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linky links that have caused thinky thoughts: urban life edition

06 Monday Oct 2014

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I had a two-day migraine last week and now seem to be battling a cold, so — suffice to say writing energy and focus is low, and time scarce. In the meantime, here’s some stuff I’ve been reading on the internet I’ve been thinking about when not following #teamharpy.

Jacobin Magazine recently published a bitter analysis of the forces of gentrification by Gavin Mueller that has returned my thinking to urban history and politics:

Gentrification has always been a top-down affair, not a spontaneous hipster influx, orchestrated by the real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy, with individual home-buyers deployed in mopping up operations. …

“What choice do I have?” ask the liberal gentrifiers, if you press them a bit. “This is the only place I can afford to live!” This sums everything up perfectly, puncturing the bubble of individual choices that make up liberal politics.

You have no choice; everything’s been decided ahead of time. If you want the American dream of a middle-class life with a home you own in the city in which you work, you have few other choices than to join the shock troops of the onslaught against the urban poor. Align with big capital and the repressive state in the conquest of the city, and maybe you’ll have enough equity to send your kids to college.

Maybe because of the Jacobin piece, or because of the series on Uprooting Racism I’ve been doing over at the Amiable Archivists Salon, I’ve been thinking about gentrification a lot lately. This piece by Dannette Lambert on “20 Ways Not to be a Gentrifier” from the Oakland Local is always worth a re-read: Continue reading →

booknotes: hollowing out the middle

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

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Footnote mining from Paying for the Party, I ordered Patrick Carr and Maria Kefelas’ Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America (Beacon Press, 2009) through ILL and read it last week. This slim volume is based on an ethnographic study Carr and Kefelas of three hundred high school graduates from a small, rural town in Iowa they call “Ellis.” With a population of about two thousand, Ellis’ economy is primarily agriculture and industrial; high school graduates who go on to college rarely return. Those who remain struggle with social isolation and financial solvency. Carr and Kefelas surveyed over three hundred Ellis high school graduates from the 1990s (who at the time of their study were about ten years out from the end of twelfth grade) and conducted approximately one hundred interviews of young adults who had either stayed in, left, or returned to their hometown. Hollowing Out attempts to describe the motivations and experiences of each group of individuals, and ends with some reflections on the role that social policy can (and cannot) play in supporting and reinvesting in rural life nationwide.

What Carr and Kefelas found was that high school graduates were tracked / self-sorted into a handful of broad categories: the Achievers and Seekers, the Stayers and Returners. Achievers were tracked from a very young age by their parents, school system, and socioeconomic status, to leave Ellis and attend a four-year college and possibly graduate school. Most will never return to live in their hometown, having built lives elsewhere with career opportunities and social connections. Seekers don’t have the resources to attend a four-year college, even a good state school, and so often join the military; they will leave to explore the world, but have limited socioeconomic mobility and often struggle to find a place in the world beyond the armed forces. Stayers have dropped out of high school or obtained limited qualifications, usually struggle with un- or underemployment, wed and/or become parents much earlier than those who leave. They, and the Returners, often have negative perceptions of the world beyond their small town community — either because they tried and failed to find a foothold there, or because they have no desire to leave the familiar. Returners are usually “Boomerang” individuals (often women) who may have relocated for an associates degree or attempted a four-year college education but never established connections that made them feel comfortable beyond Ellis. They can also sometimes be Achievers who, for a variety of individual reasons, return home (familial responsibilities, political ambitions, occasionally the right job at the right time). However, these “High Flyers” — the ones so desperately sought by states with struggling economies — are few and far between.

In the end, Carr and Kefelas encourage policy-makers to focus less on trying to lure these “High Flyers” back to their states, since individual motivations usually have little to do with initiatives to woo the Achievers into returning, and instead focus their resources on the Stayers and Returners who are already the backbones of their communities and remain an un- and undertapped social and economic resource.

The authors do, eventually, touch upon some of the non-economic reasons that Achievers and others who leave Ellis may resist returning — reasons such as prioritizing racial diversity or acceptance of queer identity and relationships — that I think should have been foregrounded a bit more. Granted, interesting work is currently being done to highlight the lives of queer folk in rural America. Rural Americans are not inherently more or less prejudiced toward Othered groups than urban or suburban Americans. However, smaller communities are often self-selecting and more homogeneous; they’re also often extremely isolating for those who are somehow different, even if they (we) don’t experience overt prejudice or violence. Simply put, it was harder for me, as a bi woman, to find potential female partners (and even potential male partners!) in a medium-sized Midwestern town than it is.

And now, as a married lesbian, I have structural as well as cultural reasons not to return to Michigan: our marriage would not be honored by the state government. So whenever I read about state campaigns for professional Michiganders to return and invest in the state where I grew up — and which I continue to love in many respects — I admit I’m not exactly feeling the love. Many of us Leavers have left precisely because our communities scarred us, deeply, and returning to live there would open old wounds.

But in the end, I was uneasy with the way in which the authors’ solution seems to encourage a “circling the wagons” approach to social policy, where the parochial reasons that people leave certain communities are glossed over rather than challenged. I wanted them to dig more into the ways, for example, racial prejudice, the gendered division of labor in working class communities, or anti-gay sentiment not only drives Achievers away but harms those who stay behind. Not every person who embodies a marginalized identity (queer, physically disabled, non-white, Muslim, etc.) has the resources to “get out of Dodge” even though we may have strong push-pull factors to do so. While I’m comfortable with studies of rural America that ask us to reconsider our prejudices toward “hicks” living in “flyover” states, the fact that homogeneity was a fact of small town life the authors’ touched on but never developed is something I found troubling.

Still, I’d recommend this book to anyone with an interest in how education and social policy reproduce class and cultural divides here in America. The personal narratives woven throughout the sociological analysis will resonate with many readers who grew up in rural or quasi-rural Midwestern communities (raises hand), and provoke reflection beyond personal experience toward broader social trends.

booknotes: new deal & american way of poverty

24 Monday Feb 2014

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I read Michael Hiltzik’a The New Deal: A Modern History (Free Press, 2011) and Sasha Abramsky’s The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (Nation Books, 2013) in tandem, leading to a very strange stereovision of America’s twentieth-century successes and failures in delivering basic material security to its people. Hiltzik, whose reporting I first encountered last fall around the Obamacare rollout, offers us a detailed case history of the incomplete construction of America’s social safety net, while Abramsky details the ways in which even that open-weave net has been slashed and burned since the 1970s. Taken together, the two volumes chart a twentieth-century history of callous uncaring for the economically vulnerable, with a brief burst of effort during the Great Depression, and then again in the postwar era when America’s affluence made it seem, temporarily, like poverty could be eradicated without asking the other other half to give up that much, if anything. Did you know that during the Great Depression, relief workers were making the case that giving cash to people in poverty, no strings attached, was the most effective way to stimulate the economy and help them put their lives back together? And we act like we’ve just discovered that poor people are actually the experts on their own lives. Can you imagine a world where Richard Nixon floated the idea of a guaranteed universal income for every American? Because it existed. Briefly. It’s both refreshing to recover these histories of (dare I say it) socialist activism in American life, and also a real downer to realize that in every era political realists tempered their radical inclinations to better the well-being of Americans because they knew they would only be able to win lesser concessions from those who held the political power (and financial resources).

Hiltzik’s New Deal is straightforward political and economic history. In a sweeping chronological narrative he charts the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to resolve the crises of the Great Depression (banking, housing, jobs, food) from Roosevelt’s inauguration through to the eve of WWII. The story he tells is Washington-centric, a tale of New Deal politicians, those in their employ, and their adversaries. Those looking for a more grassroots narrative of the Great Depression and the effect of New Deal policies and programs should look elsewhere — but Hiltzik does provide a useful sense of the real politik required to push through programs such as Social Security. While those on the left wanted guaranteed pensions for all elder Americans, the program as finally designed — as we know it today — tied payouts to lifetime earnings:

The program’s near-total dependence on enrollee contributions has been both a blessing and a curse. (Economists consider the employer’s payments to be employee contributions under another guise, on the theory that if the employer tax were not levied the money would flow to the workers as wages instead.) Although the contributory element makes the program’s financing regressive — that is, wealthier Americans pay a smaller portion of their income than lower-paid workers to support a program of broad social utility — it has also helped protect it from political attack by giving its enrollees what appears to be a concrete stake in its survival (251).

In many ways, Saul Abramsky picks up where Hiltzik’s narrative leaves off, exploring American poverty and economic insecurity as it has manifested since the mid-twentieth century and the War on Poverty efforts of the ebullient 1960s and early 70s. The American Way of Poverty is a difficult book to read, in that it ruthlessly reminds us that we are all one or two or a series of three, four, five, instances of bad luck of poor decision-making away from material ruin. In a society that has only ever grudgingly supported social safety nets — and then only for the “deserving” poor. As the rich grow richer, we talk about slashing social security benefits, refuse to extend Medicaid to our nation’s poorest regions, and continue to see the socialized guarantee basic material security (health care, food, shelter, education, and work) as the flower-strewn path to slothful dependency.

As someone who believes that a life lived in basic faith that human beings seek to be creative in community with one another (recognizing there will be a few who take advantage of this trust) far outweighs the toxicity of a life lived on the premise that human beings require shock prods and chains to squeeze labor and “productivity” out of their souls, I found Abramsky’s reminder of how few Americans share my values possible to read only in small doses. Particularly (ironically enough) the final sections in which he offers solutions for the various problems of endemic poverty: a guaranteed minimum income, socializing the costs of higher education, reinvestment in Social Security, national healthcare, renewed support for unionization, a laundry list of practical steps toward a society oriented toward benefiting all not just the plutocratic few. That such a simple, modest list of steps toward the lessening of human suffering seems politically impossible leaves one with a creeping sense of apathetic despair.

I won’t stop at the apathy, of course (I suppose maybe not “of course”, but I’ve imbibed enough lefty theology in my time to believe that a meaningful life involves struggling for justice even when the possibility of success is vanishingly small). But it’s shocking every time to re-realize how willing we are to throw some people under the bus so the “right” sort of people can keep on hoarding the resources for themselves. And how we narrate those acts of violence as inevitable, natural, as “freedom” and “choice,” as the neutral forces of the universe, simply the way things are rather than the way we’ve decided things will be. Reading histories like Hiltzik’s are a good reminder that our present has been shaped by our past, and that the past is made up of concrete actions taken up by human beings. Human beings who could have made different decisions, taking us along different paths.

We always have choices. I do hope that, collectively, we can make ones that benefit the vulnerable, the marginalized, the trapped, and dehumanized, so that they too are free to make meaningful choices about their own lives.


booknotes: the new soft war on women

02 Monday Dec 2013

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A few weeks ago, I was sent a review copy of Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett’s latest collaboration, The New Soft War on Women: How the Myth of Female Ascendance is Hurting Women, Men – and Our Economy (Tarcher Penguin, 2013). I have read and appreciated the work of Rivers and Barnett before: their previous work has drawn on the latest in social science and psychological research to refute cultural narratives of gender difference that hurt us as children and as adults. This latest work treads little new ground. Rather, The New Soft War reminds us what we know (thanks to the research) about the continuing, pernicious discrimination against women in the high-powered workplace.

Such quantitative and qualitative research data run counter to recent anecdotal narratives (e.g. Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men) that predict in near-hysterical terms a present or future of gender imbalance in which domineering women run the world while emasculated men creep away into the shadows to nurse their wounds. Instead of “female ascendance,” Rivers and Burnett argue, female white-collar workers (virtually all of their examples come from the fields of business, finance, law, and corporate media, with a smattering of academics thrown in for good measure) continue to face gender stereotypes that impede their ability to succeed in their careers — while the gender stereotypes their male counterparts experience often boost their success out of proportion to their proven abilities. Individual mentoring programs and other exhortations for women to self-advocate (the “lean in” approach) fail, the authors argue, because placing the burden for change on professional women themselves ignores cultural biases and structural disadvantages that conspire to make many individual opportunities a no-win situation if the individual in question is a woman rather than a man.

The book was a useful review of what the research tells us — as far as it went. However, I found its overall narrative to be lacking in broader analysis and its ultimate conclusions (a reiteration of the need for systemic change, coupled with suggestions for how women can work within or game the current system) to be tepid. For two authors who have just spent over three hundred pages detailing how endemic sexism is in the white collar workplace, to have the final chapters focus largely on individual strategies would seem to undercut their argument for policy-level change.

I was also irritated by the focus on white collar professional women, most of whom were navigating a corporate culture I have little experience with and struggled to relate to. I would have appreciated a more class-inclusive approach: women working in less high-powered professions, including my own world of library science — not to mention women working in the service and retail industries — were barely mentioned. The focus was on women in traditionally male-dominated professions. Some of that data can no doubt be generalized to women in the workplace more generally, but I am wary of casually assuming that the experience of highly-educated (largely cis, het, white) professional-class women pulling down six-figure salaries can stand in for all of us.

Given, for example, the way recent scare stories about women dominating the new labor market often focus on working-class and poor women who are heads of household, it seems particularly important to push back against the notion that a first-generation female college graduate who earns a living wage as a pharmacist is “empowered” to the extent that she is immune from exploitation as a worker, sex discrimination as a woman, race discrimination if she is non-white, and ageism if this is a second career — the list could go on and on. Rivers and Burnett rarely complicate their picture of the ideal worker with any of these intersectional concerns … their analysis generally presumes a high-powered businesswoman who has learned (and is able) to play the corporate game, yet still finds herself passed over for a promotion, or condescended to after the birth of her first child.

In other words, a woman frustrated that all of her (acknowledged and unacknowledged) social privilege and personal gumption haven’t rewarded her as lavishly as they have rewarded the men in her graduating class at Harvard Business School. This woman’s concerns are not invalid ones — it is fair to ask why our society rewards some groups of people more lavishly than others — but the “new soft war on women” does not only affect her and her peers. It is part of an aggressive neo-capitalist campaign to dehumanize and disenfranchise employees and grant ever-more power to the plutocrat employers. Within this broader struggle between the (relatively) powerful and the (relatively) disempowered, gender discrimination is often but one of many battlegrounds. That Rivers and Burnett ignore this larger framework ultimately weakens their closing arguments for political and social change.

The kind of feminist analysis I appreciate most is the kind that does not ignore the complex differences that exist between women, but rather engages with them (even if only to say in one’s introduction that a given study out of necessity will narrow its focus to X and Y group). The New Soft War would have been a better book, in my estimation, if it had at the very least acknowledged that its study population (and intended audience) was but one specific group of upper-middle-class professional women — rather than women generally. And that its agenda for social change was one of limited reforms within the pre-existing system, rather than a more ambitious questioning of the economic status quo.

reality check [mcdonald’s style]

17 Wednesday Jul 2013

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(via Lawyers, Guns, and Money)

It’s hot here, as it is pretty much everywhere in the States right now, and I had an iced latte this afternoon to see me through my evening shift … so sleep isn’t coming. Solution: blogging.

I Tumblr-ed & Tweeted the link to this story earlier in the evening, but laying awake in the dark I was doing the math so here’s an expanded/comparison version.

The sample monthly budget above is courtesy of McDonald’s corporation, composed by mad ferrets working for snails in their corporate offices as a teaching aide for their minimum-wage earning employees. See employees! Living in poverty is easy! All ya gotta do is plan.

As the author of the post linked above, Robyn Pennacchia, points out this budget exists in a fantasy where things like food, gas, and heat don’t cost anything — or perhaps, can be squeezed out of that $27/day “spending money goal” at the bottom of the table? She writes:

You may think that most of these minimum wage earners are teenagers. Well, 87.9% of minimum wage earners are over the age of 20. 28% of those people are parents trying to raise a kid on this budget. That is not a good thing for our future and it is not a good thing for our economy. In order for the economy to thrive, people have to be able to buy things. All the money going to people at the top does not help us. 

I don’t want to live in any kind of dog-eat-dog Ayn Rand erotic fantasy. Human beings are worth more than that. Anyone who works 40 hours a week (nevermind 74 hours) ought be able to take care of all the basic necessities in life. Corporations shouldn’t be able to pay their workers nothing, keep all of the profits to themselves, and expect taxpayers to make up the difference with social programs. It’s not fair to the workers, and it’s not fair to any of us.

Pennacchia has the (shockingly not-shocking) national stats; I thought I’d throw a little cold-water reality on the ferrets’ fantasy budget by comparing it to what Hanna and I actually have to spend on the necessities listed above. Line by line. (I said I’d had too much coffee!)

  • Savings …… $500.00

The number above is wholly comprised of 401(k) with-holdings and the money we set aside to pay Hanna’s self-employment tax in April. Some of that we get to keep, thanks to deductions, but it’s not exactly secure savings. We’d put some by in our slush fund earlier this year, but that went to the cats’ vet bills in June.

I’m not saying all this in a poor-us fashion, I’m pointing out: $100.00/month in “savings” for someone making minimum wage probably isn’t going into a retirement plan. It’s likely in the sock drawer until they need to drive across the state to the only Planned Parenthood offering affordable healthcare services.

  • Mortgage/Rent …… $1295.00
We pay for a 1-bedroom in a cheapish part of Boston. I get that Boston is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the United States, but when I first moved here I was working a retail job at Barnes & Noble that paid $9.00/hour. That’s only $0.75 more than the minimum wage. The idea of anyone making that level of income being able to afford a rent, let alone buy a house, is pretty laughable from where I and my compatriots are sitting. If you’re putting aside $100.00/month you’re not accruing anywhere near enough for a downpayment.
  • Car Payment Transportation …… $175.00
I got this number by adding together our monthly T pass expenditure (about $30/each), our monthly Zipcar membership ($75) and my Hubway membership ($7/month), with a bit of cushion for additional Zipcar fees when we need the car for more trip than usual (like to the vet). 
If we lived in the more affordable real estate zones around Boston (i.e. a place where someone might be able to rent a studio apartment for $600.00/month. Maybe. Then we’d be adding in commuter rail fees or car maintenance, insurance, parking, gas. We’ve done the math, and it pretty quickly starts to cancel out any savings otherwise realized.
  • Car/Home Insurance Student Loans …… $430.00
So we don’t have to pay insurance for a car (which we don’t have) or a home (which we don’t own), but we do have to pay a percentage on our brains. While we have relatively affordable student loan payments through the federal Income-Based Repayment plan, that’s still a not-inconsiderable chunk of our income every month. Which might otherwise go toward that retirement TDA or eventual home ownership. Just sayin’.
  • Health Insurance …… $225.00
Hanna and I are both generously insured through our workplaces, with plan that are not only paid for pre-tax (the equivalent of a 20% reduction in premiums) but subsidized by our employers. Harvard University even reimburses us Hanna’s copayments after she reaches $135/year (no small perk when you’re talking about regular physical therapy or mental health treatments at $15/visit). 
I was on my parents COBRA insurance for a couple of years out of college, and independent Blue Cross/Blue Shield catastrophic-emergency-only insurance a couple of years after that, before moving to Massachusetts and being poor enough to qualify for their state-subsidized insurance plans (thank you Ted Kennedy!). I know how even $225.00/month for a family of two is a deal.
  • Heating Gas …… $30.00
Our heat is electric (see below), and our water comes included with the rent — but we have a gas stove and pay monthly for that, to the tune of $20-30/month. More in the winter when we’re baking, less in the summer when we’re too sleep deprived to cook in our non-air-conditioned apartment (which of course means we spend more on prepared meals…).
  • Cable/Phone/Internet …… $70.00
We get the have-a-television cable package for about $18/month, internet for $32, and a land-line for $28. I also maintain my old AT&T cell phone on a pay-as-you-go plan that costs us about $100/year in top-up fees.
I don’t think we need to go over, once again, why services like the internet and phones are basic necessities for even those who are homeless and poverty-stricken; without connectivity it is impossible to conduct business in the world, be taken seriously by potential employers, or — hell — just enjoy your downtime with crap movies. 
  • Electric …… $62.00
We actually do pretty well with our electricity, no that we pay a flat monthly fee that averages out the winter highs (over $200.00) and the summer lows that come from inefficient electric heat. We pay slightly more for wind power, though the differential is pennies at our level. I wish we had the option for solar, since our apartment building gets direct afternoon sun that could really dial the meter back if taken advantage of.
  • Other …. ???
“Other”? By which you mean … food ($800.00)? Or work-appropriate clothing (~$600.00 annually)? Professional development ($500 so far this year)? Union dues ($380 annually; and no complaints from this quarter)? 
The compost collective we pay into for $20/month?
Oh, I suppose you could mean Netflix at $7.99/month…
…and yeah, you probably look askance, McDonald’s, at the $4.00 latte I bought this afternoon which is fueling this late-night verbiage.
  • Monthly Expenses Total …… $2,562.00
Or 2.03 times what that McDonald’s employee working 74 freakin’ hours per week is supposed to be living on. 
You’ll notice I haven’t included anything as luxurious in here as weekend trip to Maine to visit the in-laws (about $300.00 for a car rental plus gas) or fun activities like a movie or the purchase of a used book.
On the one hand, I’m grateful that both of us have found work with employers who value and foster our skills, who encourage our professional growth, who offer generous benefits, and who compensate us within the range of professional respectability. Our household income of about $3,625/month net last year* is a solid cushion above the minimum $2,525/month supposedly required by a household of two adults to get by in our county.
On the other hand, I’m appalled that — as a nation — we continue to ignore the reality that is the increased cost of living well or even just securely. And that we continue to individualize a social problem — pretending that just teaching people struggling to get by on what is patently not enough to craft and stick to a budget is somehow going to solve the problem of poverty.
The only thing that will solve poverty is better-paying employment and a strong social safety net.
And now I’m going to return to staring at the ceiling and listening to the cat hunt mosquitoes in the dark.
*I took our Adjusted Gross Income from our joint state tax form, reduced it by 20% to account for tax with-holdings, and divided by twelve. Our AGI was $54,369.00 in 2012.

tuesday morning economics: academia edition

02 Tuesday Nov 2010

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Somewhere in me, I have a post percolating about the way my personal perspective on, and awareness of, economic issues has been subject to a steep learning curve in the last three years since I started graduate school.

In sum, while I had a fairly firm grasp on personal finance and budgeting when I entered graduate school, taking out the student loans necessary for my education, the high cost of living in the Boston metropolitan area, and the experience of bringing my material life together with that of another person for the first time raised new anxieties and questions. Additionally, attending graduate school for a professional degree — not to mention doing so in the context of a recession — means being caught up in a series of explicitly economic propositions. For the first time in my life, I have formed a relationship with education that is, in part, about economics. (More on why this is a new dynamic for me will have to wait for that later post).

I don’t have time, right now, to write at length about these personal experiences. But I do want to draw your attention to a fascinating series of posts over at (once again) Tenured Radical and Historiann about the politics and economics of academic employment.

With good (read: lively!) comment threads on all of them for further reading. While the discussion here is primarily focused on faculty (teaching and research) positions, the economic climate of higher education inescapably touches those of us in the library field, particularly those who work at said institutions of higher education (not to mention that there are library positions with faculty status and tenure track).  In a more abstract sense, this conversation about the economics of education is a conversation about how to make a living doing intellectual work in fields that are not widely respected by the corporate sector (i.e. history! women’s and gender studies!) and are often seen as peripheral to education of “real” worth (see the catch-22? “real worth” here = financially lucrative; the market is seen as the neutral, unbiased arbiter of social as well as economic value).

So there’s your difficult-yet-worthwhile reading assignment of the week … I promise more pictures of cats and other miscellaneous fluff on Wednesday!

librarianship =/= dick-waving contest

02 Thursday Sep 2010

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Okay, so I gripped about this on Twitter, and then because that wasn’t enough thought about posting it on Tumblr. But then the draft of my tumblr post got way longer than I planned so now it’s going to be a bona fide blog post.

AndyW @ LISNews appears to be surprised that an MLS degree does not exempt him from plebeian tasks such as checking out books to patrons and staffing the reference desk (instead of holding court in private with “people who have actual reference questions”).

On any given day, I can be standing at the circulation desk side-by-side with a support staff member doing the same thing that they are doing. So long as this arrangement exists, the perception that librarianship does not require an advanced degree will continue to taint the image of the profession.

One response to this state of affairs for any individual with critical thinking skills might be to ask “if the tasks of librarianship do not require an advanced degree, then why are we requiring advanced degrees of librarians”? This is, in fact, a question that has already been asked in comments to AndyW’s piece and no doubt will continue to be a subject of debate. (See, for example, my post from May on this very topic).

AndyW doesn’t ask this question, however. He’s pretty clear on the fact that he likes the status his library science degree grants him — or rather, he wishes that his library science degree would give him the sort of status he imagined it would grant him. (Aside from, presumably, his ability to apply for professional positions which are compensated financially above the paraprofessional and nonprofessional level). He wants the whiff of authority. The deference. The aura of mystery, perhaps? And rubbing elbows with the working, uneducated masses just isn’t cutting it.

It is a disservice to the education, to the degree, and to the profession when the bulk of a librarian’s daily tasks could be performed by someone with a GED. It does not take a master’s degree to place a hold on a book, clear a copier, push in chairs, tell people they are being loud, shelve items, or other similar tasks. When librarians are seen doing this and then told there is an advanced degree requirement, there is a reasoning dissonance that occurs in the outside observer.

Because, you see, it’s all about appearance. About the need to ensure that patrons who are using the library (in ever-increasing numbers) understand Andy’s credentials. What sets him apart. That, while he may be assisting his staff in a time of need, such tasks as reshelving or helping patrons find and check out the books they need to meet their information needs (or thirst for pleasure reading) are generally below him.

As a fellow librarian, may I suggest it would be a professional move to spend less time worrying that observers won’t be able to tell you apart from the paraprofessionals and “someone with a GED” (damn those lowly plebes and their ability to work with books!). To insist on the distinction, particularly in such dismissive terms, is insulting to your staff. Staff who presumably, though lacking credentials, are working in a library for a reason (and it’s probably not because it pays incredibly well). It is also insulting to your patrons: is assisting them — even if it’s simply to point them toward the bathroom or unjamb the photocopier — somehow beneath your dignity? Those “observers” whom you imagine are so obsessed with your credentials are probably, in the end, much more interested in whether their information needs are met promptly, knowledgeably and courteously than they are in whether the person meeting those needs has taken a class in Information Organization. As a commenter on the LISNews site suggested rather pointedly, “Staff who aren’t willing to chip in to do ALL the things to make the library a success aren’t professionals – they are just getting a paycheck.” To seek professional respect by denegrating the work of non- and paraprofessionals whose service unarguably enables a library to function is (to put it bluntly) the behavior of an asshole.

Librarianship is not some giant dick-waving (er, degree-waving) contest. An advanced degree is not a magic, respect-demanding bit of psychic paper. It is, arguably, an outdated method by which certain knowledge workers in the late-19th and early 20th century made the case for their work to be given social status. But that’s a blog post for another day.

In the meantime, I mostly want to say: Way to reinforce the kyriarchy, dude. In a totally uncool sort of way.

Booknotes: Status Anxiety

21 Thursday May 2009

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In Hamburg in 1834, a handsome young army officer, Baron von Trautmansdorf, challenged a fellow officer, Baron von Ropp, to a duel over a poem that von Ropp had written and circulated among friends about von Trautmansdorf’s moustache, stating that it was thin and floppy and hinting that this might not be the only part of con Trautmansdorf’s physique imbued with such qualities. . . thw two men met in a field in a Hamburg suburb early on a March morning. Both were carrying swords, both were short of their thirtieth birthdays, both died in the ensuing fight (115).

“Dueling symbolizes,” writes Alain de Botton, in his work of popular philosophy, Status Anxiety, “a radical incapacity to believe that our status might be our business, something we decide and do not revise according to the shifting judgments of our audience. For the dueller, what other people think of him will be the only factor in settling what he may think of himself” (116). I have been meaning to read de Botton’s book since it first appeared in 2004 — and have had even less of an excuse since finding it on the $1 cart at the brookline booksmith this past fall. So this week, as a break from the dense fictional narrative of Anathem and the ethical psychology of Erich Fromm, I finally pulled it off the shelf and read it in an afternoon.

Like de Botton’s other books (such as The Art of Travel and The Consolations of Philosophy), Status Anxiety takes a human experience or feeling and draws on the writings of philosophers, intellectuals, and artists to explore how human beings in diverse times and places have responded. In this case, the topic de Botton tackles it the question of what we make of what other people think of us, and how we measure the success or failure of our lives by the opinions of others.

The first half of the book details the “causes” of status anxiety, the second half it’s “cures,” or antidotes that people in different times and places have found effective in combating the anxiety of not meeting the expectations of others: philosophy (big surprise), art, politics (more below), Christianity (which could be expanded to religious traditions more broadly), and “bohemia.” Although de Botton’s narrative is, per his usual style, more anecdotal than argumentative, he offers a lot of food for thought.

For example: political consciousness, de Botton argues, serves to denaturalize whatever framework a given time and place has decided to use when judging someone’s social status — and ultimately their success and failure as a human being. “What the political perspective seeks above all is an understanding of ideology, to reach a point where ideology is denaturalized and defused through analysis–so that we may exchange a puzzled, depressed response to it for a clear-eyed, genealogical grasp of its sources and effects” (222). What he calls “political consciousness” here I would argue is more accurately historical consciousness: the knowledge that that which appears “normal” in one time and place is, in fact, contextual — and thus, it can be changed.

Likewise, while resistance to status anxiety often turns on our ability to self-determine whether we are a success or failure, the extent to which this resistance works is often related to the strength of alternative communities and friendships with which we have allied ourselves–whether they are religious (Christian), political (feminist) or cultural (bohemian, artistic, etc.). In fact, reading the “solutions” half of Status Anxiety the book reminded me of a paper I wrote in undergrad on pacifism during the American Civil War. I was interested in how men who chose to resist enlistment in the military defended their decision to practice nonviolence — and particularly how they understood themselves in relation to the mainstream concepts of manhood and masculinity, which were so deeply connected to participation in the war. What I discovered was that the men who resisted were most likely to be part of religious sects that practiced nonviolence, and had developed an alternative vision of what manliness entailed — a vision of manhood that actually supported, rather than conflicted with, a pacifist life.

Despite the anecdotal feeling of the book, I found de Botton as charming and thought-provoking as ever. I think it is particularly useful, in a world that is currently so preoccupied with economic concerns, to remember that material worth, though undeniably important for well-being in some respects, is not in any way analogous to moral worth. And that, if we care about having a life worth living, being mindful of what kind of success we actually wish to aspire to, and why, is a deeply relevant line of inquiry.