Ed Luce: belief

Transcript context

…Why Anglo‑American? That is a really good question. I think part of it is that the middle classes have fared worse. There are fewer supports for the middle classes in Britain and the United States than there are elsewhere, so the level of frustration, I think, is higher. It’s a remarkable fact that there are more prime‑aged males in work in France than there are in the United States ‑‑ in France, of all places, so there’s a male element to this, too. I think that the cynicism generated by the Iraq War, the US‑led but British‑supported Iraq War in 2003… The fact that France and Germany very much stood apart from it, and I think correctly, and that that’s a decision that sort of matures like a good wine. It looks better and better over time. I think that that created a poison in our politics that is missing in Germany and in France, but I would most of all focus on something that a former French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, said, which is, “We want a market economy, not a market society. ” I think that in the United States, and to a large extent, Britain, we have commodified public life, and we have commodified to a degree that you just don’t see in places like Germany, and I think we have things to learn from parts of continental Europe, including how they treat their middle classes. We confuse ourselves in the US and Britain as to what skilled means. We think if you’ve got a college degree, you’re skilled. I know lots of skilled people who don’t have college degrees, and I know lots of people with college degrees, [laughs] including myself, who are unskilled. I think that there is a better understanding, particularly in the Nordic, Denmark and Germany, of the need to accommodate a diversity of aspirations and aptitudes in the labor force, and they invest in things that we consider to be low‑skilled stepping stones to either something better or to failure. We’ve got a lot more failures, I think, and they’re are a lot more frustrated. Aren’t we, in a sense, ahead of them along the curve? If you look at top French companies and try to find any that postdate 1975 in terms of origin, very difficult to do. Eventually, those sectors will fall away, or those companies will shrink.…

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