the left need to create a return to economic opportunity as well as new feeling rules that
stigmatize derision of all disadvantaged groups. This is not just a possibility—I actually
accomplished it. In the course of a single week on tour, I did both an hour-long podcast
for left-leaning Slate and an appearance on Fox News , with positive feedback from both.
All I did was point out the need for family-sustaining jobs and respect for the dignity of
blue-collar men. And I thought: really, how hard is this?
I happen to be writing this from China, where I’m the tagalong spouse accompanying my
husband, an expert on privacy and cybersecurity. His descriptions of China made me
determined to go, in part because it’s a country with a long history of the kind of
geographical maldistribution of opportunity that the United States developed only
recently. Jack Ma’s response was to create Alibaba, a tech company that’s a combined
eBay, Amazon, and PayPal. While the concentration of so much power is sobering, there
are bright spots: a subsidiary trains rural Chinese to use their e-platform to sell
agricultural goods and handicrafts to the world, bringing opportunity and talent back into
rural areas.
Similar transformation is possible here. What if an electrician in Indiana could use a smart
helmet to fix a machine in Thailand? Or if a company in Mississippi could use 3-D
printing to sell customized prosthetics worldwide? J. D. Vance (of Hillbilly Elegy fame)
is financing new companies in the heartland, and money is pouring in to train tech talent
in areas where young people can still afford to buy a house.^7 That’s important, but tech
talent is just a start.
An often-overlooked key to turning the tide of economic populism is to stop pretending
that jobs fall fully formed from heaven. They don’t. They’re designed by people, who
create either good, family-sustaining jobs or the kind of unstable jobs that have long
demoralized the poor and are increasingly impoverishing the formerly middle class. Soon
60 percent of jobs will be at least partially automated.^8 We can design those as either
good jobs or McJobs. If we go with McJobs, democracies—and businesses—will
continue to pay in the coin of political instability.
The widespread assumption that there is a zero-sum game between addressing the
concerns of the white working class and addressing the concerns of communities of color
is demonstrably false. If we were to commit to providing good jobs for noncollege grads,
that would help communities of color as well as working-class whites. For one thing,
communities of color are more likely to be poor; for another, boys born to affluent black
families are more likely to experience a fall in class status than their white peers.^9 College
Preface