{"id":9531,"date":"2019-01-09T09:27:16","date_gmt":"2019-01-09T14:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=9531"},"modified":"2019-01-09T09:27:16","modified_gmt":"2019-01-09T14:27:16","slug":"appreciating-elizabeth-warren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=9531","title":{"rendered":"Appreciating Elizabeth Warren"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amid the cataracts of learned meditations upon Elizabeth Warren’s ‘likability,’ it’s nice to come across a piece that says what is needful: Warren is a quality individual whose bona fides<\/i> as a champion of the middle class<\/a> are in good order.<\/p>\n

\n

Like Moynihan, she\u2019s a serious intellectual turned influential politician. Her scholarly work on bankruptcy and its relationship to rising inequality made her a major player in policy debate long before she entered politics herself. Like many others, I found one of her key insights \u2014 that rising bankruptcy rates weren\u2019t caused by profligate consumerism, that they largely reflected the desperate attempts of middle-class families to buy homes in good school districts \u2014 revelatory.<\/p>\n

She has also proved herself able to translate scholarly insights into practical policy. Full disclosure: I was skeptical about her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I didn\u2019t think it was a bad idea, but I had doubts about how much difference a federal agency tasked with policing financial fraud would make. But I was wrong: Deceptive financial practices aimed at poorly informed consumers do a lot of harm, and until President Trump sabotaged it, the bureau was by all accounts having a hugely salutary effect on families\u2019 finances.<\/p>\n

[ … ]<\/p>\n

Again, I\u2019m not arguing that Warren should necessarily become president. But she is what a serious policy intellectual looks and sounds like in 2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m aware that, in an increasingly anti-intellectual country, her Harvard affiliation will cause a lot of people to dismiss her out-of-hand as an elite; hell, I live in the blindingly ignorant Southern Baptist south and know a lot<\/i> of those people.<\/p>\n

But, please, let’s stop indulging the nonsense that smarts and education are a problem, an imponderable defect. We desperately need smart, well-educated people with middle-class instincts, and we need to put the failure where it rightly belongs — on the resolutely ignorant who resent the educated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amid the cataracts of learned meditations upon Elizabeth Warren’s ‘likability,’ it’s nice to come across a piece that says what is needful: Warren is a quality individual whose bona fides as a champion of the middle class are in good … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9531"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9531"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9533,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9531\/revisions\/9533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}