class and money

I had a conversation with my neighbor S the other night. S works for a huge corporation based in San Jose. S is very smart, probably very good at what he does. What does S do? I'm not sure! Devises monetization schemes, I think. We were talking about our current national situation, and of course S thinks it's unbearable, terrible, and so on. I really don't want to meet a person who would use an approving adjective. We were agreeing and then I started talking about my pet issue, about which I have nothing original to say, because it's all taken from economic blogs, and so I assume that all the smart people I know are also reading these blogs or something like them. At first I thought S was with me but then I realized that when I said that globalization is not organic but drive by policy choices, S didn't really understand me.

I began to talk about the movement of capital (allowed) vs. the movement of labor (restricted) but S started talking about a new technology they are working on that would allow a person to, say, manage an oil well out in the ocean (his example! ugh) via video. So, you see, labor wouldn't need to move! Then I said, you're talking about people who have jobs. I'm talking about people who need or want to move to places (other countries, other states) where they might be able to live and work. Even within the US it has gotten harder to move around. S looked at me, and then started talking about a factory in Minnesota that has a problem with absenteeism, which has prompted them to bring in robotic "contract workers" (so now even the robots don't get benefits!), for only $15/hr. I asked if that was what the human workers were getting paid, and S said, oh, less than that, somewhere around $11 or $12. I said, well, one solution would be to raise wages. S looked puzzled, and said that the workers didn't need more money because the cost of a house is so low -- $60,000. I was taken aback on many levels. First, it's almost certainly not true that the cost of a house is anywhere near that low. But, wow, I couldn't believe that a person who makes a six-figure salary could be so dismissive of other people's desire to make a decent living. I guess that's the thing -- from the monetization standpoint, these people are not people, in any meaningful sense.

Anyway, it turns out that a lot of people -- white people? white men? -- don't understand, or don't want to know, that there are a lot of other people outside the golden circle who probably want the same things they want. I shouldn't be surprised. But I am. Maybe it's because people like S do seem at least somewhat interested in their communities -- for example, S often says that the diversity in the neighborhood is important. But what does diversity really mean to S? I'm not sure.

book passage

They walked close together, their arms sometimes touching. She felt his immanence, the fullness of his attention; they seemed to be walking towards some agreement, something inevitable, without ever quite reaching it.

Rachel Cusk, Transit