“We won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes on a glaring imbalance in our electorial politics…
Both major U.S. political parties regularly tout their commitment to working-class Americans and claim to be the party of the working class. However, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans nominate many candidates who spent substantial time in working-class jobs.
This near-absence of people from working-class jobs in the halls of power matters. According to research in the U.S. and in other democracies, safety net programs are stingier, business regulations are flimsier and protections for workers are weaker than they would be if people from working-class jobs went on to hold office at higher rates. Working-class people can sometimes influence policy in other ways, but the fact that so few former workers hold elected office means that working-class interests often fall by the wayside in the world’s political institutions.
We research the causes and effects of the shortage of politicians from working-class jobs. We define working-class jobs as manual labor jobs, like construction worker, service industry jobs like restaurant server, and clerical jobs like receptionist.
We don’t include small-business owners or people who work in jobs that require extensive formal education. Instead, we focus on people in jobs that offer employees little stability or security.
There are, of course, a small number of notable politicians from these kinds of occupations. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, was a bartender before she became a lawmaker. Troy Jackson, Maine’s Democratic Senate candidate, worked as a logger before entering state politics. Indiana state Sen. Jim Tomes, a Republican, worked as a truck driver and union steward.
There are also examples outside the U.S., such as Stefan Löfven, the former prime minister of Sweden, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil.
Politicians like these often attract outsized media attention, but overall, people from working-class jobs are sharply underrepresented in political institutions.
By our count, about half of all Americans in the labor force have working-class jobs. However, people who last had working-class jobs when they got into politics make up only about 1% of the average state legislature, regardless of their party affiliation. The same goes for Congress.
And the U.S. isn’t alone. Starting in 2016, we partnered with a team of researchers to collect data on 97 of the 103 democracies with more than 300,000 citizens. Like the U.S., the average global democracy draws just 2% of the members of its national legislature from people who last had working-class jobs.
People sometimes blame the shortage of working-class people in office on features of American elections, such as soaring campaign spending or the decline of labor unions.
But even in Germany and Belgium, which offer public financing to candidates, or Finland, where the vast majority of the labor force is unionized, people from working-class jobs make up around 5% or less of the national legislature.
There doesn’t seem to be any shortcoming on the part of working-class Americans that would explain why they so rarely go on to hold office.
Working-class candidates tend to be about as qualified in the ways we can measure as white-collar professionals, about as interested in running for office and about as likely to win when they run.
Our new book, “Keeping Workers Off the Ballot,” shows that what keeps working-class Americans – and their counterparts around the world – out of elected office is that they so rarely run. And that’s because campaigning anywhere for any office at any level of government is personally burdensome, as we show in our book. It takes time and energy, it entails personal risks ranging from embarrassment to physical violence, and the outcome is always uncertain…
… We believe there are ways to overcome the obstacles that keep working-class people out of office.
In a report we wrote for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we outline a range of options. Some of the reforms we’re proposing would help in the short term, such as creating candidate training programs or political scholarships that target working-class people. Some examples already exist, such as the New Jersey AFL-CIO’s Labor Candidates School.
Other options, which admittedly might be less likely to happen in the current political environment, would create long-lasting paths to office for working-class people, such as the creation of party or institutional quotas for people from working-class jobs, or randomly selected citizen juries that advise policymakers.
But without serious reform efforts that target the factors that keep workers off the ballot, our research suggests that working-class people will never make up more than tiny fractions of elected officials in the U.S. and in democracies around the world…
Putting the “representative” back into representative democracy: “Why working‑class people account for around 1% of lawmakers in the US – and only 2% in the average democracy around the world,” from @theconversation.com.
And of course some of our elected officials appoint others to office… which has led to our situation becoming even more egregious: “Trump’s Billionaire Boys Club: How Donald Trump has stacked his administration with investment bankers and billionaire businessmen and women.”
See also: “Class wars and the midterms” (“The US economic conversation is expanding to include things such as corruption and the Wall Street-Main Street divide…” Gift article from the Financial Times) and “Upend the trickle-down” (“Neoliberal policies have hollowed out democracies and spawned unchecked oligarchs. Grasping their structure points to a fix…” From Aeon)
* Zohran Mamdani
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As we play fair, we might recall that it was on this date in 1819 that the Philadelphia Balloon Riot occurred at Vauxhall Garden in Philadelphia.
In the early 1800s, balloon aviation was a novelty in the U.S. So, when the Franklin Gazette of Philadelphia announced that French aeronaut Monsieur Michel would perform a balloon ascension and parachute leap at Vauxhall Garden, tens of thousands arrived to witness the balloon launch. But the one dollar admission fee (equal to $24.77 in 2024) prevented all but the wealthy from taking a closer look at the balloon. After guards beat a boy unconscious for attempting to get a better view by climbing atop a fence separating the paying guests from those who couldn’t afford the expensive entry fee, crowds broke down the fence and ripped the hot air balloon to shreds.
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”*…
Today is, of course, Labor Day, a recognition of the American labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements in the U. S. that dates from the latter 19th century. Livia Gershon reminds us that, earlier that century, labor had an important champion…
Today, the idea that the value of all commodities comes from the labor power used to produce them is closely associated with Karl Marx. But Marx was far from the only thinker in the mid-nineteenth century to believe this. Literature scholar Owen Cantrell looks at another: Abraham Lincoln [and here].
In 1847, Lincoln wrote that goods rightfully “belong to those whose labour has produced them,” and any good government should ensure that workers receive the entire product of their labor “or as nearly as possible.”
However, unlike Marx, Lincoln saw no problem with the private ownership of property, or even of some people becoming rich. Cantrell argues that his view was the product of his own background in rural middle America. As a young man, Lincoln’s father had worked odd jobs in Kentucky, sometimes alongside enslaved laborers. This became increasingly difficult as the growing use of enslavement crowded out free workers. But he was eventually able to help his community with his carpentry skills and establish a homestead in Indiana. There, Lincoln grew up doing manual labor on the homestead and at neighboring farms.
In 1861, the newly elected president warned that slavery threatened a system of free labor in which “the prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages for awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.”
Cantrell writes that Lincoln believed that both human advancement and political stability for the American democratic republic depended on workers’ dignity and ability to improve their conditions. He envisioned the Civil War as a fight between a slave economy that left workers powerless and a kind of capitalism in which they could use the cash economy to advance, improve production techniques, and create better material conditions for the country as a whole.
Marx had a very different view of the capitalist system, seeing wage work as the mark of an oppressed class making up the majority of industrial nations’ populations. But, like Lincoln, he saw the Civil War as an opportunity to secure better lives for all workers. When Lincoln was reelected in 1864, Marx—on behalf of the First International—wrote to him with hopes that the “American Antislavery War” would essentially function as a revolution bringing the working class to power.
In the end, the post-Civil War era did bring a new labor system, though not one for which either Marx or Lincoln had hoped. It saw the rise of large corporate employers and the consignment of an increasing part of the workforce to lifelong wage work—thanks in significant part to Lincoln’s Republican Party choosing to ally itself with the corporations.
“If he had witnessed the capitalist excesses of the Gilded Age, it would have proved the lie to his conception of capital and labor in the starkest possible way,” Cantrell writes…
Abraham Lincoln was no Marxist, but his ideas resonated—albeit with a rural American flavor: “Abraham Lincoln’s Labor Theory of Value,” from @liviagershon.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.
If Lincoln would have been appalled at the Gilded Age, what might he think of what’s transpiring now? “How Did Trump Do on His Labor Day Report Card?” (“Spoiler alert: He flunked…” From @timothynoah.bsky.social in @newrepublic.com.)
* Abraham Lincoln
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As we take the day off, we might recall that it was on this date in 1822 that a prisoner-powered treadmill for grinding corn began operation at the Bellevue County Penitentiary in New York City, located where 26th Street meets the East River. Up to 16 prisoners at a time walked on two paddle-wheel like treadmills, grinding about 50 bushells of corn per day.
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor”*…
We’ve become a nation of credit and debit card users. As of this year, Pew reports, 42% of Americans don’t use cash for purchases in a typical week (up from 24% in 2015); another 46% use a mix of cash and plastic; only 12% use mostly (or entirely) cash. The Federal Reserve reports, unsuprisingly, that cash remains the dominant mode for the elderly and the poor; debit cards, for lower-to-middle-income households.
NBER unpacks one little-understood consequence of this shift…
Every time a consumer swipes a credit card, the merchant pays an interchange fee—typically around 1.9 percent of the transaction value—most of which funds the rewards that cardholders receive. Because merchants generally charge the same prices regardless of how customers pay, consumers who use cash or debit cards effectively help finance the rewards enjoyed by credit card users. In Who Pays for Payments? (NBER Working Paper 35067), Mark L. Egan, Gregor Matvos, Amit Seru, Lulu Wang, and Vincent Yao use novel merchant-level data from Fiserv—one of the largest US merchant acquirers—to measure how the payment system redistributes resources.
The primary dataset contains establishment-level payment data from 2006 to 2022, including total payment values, transaction counts, and interchange fees paid for different card types…
… The researchers’ analysis using these datasets suggests that interchange fees transfer approximately $30 billion annually from cash and debit card users to credit card users. Cash users lose about 96 basis points of purchasing power, and regulated debit card users lose roughly 47 basis points, while basic and premium credit card users gain approximately 48 and 59 basis points, respectively. Because credit card use rises with income, the system generates an estimated $9.2 billion annual transfer from households earning less than $150,000 to those earning more.
Two forces moderate this redistribution. First, the tendency for cash, debit, and credit card users to shop at different merchants limits the overlap necessary for cross-subsidization. Second, where overlap does occur, such as at large grocery stores and gas stations, interchange fees tend to be lower due to sector discounts and negotiated rates. Together, these forces reduce the transfer by approximately 25 percent relative to the transfer that would occur with homogeneous consumers and merchants.
The researchers also examine the redistributive consequences of two specific developments in the payment system. The first is the Durbin Amendment, which capped interchange fees on debit cards issued by large banks. The authors show that one perhaps unintended consequence of the amendment was that it primarily benefited credit card users through lower retail prices at the expense of regulated debit card users, who lost approximately $9.6 billion in rewards and free checking benefits. This was a net transfer from middle-income to higher-income households. The second development is the rise of premium credit cards, which grew from 15 percent of credit card volume in 2006 to 60 percent by 2022. This has also been a regressive development. While premium cardholders gained about $7.9 billion, debit card users—not cash users—bore the largest dollar losses because they shop most frequently alongside premium card users…
The rich getting richer: “Who Ultimately Pays Credit Card Interchange Fees?” from @nber.org.
Pair with Annie Lowrey on another burden– a “time tax”– that falls disportionately on the neediest: “How American Bureaucracy (Literally) Steals Years From Your Life“:
Washington currently estimates that Americans spend 12 billion hours a year filling out government forms, meaning the average person spends six 8-hour workdays filing their taxes, signing up for Medicaid, renewing their driver’s licenses, and applying for government loans. At prevailing wages, this uncompensated labor is worth $430 billion a year. If Washington were to create a Department of Bureaucracy to take on the paperwork it shunts to citizens, the agency would require 5.9 million employees, making it four times the size of the active-duty military. The DOB’s payroll would be larger than that of every other federal department combined.
The nation’s paperwork regime frustrates every resident, and particularly lower-income residents who use more government programs and interact more frequently with public officials. The political scientist Elizabeth Cohen has done seminal work exploring time as a potent, if obscure, form of political currency. “The devaluation of a person or group’s political time is a structural obstacle to equality,” she writes. Yet we can’t measure time and effort as easily as we measure dollars, and we don’t even try. The 12-billion-hour estimate is an undercount, and an egregious one…
* James Baldwin (see also Terry Pratchett’s “Boots theory“)
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As we second-guess secreted subventions, we might spare a thought for Jean-Baptiste Colbert; he died on this date in 1683. A French statesman who served as First Minister of State under the rule of King Louis XIV from 1661 until his death. His lasting impact on the organization of the country’s politics and markets, known as Colbertism, a form of the mercantilism so popular in the Trump Administration today. Colbert also helped craft the Code Noir, a legal instrument that sanctioned an intentionally brutal system of torture and repression to enforce institutional slavery in the French colonial empire and restrict the enterprise of free Black people.
Though Colbert was more competent and less crony-ish than the crew at “work” in D.C. over the last couple of years, his goal of a healthy economy was frustrated by a King whose spending out-ran (and whose favoritism undermined) Colbert’s efforts. In the longer run, many economists suggest that “Colbertism” has contributed to contributed to a lack of adaptability in French industry and a hostility to technological innovation.
“Reality is a very subjective affair”*…
As Nathan Gardels reports, the Berggruen Institute recently gathered religious scholars, philosophers, quantum physicists, AI technologists, neuroscientists and science fiction novelists at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice to ponder the nature of consciousness. Noting that “it is fascinating to see how their ideas correspond to the long-ago musings of Medieval mystics and even the “pagan masters” of antiquity'” Gardels observes that “the great question then, as now, and probably forever, is whether there is a metaphysical gap between the body and the soul, or if they are made of the same substance, symbiotic aspects of a singular reality that entail each other.” He concludes…
…The quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that the much-discussed metaphysical gap between body and soul, subjective and objective, doesn’t exist.
As he has written in Noema, “We, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. Our theories and knowledge are embodied tools to help us navigate the real world, not disembodied views on reality from the outside. They are themselves aspects of the very world they describe. Our understanding, like our feelings, perceptions and experience, is a natural phenomenon.”
For Rovelli, the notion of a metaphysical gap “contradicts everything we have learned about nature in the last centuries. The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. We do not need to assume that the circle between epistemology (how we get knowledge) and ontology (what exists) requires a starting point. There is nothing wrong with its circularity: The world I access is the information I have about it, and I am part of that world.
“Nor do we need to require that there is any ultimate or fundamental account of reality. Any account is approximate, has blind spots and is realized within reality, so it is embodied in a part of that same reality.
“If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is also a collection of atoms. It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.
“Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature.”
Rovelli’s scientific case that we humans are not outside the world of reality, but constitutive participants in it and constructors of it, tracks with the intuition of Medieval thinkers like the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart.
For Eckhart, consciousness was being aware we are not apart from, but both inhabit and are inhabited by, the mind of God — that is, “objective reality.”
As stated in the New Testament’s Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” In biblical terms, the Word, or Logos, is divine reason. Eckhart interpreted this passage as meaning that the incarnation of the divine in man was not a one-time event of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, but takes place through continuous human participation in the unfolding Logos of the Word, making us part of and conjoining with the mind of God; co-essences, so to speak.” If God is the pure thought of divine reason, then, as Sloterdijk has put it, ‘To think is to give birth to God.’”
That Medieval insight is another way of saying, in Rovelli’s words, that “objectivity without a subject is an abstract construct, of little relevance — it is the illusion of a science now belonging to the past.”
Consciousness, then, can be said to be the perspective of the aware self in a world where there is no outside. The “I” is not detached from some order of objective reality, but in all the diversity of personal experience, part of what makes it “everywhere whole.” Not only is “the universe disclosed by a knowing subject;” the knowing subject is its co-creator from within…
Eminently worth reading in full.
Striving to understand the nature of consciousness: “Subjective Perspective Makes Objective Reality ‘Everywhere Whole’,” from @noemamag.com.
Pair with: “Everything is not itself.”
* Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
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As we muse on our minds, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with these same issues, Auguste Comte; he died on this date in 1857. A philosopher (and mathematician), he is remembered as the father of the doctrine of positivism. He developed the Law of Three Stages to describe the historical evolution of human thought and consciousness, arguing that the human mind, in its search for understanding, progresses through three distinct intellectual phases (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive (or scientific), each with a different method of explaining reality.
Comte is widely regarded as the first “philosopher of science” in the modern sense, and as the forebearer of sociology (the name of which he coined, as he did the word “altruism”). He had a major impact on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers like John Stuart Mill and George Eliot. His concepts of “sociology” and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists including Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology (a la Émile Durkheim) as practical and objective social research.
“I wisely started with a map”*…
From Daniel O’Donohue, 29 print-ready folding globe templates (the one above is “Earth Today”; there are also globes of the sun, the moon, the planets, and lots of different “views” of Earth) — every one free to download, print, and fold, and every one customizable into other shapes or create your own, with your own pinned places. via the custom globe builder…
… This project started with a simple observation: we look at maps on screens all day, but almost nobody gets to hold a planet. A paper globe is the cheapest possible spacecraft — print a sheet, cut along the lines, fold, glue, and you are turning the actual shape of the world over in your hands.
Nothing here is decoration. Every globe is built from openly licensed scientific data — NASA satellite imagery, USGS planetary mosaics, Natural Earth cartography, NOAA ocean data, the Smithsonian’s volcano inventory — rendered through real map projections into print-quality PDFs. Each globe credits its source, and the source is always one click away.
The fold shapes are the classics of mathematical cartography: icosahedra, dodecahedra, gores like a 17th-century globemaker would cut, even the Airocean projection that unfolds the world onto twenty triangles with barely any distortion.
The curated globes are free — print as many as you like. When you want a globe that is yours alone — your places pinned, your countries highlighted, your choice of shape — the builder is where it happens…
Getting our minds– and out hands– around the places we are: “Folding Globes.”
Harmonic: “24 Times,” from Gysin-Vanetti: “A collection of twentyfour variations on the theme “clock” created for HeK… Each of these clocks shows time in a distinct form. The result is a sequence of numbers, letters or punctuation marks animated in different ways….”
* J. R. R. Tolkien
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As we orient ourselves, we might spare a thought for William John McGee (or “WJ McGee, without the periods, as he referred to himself); he died on this date in 1912. An inventor, geologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist, he is remembered for his pioneering studies documenting the occurrence of waves of invasions and recessions of ice sheets in North America (thus establishing the complexity of the Great Ice Age). But he worked in a number of governmental and organizational capacities that contributed to teh development of geography as a discipline: e.g., as a director in the U.S. Geological Survey, and as a founder and president of the National Geographic Society. While on the staff of the Bureau of Soils, in 1918, he organized the landmark Conference of Governors on Conservation of Natural Resources, for whihc he has been called the “chief theorist of the conservation movement.”
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