Via Brad DeLong, a story about the regular everyday folks invited to the President Bush’s economic summit in Waco. In response to criticism that the hand-picked attendees were unrepresentative, Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill

cited attendee Marilyn Carlson, ‘who owns a travel business. She should be able to give us perspective about what it means to be on the front lines.’ Well, Marilyn Carlson’s ‘travel business’ is the Carlson Companies, the privately-held conglomerate that owns the Radisson hotel chain, TGI Friday’s, and a dozen other entities. (See carlson.com.) She’s the daughter of the late Curt Carlson, the wealthiest person in Minnesota. [Courtesy Andrew Tobias]

I expect next year’s Waco conference will include invitees like Michael Dell (computer store owner), Jack Greenberg (family restaurant business) and Jesus Christ (small town carpenter—- or possibly CEO). Portraying conglomerate owners as regular folks is an interesting counterpoint to the practice of renaming lower-status jobs so that they sound more important. Hence the garbage man becomes a “sanitation engineer” and a secretary is now an administrative co-ordinator. Jobs relabeled in this way often sound silly, until we get used to the new title, but it has a defensible purpose. It strips away connotations about the gender of the worker doing the job.

Relabeling the very rich as regular Joes, on the other hand, has no defensible purpose. It’s a small but telling example of the rise of market populism—- the idea that the market is identical to democracy—- trenchantly analyzed by Thomas Frank in One Market Under God. As Frank argues:

Wherever one looked in the nineties entrepreneurs were occupying the ideological space once filled by the noble sons of toil. It was businessmen who were sounding off against the arrogance of elites, railling against the privilege of old money, protesting false experise, and waging relentless, idealistic war on the principle of hierarchy wherever it could be found … Market populism encompasses such familiar set-pieces as Rupert Murdoch’s endless efforts to cast himself as a man of the people beset by cartoon snobs like the British aristocracy. Or Detroit’s long-running use of the simple fact that Americans like cars to depict even the most practical and technical criticisms of the auto industry (seat belts, airbags, fuel efficiency, etc.) as loathsome expressions of a joyless elite. (29-31).