As the universities go, so goes the PMC

If it’s not the end of the world, it’s at least the end of a world

“What’s on the agenda is the full suite of issues,” Mr Albanese said. “What we’re doing is inviting people to come in, from business, from unions, from civil society, to put forward their ideas about how we deal with the economic challenges of boosting productivity.

“How we deal with the transition with complex issues such as artificial intelligence, which has the opportunity… to really boost productivity, but we need to make sure that it operates in the interests of people as well,” the Prime Minister said. “So how do we train Australians, for the jobs of the future, and that is a priority for us.”
The Australian, 10/8/25

At Canva’s debut AI Vision event, founders and executives grappled with both the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence, Daniel Van Boom wrote for this week's Sweat Equity. Culture Amp CEO Didier Elzinga warned that behind closed doors, companies are weighing how AI will reshape headcount, even as he described it as unlocking new possibilities for his business. Relevance AI’s Jacky Koh revealed that 70% of his startup’s work is already handled by AI agents, with plans to push that to 90%. The event comes as the Albanese government’s Economic Reform Roundtable makes AI central to its productivity agenda, with figures such as Tesla chair Robyn Denholm and CSIRO chair Ming Long advising Jim Chalmers. But while industry pushes for incentives and infrastructure like data centres, tougher policy questions around copyright, job losses and Big Tech’s local footprint remain unresolved.
Capital Brief, 20/8/25

I’m writing this post on Sunday afternoon, well before it will be published, dear reader.

In two days, Australia’s heavy hitters will assemble for a three-day ‘Economic Reform Roundtable’.

It was initially billed as a Productivity Summit. But like its close sibling ‘greater labour market flexibility’, any reference to productivity nowadays causes Australian workers to begin darkly imagining just how much further the workplace balance of power is about to be tilted in favour of their employers.

In PM Albanese’s soaring rhetoric, the purpose of the summit is to “to build the broadest possible base of support for further economic reform… in a time of global uncertainty”.

(Just throwing ideas out there, Albo, but I imagine a large majority of Australians under the age of 60 would support bold reforms that made Australia’s economy a little less weighted in favour of affluent Boomers.)

But if real reform comes, it will come in the wake of a painful crisis, not as a result of a gabfest.

The current ‘Roundtable’ will probably end up just as pointless as the ‘Australia 2020 Summit’, held 17 years ago.

ChatGPT reminds me that this was “a two-day gathering of 1,000 of the ‘best and brightest’.”

Thousands of brilliant ideas were brainstormed, none were ever implemented.

The Summit’s highest-profile attendees were Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman.

Both left Australia some years ago and don’t seem to have any intention of returning.

The ground shifts under the PMC’s feet
Though the Canberra jamboree was meant to canvass a range of issues, most of the commentary around it (so far) has focused on AI.

To the extent there is anything noteworthy about the event, it’s that the union movement went into it arguing that (a) Employees should have some say in how AI is rolled out and (b) Employees should capture some of the upsides of AI-driven productivity gains in the form of a four-day working week.

The first of those demands is never going to be met.

The time is not yet right for the second, as even the union movement quietly understands.

But that doesn’t mean the times aren’t a’changing.

The weekend papers have been Roundtable heavy, but most of them still devoted some attention to how, as The Australian put it, Universities have announced sweeping job losses in a cost-cutting purge.

18 universities have announced 3578 job cuts since last year… The cuts would account for 2.5 per cent of academic, research and administrative jobs in the sector.

I should make clear to my freshly acquired American readers that the Australian university system’s woes aren’t due to a right-wing populist government gleefully bitch-slapping ‘woke madrassas’.

Australia has a centre-left government positively inclined towards universities and the overwhelmingly left-leaning academics they employ.

Some of the declining demand for those academics’ services is a result of the aforementioned centre-left government belatedly placing some broad limits on the volume of cash-cow international students.

Many of whom, of course, are not so much students as cheap foreign labour.

But don’t get me started.

The PMC’s now-collapsing grift
The existential issue facing the Anglosphere’s academics isn’t that political elites are putting the woke open borders away.

It’s that in a post-AI age, it simply no longer makes sense, in many instances, for a bright and ambitious 17-year-old to go into debt and burn years of their fleeting youth acquiring a credential that will almost certainly be much devalued, if not worthless, long before they graduate.

If growing numbers of students don’t matriculate, societies will have far fewer university-qualified professionals and managers in the future.

That means, in the not-so-long run, the Professional-Managerial Class will be dead.

Granted, it will be a slow torturous death. Ever-striving PMCers aren’t the type to go gently into that good night.

Which brings me to a recent Substack post by the magnificent Lorenzo Warby.

As is often observed, the PMC covers a lot of ground, from someone barely staying afloat as a sessional academic to a C-suiter pulling down millions every year.

But as a general rule, the credentialled have historically earned at least average incomes.

Those with ‘good degrees’ from top-tier institutions frequently earn between earn 2X-4X the median income.

Speaking of making good coin, let me start quoting the aforementioned Warby post.

The central aim of contemporary left-progressive politics is to insert the professional-managerial class into as many resource flows as possible and then to defend and extend such insertion through control of public discourse legitimacy… The sustained, and accelerating, social imperialism of the activist professional-managerial class has become progressivism’s central dynamic.

But as one or two Substack pundits have noted, the PMC’s iron grip on public discourse legitimacy has been slowly but steadily weakening since 2016.

The rise of populism—especially national populism—is one (major) response to the social imperialism of the professional-managerial class (and pervasive contempt for the concerns and interests of the working class).

The current disruption of the Western alliance comes from Trump 2.0 prosecuting a cultural class war against that social imperialism, both domestically and internationally. Because this social imperialism has sought to bypass wider electoral consent in multiple countries—indeed, to block the articulating of dissent—various Western nations (particularly the Anglosphere)—are experiencing preference cascades where people become aware of how unpopular various “compulsory” views actually are and move sharply away from them.

What happens when the PMC can’t replicate itself?
Warby touches on the mechanics of class reproduction.

The activist professional-managerial class prosecutes its insertion into as many resource-flows as possible by creating and using dominion capital. As defined in a previous post, dominion capital is (slightly reworded): the skills, knowledge, motivation, and networking to coordinate entry into organisations and institutions, shifting them towards serving the status and social-leverage strategies of those who possess said capital.

PMCers acquire their dominion capital – the skills, knowledge, motivation, and networking to coordinate entry into organisations and institutions – primarily during their time at university. If you doubt that, estimate how much influence the unlettered have over any of your society’s important organisations and institutions.

The eternal dilemma of middle-class individuals is that – unlike those at the top and bottom of the heap – they don’t simply inherit their class position. They have to earn it, generation after generation.

Loving parents have long told their children that getting a good education is the surest path to financial security and a happy life.

But now it’s not.

What is the surest path to financial security?

Nobody knows.

What’s going to take the place of universities?

Nobody knows.

What are all the high-school grads who used to head to uni going to do now that they are not doing that?

Nobody knows.

What happens when society’s current leadership class is no longer being replenished from below? (Or at least not replenished in the conventional fashion?)

Nobody knows.

How will the Anglosphere’s political systems respond when these questions become pressing?

Well, it seems nobody is quite sure about that either.