One thing he doesn't quite name here, though, is trauma and recovery. Decades of cushy software jobs has given me opportunities to heal. I have my shit much more together now, and wouldn't have happened without that healing. Sanity is a luxury good.
So it's this part that troubles me:
> on average low-skill workers are worse in a lot of ways than high-skilled people
I think this is partly correct, but it treats worse-ness as an intrinsic of the person, not a consequence of the circumstances. It's a good example of the fundamental attribution error. [1] It's also a good example of why playing around with E-Prime [2] can be such a useful cognitive tool; avoiding intrinsics can clarify thinking.
As he noted, shitty jobs caused physical illness. But they also break and stunt people in non-physical ways. Treating people like an underclass is a good way to create an underclass. Not just in the workers themselves, but in the children of the workers. The various ACE studies make clear the ongoing cost of childhood trauma, some of which is caused and all of which is worsened by poverty and economic instability.
And from the story in the footnote, that's quite clearly what some people want. That manager didn't regret fucking all those people over. She gloried in it. Managerialism [3] is the modern, socially acceptable form of feudalism. There are plenty of people who only feel good if they have it better than somebody else. We let that continue at our peril.
[1] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
[3] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/confronting-managerialism-9781...