Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

stratfor.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 151 posts

Re: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

#11

Post by scarmig »

CleanedStar wrote: post #3

When Karl Marx wrote Capital in 1867, he said capitalism would never be able to get rid of credit bubbles, financial crises, high unemployment etc. He said that over time the problems would get worse and worse with greater and greater financial crises. Here we are about a century and a half later and you just have to look at the housing bubble, the bank crisis, TARP and the government bailout, unemployment in the US…

Marx, however, was and is historically inaccurate. Both in his understanding of the past and his predictions of the future. Check out Immanuel Wallerstein or Fernand Braudel for more accurate, careful, and relevant histories that're not just glorifications of the ruling class.

Looking at your example, it fails to explain why wages rose for 200 years before the alleged stagnation hit (sure, you can hack some Leninist stuff on about imperialism, but it's mostly unconvincing). Worse, Marx's grand scheme of progress is pretty flawed: even in one lifetime, people readily shift to and from one economic system to another, and each system relies upon and coexists with its predecessors and successors.

Wide swaths of life and economic activity aren't subject to what Marx described as capitalism, and as capital increasingly tries to squeeze more and more value out of people, people increasingly shift to using exit as a means of liberation. Look around you, and you can see it: that's what's most marvelous about the era we live in.

Re: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

#12

Post by magoghm »

silentmars wrote: post #2

Decent basic points, but superficial and often missing the real underlying trends. For better analysis on the same general ideas, I recommend: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/12/08/acting-dead-trading-up-... http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-... (ribbonfarm is my favorite blog)

Thank you for those links. Interesting analysis.

Re: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

#13

Post by awakeasleep »

This sure fits an interesting middle ground sort of journalism. I don't think I'm quite qualified to describe it, anyone up to help?

For one, it tackles the same insecurity subject conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones approach. However, he keeps it in the realm of rationality. What is the "It"? The main subject seems to be a description of the position and orientation of classes in USA society, and how they're changing.

Now, why is this so different than what other publications publish? I've heard before that Class in America is a touchy subject, and I don't see it mentioned much in The New Yorker, the New York Times, on TV, or in any of the sites I read online.

It seems like something in the idea of Classes conflicts with the Left/Right narrative you hear in 'the media'. Classes should have interests within themselves, not necessarily 100% split among party lines. And the media mostly tells the stories from party perspectives. Does that make sense to anyone? This is confusing to me.

Re: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

#14

Post by gz5 »

surprised the corporate agility theme doesn't explicitly include globalization displacing former US-based middle class jobs? globalization has positive economic consequences for the US as a whole, but not to key parts of the displaced middle class, at least not yet?

Re: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

#15

Post by scarmig »

awakeasleep wrote: post #13

This sure fits an interesting middle ground sort of journalism. I don't think I'm quite qualified to describe it, anyone up to help? For one, it tackles the same insecurity subject conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones approach. However, he keeps it in the realm of rationality. What is the "It"? The main subject seems to be a description of the position and orientation of classes in USA society, and how they're changi…

Class is both very real and very touchy in the United States. But people use the term in a really broken way, typically trying to map arbitrary income groups with classes. Which is convenient for everyone: Democratic-aligned classes can try to maintain their privileged position using class rhetoric to bludgeon Republican-aligned classes, and Republican-aligned classes can deny class altogether and take advantage of real but ignored class rifts within the Democratic coalition.

Of course, the classes at the bottom of the respective coalitions get screwed in the process. Which isn't to say that there's any grand lower-class coalition waiting to be made: disempowered classes align themselves in the partisan coalitions out of genuine self-interest, not out of false consciousness. They're just getting a disproportionately small serving of the winnings.

Re: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

#16

Post by pdonis »

One thing I don't see addressed here (or in other articles linked to in this thread): corporate governance. Abusing the standard corporate governance model, where shareholders delegate to a Board of Directors, is one of the key ways that rich people game the system.

Re: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

#17

Post by pjzedalis »

tsotha wrote: post #5
CleanedStar wrote: post #3

When Karl Marx wrote Capital in 1867, he said capitalism would never be able to get rid of credit bubbles, financial crises, high unemployment etc. He said that over time the problems would get worse and worse with greater and greater financial crises. Here we are about a century and a half later and you just have to look at the housing bubble, the bank crisis, TARP and the government bailout, unemployment in the US…

Much of Marx's critiques of capitalism make some sense. The problem is nobody has come up with a better system for lifting people out of poverty.

Why does capitalism have to lift anyone out of poverty? The opportunity to own assets and control your own production sometimes provides the means to do so. Just because enough impoverished people are not becoming rich per year does not mean capitalism is not working as intended.

Re: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

#18

Post by InclinedPlane »

scarmig wrote: post #8
InclinedPlane wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who thinks that the recent financial crisis is due to a fundamental failing of the free market just has not been paying attention, or has an ideological ax to grind. The latest economic crises are mostly the result of bad government policies and excessive government debt.

Government policies, perhaps, though mostly in the sense that it creates the regulatory environment that finance works in. But government debt? Hardly. It may have been a headwind due to issues in Europe, but the core cause was overleveraged financial firms.

Government policies are what created gargantuan financial firms who were in a position to overleverage themselves because they didn't think there was any risk in it. And low and behold governments bailed their asses out. In a more diversified market the companies that had overleveraged themselves would simply have gone under. More so, in a situation where the government had not put pressure on lenders to give loans to "sub-prime" borrowers, the whole mess would have never gotten so out of hand. Defaults would not have been so high, and real estate valuations would not have been so inflationary.

Additionally, we've pretty much gotten over that problem. The problem now is a sovereign debt crisis, especially in Europe, and that has little to do with the market.

Re: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

#19

Post by pjzedalis »

CleanedStar wrote: post #3

When Karl Marx wrote Capital in 1867, he said capitalism would never be able to get rid of credit bubbles, financial crises, high unemployment etc. He said that over time the problems would get worse and worse with greater and greater financial crises. Here we are about a century and a half later and you just have to look at the housing bubble, the bank crisis, TARP and the government bailout, unemployment in the US…

What you are describing is Roulette.

Re: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

#20

Post by pjzedalis »

jonnycoder wrote: post #9

This article is a great explanation of what I've been thinking all along. The rising tide has been in efficiency and technology but every American is realizing these gains through computers, phones, and access to information. The baby boomers were able to get an education, buy a house, a car, have a kid and go on vacation, and all of those things have been squeezed to the breaking point in the past two generations. O…

You make it sound like a community college education and 90's Honda are bad things to have. They might not be as nice as your neighbor but it's certainly nicer than 100 years ago, no?
Post reply on HN