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Comment by rehasu | Hacker News Reader

My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now. They are the glue that brings stability to any organization, they are what keeps to energetic lower layer people from gaining power from crazy ideas, and they are the first to get blamed when a crazy idea from the top management layer fails. Do you see differences between that statement and your experience?

And the real question I want to ask: Do you feel that especially the middlest of managers have to fear AI the most, because AI could theoretically replace exactly that middle layer and do it even better than a human could?

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AI will not replace the middle manager any time soon. Their job is too general and not specific enough to be solved by AI. Some of the tasks they do like scheduling can be aided by AI and have been aided by scheduling software but that doesn't mean AI could do their whole job. Stuff like talking to people about how they are getting along and helping develop and grow the people on the layer below them is something a good manager should be doing and something that would be foolish to replace with a system that has no humanity. See also defusing team conflicts and keeping up morale.

The problem is your reference is some kind of broken organisation where people are basically slave labour and managers only serve to dish out the work given from above. Sure bad managers of that description could be replaced by a good AI in the future but that would be awful because a good manager brings vitality to a team, helps individual team members and helps to filter and promote ideas up and down the organisation.

> My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now.

The middle class really isn't any less powerful today. Near as I can tell what happened isn't that the middle class became less powerful, but that journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class so they spread the perception that the middle class has lost its power because they themselves feel like they have lost power, especially economic power.

I suspect that society is most likely perceived as most stable when those with megaphones and that buy ink by the barrel feel most stable.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/th...

Are you suggesting that skyrocketing education, housing, and medical care costs in proportion to stagnant wages for most people resulting in less economic security and mobility for the next generation is not real?

"journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class"

For most of the history of journalism in the U.S., journalists were not in the "upper middle class". Journalism was a poorly paid working class job for most of the 20th century. Maybe a couple decades at the end of it different.

That low pay serves as a gatekeeping mechanism so poor people can't survive on that career. On the other hand, journalists have a disproportionate influence over public discourse, now tightly controlled by the elite class.

Or maybe it's the reverse, because the field has high prestige and impact, it attracts upper class children who don't need the salary, causing a downward pressure for journalist wages.

Idealistic professions done "for the greater good" typically struggle. These days, anyone with internet access can do low-paid writing through various services or publish their own thoughts via a blog or social media. There has been tremendous downward pressure on writing and many local papers have closed, among other things.

Eh, I don't think that's what was actually going on for most of the 20th century. Journalist was not a prestigious job, it was in fact done by working class people. I think. It's instead a new thing that journalism is dominated by "elites".

"How journalism became a middle class profession for university graduates": https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2009/jul/21/new...

"The death of the working class reporter": https://blog.usejournal.com/the-death-of-the-working-class-r...

The original claim I was challenging was "journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class" -- I don't think they ever were, it's possible that MORE of them are now than previous -- as you say, even as salaries drop.

> "The death of the working class reporter"

This article is just standard journalistic myth-making. The journalists cited as examples of success without college degrees, Carl Bernstein and Walter Cronkite (who both went to college, just dropped out), came from privileged backgrounds just like the privileged kids who fill the industy today.

> public discourse, now tightly controlled by the elite class.

Maybe 10-15 years ago that was true, but today the control of public discourse is no longer controlled by the elite class. Blogging completely ended that control.

Lots of “journalists” are people who established themselves outside of journalism and then transferred in.

Journalists for the most prestigious outlets (NYTimes, WaPo, Newsweek, Time Magazine, etc) certainly did well for themselves. At secondary institutions it was a solid middle class job.

Now because of blogging and commodification of the news, the money is no longer in journalism but in clickbait and it's a race to the bottom.

This article about the decline of Newsweek does a good job chronicling what is happening at news media companies all over the world:

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/newsweek.php

Journalists now find themselves among the precariat, especially those in the long tail of journalism working at clickbait factories like Business Insider, HuffPo, Jezebel, etc. News media is now a gig industry job.

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