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The Real Class War

americanaffairsjournal.org

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141–150 of 634 posts

Re: The Real Class War

#141

Post by [deleted] »

nine_k wrote: post #89
fladrif wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but my personal belief is that all work is valuable, otherwise it wouldn't be desired. I don't think it's a good exercise to decide how much it is worth, except to say that work that requires X unit of time should provide at a minimum an amount of compensation that allows a person to obtain a standard of living above the poverty line.

In my book, work has negative utility. It is something you tolerate to get the fruits of it, which may have positive utility. Being paid in exchange for work is the sign that otherwise the work won't be worth doing for you. The less work you do to achieve a desired result, the better. This is why technical improvements are valuable: they allow you do less work. There are activities that are rewarding by themselves, l…

[deleted]

Re: The Real Class War

#142

Post by raxxorrax »

kingkawn wrote: post #5

I disagree that the working class is not going to radicalize itself. They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an unprecedented rate, like everyone else. For the first time they have the power to publish and think in public uncoupled from professional barrier. Better believe it’s being used, and that they will assert their awareness.

Looking forward to it since I believe the professional barrier to be quite dysfunctional in recent times.

Re: The Real Class War

#143

Post by jacobush »

hnuser77 wrote: post #128
kingkawn wrote: post #5

I disagree that the working class is not going to radicalize itself. They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an unprecedented rate, like everyone else. For the first time they have the power to publish and think in public uncoupled from professional barrier. Better believe it’s being used, and that they will assert their awareness.

I think the author's take would be that the working class can radicalize all they want, but it probably won't change anything without the support of a significant part of the 10%-0.1%. I wish he had gone into detail on why he thinks the upper-middle class is required to effect political change. Is it because they have just enough capital? Or maybe they are closer to and more familiar with institutional power?

You can't run the world without them. (Yet, barring some sci-fi hell dystopia.) That's why.

Re: The Real Class War

#144

Post by take_a_breath »

mc32 wrote: post #130
take_a_breath wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget how Reagan told us that tax cuts would “trickle down” and busting unions would make us all more prosperous.

No doubt but that’s amateurish compared to how we got screwed by people who said they were fighting FOR US . On the other hand he deregulated airlines and telephony which jump started the tech revolution.

I don’t see how it’s any different, let alone “amateurish”. Clinton cleared the way for the internet to create as much wealth as it has (Telecommunications Act of 1996). Every President has had positive policies and negative policies, so we could play that game all day.

Acting like deregulating airlines and busting unions are on the same level is curious. One has created some new companies (and many corporate bankruptcies) while union busting and trickle-down economics helped lay the foundation for the income stagnation the article is largely about.

Re: The Real Class War

#145

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

nine_k wrote: post #89
fladrif wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but my personal belief is that all work is valuable, otherwise it wouldn't be desired. I don't think it's a good exercise to decide how much it is worth, except to say that work that requires X unit of time should provide at a minimum an amount of compensation that allows a person to obtain a standard of living above the poverty line.

In my book, work has negative utility. It is something you tolerate to get the fruits of it, which may have positive utility. Being paid in exchange for work is the sign that otherwise the work won't be worth doing for you. The less work you do to achieve a desired result, the better. This is why technical improvements are valuable: they allow you do less work. There are activities that are rewarding by themselves, l…

You're describing the utility of work for the worker, and I agree with your description.

But work also has utility for the person who pays the worker, and this is extremely different from what you've described.

This difference in the utility functions for each party (one wants to maximise the return on work and minimize the work; the other wants to minimize the work and the cost on it) is what sets up most of the "classical" marxist class tension. This is despite their agreement that the less paid work that needs to be done, the better.

Re: The Real Class War

#146

Post by AlexandrB »

Pigo wrote: post #118
nsporillo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average voter doesn't care about the merits of competitive advantage. Maybe if the Chinese actually opened their markets up to competition would we see true benefits in the west. The problem of course is preventing the majority of the wealth going straight to the top.

Maybe if China played by the rules, and did something about ip theft...

I really hope they don't. Western IP laws have become suffocating to innovation (life of author +70 years copyright, software patents), and need to be weakened. Perhaps if China is successful with weaker IP laws it will get some politicians off their ass on the issue.

Re: The Real Class War

#147

Post by sct202 »

simonh wrote: post #105

This is all driven by globalisation, and don't get me wrong I'm a globalist, but this is just a fact. First manual labour in manufacturing was outsourced abroad, then higher tier tech jobs in software and product engineering. Now big firms from former third world countries are muscling in on markets at every level of the economy, creating competition at every level of business. You can't add hundreds of millions of C…

Globalism has definitely supported the US tech industry significantly and wealth in cities that have tech giants. The internet was left basically open across borders, and I don't think that American tech's dominance would have been possible if everyone acted like China did by throwing up firewalls to protect local companies.

Re: The Real Class War

#148

Post by [deleted] »

barry-cotter wrote: post #58
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to? The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest may be unable to acquire more information than is conveniently delivered to them through a handful of sources, and if those sources are controlled by certain actors and not balanced by o…

> The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest The average American watches three hours of TV a day. People have plenty of free time. If they’re not interested their political opinions are irrelevant, politics will happen to them, not with them.

[deleted]

Re: The Real Class War

#149

Post by jacobush »

chii wrote: post #83
pjc50 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

There's a lot of confounding issues here in relation to the insulin problem: the fact that medical patents are poorly structured - insulin is hard to make, and making it via a biological mechanism means the "molecule" is slightly different, and so the FDA needs time and money to assess it. This creates a defacto monopoly, and thus, said monopoly can raise their prices. The fix isn't to force billionaires to give out…

This close to the money, there's no distinction between what you are proposing (fixing the monopoly laws) and force billionaires to do something. Currently, the companies write the laws. You want to force them to stop writing the laws.

Re: The Real Class War

#150

Post by dcolkitt »

Despegar wrote: post #135
intended wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s incorrect - the global pie has grown bigger. Inches and markers exist which never existed before. All those new workers are consumers for goods and services from America. America soy beans are famously bought in China, as are American bonds. Economically- if you get cheaper goods, you do more with the same income, meaning your quality of life goes up. The issue is not the growth of China- the issue is the dist…

The pie may have grown, but aside from labor in the Global South, the people who have captured the gains from that growth have been the capital class in the developed nations (i.e not blue collar workers or the professional class). And no, getting some of your compensation in stock options doesn't make you apart of the capital class, unless you can stop working.

> the people who have captured the gains from that growth have been the capital class in the developed nations (i.e not blue collar workers or the professional class)

Wrong. Middle-class Americans have captured gains through cheaper, higher-quality products than would have otherwise existed without trade and development. Are you using a phone made in China, or wearing clothes made in Bangladesh, or eat fresh fruit in the winter? Then by definition, you've captured gains from trade.

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