CEOs, marketing executives, database developers, marketing collateral designers, the sales force, middle managers of all kinds, and doctor: All these professions are highly credentialed. And all have, or should have, different levels of responsibility for the mortality rates from the opoid epidemic; executives have fiduciary responsibility; doctors take the Hippocratic Oath; those highly commissioned sales people knew or should have known what they were selling. Farther down the line, to a database designer, OXYCONTIN_DEATH_RATE might be just another field. Or not! And due to information asymmetries in corporate structures, the different professions once had different levels of knowledge. For some it can be said they did not know. But now they know; the story is out there. As reader Clive wrote:<\/span><\/p>\nIncreasingly, if you want to get and hang on to a middle class job, that job will involve dishonesty or exploitation of others in some way.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd you\u2019ve got to admit that serving as a transmission vector for an epidemic falls into the category of \u201cexploitation of others.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd I don\u2019t think it\u2019s too much of a stretch to think that red-shift voters would identify Clinton\u2019s base in the urban, professional classes with the very same people responsible for the opioid epidemic that was killing their families. Consciously? I don\u2019t know. Viscerally? I\u2019d bet on it.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt isn’t just the opiod crisis.<\/p>\n
You see it in healthcare price increases (Doctors and administrators benefit), the skyrocketing cost of education (Administrators and tenure track professors), finance (’nuff said), etc.<\/p>\n
The professional, college educated class needs to understand that they are not spectators to the destruction of working class lives and livelihoods, they actively benefit from this destruction.<\/p>\n
To fix this requires sacrifices on our part.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Frequently the analysis is about how the winners and losers in an increasingly interconnected and technical worls engage in her. Using the example of the opoid epidemic, Lambert Strether makes another point, that the professional and credentialed class (Hillary’s base) has benefited from the losses of the working class: That said, can we think of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[760,464,504,374,595],"class_list":["post-180727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-class","tag-good-writing","tag-philosophy","tag-politics","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180727"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}