Comments on: Is San Jose’s mayor out of touch, or just a panderer?

By: don

don — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:20:31 +0000

Chuck Reed is a horrible Mayor!

By: ruth gutmann

ruth gutmann — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:40:02 +0000

What makes people choose a particular profession? How much they are going to make? What kind of prestige goes with it? How others will judge you? My guess is that if the opportunity for choice was there, financial reward will often be uppermost in mind. That is what has made the current graduating class at Harvard — hopefully not everyone — so antsy: there were no promising jobs on Wall Street. It takes people years — and David’s examples have obviously not gotten there yet — to realize that there are other ingredients which make for a fulfilling life, regardless of how much or little is left over after your “needs and wants” — questionable concepts for sure — have been stilled.

By: eric

eric — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 13:07:34 +0000

I was being disingenuous about my colleague–he is actually quite an anomaly. In fact, of course, schoolteachers whine about money way too often. Maybe people in every profession do–and you could argue that that’s because of American inequality and insecurity…

Yes, the WSJ should profile you!

By: dc

dc — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:57:15 +0000

eric: I’m sure you’re right that having more security would reduce people’s anxiety, but regardless of your colleague’s job/health case/pension security, don’t you think the fact that he chose to become a public schoolteacher probably does a lot to explain his attitude? When I was making $35,000-40,000 as a single guy working at a newspaper in notoriously expensive New York City, I probably wouldn’t have described myself as “upper class,” but I did feel rich. Sure, I might have earned more if I’d tried to get a job on Wall Street (my weeklong stint as a temp at Dean Witter doesn’t count), but that was a choice I made based on my own priorities. I still managed to save between $500-$1000 a month on top of my 401k savings—a small fortune! Admittedly, security would have been more important to me if I had had kids, or if I had been older. (Now I earn less money, so I no longer feel rich. Should I see if the WSJ wants to profile me?)

Obviously there are a lot of people who earn more than $250,000 a year who have a sensible perspective on how well they are doing, and who would think it was unseemly to whine to a reporter about how they aren’t “wealthy” and “don’t have loads of cash for wants.” And I’m sure there are schoolteachers who are as silly as the Parnells regarding their financial situation. But I would guess that a lot of the attitude difference has less to do with security, and more to do with the self-selecting nature of career choices. People who are likely to judge themselves on whether they have as more money or larger homes than their peers are more likely to pursue high-earning career paths, while people who judge their lives according to other yardsticks are more likely to become schoolteachers.

I agree with your “common cause” argument. In fact, while I am disgusted by their whining, I don’t have strong feelings about whether or not families like the Parnells should see their taxes raised—my general feeling is that becoming more like Sweden would probably be a good thing, but if someone could convince me that we could decrease poverty and increase the safety net without raising income taxes on anyone earning less than $1 million a year, then I’m all ears.

By: eric

eric — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:14:08 +0000

Yes, wordnerd, I do. But insecurity is important too. I remember a colleague of mine telling me that he and his wife, both public schoolteachers with a combined income of about 120,000 (this was four years ago–by now his wife is half time and their combined income is about the same), because their income was (just about) in the top 10% and because they both had postgraduate degrees, were in the “upper class.” This was ridiculous but charming, and in some ways it strikes me as the reverse of was the mayor said: my colleague felt secure (good health care, safe job, apparently sound pension, etc.) and therefore looked at the situation with a more rational, disinterested eye, and saw that he was indeed very fortunate, fortunate beyond 90% of his fellow citizens, and so decided he, a high-school teacher with no inherited wealth and a two-bedroom house in a blue-collar neighborhood, who drove a Jetta, was “upper-class.”

The reason I stress the insecurity angle is that I think this shows vividly how we would ALL be better off in a system that was less unequal and had national health care and a stronger social safety net. I think we should make common cause with the people who make $500,000–common cause against, if need be, the people who “make” tens of millions or billions.

By: wordnerd

wordnerd — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:14:00 +0000

Eric: Don’t you think greed and entitlement, quasi-independent of insecurity, also have something to do with it?

By: eric

eric — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 02:30:40 +0000

Barbara Ehrenreich called it “Fear of Falling” and I think she was basically right: in our grossly unequal and safetynetless society, EVERYBODY feels insecure. It’s that fundamental insecurity that gives these idiots “their distorted view of reality,” as you put it. There’s also just basic human egocentricity, but what these people really mean is not, “I’m really no richer than someone who makes a tenth what I make,” which is obviously false, but “My life sucks and I’m terrified of losing everything I have.” If they said THAT, they wouldn’t be lying. Paradoxically, there is even less social mobility here than in many other rich countries, so they probably won’t lose everything they have, but that doesn’t mean they’re not terrified. The terror comes largely, I think, from seeing how really, really poor are poor Americans, whose lives suck even worse, and from knowing that they are one layoff and disease away from bankruptcy.