I liked those. The Lakoff piece mentioned something that I've always struggled with: he basically says "workers deserve higher wages" and "people deserve jobs". How do we make companies hire more people? If they do not need more people, they won't hire them. If they can get the workers they need paying the wages they pay, they will continue paying those lower wages. How do we fix this?
I think about this a lot, because I think a lot about a fundamental shift that has occurred and makes it so that people do not want to hire me. Our economy used to need a lot of paper-pushers who were relatively educated but without specific training/skills. An anthropology major from a good school could get a job in that market. When my parents graduated from college in the late 70s with degrees in goofy liberal-arts things, they were able to get office jobs and move their way upwards.
Our economy no longer needs those people to push paper around. There is no way to force our economy backwards to where it needs those people again. They've been replaced by computers, or by more efficient systems, or better allocation of workers' time, or something. Is there anything we can (or should) do to change this?
An alternative view, which I can't confirm or deny since I wasn't alive, is that companies used to accept that they needed to train their employees. Now they do not, and can afford to do this because of the glut of job-searchers.