Nearly three years since the ostensible end of the recession, the United States is still beset by over 15 percent underemployment—millions of Americans who would like to work full time and either can’t find jobs, or can only find part time work. We know from a large body of research that unemployment and underemployment have many negative consequences, not only financial but physical and mental. But this plague of underemployment exists alongside the corresponding problem of over-employment.

I think these do a fantastic job of articulating one of the underlying reasons i find both political parties so (a) pathetic and (b) frustrating. Neither party articulates a vision for what an America that provides "middle-class achievement, economic independence, and democratic inclusion" to the working class would look like under current global economic and technological conditions. (I think that's a big part of the explanation that Democrats need to hear, by the way, for why lower-income/working-class "red staters" consistently vote in a manner that Democrats perceive to be contrary to that class's inherent economic interests -- a Democratic party which is essentially neo-liberal and under the sway of professionalism cannot articulate a convincing alternative to a Republican vision whose appeal is primarily "let's make things the way they were", even if that Republican vision doesn't articulate an accurate causation for the disappearance of those conditions.)

Indeed, it sometimes seems that the distribution of wages is, to a first approximation, the exact inverse of the social utility of work. Thus the workers closest to our most fundamental needs—food and shelter—are non-unionized residential construction workers and migrant fruit pickers, lucky to even earn the minimum wage. At the same time, bankers are given millions for the invention and trade of sophisticated credit derivatives, even though most of their work is equivalent to—and as we’ve now discovered, quite a bit more destructive than—betting on the outcome of the Super Bowl. This perverse reversal of values has a fractal quality, as well, so that even within individual occupations the same inverse relationship between wages and social value seems to hold. Plastic surgeons have easier jobs and vastly greater earnings than pediatricians, and being a celebrity pet groomer is more lucrative than working in an animal shelter.

Things got so bad that in 2008, Forbes Magazine called Lancaster the most vulnerable place in America

We have been living in a society where debts, rather than rights, have been the major means for accessing basic social goods like housing, education, and health care.

"The impossible quest for that ersatz authenticity is wearing us down. In the absence of sustaining, reciprocal, non-schematized relations with others, however, the self, as the Invisible Committee asserts, begins to break down: “The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get.” Even though consumerism reifies and exalts individuality, it is ultimately self-annihilating. Rather than losing ourselves in the flow of socially meaningful and useful activity, we are congealed in the aspic of our stultifying self-consciousness, replaying strategies of competitive selfhood, disguising ploys for attention as disinterested solicitude. The ceaseless cynicism is corrosive."

This contest could be the ultimate test of whether such voters can be won back through unadorned and unabashed class-based populism.

...3-D printing, and automated manufacturing at a small-distributed scale in other ways. This is a hobbyist phenomenon right now where you have a machine that takes some gloop, that connects to your computer, and then the gloop is printed out into something you might like, like a new Frisbee, or coat hanger, or clarinet mouthpiece, whatever it is. As this gets more and more sophisticated, it becomes possible that more and more things can be manufactured onsite instead of made in China or wherever, and then moved over through a huge transportation network...<br />
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Once again, whenever you improve efficiency, when you save money, it's only the same thing as making money if you're already rich. If there are people who aren't rich enough to benefit from that, it just makes them poorer because they have less to do, and less ways to earn money.

(Note also that the top 1% control somewhere between 35-40% of the nation's wealth.)

That’s not what the left wants.  We want to give people the chance to do something else with their lives, something besides merely tending to it, without having to take a 30-year detour on Wall Street to get there. The way to do that is not to immerse people even more in the ways and means of the market, but to give them time and space to get out of it. That’s what a good welfare state, real social democracy, does: rather than being consumed by life, it allows you to make your life. Freely. One less bell to answer, not one more.

Republicans are resistant. And Democrats are too cowed to counter much, given polls that show many Americans believe Mr. Obama’s 2009-10 stimulus package did not work, despite studies to the contrary.<br />
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A Democratic Congressional adviser, granted anonymity to discuss party deliberations, said: “We’re at a loss to figure out a way to articulate the argument in a way that doesn’t get us pegged as tax-and-spenders.”<br />
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In a column in The Washington Post on Friday, Bill Gross, who runs the giant bond-trading firm Pimco, lashed out at Republicans and “co-opted Democrats” for setting aside widely accepted economic theory.<br />
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“An anti-Keynesian, budget-balancing immediacy imparts a constrictive noose around whatever demand remains alive and kicking,” he wrote. “Washington hassles over debt ceilings instead of job creation in the mistaken belief that a balanced budget will produce a balanced economy. It will not.”

...any attempt to return to the “simpler times,” to the polis, where one’s relationships were inherently political—that is, related to the life of the community—is impossible.  So we have lost the polis.  And, despite the good (and there has been good along with goods, though it’s too soon, I think, to start loading the scales) that has come with these changes, we should mourn the polis.  In one form, it was the foundation of Western thought; in another, it was the foundation of American political society.<br />
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Whatever we create going forward, it will not be—because it cannot be—a polis.  This, and the changes in scale, technology, and mobility, between 1776 and 2011, lead me to a further conclusion: The “Founding Vision,” whether it was, whatever it was, however noble it may or may not have been, can never be wholly relevant to the American future.

We called the big-idea experts “hedgehogs” (they know one big thing) and the more eclectic experts “foxes” (they know many, not so big things).<br />
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Lehrer: Do these different styles correlate with levels of accuracy?<br />
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Tetlock: In assessing accuracy, it is crucial to make the “law of large numbers” work for you. Any fool can be lucky a few times. The key is consistency. So, in the first round of our studies, we assessed the accuracy of almost 30,000 predictions from almost 300 experts. We tested a lot of different hypotheses about the correlates of consistency and accuracy. Is ideology the key factor? Having a PhD? Having past access to classified information? And a lot of hypotheses bit the dust. The most consistent predictor of consistently more accurate forecasts was “style of reasoning”: experts with the more eclectic, self-critical, and modest cognitive styles tended to outperform the big-idea people (foxes tended to outperform hedgehogs).

We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening. Also, this: if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions? When the final tally comes in for the 2012 presidential race, who among us wouldn't bet that Barack Obama is going to beat his Republican opponent in the fundraising column very handily? At the very least, he won't be out-funded, I can almost guarantee that.<br />
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And what does that mean? Who spends hundreds of millions of dollars for what looks, on the outside, like rank incompetence?<br />
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It strains the imagination to think that the country's smartest businessmen keep paying top dollar for such lousy performance. Is it possible that by "surrendering" at the 11th hour and signing off on a deal that presages deep cuts in spending for the middle class, but avoids tax increases for the rich, Obama is doing exactly what was expected of him?

"That's how student radicals think -- not conservatives."

whether your problem is alienation or lack of good jobs, it’s hard to present manufacturing as the solution unless you’re willing to take a radical stand against labor-saving technology, and in favor of lower material standards of living.