This post is going to be about the working poor.  I say that first because it is going to take me a little bit to get there.

In my line of work, which is political psychology, we make a good bit of use of a category called salience.  “My line of work,” will not change, by the way, when I retire for Portland State University.  I’ve been mulling over political psychology ever since there was a subdiscipline called that and I’m going to continue being a political psychologist long after they have stopped paying me for it.

Salience is one of those words, like data, that seem to be “out there,” but which are, in fact, “in here.”  They are something we do, not something “it” does.  Data is a word that comes to us from the empiricist tradition.  It comes to English from the Latin and I am going to give all four principal parts because it is a funny-looking verb for English speakers.  The parts are do, dare, dedi, datus.  You can see the beginnings of data in datus.  It means “to give” and data are “given to us” by the environment.  We now know that nothing is “given to us.”  Conception shapes perception.  It if comes into our minds, it comes in tainted.  That is why rats in mazes observed by English scientists behave differently that rats in mazes observed by German scientists.

Salience comes, Latin again, from salire, which means “to jump.”  We say something is salient if it “jumps out;” it “calls itself to our attention,” we sometimes say.  A fact “jumps out at us” in the same sense that the sun “rises” in the morning.[1]  It is a perfectly natural way to describe the feeling of the occasion, but when you start paying serious attention to it the earth and the sun, you need to understand the process differently.

I am going to show you two tables and give you a little back-of-the-envelope calculation.  It isn’t anything in the tables that I want to talk about.  The tables present data that are salient.  In each, there are comparisons that lead our minds along one path or another.  What I want to talk about is the choice of paths.

Here’s the first table.  It shows who was making how much money in wages in Oregon in 2010.

Here is a little razzmatazz that I put together for a course on public policy.  It doesn’t say anything important.  It simply says what is in the table

1.         One of the ways of calculating a “family wage job” is called the “average covered wage.”  That is the sum of payroll from establishments covered by unemployment insurance law divided by the total number employed at those establishments.  In 2010, the average covered wage was $41,700.  By an eyeball calculation, that fits at about the center of the $35,000–$49,999 bar, the fifth from the left.  If that bar is read at 15%, we can borrow half of it (7.5%) and add it to all the bars to the right and come up with a percent of “family wage jobs.”  It is 54.5%.

2.         That means that 45.5% have “less than family wage jobs.”  You can calculate it, or add up the value of all the remaining bars.

3.         The poverty level for a family of three in 2010 was $17,400.  It would take more bar-splicing to get that exactly, but the total of the two left hand bars is just over 13% and that is close enough for this exercise.  The number is $11,000 for a single individual, so only about 7% of the “households” are poor if they are one person households.

4.         If  the botton 13% of the nonfamily wage earners are below the poverty line (for a family of three), then  32.5% are left in that fuzzy category that is better than poor, but not as good as family wage.  “Family wage” is defined as covering the “basic expenses,” like food, housing, and utilities for the earner, a spouse, and/or two children.

We learn from this chart that in Oregon in 2010, somewhere around 13% of the workforce are going to be living in poverty.  We don’t know who that will be, but if I had money to put on it, I would put the money on children who had been reared in poverty and, as adults, are still poor.

We learn that 32.5% are going to be “better than poor” but not as comfortable as “meeting the basic expenses like food, housing, and utilities for a family of three.  Again, we don’t know who they will be, but we know how many of them there will be.

Here is the second table.  It doesn’t anything much either.  It shows how much schooling was received by the categories “low-wage workers” and “high-wage workers.”[2]  A glance at the table tells you everything you want to know.

Now we get to my part.  What is the presupposition of the first table so far as jobs and poverty is concerned?  It is that there are only so many jobs that are “family wage jobs.”  When those are filled, we are done.  Everyone else who is in the workforce will have a “less than family wage” job.  That seems obvious, doesn’t it?  If there are 100 students in a classroom with 20 seats, we know that 80 students will be standing or making some other arrangement.  We don’t know which 20 will be seated, but we know how many.  If you want to know how many students will be standing, you look at the first chart.  If you want to know how to get one of the seats for yourself, you look at the second chart.

What is the presupposition of the second table so far as jobs and poverty are concerned?  It is that the more education you have, the more likely you are to have a “higher-wage” job.  If nearly a third of those good jobs are held by people who have college degrees “or more,” and if I want one of those jobs, I had better get me some college “or more.” [4]

And that is true, of course, up to the point where we run out of higher wage jobs.  When we have more “college or more” workers than we have “higher wage jobs,” then we will start gathering a crowd of people who have college or more and putting them into “less than family wage jobs” because those are the only jobs left.

And this returns us to salience.  By this reading, the most important aspect of the table on the distribution of wages is the presupposition that there are so many higher wage jobs and not more.  A table could be constructed that dealt with the processes by which a larger number of jobs is produced, but it would not be an “educated workforce” table.  The whole presupposition of this table is systemic—there are so many such jobs and no more, exactly as in the classroom, there are 20 chairs and no more.

Conversely, the presupposition of the table on education and wages is that the more education you have, the higher your wages will be.  It is individualistic rather than systemic.  It tells me what I must do to improve the likelihood that I will get one the jobs in those top few bars the the distribution.  It has nothing at all to do with how many such jobs there are, only what I must do to get one.

So the most important aspect of these two tables, by this reading, is not what they say but on what they presuppose.  The salience, what jumps out at me, is that you can look at either the individual goals table or the systemic capacity table—provided that you know that there are two and what the limitations of each one are.

Otherwise not.  And that’s why it is sometimes handy to have a political psychologist around.