Predatory Professionals

The social theme that touches my spirit most deeply these spring days in Dayton, Ohio, 2016, is the corruption of the professions and the professionals.

Thomas Frank writes about it in his “Listen, Liberal, or Whatever

Happened to the Party of the People?” which is the best thing I've read on the subject. So I thought I would share a couple quotes from it with you:

p. 27: But generally speaking, the system of professionalism was long ago subverted and transformed into something different and more rapacious. Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care providers, all out for themselves. The corruption of the professions...

And there is this from his chapter "The Blue State Model," which is about Massachusetts, particularly Boston, as being representative of what is wrong:

p. 183: ... Boston is the headquarters for two industries that are steadily bankrupting middle America: big learning and big medicine, both of them imposing costs that everyone else is basically required to pay and yet which increase at a pace far more rapid than wages or inflation. A thousand dollars a pill, thirty grand a semester: the debts that are gradually choking the life out of people where you live are what has made this city so very rich.

 My final quote is from a central chapter, The Defects of a Superior Mind, which struck particularly deeply with me because I have long held, but now more than ever, that clever, well-graduated, bright, intelligent people come a dime a dozen and are much more likely to harmful than not:

pp. 172-173: “One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is kind of a disequalizer,” Larry Summers told journalist Ron Suskind during the early days of the Obama administration. “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer the way they're supposed to be treated.”

“Remember, as you let that last sentence slide slowly down your throat, that this was a Democrat saying this – a prominent Democrat, a high-ranking cabinet official in the Clinton years and the man standing at the right hand of power in the first Obama administration.”

I don't think this one is going away - too many people are suffering and more will be suffering for it to "go away." Nothing is "set in stone" or "inevitable" when it comes to human beings and what they think, but there are realities that have to be dealt with successfully, like the melting of the ice caps and subsequent rising level of the oceans. This problem of an oligarchy by the highly-paid people whom Frank calls “the well-graduated” seems to me to be one of those problems that has barely begun to be recognized.