From behind our keyboards, it’s sometimes hard for the laptop class to believe that anyone in America actually wants to, say, work in a sneaker factory.
Progress, to a certain sort of progressive Democrat, means that we can all work in the idea economy and leave the physical economy to other parts of the world. This is a fine aspiration for the media class, but the odd thing is that they assume everyone in America feels the same way.
So a recent survey on manufacturing jobs seemed to confirm all the class biases of our scribblers.
“Americans want more U.S. factory jobs—as long as they don’t have to work them,” ran the Yahoo News headline.
“Americans,” Yahoo noted, “overwhelmingly say the U.S. would be better off with more manufacturing jobs. But only if they’re not the one stuck in the factory.”
The story leaned on a poll that found 80% of people believed “America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing,” but only 25% of people agreed, “I would be better off if I worked in a factory.”
But that’s not really an intelligent read of the data.
First of all, there are 258 million adults in the United States, and so this poll suggests that while about 12 million work in a factory, nearly 65 million of us wish we did.
And what of the 65% or more of people who say factory jobs are good, but I don’t want one?
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It’s quite a stretch to call that hypocrisy or nostalgia or anything of the sort. For comparison, only 16% of those aged 18-29 are “very willing” to serve in the military, and 36% are at all “willing.” Is it false consciousness that most people who don’t want to take up arms nevertheless want to incentivize military service?
Maybe, and forgive the speculation here, maybe the broader population doesn’t have the disdain for physical labor that the commentariat does.