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Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class QUOTES

Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class QUOTES

1 " Taylor's contribution was to show how the intellectual command of the production process could be stripped from the workers and concentrated in a more reliable cadre of middle-class managers and engineers. Through a careful analysis of the production process, the complex and intellectually demanding work of the craftsman could be broken down into simple, repetitive motions to be divided among less-skilled workers. Henceforth, no mere workers would be able to comprehend or control the entire process; each would be reduced to a few repetitive motions, such as turns of a wrench. Meanwhile the manager or engineer, armed with a stopwatch, now oversaw the work process, determining who would do what and, crucially, how fast it should be done. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

2 " The New Right, however, was not about to blame permissiveness on capitalism, no matter how indirectly. In the New Right's scheme of things the businessman is not an enemy; he is a "producer," allied with the working class in his allegiance to the traditional values of hard work and self-denial. He cannot be criticized. His economic interests, after all, are at the core of the New Right's economic program.

Hence the central dishonesty of the New Right: Its intellectual leaders pinpointed permissiveness as the source of America's ills. Yet they could not attack, or even mention, the one source of genuine permissive ideology in American culture. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

3 " Of course, as the poor become dangerous - addicted, short-tempered, diseased - the middle class withdraws still further from contact. Better to close the park, as some affluent lower-Manhattanites have argues, than risk mingling with those who have no other space in which to sleep or pass the time. Better to block off public streets, as some Miami neighborhoods have concluded, than allow fee passage to the down-and-out. Even our city streets are less likely than in the past to offer the promiscuous mingling of "others." Suburban mall have drained downtown shopping areas and left them to the poor; the new urban skywalks lift the white-collar population into a weatherproof world of their own, leaving the streets to the overlapping categories of the poor, blue-collar workers, and people of color. And the more the poor are cut off or abandoned, the less they are capable of inspiring sympathy or even simple human interest. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class