Thread: The Future Of America's Working Class

The Future Of America's Working Class

Joel Kotkin, 06.01.10, 05:45 PM EDT
It will have to work hard to avoid the pitfalls plaguing the U.K.

Watford, England, sits at the end of a spur on the London tube's Metropolitan line, a somewhat dreary city of some 80,000 rising amid the pleasant green Hertfordshire countryside. Although not utterly destitute like parts of south or east London, its shabby High Street reflects a now-diminished British dream of class mobility. It also stands as a potential warning to the U.S., where working-class, blue-collar white Americans have been among the biggest losers in the country's deep, persistent recession.

As you walk through Watford, midday drinkers linger outside the One Bell pub near the center of town. Many of these might be considered "yobs," a term applied to youthful, largely white, working-class youths, many of whom work only occasionally or not at all. In the British press yobs are frequently linked to petty crime and violent behavior--including a recent stabbing outside another Watford pub, and soccer-related hooliganism.

In Britain alcoholism among the disaffected youth has reached epidemic proportions. Britain now suffers among the highest rates of alcohol consumption in the advanced industrial world, and unlike in most countries, boozing is on the upswing.

Some in the media, particularly on the left, decry unflattering descriptions of Britain's young white working class as "demonizing a whole generation." But many others see yobism as the natural product of decades of neglect from the country's three main political parties.

In Britain today white, working-class children now seem to do worse in school than immigrants. A 2003 Home Office study found white men more likely to admit breaking the law than racial minorities; they are also more likely to take dangerous drugs. London School of Economics scholar Dick Hobbs, who grew in a hardscabble section of east London, traces yobism in large part to the decline of blue-collar opportunities throughout Britain. "The social capital that was there went [away]," he suggests. "And so did the power of the labor force. People lost their confidence and never got it back."

Over the past decade, job gains in Britain, like those in the United States, have been concentrated at the top and bottom of the wage profile. The growth in real earnings for blue-collar professions--industry, warehousing and construction--have generally lagged those of white-collar workers.

Tony Blair's "cool Britannia,"epitomized by hedge fund managers, Russian oligarchs and media stars, offered little to the working and middle classes. Despite its proletarian roots, New Labour, as London Mayor Boris Johnson acidly notes, has presided over that which has become the most socially immobile society in Europe.

This occurred despite a huge expansion of Britain's welfare state, which now accounts for nearly one-third of government spending. For one thing the expansion of the welfare state apparatus may have done more for high-skilled professionals, who ended up nearly twice as likely to benefit from public employment than the average worker. Nearly one-fifth of young people ages 16 to 24 were out of education, work or training in 1997; after a decade of economic growth that proportion remained the same.

Some people, such as The Times' Camilla Cavendish, even blame the expanding welfare state for helping to create an overlooked generation of "useless, jobless men--the social blight of our age." These males generally do not include immigrants, who by some estimates took more than 70% of the jobs created between 1997 and 2007 in the U.K. [My note: we have a similar problem. In fact, 9 out of 10 jobs in American IT over the last decade were given to foreigners on work visas]

Immigrants, notes Steve Norris, a former member of Parliament from northeastern London and onetime chairman of the Conservative Party, tend to be more economically active than working-class white Britons, who often fear employment might cut into their benefits. "It is mainly U.K. citizens who sit at home watching daytime television complaining about immigrants doing their jobs," asserts Norris, a native of Liverpool.

The results can be seen in places like Watford and throughout large, unfashionable swaths of Essex, south and east London, as well as in perpetually depressed Scotland, the Midlands and north country. Rising housing prices, driven in part by "green" restrictions on new suburban developments, have further depressed the prospects for upward mobility. The gap between the average London house and the ability of a Londoner to afford it now stands among the highest in the advanced world.

Indeed, according to the most recent survey by demographia.com, it takes nearly 7.1 years at the median income to afford a median family home in greater London. Prices in the inner-ring communities often are even higher. According to estimates by the Centre for Social Justice, unaffordability for first-time London home buyers doubled between 1997 and 2007. This has led to a surge in waiting lists for "social housing"; soon there are expected by to be some 2 million households--5 million people--on the waiting list for such housing.

With better-paid jobs disappearing and the prospects for home ownership diminished, the traditional culture of hard work has been replaced increasingly by what Dick Hobbs describes as the "violent potential and instrumental physicality." Urban progress, he notes, has been confused with the apparent vitality of a rollicking night scene: "There are parts of London where the pubs are the only economy."

London, notes the LSE's Tony Travers, is becoming "a First World core surrounded by what seems to be going from a second to a Third World population." This bifurcation appears to be a reversion back to the class conflicts that initially drove so many to traditionally more mobile societies, such as the U.S., Australia and Canada.

Over the past decade, according to a survey by IPSOS Mori, the percentage of people who identify with a particular class has grown from 31% to 38%. Looking into the future, IPSOS Mori concludes, "social class may become more rather than less salient to people's future."

Britain's present situation should represent a warning about America's future as well. Of course there have always been pockets of white poverty in the U.S., particularly in places like Appalachia, but generally the country has been shaped by a belief in class mobility.

But the current recession, and the lack of effective political response addressing the working class' needs, threatens to reverse this trend.

More recently middle- and working-class family incomes, stagnant since the 1970s, have been further depressed by a downturn that has been particularly brutal to the warehousing, construction and manufacturing economies. White unemployment has now edged to 9%, higher among those with less than a college education. And poverty is actually rising among whites more rapidly than among blacks, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

You can see the repeat here of some of the factors paralleling the development of British yobism: longer-term unemployment; the growing threat of meth labs in hard-hit cities and small towns; and, most particularly, a 20% unemployment rate for workers under age 25. Amazingly barely one in three white teenagers, according to a recent Hamilton College poll, thinks his standard of living will be better than his parents'.

It's no surprise then that Democrats are losing support among working-class whites, much like the now-destitute British Labour Party. But the potential yobization of the American working class represents far more than a political issue. It threatens the very essence of what has made the U.S. unique and different from its mother country.

Joel Kotkin is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Legatum Institute in London and serves as executive editor of newgeography.com. He writes the weekly New Geographer column for Forbes. His latest book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, was published in February 2010 by Penguin Press.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/01/workin ... otkin.html

Unless America controls immigration,returns to a manufacturing base then America as I've known it past 60 years will be gone, we simply can no longer feed the world,fight there battles, Importing cheap/junk products,under educated people while at the same time exporting jobs and manufacturing.

America must return to its roots of making top quality products the rest of the world envies, a consumer based, service society is a death sentence for the middle class.

Very true. I've been worried that we may becoming a nation of human army ants, who can't feed ourselves and need to import other kinds of ants into the hive to take care of everyday business. We need to puruse optimal employment for Americans (i.e. at their highest level, not just underemployment or any old job).

Scary stuff

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [ the banks ] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." Thomas Jefferson

"Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history." Karl Marx

"Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.....And when you realize that the entire system is easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate." James Garfield

"Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders....The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and ... Manipulates the credit of the United States. Sen. Barry Goldwater

The day will come when men will throw their gold and silver into the street.

If one understands how bubbles are created, inflationary bubbles then one with unlimited resources can play the game very well. Follow the inflationary curve on the bubble, (times are generally good) buy gold and silver and commodities, as they will be cheap during this time. As the peak of the bubble nears the commodities will start to come alive. As deflationary forces ( plenty of goods and services yet very little cash,...as all of the cash has been spent,...no one willing to take credit as inflationary pressures have peaked the prices of goods and services.) come back on the scene, they will create the deflationary commodities bubble. If you bought a billion dollars worth of commodities with your monopoly money, (fiat currency) you sell a third or a half and then you retain the commodity and have a full return on your cash. A million into gold, a little time, you sell a third, pay for the investment, you are left with two-thirds of your gold intact and all of your original seed money. Thus the transfer of wealth was accomplished while the general public slept. Now it is time to start working on the inflationary bubble again. Paper investments work the same. Follow the bubble.

Goods and services do not go up in value with a fiat currency system,...it is the fiat dollar that loses value due to dilution. More dollars chasing the same goods and services. Those dollars are loosed on the public at the opportune time, thereby helping to burst the bubble. JMO

"Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the result has been only grotesque." Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Things have come to a heluva pass when a man can't cudgel his own jackass." Henry Watterson (newspaper magnate) Reply when rebuked for criticizing the Governor of Kentucky

Andrew Jackson called the Bank a "hydra of corruption."

Honest money is not a fiat currency controlled by private interests. Me

The game of Monopoly seems to be a great example of inflation and deflation played with a fiat. The winner takes all.

The price of gold remains the same, the fiat changes.

"Wait till Jackson gets at the Bank again, and then the scalping knives will glisten once more." Isaac Hill

Another bit I would like to include here. From a history book that I recently picked up from the 50's.

Advertising tried hard to develop the home market. In the early 1890s Cyrus H. Curtis, publisher of the Ladies' Home Journal, asked a convention of pioneer advertising men, "Do you know why we publish the Ladies' Home Journal?" And he answered his own question. "The editor thinks it is for the benefit of the American women. That is an illusion that is a very proper one for him to have. But I will tell you; the real reason, the publisher's reason, is to give you people who manufacture things that American women want and buy a chance to tell them about your products."

So what is Hollywood for,....your enjoyment? Or to sell you on a fiat dollar that continues to buy society more and more hemp rope? JMO