Michael O Church’s Theory of 3 Class Ladders in America (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Michael O Church’s Theory of 3 Class Ladders in America (2017)

indiepf.com

54 pointsmpweiher20 comments

I found this to be really interesting and appealing (as did, probably, most people on this site), but I can't look past how incredibly subjective and biased it is. No actual data is cited anywhere; the only subject expert even mentioned is Malthus. Therefore as much sense as it makes from my own anecdotal perspective, I'm hesitant to take it seriously.

There are a couple things about this perspective that don't sit right with me. It's heavy on detail but low on facts. And most of it is an attempt to pidgeonhole massive quantities of people into 13 groups "based on what [the author has] seen, and [the author's] limited understanding of the macroeconomics of income in the United States."

The bit that made me kind of boggle my eyes was this:

>These are the very rich, powerful, and deeply uncultured barbarians from all over the world who start wars in the Middle East for sport, make asses of themselves in American casinos, rape ski bunnies at Davos, and run the world

It's harmful to describe the behavior of ~60,000 people (or ~60,000 of anything really) so specifically. Globally, the struggle for power is a free-for-all even at the highest levels of play. Even in America, super-wealth does not automatically make someone the bastard spawn of hitler and skeletor. The Rockefeller Family Fund and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund have both divested from fossil fuels, and the family as a whole (even John Sr.) has made massive contributions to conserving America's wilderness.

I don't see what this article adds to the discussion of how power works and how it can be harnessed to produce socially optimal outcomes.

I sort of like the underlying idea but this guy is doing his damnedist to turn it into horoscopes. Is there a better analysis of this idea somewhere?

I think it's probably best taken as an interesting thought exercise, not a study.

> The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is one of open rivalry, and that between the Gentry and Labor is one of distrust. What about Labor and the Elite? That one is not symmetric. The Elite exploit and despise Labor as a class comprised mostly of “useful idiots”. How does Labor see the Elite? They don’t. The Elite has managed to convince Labor that the Gentry (who are open about their cultural elitism, while the Elite hides its social and economic elitism) is the actual “liberal elite” responsible for Labor’s misery over the past 30 years. In effect, the Elite has constructed an “infinity pool” where the Elite appears to be a hyper-successful extension of Labor, lumping these two disparate ladders into an “us” and placing the Gentry and Underclass into “them”.

This is the most interesting piece for me; the idea that there are several social classes, with distinct values and their own internal tiers, is not exactly a new thought, so let's proceed with the idea that everyone is on a ladder, and everyone struggles towards the top of their ladder--occasionally jumping between ladders, but not very often. Given that view of life, this is a nice synopsis of how, even in a democracy, the privileges of ownership and control of such things as media networks and financial institutions allows the elite to stabilize the class structure at the top by obscuring the true distribution of wealth and playing the cultural/educational differences of the lower classes off of one-another to create strife and political inaction.

I think the question it poses to us now is if some of these new technologies we're creating--global financial systems that allow instant transfer of cash, social networks that both connect and isolate, personalized content which fulfills marketable desires but also beguiles rational thought--are these tools of the creative class, and infrastructure which will raise up the labor class? Or rather tools of the elite? And the challenge to us is to create tools which provide the same freedoms and low transactional costs, but are very hard to be used as a corruptive force.

This is a decent, somewhat superficial, look into class in America from an ex googler. It’s simple and proves a nice read to understanding how class works.

It is indeed very american-centric while presenting itself a number of times as applicable everywhere. I don't think it is: for example, I don't think many western European would be able to sort themselves into any of his categories.

It's clearly focused on American ladders. I would expect that other countries/societies would have different L/G/E ladders, but most would connect at his E1 level. (For example, in China, E2 would actually consist of people with generational connections to the party, rather than generational connections to money.)

This isn't very dialectical.

Should it be?

Ideally, yes. It goes a long way to keeping the arguments grounded in reality and avoiding strawman fallacies (not implying that any of that occurred in this article).

Seems like dialectical arguments are highly reliant on strawmen, pretty much by definition.

I disagree. I think in this topic, you often have to ignore a ton of side channel counterpoints to get a fully fledged theory out that spans a wide enough set of phenomena to be useful.

After reading this, and recognizing that of course it’s not going to be a perfect analysis or perfect theory, then it would be good to create dialectical discussions and rejoinders that bring back in various specific side channel topics or disagreements with the overall theory.

If you tried going in a point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint manner through such a huge topic, you’ll get derailed by the million ways to bikeshed about different phenomena that the theory doesn’t perfectly account for, or predictions it makes which you dispute, and often the derailing will get political and super unproductive and zap the energy out of the bigger picture.

I think an essay like this is the right way to do it. Comprehensive, start from first principles, make the terms clear, and draw it to a full completion of the predictions or analysis you want to make.

Then rejoinders can easily proceed dialectically with counterpoints to specific parts, and the whole thing is much more organized, and side channel counterpoints have a prayer of getting discussed without it becoming loopy, unproductive politics.

I agree, I think it helps to treat theories like this as just one model for looking at society in a particular way. It's not the one and only model, and it's not prescriptive or perfect. It's a lens that lets us focus on its key theme - different types of high-level values and how they interact to shape society. It's a handy tool I'll put in my mental toolbox but it's not going to become my Swiss army knife.

It's trialectial...

The Asquith quote applies:

"I wish I knew as much about anything as that young man knows about everything."

Really, to Michael O'Church?

Maybe you wish you though you knew as much.

Does he have an accomplishment other than stirring the pot with Google and PG?

A lot of quora points.

If LARPing on Quora counts as an accomplishment...

You know he's pulling most of that stuff out of thin air, right?

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