Tag Archives: Class

Talk Rules Are Classist

Our society claims to be concerned about less-favored races, religions, genders, sexual preferences, etc. But our most visible and well-enforced policies for showing such concern are rules about what folks may not say. And these rules are heavily classist, imposing much larger burdens on lower classes. Let me explain.

Humans have complex coalition politics, wherein we jockey for allies, test potential allies for weaknesses, and try to undermine rivals. We often communicate at several levels at once, with overt talk that better withstands outside scrutiny, and covert talk that is more free.

Lower “working” class cultures tend to talk more overtly. Insults are more direct and cutting, friends and co-workers often tease each other about their weaknesses. Nicknames often express weakness – a fat man might be nicknamed “slim.”

Upper class culture, in contrast, tends more to emphasize politeness and indirect communication. This helps to signal intelligence and social awareness, and distinguishes upper from lower classes. Upper class folks can be just as cruel, but their words have more plausible deniability.

The enforcement of laws against racist, sexist, etc. expressions is limited by the ability of courts and related observers to agree on the intent of what was said. Observers will not have access to all the local context and history that local folks use to interpret each others’ words. Now since official observers like judges tend to be upper class, they do tend to be better able to interpret the intent of upper class words. But this advantage seems insufficient compensate for the much greater indirection and politeness of upper class talk.

So when an upper and a lower class person both express disfavor with a certain race, religion, gender, sexual preference, etc., the lower class expression is more likely to be legally and socially verifiable as racist, sexist, etc. If we add in the general reluctance of legal and social systems to punish upper class folks relative to lower class folks, we see that the burden of such policies mostly falls on the lower classes.

Could it be that advantaged folks are especially eager to support policies to help the disadvantaged when the cost of such policies are mainly borne by someone else?

(Idea stolen from a conversation with Katja Grace.)

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Hail Winter’s Bone

Though Intrade gives it the lowest odds of winning best picture tonight, like Tyler my fav was Winter’s Bone. Like another Oscar contender, True Grit, it is the story of a teen girl’s gritty struggle. Except that the world of Winter’s Bone is rural and low class. A colleague’s wife confessed to me that she was so horrified and repulsed by the world depicted as to make her reluctant to venture out of the city. While most folks in our society pride themselves on their respect for other cultures and ethnicities, such folk have little reason to fear being mistaken for someone from most such cultures. Their respect extends the least to “white trash,” who they have the most reason to fear being confused with.

Words like seamy, sleezy, and seedy are negatives vaguely associated with sloppiness, immorality, and low class, as if to imply that such things naturally go together. Which seems to me the worst sort of vague insinuation. I can accept that low class folks tend to be sloppier, and in some folk’s morality that in itself makes them less moral. But while I’m happy to celebrate our new better top class, if we are talking about an economists’ sort of immorality, i.e., hurting other folks on net, it isn’t clear to me that low class folks are less moral. They contribute a larger fraction of income to charity, if I recall. I can see you might be terrified of associating with them if you feared being confused with them, but I can’t sympathize much with that, as your desire to keep your status high comes at the expense of keeping the status of others low. I don’t see great cause to fear more direct harms.

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Naked Classism

When San Francisco banned the McDonalds Happy Meal, Adam Ozimek said that illustrated the slippery slope of paternalism; if we’ll ban that, what won’t we ban? Now the US Feds offer a bigger example:

The Food and Drug Administration said it had concluded that adding caffeine to alcohol was unsafe and unapproved. … The products … have become a favorite among college students. … Treasury Department officials announced … the companies would be told that the products had been mislabeled and were therefore illegal to be shipped. And the Federal Trade Commission told the companies that marketing the products might violate federal law.

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Federal officials were facing increasing pressure to take action in the wake of a series of high-profile incidents. … Students … ended up in the emergency room after consuming the most popular of the drinks, Four Loko, including some with alcohol poisoning. In other incidents, deaths and fatal car crashes have been blamed on the drinks. …

The drinks … contain high levels of alcohol and caffeine, making it difficult for people to realize how intoxicated they are, experts say. … Consuming one can of Four Loko is the equivalent of drinking as many as five cans of beer and a cup of coffee. …

Four Loko [said] … “If it were unsafe, popular drinks like rum and colas or Irish coffees . . . would face the same scrutiny that our products recently faced.” … It had previously added multiple warning labels to its cans.

My college student son assures me caffeine doesn’t keep kids from knowing they are drunk, and it is easier to track drinking with a few big cans than with lots of little shots; they usually limit themselves to one or two cans a night. Those who want to binge can do so just as easily without the cans. But the facts don’t seem to matter.

cans2The FDA likes to present itself as a paragon of scientific rigor, but there is no rigor here. No randomized experiments or even careful regressions. Just public pressure to “do something” about vivid examples of “those people” hurting themselves.

Little remains of the rule of law precept to treat people equally. The exact same chemical combinations which are fine to serve rich old folks at cocktail receptions, are banned in cheap cans from convenience store coolers. Clearly the goal is to target particular vaguely-imagined classes of people, and regulators would be fine with having the law specify the color of the cans, the geographic locations, time of purchase, form of financing, whatever it took to get to “them” without overly bothering “us.”

And this is where the slippery slope of paternalism leads: naked classism. When we the good people notice that those distrusted others do things that don’t seem proper to us, well we should just pass whatever laws it takes to make them toe our line. Surely it wouldn’t be responsible to just let them do stuff we wouldn’t, right?

Added 8a: mtraven points us to a CDC fact sheet, which cites exactly one randomized experiment with 26 subjects, whose abstract says:

When compared with the ingestion of alcohol alone, the ingestion of alcohol plus energy drink significantly reduced subjects’ perception of … impairment of motor coordination. However, the ingestion of the energy drink did not significantly reduce the deficits caused by alcohol on objective motor coordination.

They saw no difference after 30 minutes, but after 120 minutes the perception of altered motor control under alcohol was 15 +/- 15 (0 is none, 100 is max), while under alcohol plus energy drink was 11+/- 12, and under energy drink alone was 6 +/- 12.  They pooled the later two groups to get a 5% significant difference from the first group!  That’s not remotely kosher.

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