The problem with America’s upper-middle class and meritocracy

Want to have cheap healthcare? You can't have that with doctors earning 400K and nurses earning 120K. It's impossible. But you can have that with a few billionaires.

Want affordable university education? You can't have that with universities that have 3 non-academic full time staff for every full time professor. It's impossible. But you can have that with a few billionaires.

Want a genuine left party in the US? The professional classes are what co-opted the progressive movement, not billionaires.

Who does outsourcing benefit? Primarily managers and business process outsourcers. They are the ones driving outsourcing, as it creates a swollen professional class and the blue collar workers they manage are viewed as cogs. This is also why there is the rise of culture wars as the professionals need a justification to let them sleep at night as they screw the domestic working class, and that justification is that the working class people deserve to be screwed because they don't support trans rights or some other niche cause that serves as a moral differentiator between the urban professional classes and the working class.

Tired of the Administrative state? That's not happening because of billionaires, it's happening because the professional classes have extracted all that the market will allow, and now need to extract even more, using the power of the state to increase their control over society and extract more resources from it.

I recommend reading Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank. He has some choice words for the professional class, and a good history of their ascendancy.

The class position of the 0.1% (Vanderbilt heirs, Mars heirs, Koch heirs etc.) matters, but they themselves don't matter much. The bulk of the population are unskilled or semi-skilled labor, and ~10% of the population are in the professional-managerial class.

The efforts and ideology of a highly trained, highly educated, somewhat meritocraticaly placed vanguard matters, they are an existing social force, whereas the 0.1% is totally dependent on others for their position.

Sort of. The article is about unhappiness in the society - including hard working child carers. It's not the reason for the problem, but it's a symptom.

> This seems disconnected from reality because I think one of the biggest job requirements these days is imagination and adaptability.

A person can be very imaginative at his or her work and took for granted some over-simplified models, like "unproven vaccines cause autism". Similarly, here imagination is needed to see the bigger picture.