Time Marches Slowly

So the firing of Google engineer James Damore for his lengthy treatise challenging Google's diversity programs and the echo-chamber/code of silence that's built up around them has been all over the place this week. And in one (non-public) social media post I was reading on the topic, one of Damore's defenders claimed that "since the seventies" we'd effectively traded one form of discrimination for another, and asked when would it stop?

So - in the 1970s, my mother applied for a teaching position in the town I grew up in - a distant suburb of Chicago. She was rejected, because at this point in the early 1970s, they weren't hiring Black teachers. I hadn't quite started school at this point. I didn't have any Black teachers until college. Because what were the schools going to do? Fire some of the teachers they already had to make room for the people they hadn't been hiring previously? Unlikely.

But it's interesting. Because many the kids I went to school with looked at the world in the same way, even if it was over a much shorter timeframe. When I was a freshman in high school, the senior class were mostly of an age where they were born in 1964. As in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The number of my classmates who felt that in less than 20 years, all vestiges of racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States has been wiped away was astonishing. And this idea, that things outside of our own living memory don't matter, takes some maturity to get rid of.

Because would you expect that an organization that started off with no non-White employees would now have an employee makeup that matches the community around it without some continuing measures? Especially given that numerical quotas were not allowed? A new teacher who started working in the public schools of my hometown when I was in first grade could conceivably still be working there. I know that some of my high-school instructors are still with the school (although they've moved up the hierarchy in the meantime). When would you think the last school administrator who was an active participant in "no Black teachers" finally left the district? 1975? 1985? 1995? And let's not forget the last teachers hired under that rule. And in that timeframe, how many people do you think they influenced? There is an idea that in order to harbor negative stereotypes about one or another group of people, you have to be a snarling bigot, with a pointy hood folded up in the bottom dresser drawer. And that to be influenced by such people, one has to live in a place that modernization took a pass on. It's a convenient stereotype, but not an accurate one. There is a tendency to see people as immune from being influenced by bad ideas unless they somehow show themselves to be monsters. And to the degree that the monsters are viewed as relics of the past, the bed ideas are often assumed to have died with them. Even though it's understood, for example, that there are still people who believe that the Earth is flat... And in my own life, I have been much more likely to encounter people willing to share (and attempt to sell me on) the idea that people's life outcomes are shaped, wholly or mostly, by nature than the idea that the South Pole is a hoax.

In the end, the problem with diversity may be that it's not attempting to solve the right problem, because it takes, as a starting point, the intractability of scarcity. If you view various "isms" as responses to scarcity that take on lives of their own after being allowed to take root deeply enough, then it seems that the best way to combat them is to do something about the scarcity. And that's a difficult thing to tackle because so much of our culture is designed to run on scarcity.

Mislabelling

But Mark Zandi, Moody's chief economist, who has advised John McCain and donated to McCain and Hillary Clinton's campaigns, told Politico the plan is a "mistake" that will cause the labor force to come to a "standstill" in the next decade. "It is hard to imagine a policy that would do more damage to long-term economic growth," he said.

As NPR's Brian Naylor noted, economists believe the country's low unemployment rate (4.4 percent) coupled with retiring baby boomers will result in a labor shortage in the coming years.
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And if you're an American worker, high enough demand for labor that employers have to compete with higher wages and benefits, you may be selective about which jobs to take and people who have been traditionally locked out of the labor market now have an in, is bad exactly how? After all, the internet bubble caused a serious labor shortage until a) companies started failing and b) internet infrastructure became robust enough that overseas remote work became widely viable. I don't remember that as being damaging to long-term growth. Not to say that it wasn't, because it could have been. But I have yet to hear an explanation of "The Great Recession" that says that the ultra-low unemployment rate (and high participation rate) is the culprit.

There's a saying that says that many people don't understand how something works by reading about it in its idealized form in a book somewhere - they learn about by watching it in practice on a day-to-day basis. And this sort of thinking, that what's good for people who work is bad for "the economy" as a whole, appears to be coloring many people's understanding of the purpose and goals of Capitalism. Personally, I would tend to call this Capital Primacy instead - the idea that whenever there is a conflict between the interests of Capital and Labor, that Capital must always be priviledged. And therefore a situation like a labor shortage, which makes Labor more dear than Capital, and therefore able to command a higher share of the resulting profits is bad, because what's bad for Capital is always bad for everyone. And while this doesn't result in a wholesale failure to consider the problems of Labor, no solution that results in greater benefits for Labor than Capital will receive serious consideration.

And I think that, despite the idea that the Average American isn't very sophisticated about economic topics, there is something of a realization that Capital must always benefit, and this is labelled "Capitalism." And therefore people come to perceive Capitalism as a system that is stacked against them. And if they're not going to benefit from that being the ways things are done, why support it? Why back a system in which the best-case-scenario is that a general status quo is maintained? Why back a system in which making up any of the ground lost to the people at the top of the pyramid is considered damaging, and not seriously questioned. NPR is largely considered to be left of center, yet Mr. Zandi's comment is allowed to go completely unchallenged. And this isn't to say that Mr. Zandi is incorrect. It may be precisely that making it more difficult to grow the economy over the long term. But that's something that deserves some level of explanation, rather than simply be asserted as truth and allowed to stand.

Perhaps the most corrosive piece of what we commonly term "élitism" is that the non-élites don't know their own best interests and/or the value of short-term pain for longer-term again. And therefore, there's no value in attempting to bring them on board with a plan that impacts them. I'm going to digress for a moment here, and blame a lot of this in the common perception of King George. I know, I know, bear with me for a moment. Because the American Revolution is commonly taught in grade-school social studies/history, it tends to come off as something of a morality play, with clear cut good guys and bad guys. And since King George is the Bad Guy in Chief, he's seldom given rational reasons for not allowing the American colonies to have seats in Parliament. And because terms like "tyrant" and "dictator" have exclusively negative connotations in modern parlance, people who understand that they know better than everyone don't see themselves in that sense, since King George's crime became one of being an abusive ruler, rather than one of shutting the colonies out of the legislative process. And to the degree that "élites" (which has become a pejorative itself) see themselves as benevolent parents; the "adults in the room," as it were. And just like one doesn't let the kids vote on what's for dinner until they don't say "cake" or "ice cream" anymore, "élites" (or "élitists") may feel that the citizenry is too childish (and I've seen it put just that way) to participate in their own governance.

Of course, the citizenry may become resentful of that, in the same way that anyone might become resentful of being spoken down to. The whole point behind a representative republic is to allow people to participate (albeit indirectly) in making decisions the outcomes of which they're going to have to live with. A presentation of Capitalism that seems to be stacked against them by design is going to lead to people choosing to back something else instead; something that they feel is more "fair" to them. They might wind up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but the way to prevent that is to be more precise in the use of language, and to explain the counterintuitive, rather than simply state it.

Different Understandings

Abigail Cooke: There's some evidence that native-born workers who don't finish high school do compete with low-skill immigrants for the same jobs - in some cases. And when that happens, some of those people lose their jobs, their wages don't go up over time if they're having to switch jobs. But the size of this effect is really small. And one of the other things that happens, at least as often, is that those native-born workers are prompted to find new jobs doing maybe slightly different things. And often, those end up being slightly higher-skill jobs that come with higher wages.

Stacey Vanek Smith: Oh, like what?

Abigail Cooke: Back of the house versus front of the house in restaurant service, even sometimes, you know, bumping up to a sort of lower management level, or something where you're required to have a bit stronger English skills.
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I'm not sure that this is the sum total of the effect in play here. Ms. Cooke implies that the very same workers who are displayed from low-skill jobs find themselves in higher-paying, higher-skill jobs, and elsewhere in the piece implies that those new jobs exist partially because of the influx of immigrant consumers. But then at the end of the piece, she makes this point:

But I also think it's easier to point the finger at people who seem different than it is to really think about how the structures of our economy are really not helping a lot of low-skilled, low-wage people in this country. So I think there's a little bit of scapegoating going on.

So... the presence of immigrant workers in the United States does nothing to most workers, and for every worker for whom there's a direct negative or neutral impact, there's a another worker for whom there's a direct positive impact. But the economy isn't helping low-wage workers, and so they're taking it out on the very immigrant communities who are the rising tide that's lifting their boats. Hmm.

Part of this is the simple fact that you can't really get into the nitty-gritty of the economics of mass migration and the human psychology that accompanies that in four minutes. And so you wind up only briefly touching on topics that turn out to be very important - such as do low-skilled immigrants to a country, in their role as new consumers, spark enough demand for goods and services that they themselves cannot provide that they take more slack out of the labor market than they put into it? Do any front of the house restaurant jobs or low-level management jobs that are created genuinely go to the same people who were ousted from the back of the house or individual contributor jobs that the immigrants now hold, or do they go to other people whose skills or a more immediate match?

One of the recurring factors of the immigration debate is the disconnect between personal anecdote and aggregate data. And this allows the who side to both be right, and to talk past the opposition, due to the different level of granularity. It does seem strange that not-quite lowest skilled workers who found themselves pushed up the employment hierarchy by immigrant labor would be complaining about that fact. And so I suspect that that the new "native-born" waiters in a restaurant that uses immigrant labor in the back of the house aren't the same people who would have been hired for the back of the house had the immigrants not been there. And it's a safe bet that the people who are displaced from the sorts of jobs that lower-skilled Americans often complain have been lost to immigration - things like food processing and low-skill manufacturing jobs - haven't found themselves in the role of supervising those new hires, or being liaison to English-speaking upper management - a job for which a knowledge of the immigrants' language is just as important as "a bit stronger English skills."

If you're a person who has never studied economics, let alone only a high-school graduate (or dropout, for that matter), it's likely that a simple understanding of "supply and demand" is all you've ever been taught. And Ms. Cooke is right that the actual economy is more complicated than "when the supply of labor goes up the price of labor goes down." But it's not helpful to presume that this knowledge is widely-available, yet being ignored, when it's somewhat difficult to find explanations of what's actually going on that are accessible to laypersons.

Whether or not low-skilled workers born in the United States are competing with low-skilled immigrant labor for the same jobs is a matter of individual's experience and perception of the world. To the person who was turned down for a job at particular employer, who sees people who look like immigrants going to and from that workplace on a daily basis, and has had to settle for a job less to their liking or less closely-matched to their skills, an academic saying that someone like them might be supervising those workers is cold comfort. And telling them they should blame distant and impersonal "structures of our economy" doesn't give them any actions they can take to better their circumstances in the here and now.

This isn't to say that the aggregate data about how immigration impacts the country overall isn't important. But in a representative republic, studies that tell the people who are suffering that they're a small enough segment of the population that they can be safely ignored (which while likely never the intent, is often the result) simply reinforce the idea that they've been forgotten - or are being deliberately sacrificed.

Immigration undoubtedly has economic costs as well, particularly for Americans in certain industries and Americans with lower levels of educational attainment. But the benefits that immigration brings to society far outweigh their costs, and smart immigration policy could better maximize the benefits of immigration while reducing the costs.
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And that leads them to vote for people who will confirm their understanding of the world and offer to help them with it. If that's a problem, it's time to start doing something about the problems that are creating it.

Sunset Comes Early

The sky has not been quite blue this week. And the Sun fades to an ember before it reaches the treetops, although there is still some distance to the true horizon.

British Columbia is burning, and the smoke has blanketed the Puget Sound region in a haze that has prompted warnings about the air quality for the young, the ill and the elderly. But it has had another effect, one less talked about, but perhaps no less important. It's been very warm in Seattle for the past few days, but the haze has tamed the heat somewhat. Records were met, but all-time highs didn't materialize, and the evenings cooled more rapidly than is normal. The heat is fading, but not gone, and the haze should have a few more days. And then things will return to normal. For a time, anyway.

Grapes

I think I may try to teach myself how to shoot still life this summer/autumn. Not because I want to be a food photographer, but just because it seems interesting.