Live from the English Orange-Haired Baboon Page: Economista Dentata: Quick Scribbles about Goodhart: "[The] much-discussed book attempts to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short (233 pages) space... http://economistadentata.tumblr.com/post/161167736682/quick-scribbles-about-goodhart

...‘Anywheres’ – educated, liberal, metropolitan with an openness to change, both in their professional and personal lives. ‘Somewheres’.... The principle objection I have to Goodhart’s argument is that it references how people feel.... The problem with this approach is that it validates what is all too often a chimera. To take one example, people may feel that the NHS is being overwhelmed by immigrants, but the reality is that the NHS is being staffed by immigrants, and would collapse overnight if they were to leave en masse....

Goodhart airily dismissed the significance of the gender pay gap.... The enthusiasm for well-paid women in personally rewarding jobs for work outside the home is left unexplored, other than to characterise their ‘agenda’ as being unrepresentative of the concerns of most women. He seems unable or unwilling to grasp that sexism is the sea that all women have to swim in: the fact some chose to swim with the tide by accepting women’s provision of unwaged domestic labour as a given, does not make the sea’s existence disappear.

Similarly, the treatment of what has become known as ‘legitimate concerns’ about integration of ethnic minorities glosses over the power dynamics.... To say... that concerns from the in-group about their no longer ‘setting the tone’ in a neighbourhood is not racist is to wear blinkers of heroic size. To then complain at this being described as racist is the same argument as ‘feminism is sexism because it makes men feel uncomfortable’, and deserves the same credibility, i.e. none....

There is undoubtedly a problem which the Anywhere–side of the argument needs to address: fact-driven responses to concerns rooted in emotion (if not prejudice) have, shall we say, under-performed electorally of late. But that the task is difficult is not a sufficient reason not to try.

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