I would add to your first point: Many in the leftist intellectual wing openly despise the working classes and their values, especially if the working class is white.
I agree. And not just the intellectual wing, even centre-left normies over here in the UK hate the working classes - and hate that they are allowed to think for themselves.
In every discussion about Brexit, or getting rid of the Tory government, all you see is people criticising 'all those idiots who were too stupid to see they were voting for the wrong thing', or something to that effect. Essentially, working class people who don't vote with them are too stupid and gullible. I'm not really sure how this attitude is going to persuade people to side with them, but I think they gave up on that a while ago. They just want someone to castigate and feel superior to.
I rarely write pure praise in the comments (BOOORING), but I wanted to here, because reinforcing this point for me and allowing me to put a conceptual framework around the idea had been by far the best benefit of this blog for me. Thank you for saying this (over and over)!
And now time to process a grievance with almost no chance of winning, because labor isn’t all roses and boss-rage. But it’s a process.
Good test. Maybe a better less populist question is "Does this action help that single mom and her kids at the bus stop headed to drop them at school and then off to work at Dunkin?"
problem being "progressives" are rich too. they aren't looking to change the status quo, they are looking to ease their conscience for having joined the status quo.
Primarily class mobility. In the US it is the worst that it's been in decades. Why?
Look at journalism. Decades ago the most prominent names in the US were guys like Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, etc. Overwhelmingly people who did not have a college degree and who came from a blue collar background.
That is no longer the case. Over the past decade the percentage of journalists working in elite media outlets with degrees from Ivy League colleges and universities has soared. Do you just have a high school diploma but you can write? Good luck getting a job in journalism.
Credentialism isn't something that Rich Uncle Moneybags came up with. It's a mechanism beloved by the top 30% of the economy because it ensures that only people that looks like them, graduates of four year colleges, get the good jobs. Shutting down the lower class to middle class pipeline is going to be a lot more consequential than anything the 1% ever dreamed up.
Ultimately though, I don't think the "professionalization" of formerly working-class jobs is done in order to restrict competition or improve living standards. Remember that the living standards of regular journalists collapsed over the last few decades, even as the level of education required escalated, in part because even the requirements for a college degree are nowhere near enough to stop the flood of additional labor into the system. The old apprentice-based system arguably restricted the labor pool far more.
Who materially benefits from credentialization are the Wall Street billionaires who make money off of student loans. Arguably Big Ed as well, though a lot of the ever-escalating tuition is driven right back into various expenses which are (somewhat dubiously) intended to attract/retain students.
I never suggested that living standards were the issue. Just the opposite. A college degree confers an advantage in lifetime earnings but more college graduates do not raise aggregate GDP. Why? Because an executive assistant doesn't earn more than a secretary. In fact she is probably at an economic disadvantage because she had to pay for tuition for four years just to earn as much as a high school graduate of 30 years ago.
As for the argument that increased competition required increased credentialism let me point out that there's another standard that works just fine. That is whether or not somebody can write and has something interesting to say. The problem is that this second standard doesn't actually require a college degree, as writers like Breslin and Royko made clear in the past. How then to explain the precipitous rise in Ivy League degree holders working at elite media institutions? And how is the product? Is it substantially better than what the old high school grads used to put out? Or just the opposite?
A four year college degree is less and less of a guarantee of a good job these days.
Someone pointed out that college students from less privileged backgrounds use college less as a path to self-actualization and more to getting skills that can get them a job. Students from better-off backgrounds get their job training in grad school.
Thx, I misunderstood what they were driving at with the quotes.
In my view, progressivism is about economic goals - raising wages, unionization, addressing the harmful effects of wealth inequality - as well as health-related ones like UHI. If the guy was implying that some are hijacking the label ('progressive') to push identity politics as a (bad) substitute, I agree. They're not progressives.
Real progressivism has never been tried. Yeah, no. When the absolute best that the "real" progressives can come up with is rent control and other policies that don't even work in Norway, you're not dealing with serious people.
"Progressive" just means faster change from the status quo. These people are very comfortable with the status quo when it comes to the big things that would help everybody. In other words, real progressives would challenge Rich Uncle Moneybags, so if they don't, they're not really progressive.
I agree with that definition 100% and that's exactly why I'm not a progressive. Progressive used to mean GOOD change from the status quo. By your definition, Trump and the alt-right are progressive since they want to change things very quickly. Anyone who wants to break things is a progressive then, really, which is actually pretty consistent with the most visible "progressives". Which is exactly why the whole movement is filled with economic illiterates proposing legislature that has failed every time it has been tried.
Trump and the "alt-right" are actually more progressive in ways than the self-labelled progressives. But they want to go back to a former status quo, the days of smaller government and a workforce protected from globalism (if not from predatory employers).
But I'm not really in disagreement with you, though I would argue we have a lot of "broken" institutions in this country, many things we need to fix. It's just that the self-labelled progressives want to break things that aren't broken, like a multicultural society that is actually, finally learning to get along and find commonality.
As a matter of principle I agree, and at a younger age I used to agree wholeheartedly. At this point though I no longer consider this a good rule of thumb, because I no longer think there are very many zero sum tradeoffs between rich and poor people. Politics is about who you help, not who you hurt, and at the current juncture of technology and human institutions, it's mostly true that what's good for everyone is good for Wall Street. That's my read on the facts anyway. Perhaps I've been brainwashed by Tyler Cowen.
I should add, one doesn't have to like rich people in order to hold this view. Morally I have a fair bit of contempt for anyone who has anything approaching a billion dollars and doesn't give away the vast majority of it.
The left (me among them) thinks Wall Street shouldn’t exist (except maybe as an exchange facilitator service). What’s good for Wall Street is bad. What’s bad for Wall Street is good.
More precisely, much of what Wall Street sees as a threat to profits, is definitely a threat to profits. Strong unions, wealth taxes, universal healthcare, free college, strong environmental regulations, workplace safety, shorter hours, sick leave. On and on. People over profits.
Oh I don't know. Just based on Krumm's short text there, I probably wouldn't consider myself to be akin to his Fight Club level of financial anti-establishmentism.
But his remarks stir something very old in me nonetheless. Ah, yes. It's that reminder that humanity has successfully built an entire existence in which, once you get to a certain level of wealth, your money starts making more money for you. That's the real difference between the haves and have-nots: those who actually work for money, and those who just continually reinvest their own money for more.
It never fails to amaze me (and terrify me) that most of the wealth in this world is little more than a highly sophisticated game of poker in which the house always wins. And that no matter how insane the betting, the house always gets bailed out by anyone not in the house. In this sense, existence itself is sort of a joke.
Let's try another thought experiment. What would happen if you destroyed Rich Uncle Pennybags - took all his wealth and redistributed it?
Who benefits?
Do we give a share of his wealth to everyone in the world, everyone in their home country, just the very poorest?
What benefits do the people get when we redistribute Elon Musk's wealth?
Elon Musk is worth approximately $150 billion. Take all his money and distribute it across 7.5 billion people - how much does each person get?
$ 20.00
What if you prevented a corporation from making any profit, or paying anyone a substantial amount of money to run an company that employs tens of thousands of people?
Who benefits from that?
If you took the 'excess' salary from the executives and distributed it to the workers, what additional benefits do they get?
Take a CEO making $ 10 million a year, strip her salary down to $ 250 K and redistribute the rest of her salary to the 40,000 employees of the company - how much extra money does each employee get?
$ 243.75.
But now, who is going to take on that responsibility for $ 250 K?
The global 1% collectively controls $26 trillion; the global 99% controls $16 trillion. So capturing and redistributing the wealth of the top 1% would be utterly transformative for the entire world. Your math is unimpressive.
The nice thing about math is it doesn't have to be impressive, it just has to be correct.
Say you could take the $ 26 trillion controlled by the 1% without destroying it? To do that, you'd have to leave it in it's current form - equity stakes in companies, bond holdings, real estate, etc. Trying to convert it into liquid assets would destroy the value of the wealth.
How do we redistribute this - do we give everyone a share in a mutual fund? If we do, each share is going to be worth $3,500. But, what are the poorest people in the world going to do with that? They can't eat it. So, they will sell it and buy the things they need to survive. Now, the purchaser will have twice the wealth of the average person, and the guy that he just bought the share from will have no wealth, and here we are, back to wealth inequality.
You suggested that there's no material difference in distributing the money of one guy. I pointed out that, in two years, the amount earned by 1% of the world was $10 trillion more than that earned by the other 99% of the world. Obviously, distributing ~$26 trillion to people who were getting buy on $16 trillion would be profoundly meaningful to that 99%. Now you're moving the goalposts. I'm unimpressed.
I apologize - I got confused by your use of the word wealth in your original response; apparently you meant income.
If we are redistributing income from the top 1% to the rest of the 99%, then the 99% end up with an additional $ 3,500 per year. For the very poorest, this would be transformative.
This wouldn't be practical, and it wouldn't be sustainable, but for as long as you could do this, it would change things.
I find these thought experiments where we just suddenly try to redistribute all wealth not very helpful. In reality anything we pursue would be a gradual process, done in gradual ways, that over time would attempt to create more equality than exists right now. That wouldn't destroy wealth, or the current system. We need to experiment with different ways of redistributing, pay attention to their effects, and pursue the most promising policies.
You're right that there is no way for everyone to be rich, or to remove all wealth inequality without destroying the way things currently work, and it is not wise to try to take all wealth from every rich person, but I don't find any of those objections to be a very persuasive case against pursuing policies that take power and resources from the rich and give it back to the poor.
Who qualifies as "rich" though? For writers like Richard Reeves or David Brooks the problem is increasingly the top 20-30% of the economy who have achieved some level of financial security and are now busily engaged in securing their advantage by freezing the economy and all its associated socioeconomic strata. There's a reason Reeves called his book "Dream Hoarders".
That seems like a pretty loose definition of rich to me. A quick glance says that at the 20% mark you're making about $100,000 for a family of four. That's certainly enough to be financially stable if you haven't made any dumb mistakes, but I don't think the average family at that income level has too much left to spare. I saw in a different comment you discussing things like credentialism and upward mobility, and certainly I'm in favor of policies that would encourage that, but I don't think there's that much 'wealth' to take from the top 20% for redistribution.
I don't think the problem (or the solution) is redistribution. To be clear, I am essentially just restating the arguments of Richard Reeves and David Brooks: see _Dream Hoarders_ and "How the Bobo's Broke America".
Because outside of the United States per capita GDP for the average individual is very, very low. Blue collar workers in places like El Salvador typically earn less than $1000 a month. When you aggregate across the entire globe you're taking the wealthiest individuals from places like Europe and the US and comparing them against garment workers in Bangladesh.
Taking on Rich Uncle Moneybags is about more than redistribution of wealth. To me the most crucial challenge is to open up markets to competition. For example: compounding pharmacies are not allowed to compete with big pharm on off patent drugs. It used to be possible to purchase many drugs through independent compounding pharmacies at substantially reduced costs. Not anymore.
A second, related question: "Would you share/hold a particular political opinion if the only outlet to express it required anonymity?" For lots of reasons both societal and technological, political positions have taken on an outsized role in the expression of self-identity. And that makes for really bad politics.
Seems a weird world in which a lot of progressives are so defeated that they focus all their energy on "wins" that are little more than mocking the king's silly hat.
If anything, the rush in every business to introduce poorly organised inclusion training has highlighted the points you make. We can all see the things they are happy to mention (here's a dumb book you can read as moral vitamins) and things they will never mention (wages, rights).
That's along with the fact that any potential benefits of inclusion training or people spending more time thinking about privilege or power is lost with the training's total lack of any coherent content or quality.
Everything is based on the most voguish social justice arguments, disability is almost entirely ignored because it's not as sexy as gender identity or race.
I'm Irish in the UK, and though we are basically the most privileged and invisible ethnic minority in this country, I was still amused when a friend told me he started a new bullshit job for large corporation and immediately after the unconscious bias video came a video about tech security in which the star of the show was an idiot Irish dude who kept losing USB sticks and sending emails to the wrong people, much to the consternation of his posh British colleagues, some of whom were POC.
Doesn’t really matter. It’s probably ok being Jewish in Germany these days but that wouldn’t justify an anti semitic training video, however mild.
That said I’ve seen some of those types of British produced videos and there’s always an idiot losing USB keys, using a simple password, tweeting company secrets etc. and most of them are English.
My dad, a school teacher travelling Britain with his then gf in the seventies was rounded up twice for having an Irish accent. Manchester and London I think. Still, as he says himself, it was a long trip so it was only twice in 3 months, and they didn’t rough him up that much.
I've said this for years, and I'll go one further. .
Uncle would prefer that we spend our energy on endless arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise questions about how the pie is sliced.
"If you’re looking around online for criticism of Musk, you’ll find more in terms of pure volume that engages in culture war..."
The issue isn't Rich Uncle Pennybags. It's the top 20-30% of the economy, the college educated professionals that run the media, shop at Whole Foods and pass idiot measures like bag fees that disproportionately impact the lower class.
Occupy Wall Street was a lie because it promulgated the fiction that it was the top 1% versus everybody else. For the top quartile of the economy money is not the problem--in fact wealth is precisely what they aspire to. On top of that although they haven't reached the same stratospheric heights as guys like Musk and Bezos they are actually fairly comfortable and are keen to secure their material gains.
That is why the betrayal of people like Musk and Bezos (or J.K. Rowling) stings so much for them. They should endorse the same progressive, woke shibboleths as everybody else in the book club or at Sunday brunch. When they don't the sense of betrayal is palpable and the result is the culture war nonsense.
There's a difference between the level of income which provides security and the level which causes massive distortions to the overall economy. As someone gets wealthier, there are basically two transitions that one goes through.
The first is material security - which is generally secured when you hit the top 20%-30% of the income spectrum. You no longer need to live paycheck to paycheck, and can put some money away in savings for retirement. However, most people in this income tranche are still wage workers. They might have enough of a cash cushion to be out of work for a year, but they ultimately need to continue working to keep up their standard of living. Indeed, large portions of the professional class work long hours within the U.S., due to non-enforcement of the 40-hour workweek for salaried individuals (unlike in Europe, for example).
But among true HNW individuals (with rare exceptions, such as actors/pro sports players/musicians who aren't good at saving money) you reach a point where income from investments exceeds income from wage work. At this point, work is basically optional, just something you do to keep busy. Indeed, it's difficult to even say how the living standards of someone with a net worth of $50 million, $500 million, and $5 billion are appreciably different. Sure, the top end can buy more high-value real estate with cash, but all of them could not work another day in their life, travel around the world vacationing, and their money would never run out. Once you get past a certain point, the accumulation of further wealth really just exists as part of a dick-measuring contest, and in order to exercise power. In the latter case I'm not even just talking about the dubious use of money in politics - vanity projects like an endowment to your alma mater to get a dorm after you, turning the land surrounding your estate into a nature reserve, or trying to fund a private manned mission to Mars are all fundamentally vanity projects which are only possible due to wealth.
The latter - the distorting influence that NHW individuals have on public policy - IMHO is enough of a reason to argue in favor of redistribution even though it's true that there's not enough wealth held by these individuals alone to fully eliminate poverty. When money = power, we should not have a system where some people have many orders of magnitude more power to influence the system than others.
I completely disagree. Look at class mobility. Why is it worse now than it has been in decades? Because, for example, secretarial jobs have been rebranded as "personal assistant" and now require a four year diploma.
Credentialism isn't something that Rich Uncle Moneybags came up with. It's a mechanism beloved by the top 30% of the economy because it ensures that only people that looks like them, graduates of four year colleges, get the good jobs. Shutting down the lower class to middle class pipeline is going to be a lot more consequential than anything the 1% ever dreamed up.
The decrease in class mobility is likely due to many different factors. People are way less likely to marry outside of their economic class than in the past for example, and greater economic opportunities for smart women mean there are way less people inheriting their moxie from a mother who wasn't allowed to achieve anything. Falling rates of immigration can also contribute, since immigrant families typically have the highest levels of initial economic mobility.
Ultimately if we ever found a way to achieve perfect "meritocracy" the result would probably be a caste system anyway. We'd have some perfect test which slotted everyone into the right job for their skillset. They would tend to marry someone of a similar occupational background, and (since all traits are somewhat heritable) their children would probably test into similar occupations.
I'm not really concerned with class mobility TBH. Even if a perfect meritocracy were possible, someone would have to be on the bottom, and those people would largely be there through no fault of their own - they just couldn't cut it because they lacked the traits needed to succeed. It is as cruel to let them wallow in poverty as it is to force a man in a wheelchair to climb up a flight of stairs. I'm way more concerned with making sure everyone at the "bottom" has a decent standard of living than trying to make the distribution towards the top more "fair."
Assortative mating is undoubtedly a factor in both class mobility as well as income inequality. That said just because something is a factor doesn't preclude the existence of other factors. In fact in a world where almost everything is multivariate just the opposite is true so an argument to include variables like immigration is not an argument to exclude factors like credentialism.
Plus how is assortative mating not symptomatic of class stratification as practiced by the college educated set? The problem is precisely that college educated graduates seek out and marry other college graduates. What about their kids? The increase in tuition costs means that a college education is increasingly out of reach of poor and lower middle class families. How best to cover that expense? Well, a college education provides a significant boost to lifetime earnings meaning that college graduates who marry other college graduates are in a privileged position when it comes to sending their offspring off to get a degree. How convenient.
Yes, inevitably somebody is going to end up at the bottom. But the number one factor when it comes to the quality of life for the working poor is how much their job pays. If the government decides to subsidize, for example, knowledge work such as big tech while it allows for the offshoring of factory work who benefits and who suffers?
I think college is a great swindle as it's practiced within the U.S., but as I replied to you upthread, I think fundamentally the swindle is against those who are within the top 30%, not the rest of the country. Random white-collar jobs were always looking for the top 30% of aptitude, meaning the exact same sort of people (intellectually speaking) occupied these jobs 100 years ago. It's just that now you're virtually expected to take on six-figure loans for the privilege of an entry-level position, which is a way greater level of oppression against those who have a shot of pricing into those jobs (whether or not they flame out) than those who had no such option (many of whom, frankly, would never have the skillset to do the work as well).
Again, we could wave a magic wand and create some unbiased IQ-like test that measures raw aptitude on the job, filtering out the legacy admissions who were idiots, and allowing the smart who didn't go to college to have a foot in the door. There would be mobility for a generation. Then what? Then the system becomes much less mobile. This is what happened in the UK, when the Labour Party reformed the educational system after World War II, creating high-stakes tests which were fairly meritocratic - but which resulted in essentially the entirety of the former base of Labour intelligencia moving into the middle class after two generations. Now the UK has low mobility, outside of new migrants, which is unfortunately to be expected.
I simply don't think a focus on class mobility is as important in terms of public policy as the question of how much we let wealth accumulate at the top, and where we set the bottom. Even if we could double or triple class mobility, there would still be essentially the same amount of winners and losers, taking economic growth into account. And I don't think that anyone is so "deserving" of failure that they should live a miserable life.
The question is whether or not a college degree is actually required to do the kind of work that requires college degrees. In the vast majority of cases the answer is no. Look at the rise of coding camps, where somebody with a degree in French or no degree whatsoever can train for three to six months and then move to a developer's position that can often earn six figures. If the alternative is forcing somebody to spend six figures in college tuition obviously that is going to have an impact on upper middle class families.
However those families are more likely than not now made up of two earners who are themselves college graduates. For those families that debt is at least surmountable. What about somebody who would like to be the first person in their family to attend college? How do they pay for it? At the very least an unbiased test that measured ability would allow those individuals from a poor background who do have the intellectual capacity to actually move up in the world.
Plus there are already tests that measure IQ and ability: the SAT and ACT. Isn't it interesting that the PMC are now doing their absolute best to get rid of those tests in favor of "holistic" admissions that, coincidentally, discriminate against the ethnic minority that performs the best on standardized testing?
Finally the issue with "dream hoarding" or the bobo's pulling up the draw bridge is not limited to class mobility. It obviously impacts income inequality and a growing cultural and political divide between the white collar professional class and everyone else. In terms of the actual impact on the country of billionaires versus the merely well of? It's not even close.
"The problem is precisely that college educated graduates seek out and marry other college graduates."
How is it a problem? I met my husband in grad school, and we fell in love with each other partly because we are both intellectuals who love science and care about having interesting, stimulating discussions with our partner. Should I have married a high school dropout for the sake of equity or something?
In a perfect world, yes. Look, way back when it wasn't unusual for somebody to marry their secretary. Your behavior is just one more symptom of an increasing class/income/cultural divide that is having serious repercussions for the country at large.
Do I blame you? Of course not. But looking at the increasing violence and polarization that is coming to mark American life I can't help but feel concern.
Agree with the goal, just don't agree with the rich uncle test. Musk is the perfect example of the people that you do want. How many people has Musk made rich? Way more than any redistributive effort ever could. So I agree with the basic idea that your politics should help people, especially the poor, but my idea on solutions go a different direction. Make it so we can have more Musks. Which seems paradoxical to people. One guess as to why is that many people see the economy is some sort of fixed pie that we are all fighting to slice up. Well, the pie isn't fixed, not even close. Make that pie grow and everyone gets more, even the poor. Put another way, for every billionaire that is created that means we have thousands more millionaires, 10's of thousands of 1/2 millionaires, etc down the list. And not just employees of Musk, I'm talking shareholders, his suppliers and yes, even his customers. If you could magically rip Musk and everything he has done out of our current world you'd make a lot of people poorer, and yes, even a lot of poor people would be poorer.
I hate to say "look to Scandinavia" but there's plenty of evidence that at least social democracy (which isn't socialism of course) does not hurt economic growth within the global capitalist system. These countries have lower salaries than the U.S. for doctors, lawyers, and the managerial class more broadly, but that class still works pretty much just as hard, and the general economy grows at a solid clip (better than much of the Eurozone in general).
If we can have solid economic growth while having a lower gap between the highest and lowest-paid workers, than the argument in favor of trickle-down vanishes entirely.
With the caveat that the defense budgets of the Scandinavian countries (and Europe in general) have been de facto subsidized by the US defense umbrella. Now that Russia is up and roaming around again while the US faces its own debt crisis current circumstances are probably not sustainable.
Not in Scandinavia, or at least Sweden and Finland. Their spending is higher than Europe, and they are not NATO members (yet).
US defence spending levels are not a goal for others, and shouldn't be. A lower level of than US spending should be, sufficient to meet defence needs. That level is higher than Europe's average, but likely lower than Finland's.
That is completely dependent on how likely you are to be invaded. I am guessing that right about now Ukraine sorely wishes it had spent a lot more money on a bigger standing army so that at least it would have trained soldiers to operate all that donated Western machinery.
That's great, but I still don't get why people care at all about the income gap. If the income gap mattered wouldn't countries with absurdly high income gaps be terrible places to live? The US has an absurdly high income gap and yet people still want to come here. I get how an income gap goes against our emotional attraction to fairness, but I think that is just our evolutionary fixed pie brain talking. We don't live in that world anymore.
The countries with the highest income inequality in the world actually are pretty terrible places to live: developing countries with high crime rates. Think South Africa, Colombia, Congo, Guatemala, etc. Most of the countries with moderate to low rates are in Europe (though it also includes Canada, Australia, NZ, etc.). Very few developing countries have low inequality. So yes, it's generally true that high income inequality is unequivocally bad; the U.S. somewhat bucks the trend by having relatively high living standards and fairly high inequality, which suggests we're wealthy in spite of, not because of, that inequality.
Yes, I should have added that the inequality should be due to a creative economy, not a Russian oligarch version. There are few examples of the creative version, but they are out there. Commenting from only a very limited knowledge of this sort of thing, I'd guess that strong property rights and rule of law are prerequisites. And if these are met I'd argue that overall wealth *and* high inequality will follow. I liked the book "Why Nations Fail", it has some good examples through history on how and why some nations get rich, and some don't.
If you look at the grand sweep of history, it's pretty clear that economic inequality is awful for social stability. This is even the case in U.S. history - the worst periods of social instability were always eras where the gap between the rich and the poor was the highest. The U.S. was close to its bloodiest ever around 1920, but by the 1940s, inequality had dropped, ad had violent labor unrest, lynchings, etc.
I’m not arguing that income inequality is a good thing, or that it causes good things. Im arguing that in the right time and place, for example the US right now, it’s not a bad thing. This discussion started with how we should try to prevent or throttle back rich uncle Elon. I’m arguing if we had 100 more of him yes, our income inequality would go up, but so would our overall wealth, even for the poorest. And I don’t think that would increase civil strife, when everyone gets richer together no one will care about inequality.
The question is why is the gap increasing? If it's because worker A gets a $20 raise and worker B gets a $1000 raise then who cares?
On the other hand if it's because worker A's job has been off shored to Mexico and he is now doing part time handyman work for $20k a year less that is a big, big problem.
Musk is an interesting study. They tried to go after him based on wealth and the idea that we shouldn't let "billionaires control media companies," but that sort of backfired when they were reminded how many billionaires do control their favorite media companies. So if they go after Musk on issues that might matter, they go after their own. So they are left to pick at him like a bunch of guinea hens pecking at a turkey (size is the analogy I'm going for--someone probably has something far better).
As much as I abhor the focus on personal bigotries to the exclusion of most else, I disagree that it hasn't been effective at mass action at scale.
However individual 'the work' is, collectively it's captured nearly every elite institution. It's a social revolution that fails let us name it (as you pointed out), and is easily the most sweeping social and political change in my 50 years.
The net effectiveness and utility of that movement and its changes is low in my opinion, but 'mass political action at scale' it certainly is.
It's change in a minority of the country at large because it has almost completely bypassed blue collar workers, who make up a majority of the country. That makes it uniquely vulnerable to a pendulum swing backwards.
In terms of income, yes, but not values. The change for blue collar families has been at least as great, but far more mixed, as it is inseparable from the efforts to pull up the ladder and shut down socioeconomic mobility.
Given the degree of elite capture, and its depths that go back decades, I see no mechanism for reversal in less than decades without political revolution. The pendulum is a bad metaphor, because it connotes a return to the same location, which is nigh impossible. Any backlash is more likely to lead to trimming some of the worst absurdities.
The last time this happened was in the 1980's and 1990's when political correctness basically tried to advance the same issues. Look at the list of banned words circulating right now on college campuses: they are identical to the same lists put out on those same campuses 30 years ago.
What happened when the PC wave of 30 years ago receded? As far as I can tell it pretty much vanished from mainstream society and survived only in academia.
Political correctness never disappeared or receded. It grew for a couple decades until it became ambient. It's the water we swim in today.
The list of banned words circulating campuses has grown since I first starting tracking them in 1991. We're on a euphemism treadmill, and behind the treadmill is a growing pile of discarded words.
Bill Clinton felt that he needed to execute a brain damaged black man as an electoral ploy.
Barack Obama famously opposed gay marriage because during the Bush presidency Karl Rove used it as a wedge issue to inflict electoral losses on the Democrats.
I also don't find it at all incongruent with anything that Presidents are politically strategic, assuming that was their only motive in these cases. Assuming Obama's motive is especially suspect. His support for gay marriage largely mirrored his country, perhaps at about the first standard deviation ahead of the mean. He was born about 1960, and the timing of his changing beliefs are in accordance with other Americans of the same age.
The wealthy elite (like those who get the invitations to Davos and the Aspen Ideas Festival) have done the Herculean task of convincing the world's lower classes (meaning the bottom 90%) of the following 3 things:
1) iIf you "bootstrap" yourself to wealth (ignoring things like inherited wealth, structural preferences, etc) you too might have the outlier chance to become a multi-millionaire/billionaire simply by willing yourself into the upper socio-economic stratosphere and therefor your wealth is not ill-begotten but self generated and deserved.
and/or
2) If you use the vast wealth (you single-handedly generated out of thin air of course) to fund think-tanks, trusts, non-profits, and endowments that lobby for your hobbies/interests or against the pet peeves/regulations that have bothered you since reading Ayn Rand or when the EPA fined you for dumping toxic chemicals in the neighborhood then your wealth is being put to better use than actually redistributing that wealth to employees, paying taxes, and investing in the common weal.
3) Ackshually, taking away the leveraged luxuries of the MM and Billionaire classes won't result in a better world because someone else will do what I did . We HAVE to externalize all the social costs of the extractive klepto-capitalism because if we didn't how would the wealthy elite continue their socio-economic dominance in the name of freedom.
I would add to your first point: Many in the leftist intellectual wing openly despise the working classes and their values, especially if the working class is white.
I agree. And not just the intellectual wing, even centre-left normies over here in the UK hate the working classes - and hate that they are allowed to think for themselves.
In every discussion about Brexit, or getting rid of the Tory government, all you see is people criticising 'all those idiots who were too stupid to see they were voting for the wrong thing', or something to that effect. Essentially, working class people who don't vote with them are too stupid and gullible. I'm not really sure how this attitude is going to persuade people to side with them, but I think they gave up on that a while ago. They just want someone to castigate and feel superior to.
You think voting for Democrats and dealing with unlimited supply of cheap labor is good for the working class? I dunno.... that ain't it chief.
I rarely write pure praise in the comments (BOOORING), but I wanted to here, because reinforcing this point for me and allowing me to put a conceptual framework around the idea had been by far the best benefit of this blog for me. Thank you for saying this (over and over)!
And now time to process a grievance with almost no chance of winning, because labor isn’t all roses and boss-rage. But it’s a process.
Good test. Maybe a better less populist question is "Does this action help that single mom and her kids at the bus stop headed to drop them at school and then off to work at Dunkin?"
Or more populist. I won't cede to the neoliberal effort to make "populism" a right-coded slur.
problem being "progressives" are rich too. they aren't looking to change the status quo, they are looking to ease their conscience for having joined the status quo.
Not as rich as rich uncle penny bags?
But there's a lot more of them and they work in public facing industries like the media so their impact is probably much greater.
Their impact on what?
Primarily class mobility. In the US it is the worst that it's been in decades. Why?
Look at journalism. Decades ago the most prominent names in the US were guys like Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, etc. Overwhelmingly people who did not have a college degree and who came from a blue collar background.
That is no longer the case. Over the past decade the percentage of journalists working in elite media outlets with degrees from Ivy League colleges and universities has soared. Do you just have a high school diploma but you can write? Good luck getting a job in journalism.
Credentialism isn't something that Rich Uncle Moneybags came up with. It's a mechanism beloved by the top 30% of the economy because it ensures that only people that looks like them, graduates of four year colleges, get the good jobs. Shutting down the lower class to middle class pipeline is going to be a lot more consequential than anything the 1% ever dreamed up.
Ultimately though, I don't think the "professionalization" of formerly working-class jobs is done in order to restrict competition or improve living standards. Remember that the living standards of regular journalists collapsed over the last few decades, even as the level of education required escalated, in part because even the requirements for a college degree are nowhere near enough to stop the flood of additional labor into the system. The old apprentice-based system arguably restricted the labor pool far more.
Who materially benefits from credentialization are the Wall Street billionaires who make money off of student loans. Arguably Big Ed as well, though a lot of the ever-escalating tuition is driven right back into various expenses which are (somewhat dubiously) intended to attract/retain students.
I never suggested that living standards were the issue. Just the opposite. A college degree confers an advantage in lifetime earnings but more college graduates do not raise aggregate GDP. Why? Because an executive assistant doesn't earn more than a secretary. In fact she is probably at an economic disadvantage because she had to pay for tuition for four years just to earn as much as a high school graduate of 30 years ago.
As for the argument that increased competition required increased credentialism let me point out that there's another standard that works just fine. That is whether or not somebody can write and has something interesting to say. The problem is that this second standard doesn't actually require a college degree, as writers like Breslin and Royko made clear in the past. How then to explain the precipitous rise in Ivy League degree holders working at elite media institutions? And how is the product? Is it substantially better than what the old high school grads used to put out? Or just the opposite?
A four year college degree is less and less of a guarantee of a good job these days.
Someone pointed out that college students from less privileged backgrounds use college less as a path to self-actualization and more to getting skills that can get them a job. Students from better-off backgrounds get their job training in grad school.
I think you're confusing 'progressives' with neoliberals.
I'm guessing that's why the quotation marks, but you're right.
Thx, I misunderstood what they were driving at with the quotes.
In my view, progressivism is about economic goals - raising wages, unionization, addressing the harmful effects of wealth inequality - as well as health-related ones like UHI. If the guy was implying that some are hijacking the label ('progressive') to push identity politics as a (bad) substitute, I agree. They're not progressives.
I think that's what he was implying, but it's much harder to tell in the written form.
Real progressivism has never been tried. Yeah, no. When the absolute best that the "real" progressives can come up with is rent control and other policies that don't even work in Norway, you're not dealing with serious people.
"Progressive" just means faster change from the status quo. These people are very comfortable with the status quo when it comes to the big things that would help everybody. In other words, real progressives would challenge Rich Uncle Moneybags, so if they don't, they're not really progressive.
I agree with that definition 100% and that's exactly why I'm not a progressive. Progressive used to mean GOOD change from the status quo. By your definition, Trump and the alt-right are progressive since they want to change things very quickly. Anyone who wants to break things is a progressive then, really, which is actually pretty consistent with the most visible "progressives". Which is exactly why the whole movement is filled with economic illiterates proposing legislature that has failed every time it has been tried.
Trump and the "alt-right" are actually more progressive in ways than the self-labelled progressives. But they want to go back to a former status quo, the days of smaller government and a workforce protected from globalism (if not from predatory employers).
But I'm not really in disagreement with you, though I would argue we have a lot of "broken" institutions in this country, many things we need to fix. It's just that the self-labelled progressives want to break things that aren't broken, like a multicultural society that is actually, finally learning to get along and find commonality.
Bingo. It's cool to be left-wing, so the rich invented a wealth-friendly version of being "radical."
maybe. i think many of them are the same people. boomer generation were very progressive in many ways, now very wealthy.
I agree that they genuine believe they are left-wing and radical
Bourgeois Bohemians, aka "bobos" - how do they work?
Cognitive dissonance or sheer deceit, self or otherwise.
As a matter of principle I agree, and at a younger age I used to agree wholeheartedly. At this point though I no longer consider this a good rule of thumb, because I no longer think there are very many zero sum tradeoffs between rich and poor people. Politics is about who you help, not who you hurt, and at the current juncture of technology and human institutions, it's mostly true that what's good for everyone is good for Wall Street. That's my read on the facts anyway. Perhaps I've been brainwashed by Tyler Cowen.
I should add, one doesn't have to like rich people in order to hold this view. Morally I have a fair bit of contempt for anyone who has anything approaching a billion dollars and doesn't give away the vast majority of it.
The left (me among them) thinks Wall Street shouldn’t exist (except maybe as an exchange facilitator service). What’s good for Wall Street is bad. What’s bad for Wall Street is good.
More precisely, much of what Wall Street sees as a threat to profits, is definitely a threat to profits. Strong unions, wealth taxes, universal healthcare, free college, strong environmental regulations, workplace safety, shorter hours, sick leave. On and on. People over profits.
How does the comment persuade anyone not already like you?
Oh I don't know. Just based on Krumm's short text there, I probably wouldn't consider myself to be akin to his Fight Club level of financial anti-establishmentism.
But his remarks stir something very old in me nonetheless. Ah, yes. It's that reminder that humanity has successfully built an entire existence in which, once you get to a certain level of wealth, your money starts making more money for you. That's the real difference between the haves and have-nots: those who actually work for money, and those who just continually reinvest their own money for more.
It never fails to amaze me (and terrify me) that most of the wealth in this world is little more than a highly sophisticated game of poker in which the house always wins. And that no matter how insane the betting, the house always gets bailed out by anyone not in the house. In this sense, existence itself is sort of a joke.
The real problem is that the top 9% is more than happy to sock it to the 1% percent while making sure nothing reaches the rest.
Let's try another thought experiment. What would happen if you destroyed Rich Uncle Pennybags - took all his wealth and redistributed it?
Who benefits?
Do we give a share of his wealth to everyone in the world, everyone in their home country, just the very poorest?
What benefits do the people get when we redistribute Elon Musk's wealth?
Elon Musk is worth approximately $150 billion. Take all his money and distribute it across 7.5 billion people - how much does each person get?
$ 20.00
What if you prevented a corporation from making any profit, or paying anyone a substantial amount of money to run an company that employs tens of thousands of people?
Who benefits from that?
If you took the 'excess' salary from the executives and distributed it to the workers, what additional benefits do they get?
Take a CEO making $ 10 million a year, strip her salary down to $ 250 K and redistribute the rest of her salary to the 40,000 employees of the company - how much extra money does each employee get?
$ 243.75.
But now, who is going to take on that responsibility for $ 250 K?
No one.
The global 1% collectively controls $26 trillion; the global 99% controls $16 trillion. So capturing and redistributing the wealth of the top 1% would be utterly transformative for the entire world. Your math is unimpressive.
The nice thing about math is it doesn't have to be impressive, it just has to be correct.
Say you could take the $ 26 trillion controlled by the 1% without destroying it? To do that, you'd have to leave it in it's current form - equity stakes in companies, bond holdings, real estate, etc. Trying to convert it into liquid assets would destroy the value of the wealth.
How do we redistribute this - do we give everyone a share in a mutual fund? If we do, each share is going to be worth $3,500. But, what are the poorest people in the world going to do with that? They can't eat it. So, they will sell it and buy the things they need to survive. Now, the purchaser will have twice the wealth of the average person, and the guy that he just bought the share from will have no wealth, and here we are, back to wealth inequality.
You suggested that there's no material difference in distributing the money of one guy. I pointed out that, in two years, the amount earned by 1% of the world was $10 trillion more than that earned by the other 99% of the world. Obviously, distributing ~$26 trillion to people who were getting buy on $16 trillion would be profoundly meaningful to that 99%. Now you're moving the goalposts. I'm unimpressed.
I apologize - I got confused by your use of the word wealth in your original response; apparently you meant income.
If we are redistributing income from the top 1% to the rest of the 99%, then the 99% end up with an additional $ 3,500 per year. For the very poorest, this would be transformative.
This wouldn't be practical, and it wouldn't be sustainable, but for as long as you could do this, it would change things.
I find these thought experiments where we just suddenly try to redistribute all wealth not very helpful. In reality anything we pursue would be a gradual process, done in gradual ways, that over time would attempt to create more equality than exists right now. That wouldn't destroy wealth, or the current system. We need to experiment with different ways of redistributing, pay attention to their effects, and pursue the most promising policies.
You're right that there is no way for everyone to be rich, or to remove all wealth inequality without destroying the way things currently work, and it is not wise to try to take all wealth from every rich person, but I don't find any of those objections to be a very persuasive case against pursuing policies that take power and resources from the rich and give it back to the poor.
Who qualifies as "rich" though? For writers like Richard Reeves or David Brooks the problem is increasingly the top 20-30% of the economy who have achieved some level of financial security and are now busily engaged in securing their advantage by freezing the economy and all its associated socioeconomic strata. There's a reason Reeves called his book "Dream Hoarders".
That seems like a pretty loose definition of rich to me. A quick glance says that at the 20% mark you're making about $100,000 for a family of four. That's certainly enough to be financially stable if you haven't made any dumb mistakes, but I don't think the average family at that income level has too much left to spare. I saw in a different comment you discussing things like credentialism and upward mobility, and certainly I'm in favor of policies that would encourage that, but I don't think there's that much 'wealth' to take from the top 20% for redistribution.
I don't think the problem (or the solution) is redistribution. To be clear, I am essentially just restating the arguments of Richard Reeves and David Brooks: see _Dream Hoarders_ and "How the Bobo's Broke America".
Because outside of the United States per capita GDP for the average individual is very, very low. Blue collar workers in places like El Salvador typically earn less than $1000 a month. When you aggregate across the entire globe you're taking the wealthiest individuals from places like Europe and the US and comparing them against garment workers in Bangladesh.
Taking on Rich Uncle Moneybags is about more than redistribution of wealth. To me the most crucial challenge is to open up markets to competition. For example: compounding pharmacies are not allowed to compete with big pharm on off patent drugs. It used to be possible to purchase many drugs through independent compounding pharmacies at substantially reduced costs. Not anymore.
The racial group that suffers the most from affirmative action is asians, often poor immigrants, not whites.
I think the Uncle question is spot on.
A second, related question: "Would you share/hold a particular political opinion if the only outlet to express it required anonymity?" For lots of reasons both societal and technological, political positions have taken on an outsized role in the expression of self-identity. And that makes for really bad politics.
Seems a weird world in which a lot of progressives are so defeated that they focus all their energy on "wins" that are little more than mocking the king's silly hat.
If anything, the rush in every business to introduce poorly organised inclusion training has highlighted the points you make. We can all see the things they are happy to mention (here's a dumb book you can read as moral vitamins) and things they will never mention (wages, rights).
That's along with the fact that any potential benefits of inclusion training or people spending more time thinking about privilege or power is lost with the training's total lack of any coherent content or quality.
Everything is based on the most voguish social justice arguments, disability is almost entirely ignored because it's not as sexy as gender identity or race.
I'm Irish in the UK, and though we are basically the most privileged and invisible ethnic minority in this country, I was still amused when a friend told me he started a new bullshit job for large corporation and immediately after the unconscious bias video came a video about tech security in which the star of the show was an idiot Irish dude who kept losing USB sticks and sending emails to the wrong people, much to the consternation of his posh British colleagues, some of whom were POC.
When my Irish uncle moved to England in the 70s, there were apparently still places that wouldn’t serve the Irish.
And I said, “well uncle paddy maybe it’s because you were drunk and pissed yourself!”
These days it's more an advantage than a disadvantage being Irish in England, ime.
Doesn’t really matter. It’s probably ok being Jewish in Germany these days but that wouldn’t justify an anti semitic training video, however mild.
That said I’ve seen some of those types of British produced videos and there’s always an idiot losing USB keys, using a simple password, tweeting company secrets etc. and most of them are English.
My dad, a school teacher travelling Britain with his then gf in the seventies was rounded up twice for having an Irish accent. Manchester and London I think. Still, as he says himself, it was a long trip so it was only twice in 3 months, and they didn’t rough him up that much.
My uncle lived in Liverpool. (His real name was Gerald.)
I am going to have to repeat my favorite line from a comedy movie ever:
"All right, we'll take the niggers and the chinks but we don't want the Irish."
I've said this for years, and I'll go one further. .
Uncle would prefer that we spend our energy on endless arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise questions about how the pie is sliced.
"If you’re looking around online for criticism of Musk, you’ll find more in terms of pure volume that engages in culture war..."
The issue isn't Rich Uncle Pennybags. It's the top 20-30% of the economy, the college educated professionals that run the media, shop at Whole Foods and pass idiot measures like bag fees that disproportionately impact the lower class.
Occupy Wall Street was a lie because it promulgated the fiction that it was the top 1% versus everybody else. For the top quartile of the economy money is not the problem--in fact wealth is precisely what they aspire to. On top of that although they haven't reached the same stratospheric heights as guys like Musk and Bezos they are actually fairly comfortable and are keen to secure their material gains.
That is why the betrayal of people like Musk and Bezos (or J.K. Rowling) stings so much for them. They should endorse the same progressive, woke shibboleths as everybody else in the book club or at Sunday brunch. When they don't the sense of betrayal is palpable and the result is the culture war nonsense.
There's a difference between the level of income which provides security and the level which causes massive distortions to the overall economy. As someone gets wealthier, there are basically two transitions that one goes through.
The first is material security - which is generally secured when you hit the top 20%-30% of the income spectrum. You no longer need to live paycheck to paycheck, and can put some money away in savings for retirement. However, most people in this income tranche are still wage workers. They might have enough of a cash cushion to be out of work for a year, but they ultimately need to continue working to keep up their standard of living. Indeed, large portions of the professional class work long hours within the U.S., due to non-enforcement of the 40-hour workweek for salaried individuals (unlike in Europe, for example).
But among true HNW individuals (with rare exceptions, such as actors/pro sports players/musicians who aren't good at saving money) you reach a point where income from investments exceeds income from wage work. At this point, work is basically optional, just something you do to keep busy. Indeed, it's difficult to even say how the living standards of someone with a net worth of $50 million, $500 million, and $5 billion are appreciably different. Sure, the top end can buy more high-value real estate with cash, but all of them could not work another day in their life, travel around the world vacationing, and their money would never run out. Once you get past a certain point, the accumulation of further wealth really just exists as part of a dick-measuring contest, and in order to exercise power. In the latter case I'm not even just talking about the dubious use of money in politics - vanity projects like an endowment to your alma mater to get a dorm after you, turning the land surrounding your estate into a nature reserve, or trying to fund a private manned mission to Mars are all fundamentally vanity projects which are only possible due to wealth.
The latter - the distorting influence that NHW individuals have on public policy - IMHO is enough of a reason to argue in favor of redistribution even though it's true that there's not enough wealth held by these individuals alone to fully eliminate poverty. When money = power, we should not have a system where some people have many orders of magnitude more power to influence the system than others.
I completely disagree. Look at class mobility. Why is it worse now than it has been in decades? Because, for example, secretarial jobs have been rebranded as "personal assistant" and now require a four year diploma.
Credentialism isn't something that Rich Uncle Moneybags came up with. It's a mechanism beloved by the top 30% of the economy because it ensures that only people that looks like them, graduates of four year colleges, get the good jobs. Shutting down the lower class to middle class pipeline is going to be a lot more consequential than anything the 1% ever dreamed up.
The decrease in class mobility is likely due to many different factors. People are way less likely to marry outside of their economic class than in the past for example, and greater economic opportunities for smart women mean there are way less people inheriting their moxie from a mother who wasn't allowed to achieve anything. Falling rates of immigration can also contribute, since immigrant families typically have the highest levels of initial economic mobility.
Ultimately if we ever found a way to achieve perfect "meritocracy" the result would probably be a caste system anyway. We'd have some perfect test which slotted everyone into the right job for their skillset. They would tend to marry someone of a similar occupational background, and (since all traits are somewhat heritable) their children would probably test into similar occupations.
I'm not really concerned with class mobility TBH. Even if a perfect meritocracy were possible, someone would have to be on the bottom, and those people would largely be there through no fault of their own - they just couldn't cut it because they lacked the traits needed to succeed. It is as cruel to let them wallow in poverty as it is to force a man in a wheelchair to climb up a flight of stairs. I'm way more concerned with making sure everyone at the "bottom" has a decent standard of living than trying to make the distribution towards the top more "fair."
Assortative mating is undoubtedly a factor in both class mobility as well as income inequality. That said just because something is a factor doesn't preclude the existence of other factors. In fact in a world where almost everything is multivariate just the opposite is true so an argument to include variables like immigration is not an argument to exclude factors like credentialism.
Plus how is assortative mating not symptomatic of class stratification as practiced by the college educated set? The problem is precisely that college educated graduates seek out and marry other college graduates. What about their kids? The increase in tuition costs means that a college education is increasingly out of reach of poor and lower middle class families. How best to cover that expense? Well, a college education provides a significant boost to lifetime earnings meaning that college graduates who marry other college graduates are in a privileged position when it comes to sending their offspring off to get a degree. How convenient.
Yes, inevitably somebody is going to end up at the bottom. But the number one factor when it comes to the quality of life for the working poor is how much their job pays. If the government decides to subsidize, for example, knowledge work such as big tech while it allows for the offshoring of factory work who benefits and who suffers?
I think college is a great swindle as it's practiced within the U.S., but as I replied to you upthread, I think fundamentally the swindle is against those who are within the top 30%, not the rest of the country. Random white-collar jobs were always looking for the top 30% of aptitude, meaning the exact same sort of people (intellectually speaking) occupied these jobs 100 years ago. It's just that now you're virtually expected to take on six-figure loans for the privilege of an entry-level position, which is a way greater level of oppression against those who have a shot of pricing into those jobs (whether or not they flame out) than those who had no such option (many of whom, frankly, would never have the skillset to do the work as well).
Again, we could wave a magic wand and create some unbiased IQ-like test that measures raw aptitude on the job, filtering out the legacy admissions who were idiots, and allowing the smart who didn't go to college to have a foot in the door. There would be mobility for a generation. Then what? Then the system becomes much less mobile. This is what happened in the UK, when the Labour Party reformed the educational system after World War II, creating high-stakes tests which were fairly meritocratic - but which resulted in essentially the entirety of the former base of Labour intelligencia moving into the middle class after two generations. Now the UK has low mobility, outside of new migrants, which is unfortunately to be expected.
I simply don't think a focus on class mobility is as important in terms of public policy as the question of how much we let wealth accumulate at the top, and where we set the bottom. Even if we could double or triple class mobility, there would still be essentially the same amount of winners and losers, taking economic growth into account. And I don't think that anyone is so "deserving" of failure that they should live a miserable life.
The question is whether or not a college degree is actually required to do the kind of work that requires college degrees. In the vast majority of cases the answer is no. Look at the rise of coding camps, where somebody with a degree in French or no degree whatsoever can train for three to six months and then move to a developer's position that can often earn six figures. If the alternative is forcing somebody to spend six figures in college tuition obviously that is going to have an impact on upper middle class families.
However those families are more likely than not now made up of two earners who are themselves college graduates. For those families that debt is at least surmountable. What about somebody who would like to be the first person in their family to attend college? How do they pay for it? At the very least an unbiased test that measured ability would allow those individuals from a poor background who do have the intellectual capacity to actually move up in the world.
Plus there are already tests that measure IQ and ability: the SAT and ACT. Isn't it interesting that the PMC are now doing their absolute best to get rid of those tests in favor of "holistic" admissions that, coincidentally, discriminate against the ethnic minority that performs the best on standardized testing?
Finally the issue with "dream hoarding" or the bobo's pulling up the draw bridge is not limited to class mobility. It obviously impacts income inequality and a growing cultural and political divide between the white collar professional class and everyone else. In terms of the actual impact on the country of billionaires versus the merely well of? It's not even close.
"The problem is precisely that college educated graduates seek out and marry other college graduates."
How is it a problem? I met my husband in grad school, and we fell in love with each other partly because we are both intellectuals who love science and care about having interesting, stimulating discussions with our partner. Should I have married a high school dropout for the sake of equity or something?
In a perfect world, yes. Look, way back when it wasn't unusual for somebody to marry their secretary. Your behavior is just one more symptom of an increasing class/income/cultural divide that is having serious repercussions for the country at large.
Do I blame you? Of course not. But looking at the increasing violence and polarization that is coming to mark American life I can't help but feel concern.
Only after the millionaires are vanquished can the billionaires be dealt with.
Agree with the goal, just don't agree with the rich uncle test. Musk is the perfect example of the people that you do want. How many people has Musk made rich? Way more than any redistributive effort ever could. So I agree with the basic idea that your politics should help people, especially the poor, but my idea on solutions go a different direction. Make it so we can have more Musks. Which seems paradoxical to people. One guess as to why is that many people see the economy is some sort of fixed pie that we are all fighting to slice up. Well, the pie isn't fixed, not even close. Make that pie grow and everyone gets more, even the poor. Put another way, for every billionaire that is created that means we have thousands more millionaires, 10's of thousands of 1/2 millionaires, etc down the list. And not just employees of Musk, I'm talking shareholders, his suppliers and yes, even his customers. If you could magically rip Musk and everything he has done out of our current world you'd make a lot of people poorer, and yes, even a lot of poor people would be poorer.
I hate to say "look to Scandinavia" but there's plenty of evidence that at least social democracy (which isn't socialism of course) does not hurt economic growth within the global capitalist system. These countries have lower salaries than the U.S. for doctors, lawyers, and the managerial class more broadly, but that class still works pretty much just as hard, and the general economy grows at a solid clip (better than much of the Eurozone in general).
If we can have solid economic growth while having a lower gap between the highest and lowest-paid workers, than the argument in favor of trickle-down vanishes entirely.
With the caveat that the defense budgets of the Scandinavian countries (and Europe in general) have been de facto subsidized by the US defense umbrella. Now that Russia is up and roaming around again while the US faces its own debt crisis current circumstances are probably not sustainable.
Not in Scandinavia, or at least Sweden and Finland. Their spending is higher than Europe, and they are not NATO members (yet).
US defence spending levels are not a goal for others, and shouldn't be. A lower level of than US spending should be, sufficient to meet defence needs. That level is higher than Europe's average, but likely lower than Finland's.
That is completely dependent on how likely you are to be invaded. I am guessing that right about now Ukraine sorely wishes it had spent a lot more money on a bigger standing army so that at least it would have trained soldiers to operate all that donated Western machinery.
That's great, but I still don't get why people care at all about the income gap. If the income gap mattered wouldn't countries with absurdly high income gaps be terrible places to live? The US has an absurdly high income gap and yet people still want to come here. I get how an income gap goes against our emotional attraction to fairness, but I think that is just our evolutionary fixed pie brain talking. We don't live in that world anymore.
The countries with the highest income inequality in the world actually are pretty terrible places to live: developing countries with high crime rates. Think South Africa, Colombia, Congo, Guatemala, etc. Most of the countries with moderate to low rates are in Europe (though it also includes Canada, Australia, NZ, etc.). Very few developing countries have low inequality. So yes, it's generally true that high income inequality is unequivocally bad; the U.S. somewhat bucks the trend by having relatively high living standards and fairly high inequality, which suggests we're wealthy in spite of, not because of, that inequality.
Yes, I should have added that the inequality should be due to a creative economy, not a Russian oligarch version. There are few examples of the creative version, but they are out there. Commenting from only a very limited knowledge of this sort of thing, I'd guess that strong property rights and rule of law are prerequisites. And if these are met I'd argue that overall wealth *and* high inequality will follow. I liked the book "Why Nations Fail", it has some good examples through history on how and why some nations get rich, and some don't.
If you look at the grand sweep of history, it's pretty clear that economic inequality is awful for social stability. This is even the case in U.S. history - the worst periods of social instability were always eras where the gap between the rich and the poor was the highest. The U.S. was close to its bloodiest ever around 1920, but by the 1940s, inequality had dropped, ad had violent labor unrest, lynchings, etc.
I’m not arguing that income inequality is a good thing, or that it causes good things. Im arguing that in the right time and place, for example the US right now, it’s not a bad thing. This discussion started with how we should try to prevent or throttle back rich uncle Elon. I’m arguing if we had 100 more of him yes, our income inequality would go up, but so would our overall wealth, even for the poorest. And I don’t think that would increase civil strife, when everyone gets richer together no one will care about inequality.
The question is why is the gap increasing? If it's because worker A gets a $20 raise and worker B gets a $1000 raise then who cares?
On the other hand if it's because worker A's job has been off shored to Mexico and he is now doing part time handyman work for $20k a year less that is a big, big problem.
I’m arguing the former case, for sure. The latter case is bad, but your not going to fix it by preventing the former.
Musk is an interesting study. They tried to go after him based on wealth and the idea that we shouldn't let "billionaires control media companies," but that sort of backfired when they were reminded how many billionaires do control their favorite media companies. So if they go after Musk on issues that might matter, they go after their own. So they are left to pick at him like a bunch of guinea hens pecking at a turkey (size is the analogy I'm going for--someone probably has something far better).
As much as I abhor the focus on personal bigotries to the exclusion of most else, I disagree that it hasn't been effective at mass action at scale.
However individual 'the work' is, collectively it's captured nearly every elite institution. It's a social revolution that fails let us name it (as you pointed out), and is easily the most sweeping social and political change in my 50 years.
The net effectiveness and utility of that movement and its changes is low in my opinion, but 'mass political action at scale' it certainly is.
It's change in a minority of the country at large because it has almost completely bypassed blue collar workers, who make up a majority of the country. That makes it uniquely vulnerable to a pendulum swing backwards.
In terms of income, yes, but not values. The change for blue collar families has been at least as great, but far more mixed, as it is inseparable from the efforts to pull up the ladder and shut down socioeconomic mobility.
Given the degree of elite capture, and its depths that go back decades, I see no mechanism for reversal in less than decades without political revolution. The pendulum is a bad metaphor, because it connotes a return to the same location, which is nigh impossible. Any backlash is more likely to lead to trimming some of the worst absurdities.
The last time this happened was in the 1980's and 1990's when political correctness basically tried to advance the same issues. Look at the list of banned words circulating right now on college campuses: they are identical to the same lists put out on those same campuses 30 years ago.
What happened when the PC wave of 30 years ago receded? As far as I can tell it pretty much vanished from mainstream society and survived only in academia.
Political correctness never disappeared or receded. It grew for a couple decades until it became ambient. It's the water we swim in today.
The list of banned words circulating campuses has grown since I first starting tracking them in 1991. We're on a euphemism treadmill, and behind the treadmill is a growing pile of discarded words.
Bill Clinton felt that he needed to execute a brain damaged black man as an electoral ploy.
Barack Obama famously opposed gay marriage because during the Bush presidency Karl Rove used it as a wedge issue to inflict electoral losses on the Democrats.
How woke is that?
I don't see a thesis.
I also don't find it at all incongruent with anything that Presidents are politically strategic, assuming that was their only motive in these cases. Assuming Obama's motive is especially suspect. His support for gay marriage largely mirrored his country, perhaps at about the first standard deviation ahead of the mean. He was born about 1960, and the timing of his changing beliefs are in accordance with other Americans of the same age.
The wealthy elite (like those who get the invitations to Davos and the Aspen Ideas Festival) have done the Herculean task of convincing the world's lower classes (meaning the bottom 90%) of the following 3 things:
1) iIf you "bootstrap" yourself to wealth (ignoring things like inherited wealth, structural preferences, etc) you too might have the outlier chance to become a multi-millionaire/billionaire simply by willing yourself into the upper socio-economic stratosphere and therefor your wealth is not ill-begotten but self generated and deserved.
and/or
2) If you use the vast wealth (you single-handedly generated out of thin air of course) to fund think-tanks, trusts, non-profits, and endowments that lobby for your hobbies/interests or against the pet peeves/regulations that have bothered you since reading Ayn Rand or when the EPA fined you for dumping toxic chemicals in the neighborhood then your wealth is being put to better use than actually redistributing that wealth to employees, paying taxes, and investing in the common weal.
3) Ackshually, taking away the leveraged luxuries of the MM and Billionaire classes won't result in a better world because someone else will do what I did . We HAVE to externalize all the social costs of the extractive klepto-capitalism because if we didn't how would the wealthy elite continue their socio-economic dominance in the name of freedom.