"identifies more with the rich"

Dear Dr. Bones,

Here we go (at the Great Blue Hill Gang) again:

Bradford DeLong had an interesting post up about a year or so ago on the upper reaches of the income bracket.  Put these two points together: 1. We tend to evaluate our success and well-being comparatively. 2. The income curve near the top has a very steep slope. Result: People who are doing quite, quite well are often comparing themselves to others who are doing a great deal better, and thus, they mistakenly think they’re not doing that well at all. This may account for a lot of the feelings of victimization we keep hearing from the 1%. kbusch @ Fri 11 May 10:01 PM

True, but it gets worse For good or ill, politics have become increasingly Darwinistic over the past four decades. While income inequality is an issue in the abstract for most people, the majority nevertheless identifies more with the rich than the poor, and blames government as much as corporations for the current economic climate. Furthermore, in the absence of grassroots-credible liberalism, corporate interests win by default, particularly on matters such as corporate tax breaks. In Massachusetts, despite a brief period of discussing income inequality, the Commonwealth is back to status quo ante, with little in the way of practical policies addressing the issue, as I write this. IMHO, this goes far to illustrate the credibility problems facing progressives; they’re simply not trusted in blue-collar communities, in the absence of tangible policies addressed to their specific needs. paulsimmons @ Sat 12 May 11:24 AM

Those of us whose notion of 'wonk'  (( fold here )) was formed before 9 April 1969, when civilization succumbed--more or less darwinistically, I daresay--to Grade Inflation , are not to be impressed with Comrade Winship of Brookings. Differential equations were never actually mandatory, I admit, but unless the aspiring wonkette or wonk gave the impression that she could deploy them with panache any time she liked, she did not survive the cut. The good news is that Comrade Kruggie of the NYTC remains a fresh breath of stagnation in this respect, when he says ‘wonkish’, Paddy prepares to revere far more than to comprehend. The bad news is, naturally, that a Nobel Prize seems to be the new lower bound. ¡Well may (( Diogeneia van Chickamauga-Warrenbuffet )) wander about with Her lantern in the marketplace at midday drooling of Intellectual Bottom! Speaking of Her Beatitude, the cartoon accompanying does accidentally fall in with the McTammany reconstruction of the Warrenbuffet conception of the All-Wunnerful Middle Class. Mentally combine the lower three squiggles, which after all are not very different, especially if taken _vis-à-vis_ the TopPercenter squiggle, and label that A-WMC. [1] The cartoon is for moralizers to moralise about, which is perfectly OK with me as long as the product comes with truth-in-packaging. One such (moralist) misinforms Hill City and the world that "the majority . . . identifies more with the rich than the poor." This e-comrade does not understand that everybooby who is anybooby nowadays "identifies with" the All-Wunnerful Middle Class, A-WMC hereinafter. To the (very slight) extent that this Journalism School / Barber College category has any analytic usefulness or ‘wonk’ implications, these necessarily involve a distinct NON-identification, a deliberate refusal to ‘identify’ with either the baincapper rich or the Bad Poor. [2] Happy days.  ___ [1] Plus maybe stick in something about the Bad Poor. We *are* the Ninety Percent after all. Technically speaking. [2] "Identifies with" is a mild formulation as well as an unstylish. The wisest thing to do with the pious A-WMC viennasausage would be explicitly to treat "(the)middleclass" as a rather clunky pronoun of the first person plural. Then one would need to be in possession of background information about the particular middle-selfclassifier to make head or tails of each attestation, just as ‘we’ and ‘us’ and ‘our’ can scarcely be said to have any absolute semantic value. (( DIGRESSION. With Her Beatitude of Warrenbuffet, we seem to have a personal A-WMC that consists of approximately percentiles ninety through ninety-eight (90-98) of the income/wealth distribution. Loosely speaking, then, faculty-lounge Lizzie might be called "a NinePercenter." (( If Paddy were a proper wonk, I might verify my informal humanist guess than one has to be approximately a NinePercenter to be plausibly solicited for a minimum of fifty dollars (USD $50.00) every time the Funders of Fratboy LLC come up with a new blunder on behalf of the People's Seat™warmer. (( The Venerable Funders suggest twenty-five bucks to their own marks an' dupes, as it happens. That might be reasonable as the *total* lay-out for politics in any one election cycle by members of the merely arithmetical A-WMC, percentiles thirty-four through sixty-seven (34-67) on the ever-immortal Herrnstein-Murray Curve™, but is still an awful lot to be askin’ for again an' again as the circus develops. However, the chances that A-WMC would be used to mean anything so soulless and mechanical as that are negligible. )) Grade Inflation did not bring us to this degradation of the vernacular in one march. Twenty or thirty years ago, A-WMC was still no worse than your cheapjack rhetor’s automatic antithesis to "the Special Interests (boo! hissss!)." Like the wonkery of Paul Krugman, there are lingering traces of that usage still, but it cannot, one trusts, survive. It would be ludicrous for Citizen Narcissus to go about strikin’ the attitude that everybody *except* Master Narky is ‘special’. Worse than ‘ludicrous’: this would be positively a matter of cuius contrarium est verum from the narcissocentric perspective.