The Two Middle Classes
quillette.com
quillette.com
A large part of that may be due to availability. In 1959 (closest year to 1960 I found data for [1]), 6% of US women had degrees, and 10.3% of men.
If every person wanted to marry someone with a degree, there would only be enough women with degrees for about 60% of men with degrees to marry women with degrees.
If the actual number was 25%, then men with degrees were marrying women with degrees about 42% as often as was theoretically possible.
In 2005, it was 26.5% of women and 28.9% of men with degrees, allowing in theory for about 93% of men with degrees to marry women with degrees, if everyone with a degree wanted to marry someone else with a degree.
If it is actually 48%, then men with degrees were marrying women with degrees about 52% as often as was theoretically possible, up from 42% in 1959.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...
First, I do think it's ridiculous that he takes it as a given that Oligarchs favour climate policy. Yes, I can see how someone can point to Musk and .... I dunno Al Gore? and try to make the point, but for every Musk-a-like, there are many dozens of rich people very deeply vested in the fossil industry. I don't think any serious survey of the financial interests of the global superrich will support this view.
Second, while he alludes to the lack of homeownership amongst the young the fact that the single biggest cost-of-living expense (and it's incredible growth during the last decade) is large controlled by his embattled "yeomanry" gets ignored. It very much complicates his story to realize that his supposed victims are in fact profiting handsomely and generally cause much pain to the supposedly superior "clerisy". Just think of the typical academic renting from an older person in any large city today and you get a good sense of how wrong his story is.
> I don't think any serious survey of the financial interests of the global superrich will support this view.
There is a subtlety here - one possible outcome is oligarchs cynically favouring climate policy while simultaneously having deep vested interests in fossil fuels.
The article isn't saying that the oligarchs want to do anything about climate change; the idea is that they are very keen on the principle of using centralised power to control others and will attach the things they want controlled to climate policies as implemented.
If I owned an oil company then backbreaking legislation that means nobody can start a new oil company would be strategically interesting; for example. Big companies don't fight regulation tooth and nail. They accept the regulation then lobby for loopholes that favour them and restrictions that disadvantage competition.
It is, in fact, rare to see a corporation moving to deregulate industries. They often fight changes, but rarely organise to reverse reverse things once they are in compliance with new rules.
As for the oligarchs, there are certainly wealthy individuals entrenched in the traditional fossil fuel industries, but the number of these individuals is dwarfed by the oligarchs in Media, Finance, Government, Technology etc, who are much farther removed both in business and culture from traditional modes of energy production and as such are able to take and advocate for radical positions on environmental policy without regard to the consequences for the "yeomanry".
This story plays out across the spectrum of issues that society contends with today. In general, sometimes for the same and sometimes for different reasons, elites in the corporate world and also members of the "clerisy" both desire a breakdown of traditional society to further their own agendas. In the case of the former that agenda is defined by profit seeking and in the case of the latter it is defined by philosophical and social beliefs.
So you see, I think while this piece is vague and steps on its own toes at points, it is addressing a real conflict that exists and is growing in contemporary society.
Weather or not some rich people are using these people by manipulating them is another question
Is the ad superficial, meaningless bullshit? Of course.
But the presence of hypocritical financial interests is irrelevant. Or rather, it supports the thesis that the clerisy are interested in power rather than actual morality.
Regarding the poor academics, the conflict between members of the middle class is the point of the article.
Tenured professors v. adjuncts might be the best possible example of the authors point.
In short, it's a propaganda piece for that operation - designed to set up fake anti-intellectual resentment against a group with very little political influence.
The reality is that far from setting climate policy, social policy, or economic policy, left-wing academics and scientists have to fight tooth and nail to create any policy push back at all against the distorting influence of this organised and toxic lie machine.
Corporate and political power is under no serious threat from this academic "clerisy". Suggesting they're somehow complicit with the interests of oppressive oligarchs, especially about climate change, is so far from the truth it's practically crank talk, and is also - conveniently - a stock variation on the old trope that climate scientists are only in it for the money, while brave and noble fossil fuel corporations are there to help protect innocent citizens from their corrupting influence.
Piketty may be many things, but right wing is not one of them.
It also tries to cast the left middle class as allies of the oligarchy by bringing populist green energy fearmongering, without mentioning that it is in fact fossil fuels that a) enrich and entrench the oligarchy, and b) reinforce centralized infrastructure tendencies over distributed ones. Lots of communities have space for renewable energy generation on-site; almost no communities could produce their own fossil fuels.
Finally, scarcity drives most of the forces that oligarchs benefit from, so naturally the oligarchy wants us to stay on fossil fuels. Renewables are the populist, conservative solution that’s better for families and communities than for corporations, but the mega-rich right-wing fossil fuel magnates have fooled their poorer and less-educated right-wing compatriots into thinking otherwise.
> A remarkable 57 percent of people who owned their own home supported Johnson compared to barely 22 percent for Labour.
This analysis is deeply superficial. Let me suggest a trivial alternative to the suggested interpretation: that people are more likely to own a home as they grow older, and that the primary division between Conservative and Labour voters in the last election was by age.
e.g. https://twitter.com/drmuig/status/1205796472194830336
Now, my writing this doesn't prove my claim, but I've already demonstrated an alternative take on political "allegiance" that seems at least as likely as the groupings suggested in the article.
It's lovely to wave one's hands around like this Quillette article does, painting broad strokes and telling big stories. But the handful of citations at the end do almost nothing to prop up his story, which while not implausible, really needs more substantial evidence to make it believable.
Instead, what we have is a attempt to separate out the middle class into left and right sections. I don't really see it.
> No president has ever incurred the wrath of the clerisy—the media, the entertainment industry, academia—more than Donald Trump. But Trump retains record support among the small business people on Main Street, particularly in the manufacturing and energy-dependent parts of the country.
Perhaps the author has failed to see the split between "mainstream" media and right-wing media over the last decade, and the massive reach the right-wing media has these days - with the largest cable news shows, the largest radio news/commentary shows, and frequently the most interactions on social media. One could reasonably conclude there is a "right" clerisy, with academia replaced by think-tanks, that is very competitive with the "left" version he defines, though this might cause problems with his entire premise.
> The climatistas’ appeal is not likely to improve as they increasingly advocate the elimination of ownership of single-family houses...
Ah yes, the proposals of a single random professor does seem like a good representation of a "climate-friendly density regime".
There's other issues to pick at with this piece ("ultra-green policies", climate policy supported by oligarchs, etc.), but I think it's better to point to someone who covers the same issues to some degree in more convincing manner.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
Stoller takes a look at the current state of the economy through the lens of monopoly and big business, and I find his analysis to match the world I see with much greater accuracy. Kotkin mentions a lot of the issues in his section on "the embattled yeomanry", but fails to consider causes that lead to this. He'll talk about concentration of wealth, but fails to conclude any negative effects it might have. And it's truly curious how he moves from increasing corporate concentration in one paragraph to fighting against climate policy in the next.
That isn't to say they aren't worth reading, but that this article is flawed in a characteristic way.
The fact that a corporation has an exterior interface with the market doesn't change that most people in it don't deal with the market day-to-day. Even those who do form that interface are relatively insulated from it: a market analyst working to set prices still is evaluated by an internal bureaucracy, not the market itself. Only people in sales really end up exposed to the market because it's so easy to come up with a metric of their performance that's legible to the interior bureaucracy.
One of the reasons that teachers and doctors have such absurdly poor working conditions and pay (in the UK at least) relative to the value they bring to society, is that they're mostly paid via the state so the only way they can demonstrate their value is through striking. If the government takes a hard line of strikes and public spending then those industries suffer.
The term “clerisy” to me rings clearer than “professional middle class” as he latter ignores [edit: removed autocorrect nonsense word] very real distinctions between corporate lawyers and directors of NGOs.
The details of the piece don't have quite enough support given how contraversial they are. That doesn't mean the author is wrong though. Worth more exploration and discussion.
What makes you think the US is going to ramp up manufacturing again?
This article is a big struggle to fit people into bad classifications and suffers readability (and a point in general) because of it. An article grouping middle class members based on toilet paper orientation would be more interesting.
Mostly true, but not completely. The private company has to serve customers at least as well as the competition; the university's outfit has to do not too much worse than what they could get from an outside supplier.
Compare the university administrator to the HVAC company manager, and the difference widens. Compare the university president to the HVAC company owner, and it widens a lot further.
I wouldn't say they really stand for anything other than "opposiste of political correctness" regardless of the topic. They post articles that would never be allowed in other media.
And judging by the replies here, seems like it surprises a bunch of other people. I'm not sure what the "opposite of political correctness" is except tilting at a strawman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura
A more cynical, but illuminating, depiction of the way this class came to be recognized and criticized was given in an old New Yorker article about why Americans don't like Hillary Clinton -- from 1996:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/02/26/hating-hillary
>In the sixties and seventies, neoconservatives liked to talk about the ascent of “the New Class,” consisting of highly educated professionals who were, in Norman Podhoretz’s words, “making a serious bid to dislodge and replace the business and commercial class which had on the whole dominated the country for nearly a century.” Podhoretz ascribes to Irving Kristol (father of William) the insight that the New Class “represented itself as concerned only with the general good, the good of others (especially the poor and the blacks), but what it really wanted was to aggrandize its own power.” As the only First Lady thus far to have come from its ranks, Hillary Clinton has suffered the fluctuating fortunes of the New Class itself. Among her peers, you’ll hear, variously expressed, a very basic sentiment: finally, a First Lady who’s one of us. “It was just as if we’d known each other all our lives,” says Carly Simon, who has spent time at Martha’s Vineyard with the First Lady; when Hillary admired a naïve Haitian painting in Simon’s house, Simon made a present of it. “It was an easy, Ivy League kind of camaraderie. Like, ‘You went to Wellesley? Oh, I went to Sarah Lawrence.’ And, ‘Oh, you like that kind of art? I like that kind of art.’ ” But if you do not feel part of that “us”—if, indeed, the very idea of Haitian folk art on the Vineyard makes you shift uneasily—you may feel the tug of an answering sentiment: that this First Lady is one of them.
Both this Quillette piece and the New Yorker article are presaged and, in my opinion, upstaged by Hayek's 1960 diatribe "The Intellectuals and Socialism":
https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Intellectuals%20and%20S...
Hayek's piece seems to me to be the founding treatise of modern libertarianism, with regard to the parts that are valuable at least. The central hypocrisy of modern liberalism is the way in which it serves the selfish interests of its most powerful proponents -- the managerial state -- while supposing to be egalitarian. Unfortunately, Hayek himself simply became increasingly cynical and decreasingly coherent towards the end of his life, after publishing his most famous works from a more moderate perspective, so we didn't get to hear a conclusion to this train of thought.
It's not obvious how to overcome this limitation; all ideologies need a base of support, and people on average tend to be selfish enough that we notice it. Andrew Yang's proposal to give citizens money earmarked for political donations ("Democracy Dollars") seems, to me, the most practical step currently available towards making politics more participatory and less hierarchical: it can foster the growth of competition among political campaigns for ordinary people's support with floating prices, reminiscent of a system we usually think of as reliable. Innovation in politics is already happening (c.f. Cambridge Analytica) and the IP is being monetized, but only a few people are currently allowed to play.
It's not wrong. But, as always, it projects nothing actionable. What does that blue-collar cohort DO to regain economic well-being?
This article is to represent the faction of people (not named, I'll call them Quilletians) who think that power and influence resting with small businesses and normal-but-wealthy families (identified as middle class yeomanry) is likely the secret sauce of why English-speaking countries have done so well so far.
The thesis here is that the yeomanry are being opposed by government or oligarchic policy and their perspective is being mitigated by a group of people called the 'clerisy'. The article is demarcating who this clerisy are and aren't so that there is a common language for Quilletians to work out what to think and then do about them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151006183427/https://michaeloc...
Never mind silliness like analyzing Trump's "record support" in a survey begun during Trump's tenure, the way he presents wrong statistics with the help of the word "particularly" is downright ridiculous. People who like pizza tend to be shorter, particularly children.