To the Editor:
Re "Jesse Jackson, Charismatic Champion of Civil Rights, Dies at 84" (obituary, nytimes.com, Feb. 17):
In 1984, the Democratic Party ceded the playing field to the Republican far right when it shut out Jesse Jackson's message of economic and social justice and peace with our neighbors in favor of its neoliberal agenda.
As the campaign coordinator for Mr. Jackson's National Rainbow Coalition during his presidential primary run, I saw how his message resonated with white working-class voters when he demonstrated that their interests for a better life were no different from those of their Black and brown neighbors.
When white farmers were losing their land to agribusiness, he delivered food from their farms to poor people in the inner cities of the country, cementing a relationship between rural and urban America. When he showed that our tax dollars were going to build weapons instead of feeding and housing people, those who had never voted or been involved in politics before began volunteering their time.
The political elites feared this kind of message and thus sought to portray him at first as a charlatan, then as a spoiler, and finally as a candidate who spoke only for African Americans.
Walter Mondale, the candidate of the Democratic Party elites, lost the 1984 race to Ronald Reagan. We have been living with the consequences of this major failure of imagination ever since.
Sheila D. Collins
New Rochelle, N.Y.
The writer is the author of "The Rainbow Challenge: The Jackson Campaign and the Future of U.S. Politics."
Today, the Chinese people enjoy near-universal health insurance, with doctor visits often costing no more than a New York subway ride. Major medical expenses are covered through a simple national insurance system, shielding families from financial ruin due to illness. China also has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, with more than 90% of households owning their homes.
Healthy life expectancy in China now exceeds that of the United States by four years (68.6 compared to 64.4). The country's incarceration rate is 80% lower than that of the U.S. and 32% below the global average. Meanwhile, public satisfaction with the Chinese government consistently exceeds 90%, far higher than in the United States. These statistics reveal the results of deliberate policies and a social system designed to prioritize people's well-being.
So how has China done it?
To start, in China, "extreme poverty" is defined not simply by income. Instead, it's defined by whether people can live with basic dignity and security. According to standards outlined by the State Council, a household can only be removed from the poverty register if its income stably exceeded the national poverty line and its members had guaranteed access to food, clothing, education, and healthcare. Poverty status is verified through a multilayered public process involving village committees, local residents, and Communist Party working groups, with results posted publicly for review. Entire villages and counties are evaluated based on poverty rates, infrastructure, public services, and economic development, and are subject to inspections and audits at multiple government levels. The system is remarkable in its transparency and emphasis on real living conditions, making poverty alleviation concrete and measurable.
In contrast, the United States defines poverty almost entirely through income thresholds that bear little relationship to real living conditions. The federal poverty line does not account for regional housing costs, medical debt, childcare, or student loans, and it offers no guarantee of access to healthcare, stable housing, or education. As a result, millions of Americans are officially considered "above poverty" while still unable to afford rent, medical treatment, or basic necessities. Unlike China's multilayered system of public verification and government accountability, poverty in the U.S. is treated largely as an individual failure rather than a structural problem. So if you fall into homelessness, the blame is on you, not the system that put you there."....
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Some of the best career advice I've received didn't come from a mentor — or even a human. I told a chatbot that A.I. was swallowing more and more of my work as a copywriter and that I needed a way to survive. The bot paused, processing my situation, and then suggested I buy a chain saw.
This advice would have seemed absurd back when I lived in Washington, D.C., in a dense neighborhood of rowhouses. But for the past 25 years, I've lived in Lawrenceburg, Ind., a small, working-class town where my grandparents once ran a bakery.
After my widowed grandmother died, I wanted to be closer to family and to live inexpensively while I wrote a novel. So I moved into her empty farmhouse on a hill overlooking the Ohio River, several smokestacks and the modest grid of downtown. Taxes from a casino help keep our Main Street looking quaint. But beneath that appearance lies a dark, familiar story: After factory jobs disappeared, neighbors without college degrees began dying in disproportionate numbers. In 2017, as opioid deaths reached a record high nationwide, a local radio station, Eagle Country, reported that county residents were "taking their own lives at a startling rate."
Preoccupied with my challenges and those of the people I cared most about, I rarely gave much thought to this crisis. For most of my adult life, I wrote nonfiction and novels, making ends meet as a freelance copywriter. I assumed I was protected from the outsourcing and automation that had left so many of my neighbors unmoored.
Over time, however, marketing departments began hiring contractors overseas for a small fraction of my rate. Then they turned to artificial intelligence, which could spit out something good enough — or even exceptional — in seconds.
Maybe I should have seen it coming. I had hired a woman in the Philippines to do transcription work, but once A.I. proved just as capable, I began using the transcriptionist less often, then not at all. When my own work was being replaced, though, I felt shocked and ashamed. I was like a factory worker who had watched manufacturing jobs disappear for years yet, after decades on a production line, still couldn't believe that he, too, was being let go.
A new and disquieting thought confronted me: What if, despite my college degree, I wasn't more capable than my neighbors but merely capable in a different way? And what if the world was telling me — as it had told them — that my way of being capable, and of contributing, was no longer much valued? Whatever answers I told myself, I was now facing the same reality my working-class neighbors knew well: The world had changed, my work had all but disappeared, and still the bills wouldn't stop coming.
And so it was that one anxious night, after staring at the due date for my property tax, I asked a chatbot what it thought would be the best work for me, exactly the way — if I'd had more money — I might have sought help from a counselor: I explained my work experience, where I lived and how urgently I needed income.
Of the options it provided, cutting and trimming trees for local homeowners was listed as No. 1.
I asked if that was seriously my best option.
"Yes," the bot wrote. "Based on your situation, skills and urgent need for income, tree work sales is almost certainly your fastest path to real money."
It told me what equipment I'd need, where to buy it, which neighborhoods to canvass, what times of day to knock on doors and even the nearest landfills where I could drop off brush.
Never mind the irony of taking career advice from the kind of machine that was replacing me. I felt increasingly hopeful. I love being outdoors, and soon I discovered I loved the clarity of the work. Unlike with copywriting, clients could never ask me to do the job over in a different way. The dead tree they'd wanted gone was now gone. And seeing them happy, handing me money, always made me happy, too.
Every so often, in a client's eyes, I thought I caught a flicker of condescension — the kind that confuses education with moral virtue and people's income with their worth. But it didn't bother me much. I'd been guilty of that perspective myself, and the more I talked with my neighbors, the more deeply I knew it was wrong. On good days, I earned more doing tree work than I ever had writing copy. And after decades of staring at a computer screen, moving only to peck a keyboard, it felt invigorating to cut through logs and wrestle branches, breathing deep lungfuls of open air.
At 52, however, I sometimes found the work challenging. When I began doing it full time last spring, I was often sore for days straight. I told myself that by stretching more in the mornings or perhaps investing in lighter equipment, I could make it sustainable. Gradually, a pain settled in one elbow: a dull ache when I gripped the chain saw.
One afternoon, while I was knocking on doors, a man stepped onto his porch, shirtless, and pointed to the Bradford pears in his yard. "I paid an old friend to cut these trees," he said. "He did a little, but then he killed himself."
In that moment, I saw before me — with an inner tremor — the path that too many of my neighbors had taken. Without steady, decently paying employment, they took on physically demanding day labor, got hurt, relied on painkillers and slid into a downward spiral.
My chatbot, with its relentless optimism, had failed to mention this possibility. When the pain in my arm made it impossible to work a full day, I often found myself in my living room, scrolling for jobs on my phone. For years, politicians and pundits had told displaced factory workers to retrain and adapt. I'd done that once already, and now, if I didn't heal soon, I'd have to try something else. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but at night, kept awake by the throbbing in my arm, I sometimes wondered: What new skill should I spend months — maybe years — learning? And how long before A.I. could do that, too?
My arm still hasn't healed. And recently while tearing out roots, I badly injured my back. A neighbor offered me prescription painkillers to help me get through the work. And I'm writing this, at least in part, to resist taking more of them. Even when I recover, I'm not sure how long this solution will last. I hope I'll be able to get back to cutting trees for longer hours. But I suspect I'll soon face increasing competition, as many people — especially recent college graduates — look for ways to make money that A.I. can't yet replace.
In towns like mine, outsourcing and automation consumed jobs. Then purpose. Then people. Now the same forces are climbing the economic ladder. Yet Washington remains fixated on global competition and growth, as if new work will always appear to replace what's been lost. Maybe it will. But given A.I.'s rapacity, it seems far more likely that it won't. If our leaders fail to prepare, the silence that once followed the closing of factory doors will spread through office parks and home offices — and the grief long borne by the working class may soon be borne by us all.
--
