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The Real Class War

americanaffairsjournal.org

481–490 of 634 posts

Re: The Real Class War

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell, public choice theory. Try The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan which explores the phenomenon from a systems standpoint without being especially partisan or ideological.

But does the book look at it from the angle of the working class specifically? Knowing only the broad thesis of that book, I'm not sure it's relevant to the claim made in this article which is about the working class specifically .

To a large extent. Like any academic work you'll need to do some of the work to joint he dots from the source material to whatever socioeconomic schema you prefer, it's not written to conform to a particular ideological tendency.

Re: The Real Class War

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GP didn't say it was about the fall of Rome, and nothing in the post suggests to me it was intended to be understood that way.

I mean, his first sentence included the phrase "the story of Rome's fall" and nothing between there and the book suggested he'd changed topics.

Given that he concluded with the focus on saving the republic specifically rather than Roman civilization it seemed obvious to me.

Re: The Real Class War

#483

The resentment of big capital is not entirely without a reason. Most money right now is "passively" deployed into pre-existing securities. This means it's used to extract existing value by market cornering / scarcity generation / rent seeking / monopolies / oliglopolies. On the other side there is new value / securities creation. This is what people like Elon Musk are doing. He took circa $50mln of his own money, add…

Whether a company is "rent seeking" vs. "value creating" has nothing to do with whether it's a pre-existing security or a startup.

If investors put $1B into a company that manufactures commodity widgets, and the company spends that $1B on a factory that produces $100M worth of widgets per year (with no market cornering, monopoly, etc.), this is obviously a value-creating business model. If the original investors sell their shares to passive index investors, that doesn't magically make the underlying business rent-seeking. Twenty years later, the company might still be doing basically the same thing, and the securities might have changed hands many times, but it's still a $1B company producing $100M of genuine value per year.

Conversely, if investors put $1B into a startup whose business model is to build a monopoly, starve the competition, and then jack up the prices (as Uber is allegedly doing), then that's obviously a rent-seeking business model. It's a rent-seeking business model from the very beginning. It doesn't have anything to do with how long the company has been in business.

There's a valid debate to be had over what fraction of the returns on stocks come from value-creation vs. rent-seeking, but the "pre-existing security vs. startup" distinction has nothing to do with it. Personally, my hunch is that the majority is genuine value creation. Every factory, farm, train car, power plant, office building, etc. is an asset that creates genuine value.

Re: The Real Class War

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But does the book look at it from the angle of the working class specifically? Knowing only the broad thesis of that book, I'm not sure it's relevant to the claim made in this article which is about the working class specifically .

To a large extent. Like any academic work you'll need to do some of the work to joint he dots from the source material to whatever socioeconomic schema you prefer, it's not written to conform to a particular ideological tendency.

Thanks for the recommendation. Queuing up this book.

Re: The Real Class War

#485
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which biography are you referring to? I’m seeing a few. I didn’t know it was famous and never thought to check, but would definitely like to read now that you mention it. P.S. it’s always a treat to stumble on a non-moderator comment from dang

Oh, by biography I just meant his life story. I didn't have a specific book in mind. Orwell is famous for having been early to break with political allies whose tactics he abhorred, even though they were fighting for his side. He had a genius for intellectual honesty, which made his writing exceptionally clear. If there's a clearer writer in English I wonder who it is.

[deleted]

Re: The Real Class War

#486

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…

Hard to say this when the entire immigration and trade policy of the US veered into an extremely unlikely configuration on the back of a candidate universally loathed by the establishment on both the left and the right.

Re: The Real Class War

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The big ideological divide in families (usually between generations) is a serious symptom of our inability to really communicate and compromise. In large part these ideological groupings are meaningless and inconsequential." I think this is only true in very specific circumstances. Ideological divide can also mean disowning your child for being gay, which is why among homeless youth there's a disproportionate amount…

It’s illegal to disown children in the U.S.

The emotional withdraw is the real problem, not the legal hurdle of being guilty of not giving food and shelter.

Re: The Real Class War

#488
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referencing the article which states, it's (almost) against class interests for these people to do so. That said, I disagree with any distinction in classes other than their actual function, workers vs owners. The upper/middle/lower descriptions don't mean much to me.

No, the article explains that Warren and Sanders are popular among exactly the professional class and that this is their natural electorate. Which it is. Sanders’s left-wing challenge to Clinton found significant support among educated, relatively affluent voters, especially younger ones (similar to Obama’s). As one 2016 Vox headline put it, “Bernie Sand­ers’s base isn’t the working class. It’s young people.”32 Withi…

Your citation is only stating that they receive support from the professional class, not that it's the natural electorate. The article never states as such, you're asserting that. The actual content reads and suggests just as I recall, offering this point as a clear preface-

>This underappreciated reality at least partially explains one of the apparent puzzles of American politics in recent years: namely, that members of the elite often seem far more radical than the working >class, both in their candidate choices and overall outlook. Although better off than the working class, lower-level elites appear to be experiencing far more intense status anxiety.

Re: The Real Class War

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which helps technological change, which leads to a more efficient economy You made a leap of logic here. The technological innovations in finance directly contributed to a more volatile economy that crashed and inflicted massive losses on huge swaths of the global population, many of whom never recovered.

Not too mention, at least in America, the vast majority of American lives are far worst off than they were in the 70s, 80s, or 90s. Making smart phones and personal computers just made rich people richer.

Correlation, causation.

Smart phones and PCs both coincide with big shifts in global politics, the post 2001 War on Terror, Operation Iraqi/Afghan Freedom, etc. Trillions spent on insurgency control, that could have been spent a lot more effectively.

All the while the middle class shrinks. (David Autor's 'Why there are still jobs?' paper is open access and has striking graphs that show just how much happened/happening.)

Globalisation lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, while the financial benefits of this economic optimization were not distributed back to those who lost their old socioeconomic status. (They only got the lower prices, but that's not much considering most of those people affected were not living in a distortion-free "free market", they had no idea what to do, they were not used to chasing new skills-in-demand, not prepared to relocate, etc.)

That said comparing healthcare outcomes, civil rights to the 70s is worthwhile, and if you think it was better then, that is mighty strange.

Re: The Real Class War

#490
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To +1 one this: Having spent a great deal of time consulting to government, in addition to working in media, but with a deep background in tech, the managerial class of people making policy have a revolving door to the universities, which are seized by faddish ideas as often as the elected representatives. Many of these policy people actually come to hate technologists because they find their more chauvinistic plans…

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…

AI will not replace the middle manager any time soon. Their job is too general and not specific enough to be solved by AI. Some of the tasks they do like scheduling can be aided by AI and have been aided by scheduling software but that doesn't mean AI could do their whole job. Stuff like talking to people about how they are getting along and helping develop and grow the people on the layer below them is something a good manager should be doing and something that would be foolish to replace with a system that has no humanity. See also defusing team conflicts and keeping up morale.

The problem is your reference is some kind of broken organisation where people are basically slave labour and managers only serve to dish out the work given from above. Sure bad managers of that description could be replaced by a good AI in the future but that would be awful because a good manager brings vitality to a team, helps individual team members and helps to filter and promote ideas up and down the organisation.

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