Are luxury beliefs affordable during a white-collar bloodbath?

Will the PMC’s xenophilia disappear with its jobs?

Photo by Dieter Blom on Unsplash

The Democrats’ first core challenge is that we live in an age that is hostile to institutions and Democrats dominate the institutions — the universities, the media, Hollywood, the foundations, the teachers unions, the Civil Service, etc. The second is that we live in an age in which a caste divide has opened up between the educated elite and everybody else, and Democrats are the party of the highly educated. If I could offer Democrats a couple of notions as they begin their process of renewal, the first would be this: Cultural elitism is more oppressive than economic elitism… If Democrats, and the educated class generally, can’t change their values and cultural posture, I doubt any set of economic policies will do them any good. It is just a fact that parties on the left can’t get a hearing until they get the big moral questions right: faith, family, flag, respect for people in all social classes.
David Brooks, NYT, 5/6/25

Right-wing populism defines the people in geographic and nationalistic and racialist terms; the corrupt elite tend to be educated, foreign and cosmopolitan. Left-wing populism tends to sever society economically: the 99 percent against the 1 percent or the corporations against everyone else. What both forms of populism share is a tendency to treat virtue as a fixed property of groups and policy as a way of redistributing power from the disfavored to the favored.
Ezra Klein, NYT, 8/6/25

In his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods, Reno argues that the West’s postwar elites made a tragic overcorrection. Determined to avoid the ideological fanaticism that led to fascism and communism in the early 20^th century, they embraced scepticism about all unifying ideals. This “postwar consensus,” Reno writes, “taught that strong loves—of God, of country, of truth—were inherently dangerous.” In their place, elites installed the so-called “weak gods”: tolerance, pluralism, individual rights, and economic integration. The result, he contends, is a spiritually hollow society: “Our time begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness. We need a home. And for that, we require the return of the strong gods.”
Roger Partridge, Quillette, 10/6/25

There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big.
Sam Altman, The Gentle Singularity, 11/6/25

A few days ago, while interviewing an insurtech CEO, I had yet another of my we’re-all-doomed moments. Such moments arrive with increasing frequency nowadays. The CEO took me through how her business had automated the claims assessment process using chatbots and AI agents. It was – at least for this Gen X digital migrant – scarily impressive. Claims were assessed and payouts were made in mere seconds, with zero human involvement. I felt like Ray Kroc on his first visit to McDonald’s, unable to comprehend having his order handed to him immediately after paying for it.

Of course, I was able to focus on the elegant efficiency of the AI agents because I’m not a claims adjuster. The AI agents that I saw in action will displace the humans who’ve been checking potentially dodgy claims since the insurance industry emerged several centuries ago. It’s no longer a matter of if that happens, only when.

As I keep insisting, AI has already begun vaporising white-collar roles. It will take AI agents some time to displace humans in highly regulated sectors, such as healthcare. But there's little to stop insurance companies from automating away most claims adjuster roles over the next 12 months.

That will mean the evaporation of yet another reasonably paid occupation that allowed grads – especially surplus elite ones lacking a ‘good’ degree from a top-tier university – a toehold in the middle class.

(ChatGPT tells me that, in Australia, the average salary for a claims adjuster is around A$70,000-$100,000, and it’s possible to pull down north of A$120,000 in more senior positions. The median full-time salary in Australia is a little under $90,000, which is roughly US$60,000.)

My digital research assistant also informs me that while a university qualification isn’t required – at least for entry-level to mid-level positions – one in three claims adjusters have an undergraduate or postgraduate degree.

In my experience, it’s the more modestly remunerated members of the PMC – artists, academics and journalists, rather than, say, tax lawyers, heart surgeons and CFOs – who’ve slammed down the Social Justice Warrior Kool-Aid hardest over the last 10-15 years. Which makes sense if you accept the premise that humans are obsessed with status and spend much of their lives playing status games. PMCers denied the status associated with financial success have long sought to boost their prestige by taking on the role of secular priests. Modern-day monks on a holy mission to rid this fallen world of the sins of sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and climate-change denialism.

The lessons of history
The PMC has gone all in on what my fellow Substacker Rob Henderson famously labelled luxury beliefs, which fill in for the religious ones they likely would have possessed a few generations ago.

There’s been plenty of discussion about the PMC’s cosmopolitan globalist ‘anywheres’ worldview since 2016. But as far as I know, nobody has yet explored the issue of whether you can afford to keep up your luxury beliefs once your luxury-beliefs-enabling role has been automated away.

Spoiler alert: it’s easy to be magnanimous when (a) You’re confident about maintaining an elevated position in a status hierarchy and (b) Others bear the costs of your magnanimity. However, the academic literature suggests people are a little less likely to dedicate themselves to the noble cause of trans bathroom access when they feel economically imperilled.

Over the last quarter of a century, much physical labour has been automated away or offshored. Have the ‘left behind’ become more socially liberal after being hurled on the ash heap of history?

PMCers have yet to experience anything equivalent to the deindustrialisation that has blighted the lives of so many blue-collar workers. So, it’s impossible to prove PMCers will abandon performatively virtuous progressivism and drift towards right-wing populism once they start moving down in the world.

But these are my people, whom I’ve lived among for half a century now. If they have one besetting sin – aside from self-satisfied self-righteousness – it’s shameless careerism.

You simply don’t attain and then maintain membership of the PMC – especially the upper echelons of the PMC – without a certain degree of vaunting ambition. Even the cognitively gifted don’t graduate from a top-tier university, or land a sought-after grad position, or climb the greasy pole at a white-shoe firm without being careerists. So, I fully expect PMCers’ extracurricular commitments to showily uplifting sacralised minority groups will be placed on the backburner within seconds of them receiving a text from HR telling them their services are no longer required.

I’ll also draw your attention to events in Germany from the early 1920s to the early 1930s, dear reader. The punishing reparations the Germans were obliged to pay under the Treaty of Versailles led to much printing of money. That created hyperinflation. That created severe economic and social dislocation. That was nightmarish for all Germans, but it was particularly disorientating for the industrious, law-abiding, middle and lower-middle class ones.

As if losing a major war and being ravaged by hyperinflation weren’t enough, Germany was also hit especially hard by the Great Depression. Godwin’s Law prevents me from revealing what happened after Germany’s unemployment rate reached 30 per cent in 1932. But let’s just say it involved some dramatic political realignments.

An end to vibrant diversification?
For a Veblen good or luxury belief to signal aristocratic status it must remain out of reach of the commoners. Once the peasants get their grubby hands on something, it might just qualify as masstige but it’s certainly not luxury. So it has been with luxury beliefs – depending on how you do the maths, they are held by 10-20 per cent of the population.

The problem is that it’s the 10-20 per cent of the population who run everything.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb explored in Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018), ‘intolerant minorities’ can – and frequently do – overrule unorganised or apathetic majorities. If you allow an intolerant minority to seize control of the commanding heights of a society’s sense-making institutions, all kinds of things become possible. Such as punishingly high levels of immigration being imposed on societies for decades against the clearly and repeatedly stated wishes of a majority of voters.

Could the worms turn?
Will right-thinking artists, academics and journalists still be quite so keen to casually hurl charges of racism around when they’re no longer working artists, academics and journalists? Once they no longer have a job that separates them out from the hoi polloi, will they remain equally enamoured with porous borders? Could my PMC brethren transition from Anywheres to Somewheres overnight?

While we are on the subject, should we also expect an abrupt volte-face from those corporations who are forever demanding ever more (cheap and compliant) migrant labour be imported? Suppose a settlement is hammered out whereby businesses are permitted to automate away their workforces in return for funding a UBI. Wouldn’t the business lobby then want to contract the size of the (now non-working) population rather than increase it?

Last week, I concluded by suggesting we reconvene at the end of 2025 to determine, with reference to hard data, whether mass automation is occurring. If the business lobby and their PMC enablers cool on mass migration over the next six months, it will be further evidence AI-driven automation is turning the world upside down and prompting once-unthinkable shifts in the political objectives of the PMC.