Classism may not be quite as "trendy" as racism or sexism right this minute, but I think you'll still find plenty of interest in the topic (and it's intersections with the others) on the left.
Interest in the topic is what drove the popularity around books like Hillbilly Elegy and tons to articles in NYT and WaPo after the 2016 election about poor white people and what were the challenges that they were facing and motivations.
There is a very great portion of the American left that cares about economic status. I do believe that admissions should factor in socioeconomic status rather than just race, gender, etc., but believing this does not require me to generalize a very wide reaching political stance.
It isn't generalizing a political stance, but summarizing the dominant narrative given to us by the media and what I call the new American left.
If the narrative was mostly about economic status, we would hear more about that and about universal programs. Rather than disparities and identity politics.
I thought Warren backed away from full Universal for all Health insurance. From my outside look, it didn’t appear as if Warren was actually that progressive. One random example — endorsing Biden (and Hillary which possibly is about identity politics) were both political moves not seeming to be of someone close to a progressive like Bernie.
—
Many poorer people already get Medicaid which is quite good. If that was expanded a bit more to slightly higher incomes and [conservatives] states couldn’t deny so many people who should get it. That would be many times cheaper than Medicare for all. It would help the most marginalized.
Millions of people on good Medicaid right now could actually see their health insurance worsen under some universal health measures.
> I thought Warren backed away from full Universal for all Health insurance.
Her exact proposal was to phase-in full universal by starting with a subsidized public option and then spending more time building out a full universal plan, i believe.
You can argue this is a cop-out but i'd say it's more of a technocratic play - offering full universal would be a massive undertaking and not something that can just pop up overnight, but offering a subsidized insurance plan in the existing system is comparatively easier and could be implemented easily in a president's first year in office (with a cooperative congress, anyways)
The "new American left" wants universal health care, college education, housing, and a clean environment. All of those issues affect lower-income whites just as much as any other racial group.
Nearly 2/3 of Americans don’t graduate college. There’s many reasons for that. Money is not the only reason nor likely the primary reason.
Free college education will not help the marginalized anywhere close to as it will others.
We essentially don’t even have free high school. If a teen has work a full time job or more while attending high school to support their family. That’s awful. That should be tackled before something as status quo as free college.
What's to explain? Universal college education cannot be done without tax increases, and increasing taxes on the rural working class to pay for a program that doesn't benefit them is a huge disadvantage to them.
If I'm a 21yo man in North Dakota working the oil fields to support my young family, how would you expect me to react to the idea of increasing my taxes so that white collar kids don't have to pay as much?
Well tax your rich and corporations more - education is singularly able to propel people out of poverty. For your tax increase you get a way out of poverty.
Tanstafl.
Frankly though- the American education problem is just people talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs at two degrees removed.
> education is singularly able to propel people out of poverty
You're using education in an ambiguous way here. Either you're including vocational training, in which case the argument for universal college doesn't follow, or you only mean college, in which case the premise is false.
Vocational training is way under-utilized and promoted in the US, but there are still many many jobs that won't even look at you without a degree in hand. As long as we're careful about where the money comes from, universal education can be a huge win for almost all citizens.
Is your claim that the "American Left" has decided to sacrifice the poor whites to help other races? If it is, it's not really an accurate claim. It's poor Asians who've taken the largest brunt of affirmative action, while Whites have remained relatively neutral in their standing.
Your comment is a non-sequitur, and that non-sequitur is emblematic of exactly the problem everyone else in this thread is discussing.
How well "Whites" as a group are doing says nothing about "poor whites" and how they're doing. It's a fallacy of division, and anyway you shouldn't pre-judge things about people based on race... it's literally racial prejudice.
> How well "Whites" as a group are doing says nothing about "poor whites" and how they're doing.
How so? "Poor whites" are just a subset of "whites". The parent comment claimed that "poor whites" are worse off. This is making 2 claims: that they are worse off because they are poor, and that they are worse off because they are white. I'm not denying that they're worse off because they're poor, that should be fairly obvious to anyone that knows anything about the American university admissions system. But the parent added the extra claim about race, and I'm refuting that for being inaccurate.
> and anyway you shouldn't pre-judge things about people based on race... it's literally racial prejudice.
Where in my comment did I make any racially prejudiced or racially divisive statements? The parent comment was the one that decided to divide the group of poor further by race.
Anyway, it's Harvard (and the other Ivy Leagues) that are pre-judging people by race. Is me discussing that fact somehow also "prejudging by race" and "racial prejudice"? I don't follow what you're trying to imply.
Edit: Looks like I confused the parent comment with the grandparent comment. The parent comment was about the "left" not caring about poor white kids. I think most of what I'm saying still applies, just replace "worse off" with "not cared about by the left". Ie. The left doesn't care about the poor too much, but they're definitely neutral towards whites, if not biased in favour.
> How so? "Poor whites" are just a subset of "whites".
"A fallacy of division is the error in logic that occurs when one reasons that something that is true for a whole must also be true of all or some of its parts."
What exactly is the benefit of these exclusionary tactics in your opinion? If there is indeed some conspiracy over excluding certain groups what could the administrators possibly gain from conspiring like this?
Most rich people are white and most legacies are rich whites. More rich, more legacies, more donations, more buildings, more grants, more money for the polo team. More opportunites for you to mingle with rich folk, curry favors.
Rich whites were less threatened when they could game the system, but once Asian Americans began to become overly represented per capita academically and Affirmative Action lawsuits on descrimination against Asians began working up the courts... problem solved now.
There’s no outright conspiracy, these people know their position and what’s best for them. They’re probably not bad people but they’re not going to give away what they’ve got.
I think SAT/ACT/AP scores took power away from provosts/admins and there was some accomadation to meritocracy. Underprivileged had a chance, but it was a long shot.
It’s too many trying to get into too few colleges. We need more, smaller universities. Federal funds/grants should be reoriented away from the Ivies. Zero Federal funds for schools that don’t have lower than 30:1 class sizes. That would stop admin bloat overnight.
The Musks, Gates and Bezos’ of the world should be building new colleges, not dumping more into the olds.
That would also kill schools that are in places with few resources.
Ivies don’t need fed funds - they play a different game since the underlying markets tend to be asymptotic - the upper end of students, the upper end of professors, the upper end of athletes, the upper end of wealthy legacies.
“the average amount of money that the eight Ivy League schools received annually over that time period — $4.31 billion — exceeds the amount of money received by 16 of the 50 states.”
Fund those with few resources or create new ones away from the Ivies. You can’t democratize the Ivies but you can give a lot more people a better education. The status quo is that the Ivies have their cake and eat it too.
> full $41.59 billion of the Ivy League’s money could be traced back to taxpayer-funded payments and benefits.
Traces back.
So part of it is tax breaks to educational institutions- which is natural, they have the biggest endowments combined so the tax benefits will be massive.
They point out that major research happens at these institutions so they have more money from that as well.
This meshes less with the “have their cake and eat it too” line of thinking and more a result of the distortions from reputation and network effects.
It's probably both groups, asians and poor and middle class whites. If the winning narrative is racial diversity by proportion of population, you now find yourself largely in competition with people of your own race for one of the coveted spots, which means that the smart tactic is to find a way to exclude a subset of your own racial group that you're not part of so you have less competition.
Liberals making conservatives personas non-grata means they have half as many people to compete with for a coveted spot at the top of the pyramid of power.
The new American left does treat it as a zero sum game. That is why they focus on disparities instead of universal programs that would eliminate the largest absolute amounts of poverty and suffering.
Zero sum thinking is probably the most central tenet of the broader philosophy of the American left.
That's why there's so much talk of "disparity" or "inequality" vs. actual improvements to standards of living and quality of life. Almost all economic growth creates inequality for the simple reason that the more wealth there is, the more potential you have for skew.
In China, for instance, there was much less income inequality back in the 60's but I don't think too many folks want to go back to those days.
Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. To hear the new American left tell it though, we'd be better off all being equally poor instead of generally wealthier with a big differences between individual incomes.
> Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life.
Your quality of life depends very much on how much other people make. It's all relative. If the average income in an area goes up by 50% but your own income only goes up 5%, then you are worse off than you started, because prices for everything will rise with the market. If you don't believe me, look at Bay Area housing. Inject a couple thousand new millionaires into an area and tell me things don't become worse for the existing modest-income people.
On a percentage basis, the world is zero sum. If someone else captures (or creates) an additional 1% of something, that comes at the expense of 1% collectively from everyone else.
This is circular statement. Percentage is defined as a fraction of a some specified thing, so of course it's fixed. Ten percent of something is ten percent no matter how big or small that thing gets...
Anyway, I'm still not following your reasoning here. If you cut everyone's salaries where I work by 50% and only cut mine by 20%, that's still a bad day for me, even though I'm getting a bigger share of the total compensation paid out. People can argue about whether or not, or to what extent, wealth should be redistributed, but zero sum thinking is a bad path to go down and completely ignores humanity's ability to better its lot through innovation, trade, etc. It's a depressingly pessimistic worldview that prioritizes taking from others instead of creating things that others find valuable. At it's core it's a selfish ethos.
40 years ago, if you looked at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality was "a rising tide floats all boats."
Today, if you look at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality is "rich get richer, poor get poorer."
Clearly, magic capitalism beans aren't the only ingredient in an economy that improves everyone's lot. My theory is that the other key ingredient is growth. Growth is chaotic and stirs money around, it's one of the precious few strong market forces that pushes towards equality rather than winner-take-all, even though it does so purely on entropic grounds and isn't strong enough to actually arrive anywhere near the maximum-entropy state.
Of course, once the growth stops, the market settles out again, and the real question is how to deal with that. "Try to stimulate growth at all costs" just creates bubbles. It's a tough question, but whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure it involves stirring money around, and I'm pretty sure big monied interests are going to fight it tooth and nail out of self-interest.
There isn't one American Left. The liberals do as you often say. The socialists often focus precisely on "universal programs that would eliminate the largest absolute amounts of poverty and suffering."
universal programs only eliminate the largest amounts of poverty and suffering if they are self sustaining long term. Any universal program that undermines the work that funds the universal programs in the first places is a threat to sustainability. The Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela and China under Mao are all examples of places that went with universal programs and policies that ultimately undermined the revenue streams supporting those programs.
Also a PoC non-rich kid. My wife's students in an inner-city school serving a mostly immigrant populace are not going to write fine-sounding essays about their time volunteering in Haiti, because they're working at Starbucks instead of volunteering in Haiti. Hell, their parents came from Haiti.
The high school I went to, one of the two towns is regularly in one of those big magazines too 50 most affluent/best zip codes. I don’t know any one off the top of my head bedsides 2 possible people who did any thing like that in HS.
Yes, vast majority did not have to work while going to HS (which is possibly why some angles toward free HS should be focused on. Not free college). But they also weren’t freely going to Haiti.
I think the data shows that the effect of affirmative action (or "holistic admission") is actually relatively neutral for white kids. For example, Asians need a much higher SAT score than Whites to get into most Ivy League schools. Not sure I understand the logic behind it, but that's how it is.
That's a valid point, and a though one. But without affirmative action policies we may never be able to change the status quo and promote social inclusion. The challenge is making sure these actions don't create new social gaps.
