Two opinion pieces from the August 3 WSJ.
First, Joseph Epstein writes,
The power of the word racism—always cocked, aimed and ready to fire—makes it impossible to say anything, outside the most obeisant praise, about black culture, black politicians, black entertainers or black anything. The entire subject is out of bounds to anyone who isn’t black, and many black intellectuals and writers are themselves in peril if they step outside the racial party line. This can’t be healthy, for blacks or for the country at large.
. . .the real racists in this country are those who insist blacks are permanent victims and always will be so in what they claim is an irretrievably, hopelessly racist America. Forgoing easy recourse to the word racism, in a small but not insignificant way, might be a step toward eliminating racism itself.
Second, Anthony Kronman writes,
But diversity, as it is understood today, means something different. It means diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Diversity in this sense is not an academic value. Its origin and aspiration are political. The demand for ever-greater diversity in higher education is a political campaign masquerading as an educational ideal.
. . .Motivated by politics but forced to disguise itself as an academic value, the demand for diversity has steadily weakened the norms of objectivity and truth and substituted for them a culture of grievance and group loyalty. Rather than bringing faculty and students together on the common ground of reason, it has pushed them farther apart into separate silos of guilt and complaint.
I find it striking to contemplate how much easier race relations seem to be in the blue-collar sectors of America. There certainly was a time when many whites did not want to work next to blacks in factories, retail stores, or construction sites. But today racially-mixed work forces seem to operate in those industries with little apparent discord.
Instead, the need for diversity and inclusion programs seems to be concentrated in academia, with some spillover into journalism and other fields that attract recent graduates in humanities and social sciences. Fifty years ago, one would not have predicted that academia would be the industry where race relations would require the most attention.
I work in HR at a large financial company where most of the employees do not come from humanities or social science. And believe me, diversity and inclusion is a huge deal here too.
That is a great point. Is the goal to 1. actually increase diversity and inclusion, 2. signal diversity/inclusion, 3. avoid law suits?
Mostly 1 and 2. There is some work done on pay equity – ensuring people in similar roles are compensated equally at the group level – and this is certainly a legal issue. But there is also a big push to not have white males overrepresented in leadership positions. This mostly means trying to get blacks and women into leadership roles and encouraging more women in tech roles. The social justice stuff definitely seeps in. There are a lot of vocal younger workers who push things in this direction.
Given what we know about race and IQ, it’s not at all surprising that the biggest stresses are in fields where a low IQ is a barrier to success.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.322.5525&rep=rep1&type=pdf
from page 20 of the linked pdf, page 96 in the original journal:
from page 17 of the linked pdf, page 93 in the original journal:
although studies using different tests and samples yield a range of results, the Black mean is typically about one standard deviation (about 15 points) below that of Whites (Jensen, 1980; Loehlin et at., 1975; Reynolds et at., 1987). The difference is largest on those tests (verbal or nonverbal) that best represent the general intelligence factor g (Jensen, 1985).
Disclaimer: I don’t administer IQ tests and I don’t have any firsthand knowledge on the subject. That report from a task force of the American Psychological Association seems like a reasonable source of information about such things, but YMMV.
The same researchers wrote both quotes. They seem to understand “mean” values and what kinds of inferences can be drawn from them. The only incongruence is your interpretation.
I shocked when I read/hear about the attacks on Charles Murray (Ezra Klein vs. Sam Harris for example) and I can’t comprehend how anyone can read the Wikipedia page on “The Bell Curve” or read anything Charles Murray has to say on race and conclude he is a racist. But then The Bell Curve is trotted out in the comments here in exactly the way progressives warn us about.
I can’t decide which set of protectionists is more frustrating, the social justice protectionists or the white culture protectionists.
I can’t comprehend how anyone can read the Wikipedia page on “The Bell Curve” or read anything Charles Murray has to say on race and conclude he is a racist.
“It’s hard to persuade these people that I don’t care if their data is bad, the problem is that *they’re* bad.”
– Dylan Matthews (Vox)
https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1160388505333325835
The quote I used was a declarative statement with specific numbers and references, and the quote you used was the sort of general, content-free hedge statement that is common in academic papers. My quote was a fairer summary of what the article says about race.
@chedolf: If beliefs that accord with the data are evil, and beliefs that don’t accord with the data consistently lead to failed policies, disappointment, and political strife, then the case for “good” seems rather weak.
No, Jay, the paper is much more nuanced than that, as is “The Bell Curve”. An equally facile argument from progressives claims the difference is due to racism. Large changes in measured IQ within one generation certainly point to a large social component, as the authors note, but they emphasize that the causation is not understood.
The “complex patterns” quote reflects the conclusions of most nature vs. nurture research; it is almost always a complex interaction between the two.
@RAD: The paper doesn’t say much about what causes the difference, except that it can’t be attributed to bias in the test. I didn’t say anything about that either.
The paper does say that the black mean IQ is about 1 standard deviation lower than the white mean IQ, and that IQ tests for African Americans are “reasonably good predictors of school and college achievement” (top of p. 21/97). That seems fairly relevant to the point of the main post, which is that race relations are particularly poor in academia.
Jay, is it really that hard to understand that when IQ has a large social/environmental component that social/environmental factors might be at play?
The whole point of this paper is to prevent people from jumping to conclusions given the existing research (as of 1996). Both you and social justice activists (the targets of the National Review articles) are too jumpy; the evidence doesn’t support either perspective.
Many claim that Germany’s industrial success compared to other European nations like the U.K., is due to their superior vocational school system. Why do they bother? Does specialization improve with a narrower IQ distribution? Do we rewrite The Wealth of Nations based on the shape of each Nation’s IQ distribution?
@RAD: I never said otherwise.
Murray claimed that a substantial portion of the IQ gap was likely genetic. There was another substantial portion that couldn’t be proven to be genetic.
That doesn’t mean that:
1) It isn’t genetic, it just couldn’t be directly linked at that time (and this stuff changes over time as we do more research and learn more about genetics with tools we never had before, usually as Murray points out validating the hereditarian view more and more).
2) That this “remainder” loosely called “environment” (but not direct environment like parental choices) is something we have the slightest control over.
Murray is as well aware of “The Null Hypothesis” as anyone else. Saying “this thing might be due to environment” and “this government/corporate/educational/cultural program can substantially change the environment in the way we want ” are different things.
Since all debates over racism are about implementing #2 (and how evil you are if you won’t implement #2), we are left with saying that a portion of a gap we can’t measure and don’t seem to have much control over justifies all sorts of things that have direct and indirect harm on others in the pursuit of a maybe impossible goal we have failed to make significant progress on for some time.
That conclusion was attacked by Murray in The Bell Curve and he basically said we should leave this stuff alone because we will do more harm than good.
Jay’s point that those areas of society where IQ is most salient cause the most tension when it comes to race is obvious. If you’re determined to “equalize” everything in those areas then you’re going to need some very heavy handed interventions with huge negative externalities that are obvious to everyone and impose clear penalties on participants who know they don’t deserve it. Murray had an entire chapter about how you could measure the job performance deficit of people pushed into a profession they weren’t smart enough to do, and he directly linked it to race and affirmative action.
Murray leaves it all very waffly and “we don’t have all the facts yet so believe what you want”. This is politicking. He wants some leftists to buy in, he has to coddle them.
But look at the MATH. You can’t read the math in there and come to any other conclusions. For all the fluff on ambiguity, The Bell Curve has a clear POV backed by the evidence it presents.
I’d quote The Bell Curve at length on this, but the last time I did it got blocked.
asdf, you and Jay assume that you have an IQ and mathematical advantage against those who disagree with you or who are not in your in-group. From what I’ve read, I don’t think that is an assumption you should promote so confidently.
Assuming group averages applies to every member of that group borders on innumeracy.
The premise of “The Bell Curve” is exactly the same point of “Coming Apart”; modern industrial societies are bifurcating into permanent cognitive classes. The inclusion of racial data in “The Bell Curve” distracted from their message and “Coming Apart” went through great pains to correct that.
You and Jay are obsessed with an American class-war between whites and blacks/Latinos. Your views baffle me.
RAD,
“you and Jay assume that you have an IQ and mathematical advantage against those who disagree with you or who are not in your in-group.”
I have not claimed this at any point.
From what I can tell many people who can’t understand Stat 101 still have a more accurate folk understanding of what’s in The Bell Curve then your average rationalizing academic with an agenda.
I think people believe things because they want to. They may or may not be capable of understanding a bell curve, that’s often secondary. Lots of people who are capable of understanding a bell curve still choose not to accept what’s in The Bell Curve, and they have lots of non-mathematics or truth based reasons.
“Assuming group averages applies to every member of that group borders on innumeracy.”
Who did this? When? I certainly haven’t.
Jay’s claim that if these differences are true then areas were equal outcomes are most difficult to achieve will be at the far ends of the bell curve is…directly stated and proven in The Bell Curve.
“The premise of “The Bell Curve” is exactly the same point of “Coming Apart”; modern industrial societies are bifurcating into permanent cognitive classes. ”
Sure.
“The inclusion of racial data in “The Bell Curve” distracted from their message and “Coming Apart” went through great pains to correct that.”
It was a distraction…but it wasn’t “corrected”. Coming Apart in no way contradicts the race chapter in The Bell Curve. Murray has offered no apology for or refutation of the race data in the Bell Curve. As recently as this year he was asked if he would go back remove the race chapter if he could. He said no. It was true, relevant, and he knew that if he didn’t discuss race then race would be used to discredit the concept of IQ. As he put it (I’m going on memory) “without the race chapter I would essentially be saying IQ doesn’t apply to blacks, which would obviously be false.”
“You and Jay are obsessed with an American class-war between whites and blacks/Latinos.”
It’s an injustice relevant to important things in my life that I can’t ignore. As America becomes majority-minority, it will only become more and more salient of an issue.
I already live in a majority black area, my day to day life is constantly touched by it.
And as someone who went to a magnet school out at the far end of the bell curve, the exact same arguments Jay is referencing were used to try to shut down my school, harass my mother, and threaten my friends. When our old math rival Stuyvesant gets attacked for being too Asian just like we were, I understand right away. It’s the edges of the bell curve (right and left) where this is always the biggest problem.
Moreover, you just can’t ignore something that big and still understand the world. It doesn’t make sense without IQ, and as Charles stated you can’t exclude the racial part of IQ while holding the entire thing together.
Let’s ask a simple question Steve Sailer always asks. “Who is to blame for black dysfunction?” Unless you can say genetics, the answer is always going to be “white people.” I don’t think they are guilty as charged. Whether actively or passively. Consciously or unconsciously.
I will not pass that guilt onto my children. Nor allow those that want to exploit it to take advantage of them.
My ancestors got used as canon fodder so Grant could free the slaves. They owe me, not the other way around.
We let blacks be part of a country with orders of magnitudes better lives than they could built on their own back in Africa. They owe me, not the other way around.
We supply roughly 750k in direct government subsidy and another 750k in affirmative action over the lifetime of an average black. We literally hand then $1.5M. They owe me, not the other way around.
Finally, I look around at the way non-Asian minorities behave towards me and I detect NONE of the virtues that I’m supposedly supposed to treat them them.
Do they treat me as a unique individual with rights and dignity? No, they don’t.
Do they appreciate and nurture my accomplishments? No, they don’t.
Do they take care to utilize the resources I provide with them well and fairly? No, they don’t.
When 90% of them vote for one political party, is it because they all came to the exact same political and philosophical conclusion about the best way to achieve the maximum good for the entire polity? No, they don’t. They ask whose most likely to get the most cheddar for blacks, and everyone else is just a resource for them to suck as dry as their political power will allow them too.
The only time they seem to treat me with a modicum of fairness or respect is when they are afraid that not doing so will have repercussions they don’t like. All empathy is returned only with exploitation. Of course if you give someone an open ended license to exploit and a rationalization for doing so is it any surprise the darker side of human nature comes through.
And to sum up lastly…it’s true. It’s true. IT’S TRUE. I won’t apologize for stating the truth. If you’re worldview is that we have to ignore/suppress the truth to do X, I don’t accept that.
“Your views baffle me.”
Obviously. Probably because you don’t engage them at all and everything you believe is just about things being the way you want them to be.
Why is it than whenever anyone mentions race, in any context, there’s always someone there ready to jump in to the fray yelling “look! I have the incontrovertible proof that black people are INFERIOR!”
Because 99.9999999999% of the world and all institutions of power mention race only to blame white people and demand free stuff as compensation. I guess you’ll have to put up with the 0.000000001% of anonymous people on blogs saying “stop hitting me”.
asdf,
>—“Because 99.9999999999% of the world and all institutions of power mention race only to blame white people and demand free stuff as compensation. ”
This is just one more hilariously ironic example of your misuse of “the MATH” from your “magnet school out at the far end of the bell curve” self imagined brilliance. Just because you mathematize your assumptions doesn’t mean they still aren’t your assumptions.
When we last clashed on this you demanded to know which of Charles Murray’s data I found fault with. The answer is none of it. I find fault with the fatuous idea that data dictates policy. It is theory that dictates policy no matter how much math and data you throw in.
In fact, Charles Murray himself and our host Arnold Kling both think that there is nothing in the data that overturns the foundational ethical principle that people should be treated as individuals rather than members of some homogeneous “worthless ” group deserving of collective guilt.
And your other hero Gregory Clark actually thinks that that his data justify the ethics of income redistribution.
1). “I find fault with the fatuous idea that data dictates policy. It is theory that dictates policy no matter how much math and data you throw in.”
That’s correct. Data merely dictates what the likely effect of that policy is to be. Murray says as much in The Bell Curve over and over.
For instance, Murray showed that you could indeed assign professional jobs via affirmative action in order to have equal distribution of such jobs. And you could decide that egalitarianism or some other principal demands such things. And you could say that people don’t deserve their talents and thus don’t deserve anything, including professional positions. These are philosophical positions one can hold, and he does not imply his data invalidates these positions.
There is simply a cost to such positions. The people put there for egalitarian reasons will have worse performance. That performance will effect the world. Murray goes on in chapter to discuss how affirmative action can be measures in say “lower teacher competency examination pass rates” , “measurable incompetence in policing and other public sector roles”, and even measurable underperformance in blue collar roles such as “Job Performance of Black Affirmative Action Plumbers and Pipefitters Compared to White Regular Hirees”.
You can hold the position that this underperformance and all of the issues it creates is offset by the gains proponents cite. Murray disagrees with this statement, but doesn’t claim he can prove they are wrong. He can only prove measurable likely this world outcomes that are implied by the policy. It is, at heart, a value judgement. That’s literally his line throughout the entire work.
1) Morally, you can decide IQ differences mean whatever you want them to mean.
2) But here are the likely effects of those ideas based on my best guess looking at the data.
Take an issue. Immigration, income redistribution, etc. He states simply that “you can believe whatever you want, but here are the consequences”.
Murray’s views match my own on much of this. Since quoting at length gets blocked, I will refer you to “Dealing With Income” and “Dealing with Demography” pages 547-549. I will be forced to summarize:
1) Life isn’t fair, but we knew all that before talking about IQ.
2) Redistribution systems are generally a bad idea
3) I support something like a basic income in rich countries that keeps people out of poverty but doesn’t mess with their incentives to act like middle class bourgeois and doesn’t bust the budget
4) I know #3 can’t be extended to the third world because we don’t have the money
5) I know we can’t afford to have too many low IQ people from the third world come here without chaos and bankruptcy, so I favor changing the immigration policy to make sure we don’t get flooded
“But we believe that the main purpose of immigration law should be to serve America’s interests.” -Murray
“Perhaps our central thought ahout immigration is that present policy assumes an indifference to the
individual characteristics of immigrants that no society can indefinitely maintain without danger.” -Murray
Which is pretty in line with my own thoughts. You’ll notice a “value judgement” in there too. Murray thinks immigration policy should serve America’s interests! Bryan Caplan would be scandalized! How can he arbitrarily favor the wellbeing of Americans over non-Americans. They are all INDIVIDUALS!
And let’s be honest, “income redistribution” doesn’t necessarily mean “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Do you really think Clark means that? I doubt it.
I do think there is a difference between me and him. Not on the facts, or even on the policy for the most part. I think that it is a fact of political, cultural, and economic reality that people form groups and that those groups struggle with one another. Such that the idea of “being treated as an individual” is not something that simply comes about because we wish it so or write some books or give some talks. It’s closer to a shaky equilibrium imperfectly attained under certain specific circumstances. I don’t think what little of it we have can even survive the path we are headed on.
Depending on the day or issue, Charles does or doesn’t agree. Clearly, he understands what a new Diverse America will mean, and he understands that “conservatism” that he likes can’t help but become “Latin America style conservatism” if the underclass continues to grow. He even points out at length what an effect even relatively small changes in national IQ have at the far ends of the bell curve where most underclass dysfunction comes from.
Charles wrote this in 1994. (Almost) every prediction has come true. We are no closer to dealing with the problems he laid out now than then. If anything, we are farther away. I have zero hope that a growing brown America will become anything like Charles Murray’s ideal state. If anything, I think all his worst dire predictions are simply going to be much worse. He forecast that elites would blame white deplorables for their failures, he was right! He forecast that the underclass would be isolated from the rest in the custodial state…if anything I wish. The elite seem intent on spreading the underclass ghetto around all spaces except their own, creating one giant slum that consumes the middle class.
Charles Murray’s tactics:
1) Civilly displaying incontrovertible data
2) Outlining in a calm and rational manner how to avoid or at least alleviate forecasted difficulties
3) Tying his philosophical ideas to what he believed were the core values of how he conceived the American experiment
…didn’t work. Why would they have? That isn’t how things happen. They happen for darker reasons in human nature.
Learning about IQ difference isn’t the dark enlightenment. Learning about human nature is. Throw the limits and defects of the human mind on top of systematic issues of large societies on top of all the moral problems people have discussed from time immemorial.
If the whole world had the demographics of Singapore and was run by LKY, of course we could accommodate IQ differences in a fair and rational manner. It wouldn’t be a problem. We don’t have that world. And LKY wasn’t exactly a libertarian who believe in individualism as some kind of religion.
Murray has never gotten down in the muck on that. And maybe that’s fine. He probably wouldn’t be useful there. But it doesn’t change the fact that his strategy failed to change things. People don’t turn away from individualism because they don’t like it, they turn away from it because it can’t seem to create and sustain itself against its modern competitors.
+1
The comments here are the only place I encounter it. If this is a common occurrence for you, Hazel, then you have my sympathy.
It’s not just here. Marginal Revolution is just as bad.
I don’t know, why is it that every time race is mentioned in real life, someone has to argue that they have incontrovertible evidence that white people are evil. Or say blatantly racist things like ‘white people should just die’ while pretending they’re making a nuanced point while anyone who opposes aff. action gets roundly accused of ‘dog whistle’ racism.
I’ve never met an asdf in real life in a coffee shop or bar or classroom; met plenty of people with the inverse of his views. In other words, why shouldn’t we be concerned that the things you’re appalled that people can say on blog comment sections about black people, people can say about white people in college classrooms and major newspaper oped sections? Maybe the two phenomena have something to do with one another, and one is not, as some seem to imagine, curative of the other.
Yes, they are both facile.
And then there is the whole Ron Paul Racist Newsletters debacle. Lew Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker ruined liberty for millennials with their race-baiting. I remember when people would get excited about Ron Paul’s 2008/2012 presidential runs before the press would (rightly) trot out the newsletters.
Lew Rockwell has sort of been ostracized for his role in ruining liberty for a generation, but Jeffrey Tucker bounces around, successfully, from one think tank foundation to another with nary a squeak about his role in tying libertarianism to racism.
Maybe libertarians, at least in the US, are kinda sorta racist (in a passive way)…
“. . .the real racists in this country are those who insist blacks are permanent victims and always will be so in what they claim is an irretrievably, hopelessly racist America.”
Do you think this is a fair characterization of the view it is critiquing? I’m sure it is some people’s views and that in writing or speaking passionately and heatedly about race, some people might engage in rhetoric that gets close to this view. But I think a more charitable interpretation of the position the quote is referencing would be that America has a deeply racist history, that race is inextricably intertwined with foundational moments and elements of American society, that the impacts of racist policies are both much more pervasive and much more persistent than most people are willing to admit, and that the effects of racism are not confined to (and outlast) racism expressed at the level of individuals.
If you also want to emphasize that black communities nevertheless retain significant moral agency and can and should bear much of the responsibility for bettering the lives of their members, I think you can accept much of hte previous paragraph and come out with a conservative position akin to Glenn Loury’s.
There is also the possibility that some of the problems are emergent based on an underlying cause that is not due to human agency but is structural nonetheless. I think it is pretty clear that dense public housing projects are a core contributor to chronic social maladies but is a really hard to change to a better model once an existing infrastructure is in place. Perhaps the stickiness of past urban planning decisions has a larger impact than does racism or other social pathologies?
Another example is the same set of social maladies that indigenous people worldwide tend to suffer from. One is puzzled to read about the Sami in Finland which share the same ethnicity and a similar language to other Finns but suffer from discrimination. Is the problem oppression, different moral norms, or a structural problem that all hunter-gatherers or nomadic herder societies must overcome to flourish in surrounding agricultural/industrial societies? I suspect it is a combination of all three but the mix changes over time.
On the public housing point, I think the advocates of the view the WSJ piece criticizes would agree but say that if you look into the people and institutions that built public housing, that decided what groups would be pushed into public housing, that decided which more organic communities would be uprooted to make way for urban infrastructure like freeways, etc. were either racist themselves or applied these policies in ways that affected different races disproportionately.
Agreed. Retroactively applying racial motivations to the implementors of past policies seems to be a reoccurring theme.
It’s odd to me that many double down on the same policies hoping that good will alone will reverse the outcomes.
First, diversity does not mean diversity. It means we want to help blacks, maybe hispanics, women and other in a “protected group”. Asians who do fine are not the beneficiaries of diversity. My guess is one day hispanics will be dropped from diversity. In areas where blacks succeed, such as sports, diversity is not a virtue (no one says we need white basketball players to serve as role models). In areas where gays or women succeed, such as fashion, no one needs diversity. And racism is defined as blacks doing worse than whites (or women doing worse than men) economically. Until that is no longer true, we live in a racist society. End of story. And while the above comments focused on intelligence, far more useful stat is criminally.
Consider two people. One is Calvin Candie, the outrageously evil slaveholder played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained. He does horrible things to black people on a daily basis. He is a worthy target of anger and just violence.
One is Joe Ordinary. He wants equality for black people, but he honestly has no idea how it could be achieved in practice. He is aware that many attempts to achieve practical equality have been made in the past and the results were disappointing. I suggest that he is not a particularly bad person; the fact that he doesn’t have answers to society’s hardest problems is not blameworthy.
I also suggest that using a single term like “racist” or “white supremacist” to encompass both of these people and everyone in between is harmful to communication.
See aslso https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
Read the works of Thomas Sowell.
Over the past 70 years (of my 95) technological, social and economic “advancements” (and their distribution) have brought about broader and more common impersonal relationships to sustain our “better” standards of living – but decreased the levels, frequencies and intensities of direct personal relationships (even within family structures and the motivational incubators they can provide).
Just 14 percent of undergraduates came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Hence “class privilege” is a non-topic. It’s not discussed.
It would be embarrassing and uncomfortable to talk about class. Class is too touchy a subject. It hits too close to home.
A conversation about race, by contrast, can conduct itself. Like auto-pilot. All the familiar poses come pre-loaded. That script is written. There’s nothing awkward about it.
Where is that stat from. How does race play into it, in other words are poor whites more likely to be undergraduates. Where are income stats from?
I’m put to the mind of the passage below from ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, Orwell. It is from chapter 8 where he describes the class divide and the “shabby genteel”, those on working class incomes but trying to present a middle class lifestyle and attitude. Seems to me the most aggressive diversity/social justice warriors are those whose position is least secure even with their elite status university credentials. Racism is the current hammer to try to beat down the “lower orders”.
Similarly, feminism seems to be a particular upper middle class problem. Those women were denied the social permission to work, etc. As my working class aunt opined, “She didn’t need anymore equality. She went to work everyday just like her husband.” The inequality in say having names on accounts and such was a middle class imposition on their customers enforced by social emulation.
“But it is quite different for the poor devils lower down who are struggling to live genteel lives on what are virtually working-class incomes. These last are forced into close and, in a sense, intimate contact with the working class, and I suspect it is from them that the traditional upper-class attitude towards ‘common’ people is derived.
“And what is this attitude? An attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred. Look at any number of Punch during the. past thirty years. You will find it everywhere taken for granted that a working-class person, as such, is a figure of fun, except at odd moments when he shows signs of being too prosperous, whereupon he ceases to be a figure of fun and becomes a demon. It is no use wasting breath in denouncing this attitude. It is better to consider how it has arisen, and to do that one has got to realize what the working classes look like to those who live among them but have different habits and traditions.”