostly to automation. Again, young people now leaving university find themselves offered jobs that formerly went to secondary-school graduates. As in Britain, low-wage immigrants in America flourish in the cracks of the formal economy, but their children and grandchildren increasingly do not.
Meanwhile, a study conducted by the Work Foundation [full text of report] found that while the majority of Britons favour a more equal distribution of income, support for egalitarianism appeared to be lower amongst those with higher qualifications, higher incomes or, broadly speaking, within regions with a more heavily service/knowledge based labour market. As their report puts it: ‘The pattern is quite clear, and shows that, the more highly educated a person is, the less likely they are to support a fairer income distribution’ [see the chart below taken from the report].
As the economy becomes more ‘meritocratic’ under Blair’s pursuit of his ‘opportunity society’ and the number of those with a university education increases as part of the drive to make the UK a high skill economy it seems likely that some difficult questions are going to have be tackled by those committed to an egalitarian ethos.
