Crises of Elite Competition in the East and West
americanaffairsjournal.org
americanaffairsjournal.org
In the 70s a blue collar worker could buy a house and look after their family. Now we have massive asset price inflation due to low interest rates and not enough growth in housing assets. This can lead to future social unrest on a massive scale (not just occasional riots/protests).
Maybe it's all about [over]population and age distributions.
Looking at that same street on Zillow it looks like there are a few 3br 2ba homes for around $200,000.
Make $20/hour like most folks in this working class neighborhood do and you are all set. Get a roommate or a spouse that works part time if you can't earn $20/hr.
People just live on a lower standard of living and get by with less. For example, my sister just bought a $28,000 3 bedroom house. It's a boring old company home, in a boring and uneducated area of the country. But, she has lived there all her life and enjoys the people and culture.
Most places that aren't deep blue cities. That seems like hyperbole but is true.
Picking just a few cities, the median house prices/sq footages are:
- Houston, TX: $238K, 2031 sq ft
- Indianapolis, Indiana: $196K, 1853 sq ft
- Oklahoma City, OK: $152K, 1455 sq ft
- Atlanta, GA: $399K, 1586 sq ft
Each one of these places has a cost of living (excluding real estate) less than 50% that of CA as a whole. All >1M size metros.
The most expensive, Atlanta, has a combined monthly payment inc taxes of $1700 a month on a 30-yr. That's $20,400 a year. Median plumber salary in Atlanta is $63K a year, so this would be 1/3rd their income.
Once again, that's median salary and salaries rise sharply at mid-career, and median home price.
* https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
A sizeable portion live on the coast:
> As of 2014, nearly 40% of the population lived in counties on the coast.
* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html
So presumably there's a decent amount of space 'in the middle'.
GDP would be enormously increased, if eg more people could move to New York City or Silicon Valley.
See also https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-o...
The problem historically has been the distribution of that additional wealth. It's common to see cycles of increasing rent seeking, followed by de-urbanization/migration, and then a gradual return to cities.
Though if more and higher construction were legal, they could afford a bigger place in dense urban cities, too.
(Of course, the number of plots for single family houses is limited. But there's no limit to how big your apartments can be, if you are willing to stack them.)
Increase in GDP means that someone is making more money. And you seldom have to _require_ anything to get people to make more money. Companies and workers already have the option to negotiate remote working arrangements. And had for a long time.
> Imagine if every small town in the country had HN types bringing money into the local economy instead of taking it out.
They'd just take it out to another 'local' economy. What makes some random spot more deserving than some other random spot?
And in any case, on a macro scale there's basically as much money in the national economy as the Fed wants there to be.
If there's some process that makes money magically vanish (eg perhaps those wacky foreigners selling you goods but then just burying the cash you pay them, instead of spending it), then the Fed will just issue more money to make up for the shortfall.
Similarly, if those foreigners dig the money back up, the Fed will just sell a few items off their balance sheet to soak up the extra money.
Inflation adjusted GDP is a completely independent measure/concept/entity/quantity from money supply.
(I agree that the parent comment is unconvincing.)
They are independent entities as measured state of an economy at single points in time. Money supply doesn't tell you what GDP is, or vice versa. Normalizing GDB for inflation is about removing even that connection.
But as far as the dynamics of an economy everything is related to everything. Changes happening to one spill into effects on the other, although as we both know, often not in a simple way.
The first was about real GDP, and natural incentives vs legal requirements.
The second was about money supply vs worrying about keeping money in the local economies.
Those people who want to be crammed (in return for higher income) should be allowed to cram.
As a nice side-effect, that leaves more of the rest of the world free for non-crammers.
Productivity is really mostly a measure of value capture.
So when we say 'productive' we can just mean 'rich people in specific companies hoarding profits and income' and then assume that this is 'productive' by the more common definition.
The problem is that those areas may not quite be more 'productive' per say, but that there's a power imbalance.
I believe that actually they are more productive, but the White Collar workers are playing on a global scale, but the plumber can still only work on a local scale.
It probably would require a 'multi pronged' solution of tweaking taxes, services, building more homes, upping the interest rate, getting companies to spread out a bit etc..
Big societal problems don't have one simple solution because if they did they'd be solved and they wouldn't be big societal problems.
Well, have you looked at those other countries?
Housing become more expensive has been a fairly broad trend in many countries. Looking at specific examples (and looking at their other problems) is instructive, indeed.
Most goods are tradable, and for decades now manufacture of consumer goods relocates relatively quickly in search of low cost labor. This leaves a surplus of workers behind, suppressing wages in industries with low costs of entry--remaining manufacturing but especially non-professional services.
IOW, labor markets are strongly globalized from the perspective of capital. A little less so from the perspective of laborers, though their wages remain stagnant all the same, so in many ways it's a distinction without a difference.
That's something we can look into.
Not necessarily, as the laborers displaced by off-shoring are now competing in the labor pool for many other non-tradeable industries. That's what I meant when I said, "suppressing wages in industries with low costs of entry--remaining manufacturing but especially non-professional services." An increase in supply relative to demand usually will mean a lower clearing price (i.e. more people for fewer jobs usually means lower accepted wages).
The U.S. population growth rate right now is easily the lowest it's ever been, except for the 1930s.
Agreed that housing and medical constriction are a big part of what's going on.
And it's a shame that it ain't larger: people migrating to more productive areas of the country is one way to increase the standard of living.
China and India (to take just the two biggest countries) have become massively more productive and massively richer since those bad old days. Thanks to their integration into the world economy, today blue collar workers can afford riches undreamt-of in the 1970s.
All the luxury you could dream of, as long as you don't dream of a home or medical care.
For medical care: 1970s style medical care is basically outlawed today, and there's lots of regulation. Eg if you want to open a new hospital, the existing hospital in your area that you would compete with have veto rights, and use them. See eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... or look for 'Certificate of Need' in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/04/highlights-from-the-co...
For housing: see eg https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-o...
Basically, building houses used to be legal in the 1970s. Now it's illegal in many parts of the US.
Essentially they're screwed up because American union power was destroyed by oligarchs and blue collar workers subsequently lost political representation.
"Everything bad is caused by government regulations!" was a story told repeatedly in many different forms by lavishly funded Koch think tanks (mercatus, which you cited, being just one example) and filtered through other oligarch run mainstream media outlets.
It was inspiredly largely by their battles with their nemesis - the EPA in the 70s/80s and was largely successful at promoting the "overregulation = bad" meme amongst the American proletariat. This was subsequently leveraged by Koch-funded politicians to democratically strip EPA regulations on their behalf.
Who said that? I mentioned two things that are bad because of regulations. But that doesn't mean that regulation is to blame for everything that's bad. Eg try as they may, regulation isn't what's keeping me from running 100m in 10s.
> Essentially they're screwed up because American union power was destroyed by oligarchs and blue collar workers subsequently lost political representation.
Huh? American auto union just got the fisc to pay them about four thousand dollars per electric car they make. I'm not sure how they lost political representation.
It's a common theme in the source you linked to which I gave the Koch backstory for.
>But that doesn't mean that regulation is to blame for everything that's bad.
Clearly not.
>Huh? American auto union just got the fisc to pay them about four thousand dollars per electric car they make.
The Build Back Better Act hasn't passed yet.
You've seen debates about these and they never go anywhere because there aren't final answers. There is no algorithm for 'blame' that is perfectly equitable. Neither holding people to high standards nor relaxing those standards is stable or workable. Reality is always multicausal and situations are different. The traditional answer to this is the discretion of judges to adjust to what is happening. But law still has to deal with the fundamental incoherence and it has been deprived of one of the historical ways it has dealt with it. The idea that different people might have differing capabilities to take responsibility for things, whatever the reason, is in untenable tension with the notion that all men are created equal. We have a few categories that recognize that not everyone can hold the same privileges such as child, felon, or legally mentally unable to grant consent. There are also the only semi legible ways that money and access grant privileges while that very same hidden nature frees the beneficiaries of any responsibility for the poor exercise of said privilege. Now we're seeing other countries find their own ways forward in creating a tiered society like China's social credit system or the soft classism of inscrutable and gameable admission to elite colleges (whereas before lower class people got in on merit). These are terrible solutions and we had better find better ones before the march of history declares a shitty winner for us. We can find a way to more tightly couple privileges and responsibilities or we can continue reaping the externalities of allowing incentives to drive a stronger wedge between them.
1) "Reality is always multicausal" i.e. the "responsible causes" of an event are a myriad of factors and 2) the law / insurance system have to assume that there is just 1-2 causes, so that blame and deserts can be meted out?
I'm curious what you think about alternate "unified theories of modernity's problems", such as Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) or racial inequity / colonialism, and how might you attempt to convince a believer of these alternate views that your theory is more correct.
But Georgism's explanation of eg business cycles is rubbish.
Interesting. How do you use this "unified" framework then, to come up with your own political opinions? (as opposed to, say, post-modernism variants like critical race theory)
> The situations of Asian countries and the United States differ substantially in the details, but both face the same core problem: how to offer as many people as possible a decent job with a family wage.
This is the heart of the (rather length) article. Elite competition is so intense because the consequences of not making it into the elite are so stark. (Related: Even getting the elite degree doesn't mean that you get a decent job. The elite competition doesn't end when you get into college, or even when you get out.)
Is it possible to do better than we are? Probably. How much better? I don't know.
We could repudiate NAFTA and close off trade with China. This could bring back local manufacturing, and the possibility of a working-class job being a reasonable life. This could also lead to us falling behind the rest of the world, as they create economies of scale that we can't match. Is that better or worse than the current state of affairs? I don't know.
On top of that, increasing adoption of technology means that more of the economy becomes driven by engineers. Computer science is one of the few fields where a top 1% individual can actually be 10x more productive than the median.
Combine these two things together - being able to instantaneously scale improvements across billions of customers for almost free because of the Internet, and technology's growth resulting in more jobs having a wider productivity gap between median and top 1% - and you get massive salaries for the top 1% and comparative peanuts for everyone else.
The exact same dynamic plays out in finance, Hollywood, YouTube content creation, and other winner takes all markets.
So, to simplify things, you have some placement exam. You're only allowed to take it once, twice, or a few times at a critical point in your life. We know that exam is only correlated like 0.30 at best with actual aptitude, which fluctuates over time. And yet that exam is treated as if it is correlated 0.90 or greater with aptitude, and that aptitude cannot change.
This is part of the problem too.
Some (much?) of this winner-takes-all phenomenon is due to societal structures around these occupations, nothing inherent to the occupations or activities themselves. It's rent-seeking and protectionism. My guess is at some level it's not a whole lot different from economic dynamics pre-world-wars era, but justified through different means, where society is blind for whatever reason to the errors in economic assumptions that the world works around, and the serious consequences those errors bring.
Increases in scale from technology undoubtedly play a role, but I doubt that's all of it. The NY Times once published an article about income distributions across fields, and you could see this winner-takes all phenomenon in all sorts of places. To me, it seems to have something to do with salary and benefits distributions more than anything else.
If you take medicine just as one example (which could be an entire book into itself), it's true that there have been technological advances that scale all sorts of things. But there's also little natural competition, due to overregulation. So you have a hierarchy, with medical administrators on top, physicians below, nurses below that, and then everyone else at increasing degrees of separation. This occurs in part because of the tendency for the administrators to control cash flows toward themselves, but also because the regulations make it impossible for cost structures to exist in any way but one where physicians get paid the most.
There's lots of examples of this. In my mind, the problem really is income distribution. It's not a matter of equality in the stereotypical communist sense, but more about fair or rational evaluation in an economic sense.
Everyone can point to bubbles in markets and say "this is way too overvaluated." That's something that has a clear meaning, even if it's hard to define at times. To me this overvaluation is everywhere. We live in an era of monopolies, and we rationalize it everywhere.
If you're a top 1% pediatrician you don't get paid much more than a median pediatrician. That's because it's pretty hard (impossible?) to be a 10x pediatrician. On the other hand, you can make the argument that 10x neurosurgeons or heart surgeons exist.
finance for instance has an underbelly of insider information being traded constantly, just as hollywood (and nyc real estate) is choked by cartel behavior (production and labor at least).
Is Facebook's dominance due to regulatory capture? No. (You could argue lack of adequate regulation, but that's not what we usually mean by "regulatory capture".) Is it due to bribery? No. Collusion? No.
Same with Google. No, no, and no. Amazon? No, no, and no.
(You could make a case for collusion with Microsoft...)
The reason that Google Search punishes slow loading sites, as proven by the AMP 'nice comparative boost' controversy, is because most of the time a page loads slowly is because it has multiple ad network trackers on it. Google will do anything to stop a page from doing that. The good news is this stuff is already being called out for anti-trust issues.
It's getting people to think and at the same time it's also a reasonable antidote for the 'culture-war' steeped people.
> The situations of Asian countries and the United States differ substantially in the details, but both face the same core problem: how to offer as many people as possible a decent job with a family wage.
The argument is everything stems from this failing (declining birth rates, cutthroat testing culture, woke language games to signal elite status etc)
The views he holds seem pretty average among worried Beltway center-right elites (actual elites), although not in any way representative of average Americans.
Other than that, yeah, I guess it's a cast iron indictment of woke politics. Or at least the most scathing indictment the author was intellectually capable of.
There was no "wokeness" at my midwestern engineering state university. In my opinion, the best solution to the increasingly out-of-reach American dream is just to build millions of apartments in cities where housing is very expensive.
> Ladies of Light & Ladies of Darkness,
> & Ladies of Never-You-Mind,
> this is a prayer for a Blueberry Girl.
> First, May you ladies be kind.
> …
> Dull days at forty, false friends at fifteen;
> Let her have brave days and truth.
> Let her go places that we’ve never been;
> Trust and delight in her youth.
And then I read stuff like this, or articles about the grim reality of private schools (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private...), and I wonder … how did we get here? is this what it means to want your kids to go places we've never been? Is this ... good?
From Flanagan's Atlantic article:
> Why do these parents need so much reassurance? They “are finding that it’s harder and harder to get their children through the eye of the needle”—admitted into the best programs, all the way from kindergarten to college. But it’s more than that. The parents have a sense that their kids will be emerging into a bleaker landscape than they did. The brutal, winner-take-all economy won’t come for them—they’ve been grandfathered in. But they fear that it’s coming for their children, and that even a good education might not secure them a professional-class career.
> …
> Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, coined the term meritocracy trap—a system that rewards an ever-growing share of society’s riches to an ever-shrinking pool of winners. “Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone,” he has written in these pages. “In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite.” This is a system that screws the poor, hollows out the middle class, and turns rich kids into exhausted, anxious, and maximally stressed-out adolescents who believe their future depends on getting into one of a very small group of colleges that routinely reject upwards of 90 percent of their applicants.
Is that all there is? Is it just, work work work, get the kids into a good school, line up their tutors and extracurricular enrichment, watch them graduate, maybe meet the grandkids, die?
Why do so many people want this so much?
Because material success is all that exists in their worldview. What a depressing form of nihilism.
The thing is, you have huge sectors; education, public transit, health care etc, that would be reasonable to improve but where privatization based capital investment have resulted in huge, costly and, well, shitty systems.
The only way out is removing a huge group of corrupt operators at the heart of each of these sectors. I don't know what hope there is of this tbh.
You could shrink the education sector by removing subsidies and tax discounts for it. (Of course, that's politically hard to do.)
> The thing is, you have huge sectors; education, public transit, health care etc, that would be reasonable to improve but where privatization based capital investment have resulted in huge, costly and, well, shitty systems.
I'm not so sure. Eg talk to any 'right-thinking' Brit and they will tell you how horrible British Rail privatisation was. Then compare the graphs in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_...
See also https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SurfaceFreightTransporta... and https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html
Or look into the recent-ish success of German legalising long distance bus travel.
this is remarkably one-sided
If you replace the slightly loaded term 'bloat', you would get something fairly unobjectionable:
'Forgiving loans people take out for an activity, would lead to more of that activity.'
Or what do you mean?
'Forgiving loans people take out for an activity, would lead to more demand and greater price appreciation of that activity.'
I think the great harm was disconnecting students from the immediate consequences of their educational spending with easy to get loans.
That economic disconnect has made it ever easier for schools to charge more for less actual value. Whether in poorly directed education (exceptional education in areas with poor career potential), or simply over priced (top heavy admins, and other overhead or expenses beyond providing actual education).
What analysis of elites doesn't include reference to Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch?
The author seems to get that the ruthless competition in our world is destroying lives, but he seems to blame the competitors and those who seek to improve things.
They get the root cause completely wrong, but of course that's expected.
Conservatives are free to talk about their agenda whenever they like. The fact of the matter is elite conservative thought is wildly unpopular, and they know it. So all this culture war crap is all they have.
Anyways, not easy to pigeon-hole. But maybe not super coherent either.
And yeah, his quip about "what passes for the left" -- indeed. The left -- and its bread and butter based economic critique -- is mostly unidentifiable in North American politics today. To the point that most educated Americans can't distinguish between neoliberalism and "socialism" anymore.
[0] https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/on-strasserism-and...
A pretty neat way of ingratiating himself with right wing elites and a promising route to political power.
This is the two wings of the business party arguing over which one of them better represents actual people.
Yeah, Trump attempted some left wing populist rhetoric just before he won but it was just rhetoric.
But instead, that wing has been taken over by white ethnic stuff and culture war (like right populist parties in other countries), which makes that sort of alliance very difficult.
Big business would seem to be the beneficiary of this situation.
Though obviously yes, in the voting booth, "Republicans bad" is a sufficient level of nuance.
The best we could probably hope for is that those two wings of the party turn on each other but as Trump demonstrated they seem to be able to find enough common ground to work together.
I think the problem today is that people view Marxism within the context of a discussion that postdates Marx by one century. Historical materialism is also something quite distinct from Marxism. Marx wasn't a Marxist (or so Engels said), and there are lots of historical materialist historians (particularly economic historians) who aren't Marxist either.
On your final paragraph, I think much of the discussion today is totally reductive. You are right there is no difference between neoliberalism and socialism but that is because there is no difference between neoliberals and socialists. I am not actually opposed to "Third Way" politics but there is no real representation for working people. And yes, part of that is because the left has the moral authority and wealthy people have hijacked that moral authority in order to fight their culture wars about social causes that are largely irrelevant to most working people (the enemy doesn't exist, it is just a way for wealthy people to shed their guilt and obtain self-justification). It is telling that working class reaction in the US was led by an orange billionaire, it makes no sense (and btw, I don't think people like Sanders or Warren are particularly compelling or effective leaders, the reason orange man won was because, for all his grievous faults, he actually seemed like a normal human being...as weird as that sounds when talking about someone who is so obviously abnormal in many ways).
Except the piece of writing focused on education/hierarchy/social standing rather than on class analysis.
I also never said that neoliberalism and socialism are the same thing or whatever; I said that among the average American, they don't know what socialism is, and often mislabel liberals/neoliberals with this label, nonsensically. And among the right in the US, this is a frequent talking point -- that somehow Biden is "socialist".. which is preposterous.
There is no effectively organized "left" in the traditional sense in American politics. Not even a social democratic party. Just a repressed minority within the Democrats (a right wing party) that is forced into a forever subservient position to neoliberal elites.
The owners of the system seem curiously left out of most analysis.
Do conservatives care about having an economy that's actually just and equitable? That's a pretty big part of what Marx was getting at; much bigger than the one point about how it undermines traditional religious belief (a good thing). That would probably solve their concerns about not enough young people starting families.
I've heard a lot of rhetoric, and I've seen what literally every "conservative" politician actually does: enrich entrenched elites, undermine democracy, and make the violent parts of the state less accountable to the public.
From the article, emphasis mine:
> Only by actually addressing problems at the point of production—for example, by ensuring decent jobs that allow workers to support a family—can one honestly hope to address these problems in a permanent way.
Maybe not as specific as you'd like, but I don't think it's accurate to say the article doesn't go beyond employment numbers on their face. In fact, in the context of SK, it's explicitly critical of the sorts of "jobs" one might suspect these days of putting a pretty coat of lipstick on the pig that is our job market:
> Though the official unemployment rate in South Korea is below 4 percent, an enviable number in any advanced economy, rosy figures such as these mask a growing structural and social malaise in the country. The rate of “self-employment” in South Korea was estimated to be over 25 percent before the pandemic, compared to 10 percent in the United States. This phenomenon of self-employment, much like the oft-hyped switch to “the gig economy” in America, has little to do with individual freedom and entrepreneurship and more to do with underemployment, a lack of job retraining, and worsening prospects especially for older members of the workforce. On top of this, the South Korean middle classes find themselves not only threatened by a potential shrinking of opportunity, but face constantly growing costs as well, including education and housing prices, especially in Seoul, where median apartment prices have nearly doubled since 2016.
Again, this is not left out. This point is explicitly mentioned.
> Do conservatives care about have an economy that's actually just and equitable?
Yes, that is what the article is arguing for. I am not actually sure that Marx did say this because the notion of justice and equity is inherently subjective. What he said is that capitalism changes the nature of social and cultural relations.
Okay, that is what you have seen, it doesn't make it true because your point of view is: conservative people are bad. If you actually think more carefully about what you are saying, you would understand why this is wrong (conservative thought in the US was founded on the principle of challenging an accountable state, challenging entrenched elites, and creating democracy).
Reagan declared that he had come to Washington to “drain the swamp” of bureaucracy, and set up the Grace Commission to investigate the operation of the U.S. government. Thatcher and Mulroney were equally committed to reform and initiated wide-ranging changes. By the end of the 1990s, the changes were dramatic. Many governments operations had been privatized in all three countries, and new management techniques had been introduced. In Great Britain, one observer judged that the changes were historically as important as the collapse of Keynesian economics. Is government now better in these countries, and was political leadership right in focusing on management of the bureaucracy as the villain? Savoie suggests that the reforms overlooked problems now urgently requiring attention and, at the same time, attempted to address non-existent problems. He combines theory and research based on sixty-two interviews, nearly all with members of the executive branch of the governments of Britain, Canada and the United States.
--Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney, In Search of a New Bureaucracy By Donald J. SavoieAlso arguably, in the US, it started under Carter (though Reagan became the face of it).
Kind of like how Trump is the face of the "decoupling" from China, but this built on the "Obama Pivot", and seems to be being continued (maybe a little better) by Biden?
The paranoid part of me wants to blame whatever happens at Davos and whatnot, but it's probably just "the intellectual spirit of the times".
What’s new post 1960 is:
1. Massive increase in the college-educated.
2. Women getting educated and entering the workforce in large numbers.
There should be enough places to live built as there are humans.
I wouldn't exactly call your typical middle class home owner an elite. Would you?
> There should be enough places to live built as there are humans.
We have the technology to build high and stack apartments, and the wealth to afford it. In many places, we just don't have the regulatory environment to do so legally.
The broken regulatory environment that exacerbates the problem is a consequence of elite competition: government not working for the public is caused by being captured by narrow interests, who work to corrupt its purpose.
The (upper) middle class homeowners who don't want apartments built nearby? They are, for various reasons, better represented by local governments than people who want to do new things. I agree that the concept of "elite" doesn't cover what's going on here, but there are echoes, because power is a spectrum.
That's the point I actually wanted to make.
Alas, not necessarily. Normal voters are perfectly capable of demanding broken stuff all by themselves. Voters (somewhat rationally!) behave like idiots.
These are the real problems we face. Not "wokeness" (basically just a nouveau slur).
More educated people aren't a problem, this has driven the greatest economic boom in history. It has driven the greatest reduction in interpersonal violence in history. Education is an unalloyed good. Political, cultural and economic equality for women and however many other categories of people you want to add to that list are unalloyed goods.
The problem is that all rewards are distributed to the top, because of the dominance of a small number of evil men over our political and economic system since about 1980. That is why competition to become an elite is so intense: only elites benefit from the current system. It is why we cannot get Democrats to govern properly, and why Republicans govern only with malice.
I'm a pretty liberal guy, but I'm seeing a rash of articles talking about some real harm wokeness has been causing lately when taken to an extreme. For example:
- California pushing new math framework that recommends no Algebra before Grade 9 in the name of racial justice. This is bordering on Harrison Bergeron territory.
- UC schools eliminating SAT as admission criteria, which is used to disproportionally hurts Asian applicants.
- Elite colleges like Harvard making their admissions less meritocratic and trying to limit Asian and Jewish admissions in favour of White, Black and Hispanic admissions. This is reminiscent of adding extra-curriculars to discriminate against Jewish students in first half of 20th century.
- Cancel culture taking things too far.
As far as I can tell, the share accruing to land increased. The share accruing to capital stayed roughly flat.
In any case, the labour share didn't drop all that much. A few percentage points.
The bigger deal is perhaps the change in distribution of that labour share amongst workers.
"Labor’s share of national income—that is, the amount of GDP paid out in wages, salaries, and benefits—has been declining in developed and, to a lesser extent, emerging economies since the 1980s."
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-gr...
This divergence since 1980 is the subject of Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century.
But the extra has gone to land, not capital.
Piketty fails to make that distinction. See eg https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/07/22/piketty-... or https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...
If it's all gone to land, the situation seems worse as far as inequality goes. The top 1% of households own 40% of land in the US as of 2017. The next 9 percent own 42%.
So maybe it's inexact to call it "capital" vs. "labor", but... a class of people is dominating.
Not sure about 'class'.
But the policy implications are quite different:
Land value taxation can capture all that extra rent going to land without hurting the economy one bit. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
By contrast, taxing capital is a really bad idea. Eg capital gains taxes hamper productivity growth.
Analysis is a bit generous. It's a retread of some pretty stale ideas. It's flagship idea is a redefinition of the word elite to include "even a college degree holder working at Starbucks".
He doesn't outright say it because it's so transparently self serving but it's very obviously painted.
Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch would approve.
It's a reactionary piece designed to protect and promote elite power by, in essence, rhetorically disguising it.
It mirrors somewhat the way that "boomer" has cleverly been positioned as a sponge for the post-occupy fury directed at the 1%.
But serving coffee at Starbucks isn't high status, as academic jobs should be, which creates a frustration in these failed mandarins: They don't treat the status as something they took a shot at and missed, like you would when trying for a three-pointed in basketball. They have the degree, they feel the status belongs to them, so ending up at Starbucks is a loss, not a miss, and humans take losses like that badly. Turchin contends that overproduction of these kinds of people is a key cause of social instability.
Yes, lots of other billionaires are individually union-busting, underpaying, colluding against workers in their companies - but the ones above suborn legislation in multiple countries to do it for them.
Charles Koch is one of the great oil magnates and uses his immense wealth to fund, among other evil things, the climate denial movement in politics and the media, especially in the United States.
It's not just these two men, obviously. But they are the real leading figures in the destruction of our society. George Soros isn't even close. Musk and Bezos might be a net positive; I'd at least consider the argument. This isn't just hating the rich. One side is evil and bent on the destruction of our species.
While you may need to pay more for a high school educated worker who can read instruction manuals to operate heavy machinery than very common illiterate subsistence farmers. Notice that where productivity is based upon worker skill more than tools are still doing very well in wages. This is because the role of capital is more recruiting than direct productivity boosting. And well capital is good at self perpetuation.
> Unless the productive forces driving spiraling competition for diminishing social and economic resources are resolved, social atomization, cultural conflict, and their many effects will continue, in one guise or another.
My take is that most of the apparent social problems are related to problems like economic inequality and insufficiency. And the best hope we have to improve them is actually logistical/technical. Better application of technology, such as for enhanced collaborative monitoring and reporting of resource usage and more sophisticated distribution systems (including high-tech forms of money) should make a big difference.
> No amount of snappy YouTube videos decrying the “degeneracy” of current elite trends, no amount of influencers selling the “trad lifestyle” to Instagram followers, no amount of pithy arguments aimed at defeating some imagined foe with “facts and logic” will affect these issues in any meaningful way
> In the struggle between tradition and economic reality, tradition simply ends up being destroyed, excepting the few parts that can be adapted to serve completely new ends.
I would posit that a 3rd option exists that the author dismissed, but it would be to move to a new system (which is self-sustaining, unlike birth + immigration that the author dismisses) to match the new realities. I get that conservative thought is that it's safest to cling to that which we know, but with all the changes so far (and to come with automation), it might be as fruitless as running a knowledge economy like a feudal monarchy.
Do you mean changing the American system, or do you mean moving, as an individual, from America?
If "changing the American system", then I think that's what he wants. He seems to want industrial policy, possibly state control of industry -- whatever it takes to employ everyone and give them good wages. A Republican pivot to the working class.
(Or even a Democratic one? (Though that's arguably what the Green New Deal is supposed to be about, even if it ends up being modest.))
If "moving from America", then I agree that's the option he didn't even consider. It may be possible to simply escape the competition. Doing this would rest on geographic arbitrage and the privilege of having been born in a developed country. That might make it "bad" in some peoples' eyes, but it might work for the individual. Even a fairly poor American could be a fairly rich person in another part of the world, by taking their (unfair) Fedbucks with them.
Yea I also read it that way. Reading between the lines a bit, I see some of a desire for the America in the 50s and 60s, not super uncommon of a sentiment for a variety of reasons.
In retrospect I should have just co-opted the author's language:
> In the struggle between tradition and economic reality, tradition simply ends up being destroyed
If there are two dependent variables: economic reality and tradition, the author wants to fix tradition and find the economic reality which allows for that.
I would posit that historically, the long term trend is for tradition to change to match economic realities, so the way out of this might be to find new traditions which are self sustaining (positive birth rates or birth+immigration as the author says).
No you can't just take your ball and leave!