I’ve written some version of this post every five-ish years for as long as I’ve been blogging. I do so because I think it’s an essential point that, unfortunately, is out of fashion in progressive circles, thanks to the obsession with interpersonal bigotries as the predominant concern of left-of-center politics.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.