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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
What’s new post 1960 is:
1. Massive increase in the college-educated.
2. Women getting educated and entering the workforce in large numbers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.