Could Our Jobs Rhetoric Be Any Dumber? Researchers Think It Could!

I'm skeptical

This week, researchers Jared Abbott and Fred DeVeaux published an article in Slow Boring with four recommendations for how Democrats can win back working class voters. Abbot and Deveaux’s job, of course, is to conduct polls and recommend tactics based on that polling. Their job is not to tell me that my favorite policies are popular, and I would have been skeptical if they had reported that people are hot in the pants for zoning reform and ending the step-up in basis loophole. Which is to say: My agita is with the implications of Abbott and DeVeaux’s work, not with the work itself.

But let’s get to that agita. Abbott and DeVeaux — hereafter DeVabbott, for brevity — make four recommendations for how Democrats can win back working class voters. Their recommendations are based on polling, and I have no reason to think that their conclusions are off-base. Still, three of their recommendations strike me as easier said than done, and one exists in a blind spot in our political dialogue that I think makes things worse for the working class.

Here’s their first recommendation:

Run working-class candidates. All else equal, working-class voters prefer candidates from non-elite, working-class occupations.

Okay, sure. I mean it when I say: Democrats should try to do that. So, everyone keep their eyes peeled for truck drivers and spot welders with the inclination, skillset, and contacts needed for a Senate run. Of course, we'll probably end up with a bunch of lawyers as candidates, because as far as I can tell, lawyers have comprised most candidates for most legislatures everywhere in the world for the past several hundred years.

Let’s take two of DeVabbott’s recommendations together:

Focus on messages that champion the working class and criticize economic elites. We found that working-class voters prefer candidates who say they will serve the interests of the working class and who place blame for the problems facing working Americans on the shoulders of economic elites.

Take a critical stance towards both parties. Candidates who explicitly criticized the Democratic and Republican Parties for being out of touch with working- and middle-class Americans were viewed more favorably across the board compared to candidates who either said nothing or stressed that Democrats have delivered for working- and middle-class Americans.

My God…is there a notion that we haven’t been doing these things enough? We’re supposed to “critique economic elites” — if you took a vodka shot every time you heard “I’m for Main Street, not Wall Street!” during the 2020 presidential primary, you would have John Bonham’d yourself long before even Kirsten Gillibrand dropped out. Elizabeth Warren sang the “billionaires are bad!” song more often than Don McLean sings “American Pie”, and she ended up as popular among the working class as satin knee-britches.

We’re also supposed to criticize both parties — isn’t that what “crumbums and fat cats” rhetoric is about? I’ve been hearing politicians say "I’m going boot out those crumbums in Washington” my entire life; I’m pretty sure it's the only reason why the words “crumbums” and “fat cats” are still in the dictionary. It's also going to be tough if you're running as an incumbent and part of your message is supposed to be “my party hasn't delivered shit.”

At any rate: People want more cheap rhetoric that won’t improve anyone’s lives. I’m confident that politicians will deliver. But it’s DeVabbott's last recommendation that I think could cause real problems:

Run on a jobs-first program. Working-class voters viewed more favorably candidates who highlighted a progressive federal jobs guarantee rather than one of the moderate economic policies we included in the survey.

Duly noted. Though I feel the need to ask: Are there ways for Democrats to attract working class voters other than promote bad policies that won’t work?

A jobs guarantee is not a good idea. There are scenarios in which a jobs program might make sense, but a jobs guarantee would not work. To boil a complex situation way down — and also insert some dirty jokes, as is my habit — the guarantee would inevitably fail for being either “too thin” or “too fat”.

The “too thin” scenario recognizes that matching a job to a worker isn’t easy. So, in this scenario, a mechanic loses his job in Missouri, and the government says: “We’ve got a job for you gutting fish in Nome, Alaska for $9/hour.” Obviously, the mechanic says “no”. He starts an OnlyFans where he sits on pies.

The “too fat” scenario does not acknowledge that matching a job to a worker isn’t easy and does backflips to provide workers with jobs they’ll accept. So, in this scenario, the government asks the mechanic “what do you want to do?” and he says “I’d like to play Ani DiFranco covers on an acoustic guitar in the corner of a Greek restaurant.” The government buys him a guitar, pays for lessons, and opens a Greek restaurant in Marthasville, Missouri. They pay him $30 an hour even though his rendition of “Untouchable Face” is never more than a B-minus, and restaurant patrons are forced to poke at sub-standard moussaka and wonder if this is a good use of their tax dollars.

Which is to say: A jobs guarantee would either be a program that is by no means a guarantee, or it would be a guarantee that’s a dumb waste of money.

I’m also worried about what “jobs first” might mean in a broader sense. Because, IMHO, political dialogue around jobs might be the single dumbest corner of a conversation that’s not exactly the Jefferson-Adams letters to begin with. Politicians often act as if jobs exist in a vacuum, which leads them to make bad decisions that hurt people’s livelihoods.

Take the air conditioner plant that got so much attention during the 2016 election. As you may recall: In November of 2016, Carrier announced plans to move more than 2,000 jobs to Mexico. 1,999 of those workers had cause to be upset, the exception being the PR person who failed to say “Hey, how ‘bout we announce these layoffs after the election?” Because a viral video of the announcement caused Trump to make the plant a central part of his campaign, and he ultimately struck a deal to keep roughly 800 jobs in the US.

Some people felt that Trump “saved” 800 jobs. The truth, of course, was more muddled. For one thing, those jobs were only “saved” if you care about Americans but not Mexicans, and — sorry to be such a bleeding heart — I think Mexicans are people. It’s also unclear what effect the change had on costs, labor markets, or future production. Would air conditioners have been slightly cheaper if the plant had moved? Would Carrier have used labor cost savings to make future investments? We don’t know. What we do know is that manufacturing in Indiana declined throughout Trump’s presidency, because one high-profile deal won’t hold back the winds of change. And “film a viral video that catches the eye of a populist presidential candidate” isn’t a strategy that will work in most cases.

The high-profile nature of that case is probably why Trump was able to buy Carrier off with a mere $7 million in incentives. That works out to $8,750 a job, an absolute steal in the world of politicians bribing companies to locate jobs in a certain place. Governments frequently throw so much money at companies to “save” jobs that they would have been better off simply handing each employee a generous severance check. This bone-headed approach to job preservation is a rare point of agreement for Biden and Trump: The “buy American” provisions that both support are estimated to cost $250,000 for each job “saved”. (*N.B. Candidates seeking to criticize both parties per DeVabbott’s suggestion are free to use the previous sentence as a talking point!)

The idea that you can count jobs and make a simple “jobs gained” or “jobs lost” calculation without considering other economic impacts is a staple of our political dialogue. When some people hear about x number of immigrants working in the US, they think “that’s x number of jobs that didn’t go to Americans.” But it’s not that simple: Immigrants also increase demand, which increases the total number of jobs. Technology is similar: We hear about technology displacing jobs, but technology also creates jobs, and we’re 200 years into the Industrial Revolution and unemployment is a delightfully low 3.7 percent. We hear about jobs that will be lost if coal-fired power plants shut down, but what about jobs that will be created when solar plants spring up? Every sports stadium ever built includes a “creates jobs!” talking point but fails to consider how many jobs would be created by whatever else would have been built there. Politicians like to shine a spotlight on one small part of a dynamic economy and say “I created jobs!”. But that just gives me an excuse to post this again:

Politicians don’t create jobs. They create conditions for economic growth, and that creates jobs. Or, ya know…not. Politicians can also pursue short-sighted and counterproductive economic policies, which becomes likely when they focus myopically on one sliver of the economy. We should want policies that create jobs, not policies that only appear to create jobs. I’m sure that working people want the former, but simple ways of talking about jobs promote the latter.

Maybe nothing I’m complaining about is implied by the “jobs first” program that DeVabbot recommends. “Jobs first” could mean “stimulating the economy during slow periods” or “appointing highly capable people to the Federal Reserve” — those are legitimate pro-jobs policies. “Populism” doesn’t need to mean “idiocy” (or does it? That’s a topic for a future post). Regardless, the first step towards creating pro-jobs talking points that align with pro-jobs policies might be to talk honestly about jobs for possibly the first time in American political history.