Michael Bloomberg Insulted the Intelligence of American Farmers in 2016
Richard Moorhead
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Michael Bloomberg spoke of American terms in dismissive terms in 2016, claiming that they performed simple and easy labor and stating that they could not perform a computer coder’s job.
“I could teach anybody – even people in this room, no offense intended – to be a farmer,” Bloomberg said at Oxford University’s Said School of Business. “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that.”
.@MikeBloomberg calls farmers & factory workers mindless
"Dig a hole, put in a seed, add water, up comes corn"
"Turn a lathe in direction of arrow, you've got a job"
He says information workers much different
"You need more gray matter"Winning votes in flyover country pic.twitter.com/vSJ7sGiIHL
— Jim Hanson ???????? (@JimHansonDC) February 17, 2020
Anyone with a passing familiarity of agriculture could quite easily debunk Bloomberg’s reaching oversimplification. Farming is an ancient trade that involves generations of wisdom, requiring knowledge of planting practices, soil quality, and yield estimates, not mentioning the additional discipline of animal husbandry.
Not satisfied with his first display of white collar elitism, Bloomberg went on to slight manufacturing workers and tradesmen.
“Then we had 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal in the lathe, you turn the crank in direction of an arrow, and you can have a job.”
It’d probably be pretty funny to see the Wall Street investment banker and former New York City mayor work as a machinist for a day.
He went on to clarify that working as a coder represents the peak utilization of human intellectual capacity.
He said programming is “fundamentally different, because it’s built around replacing people with technology and the skill sets you need to learn are how to think and analyze and that is a whole degree level different, you need to have different skill set. You have to have a lot more gray matter.”
Computer programming does provide great utility to society, as do farmers and welders. Bloomberg seems inherently ignorant of the benefits different skill sets provide to America.
Considering he’s trying to buy the presidency, Bloomberg nominally hopes to win states with large rural populations such as Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2020. If so, he’s probably hoping his dismissive remarks will go straight down the memory hole with his widely unpopular stop-and-frisk policies as mayor.
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