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Tuesday, August 28, 2007
George Lakoff: No Fun At All
One of the great projects undertaken during the Bush political era has been to tune up liberalism. By no means is this a new project, but people have recently been working on it with renewed vigor.
One school of thought is that in order to make liberalism viable, we must more forcefully and precisely articulate what we always believed. One of this school's leading thinkers, George Lakoff, just produced a paper on how living wage campaigns should craft their message about the economy. Its strength is its dissection of conservative and liberal worldviews and value systems. Its weakness is mostly prescriptive.
If Lakoff had his way, liberalism would be no fun at all. A few examples of Lakoff's way of sucking the fun out of liberalism follow. I will respond as I imagine someone uninitiated in living wage agit-prop would:
Local communities make payments out of taxpayers' money to businesses in many forms: tax breaks, development subsidies, zoning changes that raise the value of businesses, local education and infrastructure development that contribute to business profitability, and most obviously, contracts (Payment-to-Corporations frame). It is only fair that businesses return some of these payments in the form of living wages to employees (Fiscal Fairness frame). They have that responsibility (Social Contract frame).
Man, more responsibility...I guess that's true, but what do those employees have to do with taxpayer money? I still believe people don't deserve to earn a living wage, because if they're poor, they're probably lazy or something.
An important aim of such reframing should be to destroy a major economic and moral fallacy, The Myth of the Self-Made Entrepreneur. Nobody makes it alone. The American taxpayer has supplied a huge infrastructure and makes enormous payments that allow entrepreneurs to succeed. Entrepreneurs are given enormous resources by the taxpaying public. They are not operating in a free market. They owe a lot — morally if not legally. The market is skewed toward them — and away from ordinary working people.
What a bummer. So what, nobody deserves anything? There's no fun in that.
Lakoff makes many other points, but essentially what he wants to do is replace everyone's values with his own- those of a compassionate, responsible liberal. But it seems far more realistic to tailor a message to prevailing conceptions of deserving-ness- like hard work, skills, and a commitment to family, friends and community.
I'm no cognitive scientist, but low-wage jobs aren't the same as low-skill jobs- that lots of them pay below what they ought to considering the work people put in and the skills that workers bring and gain on the job (See this article for more on that). A living wage ordinance is an adjustment to an exploitative market that has incorrectly priced the value of low-wage labor.
The same goes for things like the EITC and unionization rules. You could even say it's about health care, too; people who are working hard deserve health care even if their jobs don't provide it. Soon enough we won't be trying to insure kids, and even that has turned out to be harder than anyone thought it would be.
Postscript: This post was too critical. Prof. Lakoff's rhetoric still seems inadequate in a living-wage context, but it certainly could be applied to many different types of policies, particularly those that "benefit us all" or that represent the spirit of "we're all in this together." The Frameworks Institute has some good stuff on this topic (sorry, I can't find the link to the report I'm thinking of). Things like a living wage don't benefit everyone- they benefit a select group of people who probably have to be shown to be deserving if the public is to get behind them.
Posted by Matt Lewis
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