New York journalists discovers $20,000 is in fact a large amount of money.

 This is quite interesting because it ties together several common tropes including:

Journalists are disengaged from reality.

Journalists enjoy privileges not accessible to ordinary citizens. 

Journalists are thin-skinned about their own ignorance.

The journalistic bubble is strong.

But it does also indicate that the assumption that journalists have no shame is not universally true.

Mattathias Schwartz is a contributing writer to the New York Times and a former writer for The New Yorker.  A paid up member of the chattering class, the Mandarin Class, and blue-check brigade.  

He posted:

Click to enlarge.

His interlocutors quickly do some reality calibration for him.  America is by far the richest large nation in the world with a purchasing power parity median household income of about $44,000.  Per capita median income is about $34,000.  

No matter how you slice it, $20,000 is a large amount of money for most people.  50-60% of their annual income.  When you clarify that that $20,000 is for three days of work versus the 200 or so days most people work in a year, you can almost certainly characterize that as a shockingly large amount of money.  

For most people looking at an annual income per year of 34-44k, the annualized amount for DiAngelo of, $1.7m,  would be shockingly high.  Especially since most people can see the positive outcome of quotidian labor and cannot see the value of a three-day racist struggle session.

Perhaps Schwartz was ignorant of real household income levels.  Perhaps, he did not do the math and recognize that $20,000 per three day session equates to something in the neighborhood of $1.7 million per year.  Journalists are notoriously innumerate.

The twitter trail is here. 

A guy whose resume includes the New Yorker and the NYT seems "shocked" that someone might think $20,000 is a lot of money. https://t.co/bFQ6hve4AE

— A New Radical Centrism (@a_centrism) August 15, 2020

Click for the thread.

Confronted by the reality of real world incomes, and the mocking of ordinary persons who cannot comprehend why a New York journalist cocooned in critical theory nonsense would say such a foolish thing, Schwartz attempts to hide his embarrassment by locking his account.

Fair enough.  It was embarrassing.  But as everyone always reminds us, the internet is forever.  No sooner than does Schwartz's tweets go private than someone somewhere who screen captured the tweet reposts it for all to see.

Almost enough to make you feel sorry for Schwartz except that his common chattering class admixture of ignorance and arrogance is so grating and destructive.