Sunday, March 06, 2022


Is your social class holding you back in your career?

It can do but it is not destiny. Let me give an example and then explain it:

Britain is probably the most class-ridden society in the Western world. Yet when I spent a year there in 1977 as a mere Australian of humble background, I had great social entree. For instance:

* I acquired a girlfiend of aristocratic lineage. She traced her ancestry back a thousand years.

* And I was told I could be nominated to one of London's prestigious gentleman's clubs.

* I got to have a chat to Margaret Thatcher at a small private garden party in Kent

So how did I do it? How did a mere Australian have the social acceptance that many an Englishman would have given his right arm for?

The first part to note is that I did not seek such acceptance. That would have been self-defeating. I just acted as myself. So what is there in me that opened so many doors in the "best" circles of England?

Charles Murray answered that a couple of decades ago in his notorious book and Toby Young has expanded it. Obnoxious though it may sound, there is a strong correlation in most societies between social status and IQ. The habits, attitudes and practices that characterize high status people are the habits, attitudes and practices of high IQ people. High IQ people set upper class standards. And they are often rather subtle and very hard to fake. You have got it or you do not. I did.

So, No. Your social status will not hold you back. But your IQ might. As long as you are reasonably socially competent. most doors will open to very bright people


The importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace has been well established. But one factor of identity has largely been left out: socio-economic class.

Research has shown that moving up the socio-economic ladder is becoming more difficult, and class bias has been known to affect lifetime earnings. Studies on first-generation college students also suggest disparities may follow them into their post-college careers.

Few studies have investigated the workplace experience of those from different socio-economic backgrounds. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a study of first-generation professionals, or FGPs. Also known as class migrants, FGPs are those who move from working-class roots to white-collar careers. We included FGPs and non-FGPs in the study to produce comparative data. Here’s what we learned about FGPs and what company leaders can do to support them.

FGPs were likelier than others to report that structured programs were helpful to their careers. For example, we asked each survey respondent how they obtained their first professional job and found 23.7 per cent of FGPs acquired their jobs through a work-study program at college, compared with just 7.6 per cent of non-FGPs.

Likewise, FGPs were almost twice as likely as non-FGPs to report they found employee resource groups helpful during their first job (23 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively). In contrast, non-FGPs indicated they were likelier to lean on family and friends for support and advice.

FGPs were also significantly likelier to report that professional development and leadership training was useful for their careers, contributed to promotions and improved their skills. “Code switching” means adapting one’s communication, appearance and mannerisms to fit in. It’s widely documented that people of colour feel pressured to act differently at work to be accepted. We found people from working-class backgrounds often feel similarly. Many FGPs also reported being shocked and disappointed that their hard work and results were notably less important to their careers than knowing how to communicate in a certain way and build networks. As one respondent explained: “At first I thought, oh … just as long as I’m a great worker, right? You know, I do what I need to do, I’ll get promoted fast. That’s not the case. What it really is, is your contacts. Building that network.”

In our survey, considerable differences arose between FGPs and non-FGPs when participants were asked directly about how they felt in the workplace. They were asked to rank several statements on a five-point scale. FGPs rated almost every statement lower than non-FGPs, including: “My personality type is valued,” “I have access to decision-makers,” “I feel comfortable talking about my family and personal life”. This tells us overall feelings of inclusion and belonging are likely lower for FGPs.

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Why This Woman Was Forced To Close Her Bakery Is Absolutely Sad…

Following a fatal shooting in downtown Seattle on Sunday afternoon, Piroshky Piroshky owner Olga Sagan announced the closure of their site at 3rd Ave and Pike St.

The bakery sent a series of tweets detailing problems with crime in the area.

“It’s normal to see that almost every single day,” said Piroshky Piroshky owner Olga Sagan.

According to the bakery, the gunfire on Sunday was the third in the vicinity in a month.

Shortly before 12:30 p.m., gunfire happened. In the 200 block of Pine Street, officers discovered a male with gunshot wounds. The Seattle police said the person died at the scene.

The Crime Scene Investigation Unit of the Seattle Police Department was dispatched to gather evidence and examine the scene.

Homicide detectives are also looking into the case.

For the protection of her employees and clients, Sagan claimed the most recent incidents, including Sunday’s gunshot, caused her to close the site.

“Today’s shooting was at 1 p.m. in the middle of Sunday, in the middle of downtown. There’s tourists and families, and it’s just becoming normalized. And it absolutely makes me very, very angry,” Sagan said.

Sagan is frustrated with her inability to find a solution, recalling a time when she requested police aid at the bakery and waited 30 minutes before leaving.

Just hours after the deadly shooting, Sagan told KOMO News she made the decision to close the location because the area is no longer safe for her employees. She says she will find a position for employees at one of the Russian bakery’s other locations in Seattle. She said she is also deciding if the closure will be permanent or temporary.

Sagan said:

“We have been patiently communicating with a city for the last six months, but things only getting worse. We feel that city has abandoned downtown and not treating this crisis (both humanitarian and criminal) as an emergency. All we hear is them talking and no action.”

“I came in here on Saturday to try to open up and there was a lot of illegal activity outside, a lot of people selling drugs, using drugs, I feel as if it’s a state of emergency. I think it’s humanitarian and criminal crisis and I feel it’s not being treated like an emergency.” She added.

Sagan told The Seattle Times she made her decision solely because of the crime in the area, and asked: “How many shootings do we need to have to realize this is an active emergency in downtown Seattle?”

“I really don’t want to wait until my employees get shot, or my customers get shot,” she told the Times. “I feel it’s not far-fetched right now.”

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Manchin helps defeat radical abortion bill

In a surprising turn of events, Senator Joe Manchin joined with Republicans to defeat the Democrats’ radical abortion bill.

On the evening of February 28th, the Senate defeated the Women’s Health Protection Act — which would have established the right to an abortion at the federal level — by a 48-46 margin.

The vote landed mostly along party lines, and came nowhere near close to reaching the 60-vote threshold to clear the filibuster. Manchin was the only defector from either party.

The Western Journal reports: “While the Democrats have kept the filibuster intact for now (thanks to Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who refused to go along with the 50 votes needed to invoke the so-called nuclear option in an evenly divided Senate), the attacks on the institution and the pressure on the two holdouts continue.”

The Women’s Health Protection Act passed in the House of Representatives by a narrow 218-211 vote back in September of 2021, once again mostly along party lines, with only one representative — Henry Cuellar (D-TX) — defecting from their party’s position.

As the Daily Caller’s Laurel Duggan noted, the legislation would have gone much further than just codifying Roe v. Wade as a federal law.

“The WHPA would have invalidated all state and local laws restricting what types of abortion procedures are permissible while banning requirements that doctors give women medical tests such as ultrasounds before administering abortions, unless such requirements also applied to ‘medically comparable procedures,’” Duggan reported.

“The bill proposed various deregulatory measures that would have loosened safety requirements nationwide for abortion providers, such as ending restrictions on doctors prescribing pills via ‘telemedicine’ for do-it-yourself chemical abortions at home,” she added.

The bill comes just as people have begun to speculate that the Supreme Court — which has a 6-3 conservative majority (depending on how Chief Justice John Roberts is feeling that day) — could overturn Roe v. Wade in June of this year when it rules on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which is the biggest abortion case to hit the court in decades.

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The decay of liberalism

It never was very liberal. Now is is Fascist

To get into the elite in America today—and for the last few decades—you need good grades, high test scores, a bachelor’s degree from a top institution, and often a graduate degree as well. The advent of the Information Age rewarded people with a talent for handling words and numbers, and school and college is where you learned those talents and proved that you’d done so. The requirement has stuck, and it’s more binding than ever before.

In the past, the education one acquired in those select places gave you a set of abstract skills, the kinds of cognitive aptitudes that don’t have a politics or a religion or morality. Good people and bad people both possess them, atheists and believers, too, libertarians and leftists and conservatives. The pipelines of accreditation historically understood that. They didn’t ask aspirants for whom they voted, where they stood on matters of race and sex and marriage, to which religion they belong, and what they plan to do with their skills (apart from career goals) once they moved on. The gatekeepers were liberal in so far as they kept private matters private and left people’s consciences alone. They didn’t mix the ability to do the work—prepare a court case, set a broken arm, teach a class of intermediate French—with externals. That’s what made these institutions liberal in the broad sense of the word. They respected the difference between professional competence and other human traits and dispositions such as one’s faith.

But, of course, that circumspection is no more. Universities add to job openings the requirement that applicants submit a diversity-equity-inclusion statement, which amounts to a loyalty oath to progressivist values. Students undergo orientation programs that screen out resistance to identity politics. After the 2020 election, many Trump staffers now on the job market found themselves unemployable because of their association with the administration, even if there was no evidence of those individuals’ malfeasance or incompetence. People lose jobs if they donate to the wrong causes.

This is a sharp departure from the old way. Liberal judgment focused on competence defined in a narrow fashion, contained by the demands of the elite job. In the case of academia, which runs on peer reviews of people and scholarly work, one tried to focus the evaluations on apolitical and impersonal factors. You weren’t supposed to consider the Democrat or Republican leanings of the job candidate. No, you assessed the academic qualifications alone. Is his scholarly work cogent, well-researched, and effectively presented? Does she handle evidence adroitly and draw sound conclusions? Is her teaching effective? You had to accept his premises, then determine how well he followed them through. It would be wrong to say, “She’s a feminist, and I don’t like feminism.” Instead, you would say, “Is her feminism intelligently articulated? Is it consistently pursued?”

That kind of suspension of bias is no more. The elite police one another’s opinions closely, though those opinions be uttered far from the workplace. They know that to enter the elite, they must do more than demonstrate their high-level knack for words and numbers. A roster of social beliefs has been added to the professional qualifications, a peremptory one. The beliefs are so customary and mundane that I needn’t list them, the usual take on race, sex, gender, immigration, and Trump/Trumpists. To disagree with a single one of them is to transgress the entire elite machinery. Systemic racism, the gender pay gap, transphobia, etc., have the force of taboo. The mere whisper of dissent turns you into an untouchable.

This is to say that the liberal elite now operate on inconsistent, fraught, and irrational norms. They embrace and enforce those norms by skipping the old liberal ways of debate, due process, fair hearings, and blind justice. The apolitical criterion of competence now comes second to political correctness. The best teacher in the entire country would never get an academic post in the Ivy League if it came out that she voted for Trump in 2020.

Liberalism claimed to be the basis of an open society, a bustling marketplace of ideas, but you hear leading liberal figures in academia, media, and politics talking less and less about those values. They have shown that they’re willing to let politics infiltrate the running of the institution, the hiring/promotion of personnel and the evaluation of products, without blinking an eye. The objectivity for which they strove in the past, the neutrality they prized, had no staying power once identity politics gained a foothold. Or, perhaps, the reality was that liberals insisted on nonpartisan objectivity only when a conservative, traditionalist order of things prevailed. Liberals idolized dissent but for a time, when the powers that be leaned to the right. Now that institutions are in the hands of the left (in social and cultural affairs), it’s time to shift from dissent to conformity.

And so we are left with a meritocracy that adds to word and number talents an abject fealty to a socio-political hegemony. If you want to rise to the Big Time and stay there, you must bow to the idols of identity. The very thing liberals oppose on principle, namely, a coercive and dogmatic society, they now inhabit and uphold. Remember all that liberal talk in the Sixties about the System, the Establishment, the Man? Well, they now are the Establishment, and they like it. The elites have as much sympathy for people who’ve never earned a college degree as does the King in “History of the World, Part I” (played by Mel Brooks) for the French peasants. Today’s talk of diversity, justice, and equity is a mask, a screen, a dodge.

The political correctness of the elite serves a purifying function. It’s more about social belonging than political principle. The old screening mechanisms of SAT scores and the college you attended are no longer enough. The dogmas add a fresh hurdle to membership. That’s what really counts. Politics is a handy way to divide us from them, to keep the guest lists properly elite. In truth, most members of the elite are a lot less political than they sound. They care much more for their personal status than they do about the political direction of the country. And when that status is threatened, as it was in November 2016, they will fight back. Parents at school board meetings, Trump rallies, a convoy forming in the United States … they’re a challenge to the elite. In the coming months, those challenges shall be answered in one way or another.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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1 comment:

Eddie-in-Mexico said...

On the topic of social mobility and the FGP, Richard Hoggart had identified such challenges all the way back in 1957 in his seminal work, "The Uses of Literacy". He examined the social awkwardness of the working-class group he called the 'Scholarship Boys' as they moved through the ranks into the middle-class; fascinating stuff!