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The Real Class War

americanaffairsjournal.org

421–430 of 634 posts

Re: The Real Class War

#421

I've spent my career working in public policy circles, and this rings true to me. > At most, working-class voters can cast their ballots for an “un­acceptable” candidate, but they can exercise no influence on policy formation or agency personnel, much less on governance areas that have been transferred to technocratic bodies. > Unlike the work­ing class, the professional managerial class is still capable of, and re­q…

> I've never seen actual grassroots activism accomplish much

Eh... Martin Luther King Jr?

Re: The Real Class War

#422
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now. They are the glue that brings stability to any organization, they are what keeps to energetic lower layer people from gaining power from crazy ideas, and they are the first to get blamed when a crazy idea from the top management layer fails. Do you see differences between that statement and your experience? A…

> My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now. The middle class really isn't any less powerful today. Near as I can tell what happened isn't that the middle class became less powerful, but that journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class so they spread the perception that the middle class has lost its power because they…

Are you suggesting that skyrocketing education, housing, and medical care costs in proportion to stagnant wages for most people resulting in less economic security and mobility for the next generation is not real?

Re: The Real Class War

#423
post #392

Reading this thing is an incredible downer and it makes everything sound black and white. It is literally poo-pooing on everything. Life is never this black and white, although the thesis make for a good read it is still an inaccurate model of the real world. > Moreover, increasing numbers of engineers, even at the most prestigious companies, are hired on temporary contracts. When the artificial growth model stalls,…

>Reading this thing is an incredible downer and it makes everything sound black

Full stop.

Re: The Real Class War

#424
post #64
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.

> 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.

There is no reason to think that wage growth negatively impacts investment returns in general. It requires employers to pay more but it also means that customers have more money to buy your products. For legislation that applies to all employers, wage growth is generally a net positive for investment returns because it grows the overall economy. People buy more stuff when they have more money.

The real problem is when industries get specific carve outs, which they do have the incentive to lobby for because most of your customers are not your employees, and the business won't lose as many sales to their own employees as they benefit from paying lower wages, as long as their other customers' employers don't get to pay lower wages too.

Doing that actually harms investment returns on net, because the harm to businesses across all industries lost from your employees is more than that specific industry gains from paying lower wages. But it's the same problem as avoiding pork barrel spending -- one industry will fight much harder to take a billion dollars off the table than everybody else will collectively fight to avoid losing fifty dollars each, even if fifty dollars times everybody is significantly more than a billion. So then that happens over and over and adds up to real money.

Re: The Real Class War

#425

> The company I now work for started as a parking app. . . . We were growing sustainably as the result of having a superior product based on a great understanding of consumer needs. > But sustainable growth isn’t what VCs (or the execs that they install in the firms they have stakes in) are looking for. So we pivoted. > Without going into too much detail, we are now exclusively focused on getting acquired by a big te…

Sounds like automotive suppliers.

It works though

Re: The Real Class War

#426
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now. They are the glue that brings stability to any organization, they are what keeps to energetic lower layer people from gaining power from crazy ideas, and they are the first to get blamed when a crazy idea from the top management layer fails. Do you see differences between that statement and your experience? A…

> My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now. The middle class really isn't any less powerful today. Near as I can tell what happened isn't that the middle class became less powerful, but that journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class so they spread the perception that the middle class has lost its power because they…

"journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class"

For most of the history of journalism in the U.S., journalists were not in the "upper middle class". Journalism was a poorly paid working class job for most of the 20th century. Maybe a couple decades at the end of it different.

Re: The Real Class War

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Activists, yes - but not really through marching. Money, judicial challenges and coordinated political action to promote marriage equality as a goal were the key. The debate was reframed, messaging was crafted carefully and the groups organizing and paying for it all were extremely organized and cohesive. The Proteus fund and specifically the CMC did a heck of a lot here.

Marching is the first necessary step to get people organized. It is the lowest bar for starting to organize and to participate. It is where people can drum up support, awareness and donations.

Yep it is a solid way to meet people who might also have an inside track to influencing the institutions of a given government. It also gets eyes on your cause when it's not right in the front of society at large. A lot of it is just to get otherwise ignorant people becoming aware and seeing the activists are just people like them trying to make a fair go of it.

Re: The Real Class War

#428
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the idea behind this is what? That you shouldn't trust the revolutionaries because they dont have your interests in mind? That its hopeless? This model of the world is just run of the mill statusquoism trying to make people too despondent to tear down hierarchy, not some deep truth. To be honest I dont know if Orwell agreed with the position of the high or not, but the fact people repeat this propaganda of the "hi…

Orwell's biography is so famous that we can guess the basics of how he would answer this: revolutionaries don't necessarily have your interests in mind; it's not hopeless; oppose the status quo; don't be blinded by ideology; be honest before being political.

Well said.

Re: The Real Class War

#429
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Advertising encourages people to spend, even in some times to do it by going into debt. This in turn leads to more economic activity, more widgets ordered, which in theory should mean we can reap benefits of economies of scale, we can better amortize costs, etc. Which leads to R&D and innovation, which helps technological change, which leads to a more efficient economy, which leads to more surplus, which means more w…

[deleted]

Re: The Real Class War

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you never heard of the labor movement? The grassroots activism by working class people that forced the federal government to develop an entire arm of federal law, with its own Cabinet-level agency, to protect them from the professional managerial class? How have you spent your career working in public policy circles and come away with so little understanding of what grassroots activism is, and the impact it has…

I think we're reading the parent comment in very different ways. I think the key word was seen , just like the quote from the article says the managerial class is still capable of wielding power. Basically anyone in public policy circles, even on the right, should know some labor history. But America hasn't seen a major private-sector strike victory in 20 years, and the 1997 UPS strike was a rare exception: "traditio…

Was the GM strike last month not a victory for the UAW? From what I've read they got most of what they demanded when they started out over the company's initial offer.
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