jake - if we have an interest in breeding an animal, recognizing the difference between race and species is useful. Races may look different (depending on what you’re looking at) but not be materially different in economic value. Sex is the same way.
In humans, race has been useful in separating slave stock from freemen, for instance. And sometimes in diagnosing illnesses or genetic predispositions to certain medical conditions.
On a different note - it’s not as if this is difficult to understand. Who is more likely to rob you (you person)? A rich man or a poor man? Someone in your ingroup or in an outgroup? What do we fear more than otherness?
Manufacturing labor is paid (more or less) based on its productivity, after accounting for supply and demand. Educated people are more in demand than they were in the 1960’s. American manufacturing had much less competition in the years after WWII than from about 1965 onward. Only productivity gains have staved off a further decline in manufacturing wages since then.
What has happened is that workers who are in demand have made unprecedented gains in purchasing power since WWII in the U.S. In truth, all workers have. factory workers can now only afford what was once a perfectly acceptable middle class house in the 50’s but no longer is. Postwar subdivisions that were regarded as a magical land of palaces are now slums. But if you track wages and standard of living for manufacturing workers since, say 1865 until now, things look awesome for factory workers here. They don;t when compared to a postwar world that could hardly be duplicated now. You know, unless millions of people died in a war.
What has also happened is that we are not yet over the romance of the ability of someone who can barely read to buy a three bedroom house in the suburbs. Even though it still does happen.
I have been involved in an effort (my role has been small) to bring manufacturing jobs back to the community in which i grew up. Garment manufacturing. I am grateful for the opportunity. I think it’s cool. But nothing we do is going to bring back 1952.
It’s the price we pay for overall prosperity and for the huge increase in purchasing power all americans enjoy. No one really talks about it because no trade union benefits by talking about it. There’s nothing in it for any lobbying group. And besides, it’s good news, which is boring.
When i was young, a mentally disabled person was not poor - they were incarcerated in a state institution.