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New York Times columnist gets dunked on for his boneheaded definition of 'working class' [1]

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Date: 2022-10-24

First, let’s consider the source:

x Every time Kristof says something with seeming authority, recall that he quit his job to run for Governor of Oregon without first confirming he met the residency requirement https://t.co/Pm0tgnj3WD — qui tam jinn (bill) (@bill_of_lefts) October 24, 2022

Kristof is now back at the Times, to bring us more quality takes like this.

Clearly this is someone who never, ever speaks without having first done due diligence on the facts, and in this case, he seems to have missed out on what’s been going on in the economy over the past 13 years, since the Great Recession. To whatever extent Kristof’s definition was ever accurate, since the Great Recession, the share of recent college graduates in low-wage jobs has risen and there’s been a “dramatic structural break in the employment rate of young college graduates.”

Noam Scheiber is following the trend of people with college degrees working at places like Starbucks and REI and active in the union drives at those employers. He’s interviewed an REI sales lead with bachelor's and master's degrees in education, an Amazon warehouse worker with an associate degree in computer science, a Starbucks worker with a bachelor’s in music education and a master’s in opera performance. These people are not at all uncommon in the economy if you’ve been paying any attention for the past decade-plus. In addition to working at what are not considered middle-class jobs, many of them have significant amounts of student debt as well. And what about the close to 15% of people who have some college but have not completed a degree? Where do they fall?

As the person whose question elicited that response from Kristof responded:

x Does that definition not feel antiquated to you? It’s no longer even broadly true, and too often used—as you do here—to make sweeping and unfounded assertions about whole groups of people, which serve to reinforce inaccurate stereotypes. — joelindsey (@joelindsey) October 22, 2022

But Kristof isn’t interested in breaking out of a mental image of “working class” based on stereotypes from the 1970s or even the 1950s: white, male, doing manual labor in a factory or construction site or mine. Today’s working class—even if your definition of the working class is much less sweeping than “anyone who sells their labor”—looks nothing like that. As many people observed:

x Uber driver with college degree: not working class



Uber driver without college degree: working class https://t.co/DFoVuq2qc8 — Courtney Milan 🦖 (@courtneymilan) October 23, 2022

x By whom? Because me and my BA are working weekends in a factory and weekdays at a dog camp. https://t.co/8EEIoruaKF — Jennifer Matarese (@trollprincess) October 23, 2022

x Teachers? Not working class. Nurses? Not working class. Heaven forbid your plumber have a BA 😯 https://t.co/MzY4oGX6g0 — every abortion ban is a policy failure (@qaween) October 23, 2022

Another set of people correctly noted that there Kristof’s assessment erased more than a few people on the flip side of the equation:

x Mark Zuckerberg is working class 🤡 https://t.co/nhCY2PAMnq — Frankie Huang 黄碧赤 🚦 (@ourobororoboruo) October 23, 2022

x So a high school educated failson who inherited his father’s car dealership and is a millionaire is working class but a teacher who went to college and doesn’t make more than 50k is bourgeois? https://t.co/gOCdJth7N8 — Brady “Nationwide Housing Elements Now” Shields (@bradys_01) October 24, 2022

And a third set of people wanted to introduce him to the writings of Karl Marx, who had a few things to say about what “working class” means, along with other important theorists of class:

x Karl Marx, like many other typical thinkers, famously argued that class should not be defined by a specific threshold number of college credits but rather by the material relationship of power expressed in whether or not you shake hands with a dean and get a diploma https://t.co/AujvoCOfF3 — inverted vibe curve: burgertown must be defended (@PatBlanchfield) October 23, 2022

x When you only *pretended* to read Bourdieu in that first-year theory seminar https://t.co/oojmcoYGeJ — Zachary Levenson (@grundrza) October 23, 2022

x How funny would it have been if instead he was like “the Historian E.P. Thompson insists that class is a process, and that the working class was present at its own creation” https://t.co/9OOTpMiNna — nietsniew-ztrawhcs hcaz (@nerdosyndical) October 23, 2022

The problem here is that while Kristof may have gotten dunked on for just voicing his flawed assumptions straight out, he was representing a very real set of assumptions regularly made by people like him—people with very big platforms and ability to shape the news. So, even though in 2020, exit polls show that Donald Trump won voters with incomes over $100,000 while President Joe Biden won voters with incomes under $100,000, we still hear endlessly about Democrats’ problems with the working class. Looking at education by race, Trump won white voters with no college degree while Biden won voters of color with no college degree. But we are going to hear more about white voters with no college degree than about any other group. We should hear about white no-college voters—because they are legitimately a large group and an important one—but not as overwhelmingly as we do, and they should not dominate the imaginations of our pundits in the way that they do.

[Update: Kristof left The New York Times to try to run for Oregon governor, but has now returned to the newspaper.]

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/24/2130842/-Former-New-York-Times-columnist-gets-dunked-on-for-his-boneheaded-definition-of-working-class

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