Transcript:
Fareed Zakaria on What Just Happened, and What Comes Next - Freakonomics
freakonomics.com
Knock yourself out.
Came down with a stinker of a cold suddenly and this is a pain to do on a mobile, so only gone ad far as I actually got into the video and not in as much depth as I could. I might carry on tomorrow.
Trump is not a spasm, it’s not a one-shot thing. This is a deep, enduring change.
This I absolutely agree with. The word has shifted but people are still taking the same positions they did 20 years ago.
the move from, first of all, a manufacturing sector to a service sector, which is happening in every advanced industrial country, and the further effect of the information revolution, has been to privilege knowledge workers, to privilege people whom Robert Reich once described as “symbolic analysts.” Meaning, if you manipulate symbols, code, images, language for a living — and then think of every profession we get — you know, lawyers, accountants, software programmers ...
You’re going to be doing well in that economy, you’re going to be rewarded, and you have pricing power over your labor. If you manipulate physical things for a living, you do not have pricing power.
This just isn't true, there has been a Proletarianization of the professions they have seen a decrease in pay and conditions and increasing control over ther work. This may not be the perception but it is the realty. Little anecdotal story as a white collar office worker, when I did a health and safely Union course I was the only office worker there and everyone else assumed I was paid more than then, when in reality I was paid about half as much aseveryone else. It might be true for a very small number of peope at the highest level but it is not the universal experience.
The country’s coalescing into two groups. The party that wants more openness at some level and the party that wants more closed borders, closed trade, closed technology. You know, it’s a big divide. And you’re seeing these new alignments where Hispanic working-class people are voting more like working class people than like Hispanics. So, ethnicity is giving way to social and economic class.
In what way is voting against "openness" intrinsically linked to economic class?
They don’t see the Democrats as part of their world. They see the Democrats as this affluent, elite, urban, cosmopolitan world
That might be how they see it, but it's bullshit the Republicans are at least as much an elite.
Tony Blair said this to me, “When people feel deeply insecure, they don’t move left economically. They move right culturally.”
Nice little anecdote from his mate Tony Blair about moving to the right.
you’re also seeing a lot of men who feel like politics has gotten too feminized, that they are being forgotten and that in a post-industrial world, women do better than men.
Againt they might feel this, but its not true, and if it is, good.
liberals get so frustrated and they say, “I can’t believe these people are voting against their interests,” meaning they’re voting for a party that isn’t going to do something for them economically. And yet, these same upper class liberal professionals are voting against their interests. They are voting against the party that is going to give them tax cuts. And they’re voting for the party that is going to tax them more. Why? Because even for upper class liberals, it turns out that cultural and social issues can often trump economics.
DUBNER: Although their argument would be, “Well, I’ve got mine, I’m comfortable, and therefore I’m looking out for people who don’t,” right?
ZAKARIA: They would say that. But I would argue that what’s going on is that in their world, it would be seen as so offensive to be voting for Trump. And what makes it so offensive? It’s all these cultural issues. It’s not that people in our world think it’s massively offensive to give a 3 percent cut in taxes. No, it’s about abortion and it’s about deportation. It’s about all those issues.
This is just weird. It implies the only interest someone has is how much tax they pay. Even in purely economics terms this need not be true, someone could calculate that a better economy overall would benefit them more than a cut in taxes. And this is before you even considered other possible benefits that people may cansider more important than a tax cut. Someone may decided that trying to prevent a wholesale atrack on their democratic rights is more in their intrests than a take brake. And this is to ignore the fact that they could be just, you know, telling the truth.
Overall there is nothing original or particularly interesting in my opinion and much of it is based on people's perception of things but that perception does not reflect reality and that's the point, you can't engage with people the same we we have in the past when they are so disengaged from reality. Over 40pct of Trump voters belive that post birth abortions are legal in some parts of America. Over 20pct believe that schools are performing sex change operations.How do you contend with that sort of insanity? There is nothing you can say, no evidance you can present they will just deny it.
Thinking back one of the big lies of our political generation was about WMD in Iraq. While the impact of that lie was huge, the lie itself seems so small, so quaint compared to what we hear today. And those spreading that lie knew it was a lie, one of the ironies of the "post truth" age is that I think politicians lie less as more of them belive the shit that comes out of their mouths.
What makes this time post truth to me is that the bullshit has no relationship at all to truth or reality. At least with a lie like the WMD one, it was plausible, believing it was true wasn't irrational.
I don't have answers to this, but I do think that just repeating the same old lines we have been saying for decades at this point isn't going to cut it.
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