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The Real Class War

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: The Real Class War

#61

Post by cousin_it »

kortilla wrote: post #30
roenxi wrote: post #24

What a fantastic article; this might be the high point for my 2019 Hacker News reading. What clarity of vision. It is remarkable reflecting after an article like that on the complete inability of the US political system to organise itself to reward work done rather than access to the super-elite social circles. I'd love to know if this Julius fellow has a take on what mechanisms the 0.1% are using to drive the growin…

> political system to organise itself to reward work done How do you decide which work is valuable and which work isn’t?

General rule: work spent on getting better at a zero-sum game is valuable to the player doing it, but if all players do it, the result is waste.

Example 1: companies spending on advertising to increase their share of a fixed market.

Example 2: managers hiring more people for their team to look more important within the larger company.

Example 3: if social status is determined by looking tougher than others, everyone will spend resources to look tough.

I think such waste is the main reason for failure of groups, and coordinating to prevent it is the main reason for success of groups.

Re: The Real Class War

#62

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

leereeves wrote: post #60
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Or the arguments for American democracy and the nascent European democracies, whose founding fathers advocated for such systems by citing literature from Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment. The 19th century saw a wave of low-cost, mass-market editions of the classical canon precisely because it was…

You did more than argue in favor of staying informed and aware of the tradition of political argument. You suggested that the political opinions of those who do not spend time on that are illegitimate: > Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to? But politics is not mathematics. Political ideas should be judged by their outcomes, not their theoretical…

> But politics is not mathematics. Political ideas should be judged by their outcomes, not their theoretical validity. And everyone gets a vote about whether those outcomes are good.

With voting based merely on a gut feeling, a politician’s charisma, or the candidate’s party affiliation, one may well have to wait until the next election cycle to express one’s feelings about whether the outcome was good or not, and try all over again. But an informed voting public has a better chance of getting the outcomes they want the first time around. There has always been that expectation in American democracy and some of its analogues elsewhere that the populace, beyond merely having the right to vote for its representatives, would be keenly self-educating. If a voter fails to live up to the ideals which were considered crucial for democracy to run smoothly, then I think it is fair to question the legitimacy of their views.

Also, simple, straightforward voting is not the only action or mechanism for “outcomes” in modern democratic states. There are things like strikes, tactical voting, lobbying, resorting to legal action, etc. (Radicals on either end of the political spectrum would add uprisings, too.) It is the political literature of the past that lays out all these options for the citizenry, explains the pros or cons, and lets them make an informed decision on how to better their lot.

Re: The Real Class War

#63

Post by barry-cotter »

TomMckenny wrote: post #52

It makes sense that the top 10% to 2% become more active as blame and anger are re-routed toward them. For example, many people think the "elite" are the educated but not necessarily the wealthy. So for many, adjunct faculty are called "elites" while the Koch brothers are not. Likewise, discussions of wealth inequality are becoming conflated with income inequality. Yet the professional class has only marginal voting…

> Yet the professional class has only marginal voting power and comparatively little to contribute to political funding, so it's not surprising that the astute ones are concerned.

Likelihood of voting is highly correlated with education. I wouldn’t be surprised if the top ten percent are three or four times more likely to vote than the bottom decile. Money is also far less important in politics than many think. If money won elections Michael Bloomberg would have been president long ago, Eric Cantor would still be a Congressman, rather than having been beaten by Dave Brat[1]. Joe Crowley would still be a Congressman rather than having been beaten by AOC[2].

> Add up all US spending on candidates, PACs, lobbying, think tanks, and advocacy organizations – liberal and conservative combined – and we’re still $2 billion short of what we spend on almonds each year. In fact, we’re still less than Elon Musk’s personal fortune; Musk could personally fund the entire US political ecosystem on both sides for a whole two-year election cycle.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Brat

In his challenge of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for the Republican nomination, Brat was outspent by Cantor 40 to 1: Cantor spent over $5 million, while Brat raised $200,000 and did not spend all of it.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez

She was outspent by a margin of 18 to 1 ($1.5 million to $83,000)

Re: The Real Class War

#64

Post by nl »

roenxi wrote: post #24

What a fantastic article; this might be the high point for my 2019 Hacker News reading. What clarity of vision. It is remarkable reflecting after an article like that on the complete inability of the US political system to organise itself to reward work done rather than access to the super-elite social circles. I'd love to know if this Julius fellow has a take on what mechanisms the 0.1% are using to drive the growin…

what mechanisms the 0.1% are using to drive the growing wage gap

I don't think the 0.1% cares much about the wage gap. They don't take wages and the gap simply doesn't affect them.

They care about wages generally in that any wages growth has an effect on investment returns. So they oppose wages growth, and if that means an increasing wage gap that is fine.

Re: The Real Class War

#65

Post by leereeves »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #62
leereeves wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did more than argue in favor of staying informed and aware of the tradition of political argument. You suggested that the political opinions of those who do not spend time on that are illegitimate: > Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to? But politics is not mathematics. Political ideas should be judged by their outcomes, not their theoretical…

> But politics is not mathematics. Political ideas should be judged by their outcomes, not their theoretical validity. And everyone gets a vote about whether those outcomes are good. With voting based merely on a gut feeling, a politician’s charisma, or the candidate’s party affiliation, one may well have to wait until the next election cycle to express one’s feelings about whether the outcome was good or not, and tr…

> But an informed voting public has a better chance of getting the outcomes they want the first time around. ... It is the political literature of the past that lays out all these options for the citizenry, explains the pros or cons, and lets them make an informed decision on how to better their lot.

A bold assertion that you should provide evidence for. I'd argue that, in practice, things rarely happen the way political theory predicts. Politics is not physics, either.

Re: The Real Class War

#66

Post by barry-cotter »

neonate wrote: post #31
tranced wrote: post #4

Recently, I have a friend group who all graduated from Stanford, with relatively upper middle class(but not suburb/NY upper middle class) roots, and you might even describe as "woke" who belonged to a fb messenger group called "Anti Asian Asian Group". I felt like I had to call them out on it. Though they made the group as a play on "anti social social club" and to counter conservative sentiments their upper class co…

> those who almost don't have the opportunity to decide who to become That's an interesting phrase. Can you say what you mean by it?

It’s a reference to the sociological concept of marked versus unmarked identities. If you think of an American you probably think first of a white man of Christian heritage. If you think of a Chinese person you picture someone of Han ethnicity, not Miao or Manchu. If you think of a nurse you picture a woman. All of the people who fit that identity but are different from the unmarked version are marked by their difference from the unmarked version that springs to mind unbidden when the concept is named.

Re: The Real Class War

#67

Post by jtolmar »

kortilla wrote: post #30
roenxi wrote: post #24

What a fantastic article; this might be the high point for my 2019 Hacker News reading. What clarity of vision. It is remarkable reflecting after an article like that on the complete inability of the US political system to organise itself to reward work done rather than access to the super-elite social circles. I'd love to know if this Julius fellow has a take on what mechanisms the 0.1% are using to drive the growin…

> political system to organise itself to reward work done How do you decide which work is valuable and which work isn’t?

I'd like to see what the market decides is worthwhile without capital ownership.

Re: The Real Class War

#68

Post by pjc50 »

kortilla wrote: post #34
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advancing humanity should be a requirement for access to that kind of money. It's a hugely privileged position to be in, and the idea that it comes with exactly zero responsibility to Rest of World is nonsensical.

Why? The service and/or product provided by their business is providing significant value to society (lest they wouldn’t be collecting profit). Is the reward for creating a successful business really more responsibility to just give back instead of using it to create more business?

> The service and/or product provided by their business is providing significant value to society (lest they wouldn’t be collecting profit).

This is assuming the conclusion.

They could just be collecting a monopoly rent or a land-rent or an IP rent; for example, when Martin Shkreli raised the price of insulin dramatically he wasn't "providing more value to society", he was extracting that value, potentially at the cost of human lives.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/shkrelis-former-...

Re: The Real Class War

#70

Post by bambataa »

neonate wrote: post #33
_bxg1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's radical energy there, but here's the clincher: it will never turn into anything productive because the Republican propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class into continuing to think that public services are their enemy . They will rant and holler about communism until the billionaires have milked them of their very last dollar, and then blame that on communism too. The very policies t…

Isn't there something patronizing, even patrician, about saying "the propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class"? Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? There seems to me a great assumption in saying that they are "manipulated". Who isn't? This is the idea of false consciousness ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness ), and it has always seemed questionable to me. Who…

It's a very tricky problem. My awareness of false consciousness is more from feminism.

So what if a woman aspires to being nothing more than a good housewife? But what if she's been brought up in a culture where she has been told from early childhood that being a good housewife is all she every should aspire to? I don't think you can tell that person that their desires are wrong but you can point out what other options they have. It's up to them how they personally live.

Voting and public life are different, however, because they have an impact on wider society. I think is then reasonable to critique others' decisions because those decisions impact us. On the big, high-level stuff there will always be disagreement about objectives, their relative importance, the best way to get there and so on. I don't think you can do too much there.

But on more focused things you absolutely can question someone's rationale, their evidence base and how their vote or political activity will achieve their stated objectives.

Take Brexit as an example. If you just don't want foreign people around then voting for Brexit probably makes sense. I disagree with your objective but there's a consistency to what you're doing. If you're voting for Brexit because you think the NHS needs more money then it's absolutely incumbent on you to explain what kind of economic impact you expect Brexit to have, how that'll affect tax receipts and the evidence for all of those expectations because I'm not aware of any informed analysis that says Brexit is consistent with increased NHS funding. It's not sufficient to just say "well they said on the bus that we give £350m a week to the EU and now that's going to go to the NHS".

You're entitled to have whatever concerns you want, relate to your own life however you like. You're not entitled to have inaccurate beliefs based on a poor understanding of how things work.

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