The Great Work Divide
22nd November 2011
Megan McArdle is always worth reading.
The notion of an executive washroom with its own special key now seems mostly ludicrous, but it was an actual thing–and I’m not sure that giving executives special bathrooms is actually noticeably less corrosive to social cohesion and personal happiness than giving them fatter pay packets.
It suddenly occurred to me that this is a standard feature of the work lives of blue state elites–(Update: By which I mean, affluent people who attended elite schools, not “high income people who live in blue states”): almost all of their contact is with people just like them. Same education, usually the same few states of origin, and a pretty uniformly shared set of values about what work is for and how it should be done.
These people tend to vote Democratic. Small-business owners, who work in much more diverse environments, tend to vote Republican. I’m not going to speculate on why this might be so–but I suspect that it matters.