We have a sad state of affairs when what people are actually asking for is to work. They want to work in jobs that aren't so low-skilled as to be embarrassing or minimum wage, jobs that allow them to support a family and maybe take one vacation per year and afford Christmas without debt. That's it.
The problem with "elitism" per say is not so much wealth difference. It is social. When you don't have great wealth, there are codes that must be maintained for solidarity and dignity. Things like faith, truth, integrity, physical strength, tenacity, traditionalism, and a "suck it up" attitude. I can't stress how important respect and dignity are to this group. It goes a long, long way.
What does one thing should happen to generations who used their bodies and souls to operate and build a nation who are not only stripped of their jobs, their homes, and their communities but told to take a job as a cashier that depresses their wages 4x? Not only does that happen, but then they are called names for the patriotism that drove them to give of themselves that way and told to get with the new social program? It's amazing no one has revolted yet.
“As I’ve written previously, this was capitalism’s original sin: All the amazing new machines and their miraculous productivity, all the new goods and services now available, all the immense wealth heaped up in such astonishingly short order, rested on brutal, dangerous, dirty work that broke bodies by the millions, whether in an instant or over decades”
I agree with the general point you are making in this post, but I think maybe you’re trying to force the narrative a bit too much here. The jobs those nascent industrial jobs replaced were also back breaking and extremely demanding. They were plowing acres of farm land, for instance, with virtually no meaningfully advanced machinery. I’m not sure an issue really emerged until we started moving away from an economy that was very low skilled labor intensive.
The fundamental problem is how do you address the 1. Financial needs and 2. Desire to contribute of those who lack considerable and economically relevant skills.
It’s not a coincidence that the halcyon days these workers refer to also coincided with companies like GM, Ford, and the oil majors being the largest companies in the world.
Well-paid factory work was an outcome specific to the US, in the period after 1945 when it was the unquestioned technological leader. The result was that the shift from factories to low-skill service jobs was a big loss. In Australia, there was much less difference. The shift was traumatic for those who lost factory jobs, and is still the subject of nostalgic rhetoric, but it's not reflected in social outcomes . What remains of the male manual working class ("tradies" in our terminology) has relatively high pay and high status compared to female-dominate services like nursing and teaching (both coded as "elite" in this discussion, since they require university education).
These wages are the same sort of jobs in the past as they are today. Mostly nonunion, not-manufacturing. You can think of them as the entry level for people just coming out of high school (dropouts or graduates) who aren't pursuing college or vocational training and are not pursuing a trade. These are the base on which higher paid working-class wages are built up.
Before 1933 these wages rose at a steady rate. From 1933 to 1973 they rise at a faster rate. Their rise slowed a lot over 1973-78. After 1978 they were basically flat to 2017. In 1978 labor had its last hurrah as measure of strike frequency, which collapsed after that and never recovered.
What happened? In a word, inflation. Why did we get this. 1960's Democrats screwed the pooch, effectively abandoning the working class:
Democrats threw in the towel on trying to manage economic affairs and turned management over to the Fed, who, as *bankers,* were focused on financial markets. The maintained high unemployment (labor surplus) for almost a decade that crushed inflation, and destroyed labor power and unions disciplining workers so that they no longer expected real wage increases.
With the Fed controlling inflation, deficits became uncoupled from deficits. Republicans were able to cut taxes, run big deficits and see inflation fall, investor nirvanna. Stock buybacks were made legal.
These changes created an environment that shifted business culture to shareholder primacy from stakeholder capitalism:
In a world where entry level wages rise with economic growth, an ordinary man with no remarkable traits can through his labor bring income into a household that will at lease keep up with rising living standards, giving ordinary schmucks value on the dating market. Marriage rates were high. When rising wage trends stopped marriage rates fell.
People doing the low paid working class jobs are not seeing wage increases. Those who have vocation training/apprenticeship, some college or college degrees make up a lot of the workforce and the median income reflects them. They mostly enter the labor force at a higher level. People with degrees in technical or business areas form the pool from which managers are drawn. Higher level managers come from managers, and executive from them. Executive compensation and elite worker compensation grew tremendously after the 1970's.
Workers in the pool from which executives are drawn saw their incomes go up, though not as much.
Basically you got a "stretching" effect as the range of incomes widened due to lack of a rising base at the bottom bushing working class wages up and a rising ceiling at the top dragging elite workers up.
These policy and cultural changes in the US affected the American economy. The US, as the largest economy and the holder of the reserve currency, created the 1970's inflation crisis which affected everybody and served a neoliberal model. Trade deficits are deflationary, so the US developed large trade deficits to offset inflationary effects of fiscal deficits. This allowed rising economies like Japan, Korea, Singapore, China and others to draft off US aggregate demand to grow their economies under neoliberal policy, helping to spread this approach to policymaking. Offshoring workers in a neoliberal world was now possible free trade became policy.
I have always wondered whether the relatively unprecedented period of technological advancement and massive demand for low skilled labor that characterized the 20th century is a realistic point of comparison, or whether it is a historical anomaly.
It was when there was an intersection between industry that was advanced enough to employ large amounts of people, but when that industry was nascent enough to require lots of manual labor. I wonder if such demand for low skilled labor amid technological advancement is an anachronism that only appears at a specific point in an economy’s evolution.
At the crux of this is the question: is work a means to an end or not? I'd always thought so. The end being making money and consuming things. I'm not so sure now.
One thing you don’t really address- in the past the working class had health care and pensions. Now they don’t. And they can’t afford to save for retirement or mortgages. As for marriage? It isn’t family friendly for the working class to be married- i have several family members, who have a partner but who aren’t married and guess why? It doesn’t benefit them financially. The fathers don’t have health care but at least the mother and kids do. It is crazy. People don’t marry because they cannot afford to, not because they don’t want to. And the men uniformly voted for Trump. They work their ass off at physically demanding jobs and cannot afford healthcare but have co-workers who came here claiming asylum who are getting free healthcare. It doesn’t make sense to them. Obamacare is better than the alternative but it is prohibitively expensive if you are making less than 100,000 a year. The cheapest plan available in our state was 500 a month for the family member who tried it to get it ( just for himself) with a 10,000 deductible. And over the last few years utilities and rent and gas and food and entertainment have gotten more and more expensive- eating up any piddling raises they may have gotten and reducing/eliminating disposable income. I voted for Harris, but I get why those family members did not. They may not have it better under Trump in terms of healthcare, but they are hopeful they will in terms of what they have left over after their bills. And say what you will about Trump, he does not condescend to these voters like the Democrats do. The last month of the Harris campaign all she did was talk about the death of democracy and try to woo anti-Trump Republicans. That was nuts- who in the world wants a neocon on their side? Who under the age of 60 even cares? And nowadays who are those people? Older, educated Republicans who are fearful of fascism and who believe in the societal and political norms of 30 plus years ago. Who are these people as a fraction of the nation? It was just a crazy move from a political standpoint. And she never ever addressed how she was going to do things differently from Biden. I thought she had a surprisingly good chance of winning the first couple months with a strong start ( I never liked her so was surprised by how well she started). By mid September, I realized her chances were slipping away. Her CNN interview was pathetic. Even her debate- while it was a masterful exercise in baiting Trump, it was also a masterful exercise in deflecting away from giving any real answers to the question- what are you going to do differently from Biden. And since she gave no interviews where she addressed those questions, the debate wasn’t enough. She did not convince people who weren’t already going to vote for her why she deserved their vote and she and Obama et al downright alienated men. I couldn’t believe it when Obama decided he was going to try to rally black men around Kamala by scolding them. He has definitely lost his touch ( and became out of touch) over the last 8 years of doing nothing but podcasts and book recommendations. If he wanted to remain a political influence in a party supposedly for the downtrodden, working class and discriminated against, he should have stayed in public service in some capacity, instead of disappearing into an early retirement of leisure that only the elite can afford ( no Jimmy Carter, that’s for sure), only coming out to lecture people?
both the so called "right" AND the so called "left" are who almost entirely destroyed most of the representation the general population had. They split their task and each took over one of our two parties and over a few decades transformed them into haunted house mirror simulacrums of what they were.
We used to have very imperfect and limited but nonetheless still genuinely democratic governance structures based around our two formerly decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties, each --while still being full of a lot of BS-- was for the most part honestly named, the Democratic Party was a small "d" democratic party and the Republican Party was a small "r" republican party. And they operated in a semi-politically decentralized, semi-economically decentralized, semi-culturally decentralized, and semi-scientifically decentralized system.
But due to their (not saying they didnt have help, tho) dirty deeds, foe several decades now we've had two centralized and publicly in-accessible exclusionary membership parties. And our now so called Republican and Democratic parties are no longer republican and democratic parties, they are conservative party and a technocracy party, neither of which gives a flying **** about republicanism or democracy. And part parcel with that, they operate in a deeply politically, economically, and scientifically centralized system. So we've essentially lost most all of both our representation and our democratic governance structures.
From at least the 1830s to the 1940s (fully) and then from that point until the 1970s (partially, but still mostly in some of the most key ways), the USA did not just have federalism in the political sphere, part and parcel with that (and necessarily so) it had it in the economic sphere as well. We have a concentration of political and economic power, if we didnt have that then a great many plans could emerge all across the country, just like they did before and just like they have in China from some point in the 1980s until recently (Xi et al are trying to economically and politically centralize the country).
Even if we look at just banking and finance, they system made manifest under the reign of the Jacksonians did not end in 1913, it mostly ended through a set of identifiable actions that verifiably occurred during the 1970s.
Also, or hundreds of years, we used to have very different parties that formed the basis of imperfect but genuinely democratic governance structures. The USA used to have two parties that were decentralized and publicly accessible, mass-member parties. Now, they’re centralized and publicly inaccessible, exclusionary membership parties.
Re-decentralization could create far more industry, far more firms, far more opportunity, far more science and engineering, etc., etc.
Just got this and haven't even read yet but liked for the DIA image. Also, as a reader of The Permanent Problem, am happy to get another missive from Brink Lindsey!
We have a sad state of affairs when what people are actually asking for is to work. They want to work in jobs that aren't so low-skilled as to be embarrassing or minimum wage, jobs that allow them to support a family and maybe take one vacation per year and afford Christmas without debt. That's it.
The problem with "elitism" per say is not so much wealth difference. It is social. When you don't have great wealth, there are codes that must be maintained for solidarity and dignity. Things like faith, truth, integrity, physical strength, tenacity, traditionalism, and a "suck it up" attitude. I can't stress how important respect and dignity are to this group. It goes a long, long way.
What does one thing should happen to generations who used their bodies and souls to operate and build a nation who are not only stripped of their jobs, their homes, and their communities but told to take a job as a cashier that depresses their wages 4x? Not only does that happen, but then they are called names for the patriotism that drove them to give of themselves that way and told to get with the new social program? It's amazing no one has revolted yet.
Think*
“As I’ve written previously, this was capitalism’s original sin: All the amazing new machines and their miraculous productivity, all the new goods and services now available, all the immense wealth heaped up in such astonishingly short order, rested on brutal, dangerous, dirty work that broke bodies by the millions, whether in an instant or over decades”
I agree with the general point you are making in this post, but I think maybe you’re trying to force the narrative a bit too much here. The jobs those nascent industrial jobs replaced were also back breaking and extremely demanding. They were plowing acres of farm land, for instance, with virtually no meaningfully advanced machinery. I’m not sure an issue really emerged until we started moving away from an economy that was very low skilled labor intensive.
The fundamental problem is how do you address the 1. Financial needs and 2. Desire to contribute of those who lack considerable and economically relevant skills.
It’s not a coincidence that the halcyon days these workers refer to also coincided with companies like GM, Ford, and the oil majors being the largest companies in the world.
Well-paid factory work was an outcome specific to the US, in the period after 1945 when it was the unquestioned technological leader. The result was that the shift from factories to low-skill service jobs was a big loss. In Australia, there was much less difference. The shift was traumatic for those who lost factory jobs, and is still the subject of nostalgic rhetoric, but it's not reflected in social outcomes . What remains of the male manual working class ("tradies" in our terminology) has relatively high pay and high status compared to female-dominate services like nursing and teaching (both coded as "elite" in this discussion, since they require university education).
Economics plays a bigger role than suggested here. Here is a trend in real unskilled wages (from measuring worth,com).
https://mikebert.neocities.org/Real%20Wage%201875-2022.gif
These wages are the same sort of jobs in the past as they are today. Mostly nonunion, not-manufacturing. You can think of them as the entry level for people just coming out of high school (dropouts or graduates) who aren't pursuing college or vocational training and are not pursuing a trade. These are the base on which higher paid working-class wages are built up.
Before 1933 these wages rose at a steady rate. From 1933 to 1973 they rise at a faster rate. Their rise slowed a lot over 1973-78. After 1978 they were basically flat to 2017. In 1978 labor had its last hurrah as measure of strike frequency, which collapsed after that and never recovered.
What happened? In a word, inflation. Why did we get this. 1960's Democrats screwed the pooch, effectively abandoning the working class:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell
Democrats threw in the towel on trying to manage economic affairs and turned management over to the Fed, who, as *bankers,* were focused on financial markets. The maintained high unemployment (labor surplus) for almost a decade that crushed inflation, and destroyed labor power and unions disciplining workers so that they no longer expected real wage increases.
With the Fed controlling inflation, deficits became uncoupled from deficits. Republicans were able to cut taxes, run big deficits and see inflation fall, investor nirvanna. Stock buybacks were made legal.
These changes created an environment that shifted business culture to shareholder primacy from stakeholder capitalism:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
These policy changes and their effects came to be called neoliberalism:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-is-neoliberalism-an-empirical
In a world where entry level wages rise with economic growth, an ordinary man with no remarkable traits can through his labor bring income into a household that will at lease keep up with rising living standards, giving ordinary schmucks value on the dating market. Marriage rates were high. When rising wage trends stopped marriage rates fell.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/social-consequences-of-economic-evolution
Some of people who used to be working class back in the day now work white collar jobs
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6df6bce2-bfda-4ff6-ae38-894900db94ff_607x281.gif
People doing the low paid working class jobs are not seeing wage increases. Those who have vocation training/apprenticeship, some college or college degrees make up a lot of the workforce and the median income reflects them. They mostly enter the labor force at a higher level. People with degrees in technical or business areas form the pool from which managers are drawn. Higher level managers come from managers, and executive from them. Executive compensation and elite worker compensation grew tremendously after the 1970's.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffe7dcae2-28a6-4c8c-bd76-bcee3681eb28_610x247.gif
Workers in the pool from which executives are drawn saw their incomes go up, though not as much.
Basically you got a "stretching" effect as the range of incomes widened due to lack of a rising base at the bottom bushing working class wages up and a rising ceiling at the top dragging elite workers up.
These policy and cultural changes in the US affected the American economy. The US, as the largest economy and the holder of the reserve currency, created the 1970's inflation crisis which affected everybody and served a neoliberal model. Trade deficits are deflationary, so the US developed large trade deficits to offset inflationary effects of fiscal deficits. This allowed rising economies like Japan, Korea, Singapore, China and others to draft off US aggregate demand to grow their economies under neoliberal policy, helping to spread this approach to policymaking. Offshoring workers in a neoliberal world was now possible free trade became policy.
I have always wondered whether the relatively unprecedented period of technological advancement and massive demand for low skilled labor that characterized the 20th century is a realistic point of comparison, or whether it is a historical anomaly.
It was when there was an intersection between industry that was advanced enough to employ large amounts of people, but when that industry was nascent enough to require lots of manual labor. I wonder if such demand for low skilled labor amid technological advancement is an anachronism that only appears at a specific point in an economy’s evolution.
At the crux of this is the question: is work a means to an end or not? I'd always thought so. The end being making money and consuming things. I'm not so sure now.
A fantastic article written with a real literary flair not seen much in today's media.
One thing you don’t really address- in the past the working class had health care and pensions. Now they don’t. And they can’t afford to save for retirement or mortgages. As for marriage? It isn’t family friendly for the working class to be married- i have several family members, who have a partner but who aren’t married and guess why? It doesn’t benefit them financially. The fathers don’t have health care but at least the mother and kids do. It is crazy. People don’t marry because they cannot afford to, not because they don’t want to. And the men uniformly voted for Trump. They work their ass off at physically demanding jobs and cannot afford healthcare but have co-workers who came here claiming asylum who are getting free healthcare. It doesn’t make sense to them. Obamacare is better than the alternative but it is prohibitively expensive if you are making less than 100,000 a year. The cheapest plan available in our state was 500 a month for the family member who tried it to get it ( just for himself) with a 10,000 deductible. And over the last few years utilities and rent and gas and food and entertainment have gotten more and more expensive- eating up any piddling raises they may have gotten and reducing/eliminating disposable income. I voted for Harris, but I get why those family members did not. They may not have it better under Trump in terms of healthcare, but they are hopeful they will in terms of what they have left over after their bills. And say what you will about Trump, he does not condescend to these voters like the Democrats do. The last month of the Harris campaign all she did was talk about the death of democracy and try to woo anti-Trump Republicans. That was nuts- who in the world wants a neocon on their side? Who under the age of 60 even cares? And nowadays who are those people? Older, educated Republicans who are fearful of fascism and who believe in the societal and political norms of 30 plus years ago. Who are these people as a fraction of the nation? It was just a crazy move from a political standpoint. And she never ever addressed how she was going to do things differently from Biden. I thought she had a surprisingly good chance of winning the first couple months with a strong start ( I never liked her so was surprised by how well she started). By mid September, I realized her chances were slipping away. Her CNN interview was pathetic. Even her debate- while it was a masterful exercise in baiting Trump, it was also a masterful exercise in deflecting away from giving any real answers to the question- what are you going to do differently from Biden. And since she gave no interviews where she addressed those questions, the debate wasn’t enough. She did not convince people who weren’t already going to vote for her why she deserved their vote and she and Obama et al downright alienated men. I couldn’t believe it when Obama decided he was going to try to rally black men around Kamala by scolding them. He has definitely lost his touch ( and became out of touch) over the last 8 years of doing nothing but podcasts and book recommendations. If he wanted to remain a political influence in a party supposedly for the downtrodden, working class and discriminated against, he should have stayed in public service in some capacity, instead of disappearing into an early retirement of leisure that only the elite can afford ( no Jimmy Carter, that’s for sure), only coming out to lecture people?
both the so called "right" AND the so called "left" are who almost entirely destroyed most of the representation the general population had. They split their task and each took over one of our two parties and over a few decades transformed them into haunted house mirror simulacrums of what they were.
We used to have very imperfect and limited but nonetheless still genuinely democratic governance structures based around our two formerly decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties, each --while still being full of a lot of BS-- was for the most part honestly named, the Democratic Party was a small "d" democratic party and the Republican Party was a small "r" republican party. And they operated in a semi-politically decentralized, semi-economically decentralized, semi-culturally decentralized, and semi-scientifically decentralized system.
But due to their (not saying they didnt have help, tho) dirty deeds, foe several decades now we've had two centralized and publicly in-accessible exclusionary membership parties. And our now so called Republican and Democratic parties are no longer republican and democratic parties, they are conservative party and a technocracy party, neither of which gives a flying **** about republicanism or democracy. And part parcel with that, they operate in a deeply politically, economically, and scientifically centralized system. So we've essentially lost most all of both our representation and our democratic governance structures.
From at least the 1830s to the 1940s (fully) and then from that point until the 1970s (partially, but still mostly in some of the most key ways), the USA did not just have federalism in the political sphere, part and parcel with that (and necessarily so) it had it in the economic sphere as well. We have a concentration of political and economic power, if we didnt have that then a great many plans could emerge all across the country, just like they did before and just like they have in China from some point in the 1980s until recently (Xi et al are trying to economically and politically centralize the country).
Even if we look at just banking and finance, they system made manifest under the reign of the Jacksonians did not end in 1913, it mostly ended through a set of identifiable actions that verifiably occurred during the 1970s.
Also, or hundreds of years, we used to have very different parties that formed the basis of imperfect but genuinely democratic governance structures. The USA used to have two parties that were decentralized and publicly accessible, mass-member parties. Now, they’re centralized and publicly inaccessible, exclusionary membership parties.
Re-decentralization could create far more industry, far more firms, far more opportunity, far more science and engineering, etc., etc.
Just got this and haven't even read yet but liked for the DIA image. Also, as a reader of The Permanent Problem, am happy to get another missive from Brink Lindsey!