06.30.16
Listen, Snob
I see Trump and Brexit supporters being sniffed at by sober commentators for being “anti-expert,” as if that were proof of insanity. I’ve been anti-expert since the 1970s, when feminists took on the medical profession for various forms of unnecessary surgery, hazardous contraceptives and other abuses of women. In fact, it’s my anti-expertism that turned me against Hillary, whose idea of “health reform” in 1993 was to gather a bunch of guys in suits for secret deliberations, which of course led nowhere. — Barbara Ehrenreich, on FB
As an aside, those sniffing at “anti-expertism” 98 percent of the time are guilty of believing only people of their immediate tribe and pay grade are smart enough to be them.
For as long as I’ve read her, Barbara Ehrenreich has been an — ahem, expert — on the increasingly lethal character of the American way of life.
From above:
“A certain cleaning staff would go through the garbage to find the Chinese food containers left behind by Harvard students that still contained sme food in them because you could take them home to your kids … whoah. Meanwhile, at the other end at Harvard you had a guy named Greg Mankiw, who was an economics professor, who made it his mission to point out why low wage people couldn’t have higher wages. It would destroy the economy, pure and simple.
“I always debated him on the radio. And in the years since 2002, traveling around the country talking about these issues on different college campuses I began to get the impression the whole purpose of economics departments was to teach kids that whatever is going on in the economic status quo is perfect and how it has to be, so shut up.
“Some fresh guy [would] stand up, ‘Well, we learned in economics, you can’t raise wages.” But [you] can make $100,000 or whatever.
“I began to get really impatient and even, in some places, to go so far as to say, ‘What the hell do they teach at this university?’ Because if they taught math you could figure out that on six dollars/hour you’re not going to live anywhere in the environs of Cambridge, Mass., or any property of any other major university. That’s simple.”