I have a similar sense - AI is most likely to bring about the birth of worker class consciousness in the upper middle class as it is threatened. I probably would take the under generally on AI quickly overcoming the friction that would be required to completely replace the upper middle / professional class, but I could definitely see it being their NAFTA moment. And I would also, similarly, expect to see political backlash against AI / tech oligarchs. God forbid you see a Boston Dynamics robot do a plumbing job, or you'll unite the PMC and the working class into a true proletariat.
That being said, I think PMC values are so ingrained even in the plutocrats, and they are such a large driver of demand, that it is hard to see this really benefiting anyone, except in a schadenfreude sense for some. It's basically a breaking of the American Dream contract that has existed for the last 75 years, even among the working class: "work hard, send your kid to college, and they'll get a good white collar job somewhere". I don't think ANYBODY would be politically happy in a world where you say "So you weren't born into a family that owns lots of assets? Guess you're fucked", even if seems like the state of affairs already to many today.
tldr: I can't see capitalism surviving the death of the PMC
Thanks for the insightful commentary, Steiner! I hadn't previously made the connection but I think you're on the money in labelling the mass penetration of AI as a "NAFTA moment" for we PMCers. You also raise an interesting issue about whether the (much-abused) working class will be willing to bury the hatchet with their longtime tormentors and form an alliance against the plutocratic overclass. (Let's just say I have my doubts, even if robots quickly become much cheaper and more capable, as many are predicting.
Yeah, I think you are right. Especially with all the existing cultural animosity, it might just make the working class hate PMCs all the more. There would be schadenfreude, until those former PMC-ers start getting certified as plumbers and pipefitters and threatening their jobs. I'm not arrogant enough to assume that PMC could go just "be better" at plumbing, but I also don't think its reasonable to assume that none of the human capital they've got could translate into jobs in the 'real' world.
I've worked in enough blue collar and physical service roles to know there are pretty massive benefits to things like ambition, reasoning ability, punctuality, etc. that, while not universal among PMC, are very far from universal as you go lower on the educational requirements totem pole.
If the managerial types get into welding (unlikely as the health costs are high, as in breathing in vaporized lead impregnated into an old fuel storage tank) or other, less cancer-causing trades, it will be because of their motivation and attention to detail.
Most white collar folks would scoff at what passes for a wash station, in areas theyre required to provide a wash station. You may underestimate how dirty, dirty jobs are
Believe it or not, I did do some dirty jobs in my youth, EggMan, so I take your point! Yes, a lot of people seem to be assuming that a PMCer - say a lawyer or a management consultant or accountant - can simply shift to high-paid skilled blue-collar work if all the 'email jobs' evaporate. While I think that will occur to some degree, I doubt it will be the silver bullet many nervous PMCers are hoping. If only because of the imminent arrival of affordable, sophisticated, AI-equipped humanoid robots.
I struggle to see the usefulness of a human-shaped bot over a human. Or a human with a skidsteer.
Dirty jobs are already pretty mechanized, except the more artistic ones like welding carpentry etc. CB&I has had a few auto welders on patent since the 50s. But they cant weld overhead. I struggle to think of what a ai powered bot could do
Though to critique myself here, if the NAFTA argument is right, it isn't a wholesale "one and done" elimination of PMC. I guess you would just expect to see a slightly sped up reversal of the creation of the PMC in the first place. So the marginal person, who two generations ago would have been working class / a farmer, is going to have difficulty finding or retaining a job, whereas the top portion of human capital on the PMC side is probably going to be fine for a while at least. It's really just a generally deflationary class pressure that gets created which likely leads to a strong political consciousness response.
Thanks for putting forward some counter-arguments, Ke'Aun. My responses:
*Yes, migration has waxed and waned - in the US and much of the Anglosphere – but there's been a great deal of waxing in recent decades. This has not been a free lunch, despite the utopian paeans to vibrantly diverse multiculturalism that my PMC brothers and sisters are so wont to launch into.
*The PMC doesn't have any responsibility to advocate for Marxist economic policy. But the PMC should stop kidding itself that it's some sort of heroic and noble liberating force uplifting the oppressed when they are, in most cases, utterly self-interested careerists more than happy to act as a courtier class for contemporary aristocrats (i.e the billionaire class)
*Especially from 2016 onwards, the working class has regularly voted against progressive shibboleths (ever more mass migration, ever more divisive asymmetrical multiculturalism, an ever more all-encompassing concern with transgenderism etc, etc). However, my reading of the polling suggests the working class, including the significant proportion of it that's now supposedly 'right-wing', is very comfortable with 'Marxist' positions, for instance, soaking the rich and forcing tax-shy multinationals to pony up.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but I sense a simmering rage at a specific type of PMC character that distorts the point a bit - the type of PMCer who is both self-congratulatory and self-flagellating, depending on which benefits the social situation they find themselves in, a performer of Correct Morality, a sort of PR mouthpiece for things that you have a gut sense they don’t actually give a shit about. In other words, a social climber.
Social climbers have always been and will always be irritating people. I think of the Deadwood character EB Farnum who whitewashes his middling origins with ostentatious verbosity. His lines are a hilarious onslaught of over the top poetics, all a transparent effort to disguise his class and climb above his station. But this is also a kernel of the American dream…a land where anyone can raise their status with some hard work and creativity.
I don’t believe all PMCs are social climbers to this extreme, and the (really inconsistent) definitions I hear in this piece and others of what the PMC even *is* get at a confusion of what is Good and Bad - is working hard to not be an American prole good or bad? Does this country embrace the bootstraps or not? Who are the real fascists - the annoying nerds who said Me Too online, or the fascists? Who is the real villain in Deadwood - EB Farnum, or Al Swearengen?
While I think it’s fair to say the power of the professional managerial class (with its conveniently undefinable boundaries) has risen with the expansion of wealth and therefore higher education in America, they never really had the cards. We got a couple of war-torn bank-bailout mediocre-healthcare Obama terms, but maybe what makes the PMC PMC is that they don’t have the cynicism of billionaires or the structurally poor - they’re climbers, optimists about changing the hearts and minds of the cynics. Which has unfortunately proven to be unsustainable as the billionaires continue to take the entire pie away from everyone else.
Well-spotted, Savannah! I do indeed have a simmering rage at (the not insubstantial proportion of) PMCers who so self-righteously point the finger with one hand while patting themselves on the back with the other. And, yes, the Swearengens are the main villains rather than Farnums (who've been so eager to enable the Swearengens, especially since circa 1980). But, sadly, my influence over the billionaire class is minimal, so I confine my ambitions to encouraging my PMC brothers and sisters to at least consider the possibility they are neither as virtuous nor as clever as they tell themselves.
I guess you don’t go so far as to outright blame the PMC for the crimes of the pathologically greedy in the US. But I’m sure you’ve seen those types of takes and imo that is the exact type of self-flagellating instinct that makes the PMC so unserious. I just think that as Pax Americana fades into history we need to keep our eyes on the ball.
"Friendless, they now face the type of abrupt technological displacement that’s blighted the lives of so many blue-collar workers over the last 45 years."
That whole paragraph is a super interesting thought. Well put.
As a Latino, it kind of feels like middle-class America is getting firsthand experience of what’s been happening in my neck of the woods for decades.
Life has always been crappy for working class people eg Latin America & pre social democracy Europe. What changed is the mid-20C gave people a chance to work their way up in the West - this is now being taken away again. Americans are getting a shock but really only one generation got to have a decent shot at it.
The cost of that generation's wellbeing was the plunder of the "global south" so it was a fortunate generation for a very small part of the world population.
Also, a lot of boomers are now passing away and transferring that wealth to their children. We're probably better off restricting inheritances as they create extremely unfair advantages for the beneficiaries.
I often wonder what could have happened if technology just stopped advancing at this point or another. How the regimes of say the 1890s or 80s could have ossified and settled down without new technology to shake things up.
A fanciful thought, given technological improvement is and was widely accepted throughout these various societies. Just something I've always found interesting. In this case we may not get to see what a PMC society would look like on scales outside of decades. At least theres dynastic china to see what stable bureaucratic governance looked like.
Good point, MR! I supposed you could make a case the earliest members of the PMC were the ones who passed Imperial China's famously meritocratic civil servants exam a millennia ago.
Thanks for a great essay, very fun, much smartness. I especially liked the riff on all the “priors” talk, which I found almost unbelievable. Also, I hadn’t considered that all the PMCs are gonna need plumbing or carpentry apprenticeships, but we NEED more plumbers and carpenters (maybe that will bring their prices down.) I will opt in for an unpaid subscription. Well done. I feel MUCH better about AI than I did this morning.
I believed ten years ago that robotic embodiment to that level would be impossible - things I heard on podcasts whose validity I had no way of judging and still don’t. It’s unnerving to be unsure how far it could go. Until now the technology stretch seems to have been about human convenience.
Thanks for your kind comments, David, and welcome to the Precariat Musings family! As flagged elsewhere in the comments, humanoid robots - which are currently eye-wateringly expensive and not very capable – are likely to be come a lot cheaper and more sophisticated in the near future. Once that happens, the demand for human tradesmen will also presumably collapse
I frequently recertify my credentials with the experts (which are me) to sustain and maintain an unimpeachable and unassailable authority and reputation.
It is tough to respond to such a scattershot post, but I do want to push back on your belief that the working class has it awful.
Even a quick data search will reveal that the wealthy do pay almost all income tax, that unemployment has recently been historically low, and that incomes for the middle and lower classes are substantially higher in the US than other developed nations and rising a bit faster to boot. Lifespans, health, home ownership, education and about twenty other stats are at or damn close to all time highs as well.
Sure there are some negative headwinds too, but they tend to be on social rather than economic factors, or at least social factors that drag down economic results. For example, lower and later marriage rates, higher rates of immigration, cost of living in coastal cities, the demise of communism in China, and so on.
The trouble with statistics covering hundreds of millions of people across their lifespans is that it obscures real life experiences of real individuals. Granted. But the benefit of statistics is to take all that messiness and take a bit of a step back to a higher level of abstraction.
And yes, life has gotten better for most people on most dimensions, including those considered lower or working class. Not all. Just most, especially compared to any other developed nation.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, Swami! You make some valid points – the US remains the world's richest country (even if that wealth is concentrated at the top) and, as Pinker often points out, life has gotten longer/safer/healthier for pretty much everyone over time. But I think it's difficult to make a case that the working class hasn't been left behind as the plutocrats and (large sections of) the PMC have prospered.
The CBO estimates that the bottom quintile has seen income growth after taxes and transfers of 69% from 1980 to 2014 (with more since). The middle three quintiles have seen increases of 42%. Yes, both are lower than what the top quintile gained, but calling this “left behind” seems inaccurate, especially since the working class in the US have done notably better than most of the rest of the developed world.
My summary of the situation over the past 4 or 5 decades is that vast expansions in market size and technology have led to an era where capital, entrepreneurial activity and skilled labor have become much more valuable (scarce and important). Workers, especially less skilled, became less in demand, but in nations that responded dynamically to the challenges and opportunities, most people have benefited, especially when considering reductions in taxes and increases in transfers.
I've got a day job (for the next few months, at least) so I can't spend too much more time arguing my corner, Swami. But to briefly respond to your responses:
A reasonable case can certainly be made that an average blue-collar American is better off materially in 2025 than they were in, say, 1965. For example, they probably have a big-screen TV, air-conditioning and a car that breaks down far less than cars manufactured in the 1960s did. There is a degree of truth in that old classic – 'a rising tide lifts all boats'.
But if the American working class is doing so well, why are so many of them committing slow-motion suicide through substance abuse? Or just outright committing suicide, especially if they're men? Why do they believe that they are doing far worse than their parents and grandparents? And why did they feel the system was so irretrievably corrupt and broken that they risked electing an ill-disciplined change agent like Trump not once but twice? Despite being endlessly warned about his Hitlerian tendencies by Ivy League-educated academics, journalists and 'respectable' politicians?
You make a good point; maybe the most important point. But you know how I know you’ve never worked at Walmart, and how I know you don’t work in the service industry now? Because you wrote this post. This kind of “those sods don’t know how good they’ve got it” philosophy is limited to the PMC.
I agree with your point, and I do think that Nigel may be overstating the case for the immiseration of the lower classes here. But I think his fundamental point is rock solid: we’ve (us fellow professionals) have made extremely good livings incommensurate with the actual value of our work. When you add in a lengthy period of extremely unpopular social demands with the power to back them up, and now the first technological threat to our positions since the war, we may be headed for trouble.
I disagree though that most professionals, skilled workers, entrepreneurs or capitalists earned incomes incommensurate with their work. As my note above to NB claims, the past two generations have been an unprecedented era of vastly expanding markets with the introduction of billions of lower skilled workers. This put higher skills, capital and entrepreneurial talents at a premium. The market is signaling what it wants and needs more of and is rewarding that. This is exactly what has happened.
Not only is this not a problem. It is a good thing. The problem would be not responding to the market signals and incentives.
With AI, Knowldge workers may soon be the ones less in demand. The market may begin signaling that we need more plumbers, repairmen, nurses and landscapers and rewarding those jobs more relative to accountants and lawyers.
To quickly add my two cents, I think we may, in the short term, see the labour market responding to demand in the way you outline, Swami. But the imminent appearance of cheap and sophisticated robots mean the jobs of tradesmen are also likely to be automated away, albeit rather more slowly than those of laptop class knowledge workers.
Another thing that AI will make easier is actually evaluating the real productivity/competence of PMW workers. This will make credentialism a thing of the past.
Once again, I suspect you're on the money. Of course, employers have long surveilled staff (just as governments surveil their citizens) but AI will take things to a whole new level.
A rising tide lifts all mega yachts. It drowns the rest of us. I agree that the AI revolution will throw a lot of the nomenklatura out of work, in large part because so much of what those jobs entail is either bullshit or endeavoring to maintain archaic business processes together with masking tape where welds are needed.
i find it tremendously strange that you would write an entire piece on the back of liu’s bastardized notion of the “PMC” only to turn around and cite ehrenreich at the end with no regard to her correct diagnosis that the PMC died in the 2008 recession. lest we forget that ehrenreich indicated the end of the PMC would be its capitulation to corporate capital, how much of our derision is pointed not at their “supposed repository of civic virtue and occupational dedication” but at a phantom?
Most of the PMC is basically of average or slightly above intelligence. But in general, they excel at two things: Rule following and Office politics. There will still be managerial and technical jobs, but AI will make the bar a lot higher to get those fewer jobs. But on the other side, higher intelligence people are usually way less arrogant than those midwits and care less about office politics, as well as sharing with the worker class the same hate for bureaucracy.
I have a similar sense - AI is most likely to bring about the birth of worker class consciousness in the upper middle class as it is threatened. I probably would take the under generally on AI quickly overcoming the friction that would be required to completely replace the upper middle / professional class, but I could definitely see it being their NAFTA moment. And I would also, similarly, expect to see political backlash against AI / tech oligarchs. God forbid you see a Boston Dynamics robot do a plumbing job, or you'll unite the PMC and the working class into a true proletariat.
That being said, I think PMC values are so ingrained even in the plutocrats, and they are such a large driver of demand, that it is hard to see this really benefiting anyone, except in a schadenfreude sense for some. It's basically a breaking of the American Dream contract that has existed for the last 75 years, even among the working class: "work hard, send your kid to college, and they'll get a good white collar job somewhere". I don't think ANYBODY would be politically happy in a world where you say "So you weren't born into a family that owns lots of assets? Guess you're fucked", even if seems like the state of affairs already to many today.
tldr: I can't see capitalism surviving the death of the PMC
Thanks for the insightful commentary, Steiner! I hadn't previously made the connection but I think you're on the money in labelling the mass penetration of AI as a "NAFTA moment" for we PMCers. You also raise an interesting issue about whether the (much-abused) working class will be willing to bury the hatchet with their longtime tormentors and form an alliance against the plutocratic overclass. (Let's just say I have my doubts, even if robots quickly become much cheaper and more capable, as many are predicting.
Yeah, I think you are right. Especially with all the existing cultural animosity, it might just make the working class hate PMCs all the more. There would be schadenfreude, until those former PMC-ers start getting certified as plumbers and pipefitters and threatening their jobs. I'm not arrogant enough to assume that PMC could go just "be better" at plumbing, but I also don't think its reasonable to assume that none of the human capital they've got could translate into jobs in the 'real' world.
I've worked in enough blue collar and physical service roles to know there are pretty massive benefits to things like ambition, reasoning ability, punctuality, etc. that, while not universal among PMC, are very far from universal as you go lower on the educational requirements totem pole.
If the managerial types get into welding (unlikely as the health costs are high, as in breathing in vaporized lead impregnated into an old fuel storage tank) or other, less cancer-causing trades, it will be because of their motivation and attention to detail.
Most white collar folks would scoff at what passes for a wash station, in areas theyre required to provide a wash station. You may underestimate how dirty, dirty jobs are
Believe it or not, I did do some dirty jobs in my youth, EggMan, so I take your point! Yes, a lot of people seem to be assuming that a PMCer - say a lawyer or a management consultant or accountant - can simply shift to high-paid skilled blue-collar work if all the 'email jobs' evaporate. While I think that will occur to some degree, I doubt it will be the silver bullet many nervous PMCers are hoping. If only because of the imminent arrival of affordable, sophisticated, AI-equipped humanoid robots.
I struggle to see the usefulness of a human-shaped bot over a human. Or a human with a skidsteer.
Dirty jobs are already pretty mechanized, except the more artistic ones like welding carpentry etc. CB&I has had a few auto welders on patent since the 50s. But they cant weld overhead. I struggle to think of what a ai powered bot could do
Though to critique myself here, if the NAFTA argument is right, it isn't a wholesale "one and done" elimination of PMC. I guess you would just expect to see a slightly sped up reversal of the creation of the PMC in the first place. So the marginal person, who two generations ago would have been working class / a farmer, is going to have difficulty finding or retaining a job, whereas the top portion of human capital on the PMC side is probably going to be fine for a while at least. It's really just a generally deflationary class pressure that gets created which likely leads to a strong political consciousness response.
Mass immigration is a very old practice in America, and has waxed and waned in strength since America's founding.
Why do the PMC have the responsibility to push for Marxist economic policy? Marx himself said the working class would do it.
Speaking of, the working class consistently votes against “Leftist” economic reforms, so again why should the PMC push for them?
Thanks for putting forward some counter-arguments, Ke'Aun. My responses:
*Yes, migration has waxed and waned - in the US and much of the Anglosphere – but there's been a great deal of waxing in recent decades. This has not been a free lunch, despite the utopian paeans to vibrantly diverse multiculturalism that my PMC brothers and sisters are so wont to launch into.
*The PMC doesn't have any responsibility to advocate for Marxist economic policy. But the PMC should stop kidding itself that it's some sort of heroic and noble liberating force uplifting the oppressed when they are, in most cases, utterly self-interested careerists more than happy to act as a courtier class for contemporary aristocrats (i.e the billionaire class)
*Especially from 2016 onwards, the working class has regularly voted against progressive shibboleths (ever more mass migration, ever more divisive asymmetrical multiculturalism, an ever more all-encompassing concern with transgenderism etc, etc). However, my reading of the polling suggests the working class, including the significant proportion of it that's now supposedly 'right-wing', is very comfortable with 'Marxist' positions, for instance, soaking the rich and forcing tax-shy multinationals to pony up.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but I sense a simmering rage at a specific type of PMC character that distorts the point a bit - the type of PMCer who is both self-congratulatory and self-flagellating, depending on which benefits the social situation they find themselves in, a performer of Correct Morality, a sort of PR mouthpiece for things that you have a gut sense they don’t actually give a shit about. In other words, a social climber.
Social climbers have always been and will always be irritating people. I think of the Deadwood character EB Farnum who whitewashes his middling origins with ostentatious verbosity. His lines are a hilarious onslaught of over the top poetics, all a transparent effort to disguise his class and climb above his station. But this is also a kernel of the American dream…a land where anyone can raise their status with some hard work and creativity.
I don’t believe all PMCs are social climbers to this extreme, and the (really inconsistent) definitions I hear in this piece and others of what the PMC even *is* get at a confusion of what is Good and Bad - is working hard to not be an American prole good or bad? Does this country embrace the bootstraps or not? Who are the real fascists - the annoying nerds who said Me Too online, or the fascists? Who is the real villain in Deadwood - EB Farnum, or Al Swearengen?
While I think it’s fair to say the power of the professional managerial class (with its conveniently undefinable boundaries) has risen with the expansion of wealth and therefore higher education in America, they never really had the cards. We got a couple of war-torn bank-bailout mediocre-healthcare Obama terms, but maybe what makes the PMC PMC is that they don’t have the cynicism of billionaires or the structurally poor - they’re climbers, optimists about changing the hearts and minds of the cynics. Which has unfortunately proven to be unsustainable as the billionaires continue to take the entire pie away from everyone else.
Well-spotted, Savannah! I do indeed have a simmering rage at (the not insubstantial proportion of) PMCers who so self-righteously point the finger with one hand while patting themselves on the back with the other. And, yes, the Swearengens are the main villains rather than Farnums (who've been so eager to enable the Swearengens, especially since circa 1980). But, sadly, my influence over the billionaire class is minimal, so I confine my ambitions to encouraging my PMC brothers and sisters to at least consider the possibility they are neither as virtuous nor as clever as they tell themselves.
I guess you don’t go so far as to outright blame the PMC for the crimes of the pathologically greedy in the US. But I’m sure you’ve seen those types of takes and imo that is the exact type of self-flagellating instinct that makes the PMC so unserious. I just think that as Pax Americana fades into history we need to keep our eyes on the ball.
Agreed!
The ability to use characters from Deadwood to critique such a worthy essay is a superpower. Well done Savannah. You made my day.
Ah, found you from Quora ! Good day.
Good to see ya!
"Friendless, they now face the type of abrupt technological displacement that’s blighted the lives of so many blue-collar workers over the last 45 years."
That whole paragraph is a super interesting thought. Well put.
As a Latino, it kind of feels like middle-class America is getting firsthand experience of what’s been happening in my neck of the woods for decades.
Thanks, Ramiro!
Life has always been crappy for working class people eg Latin America & pre social democracy Europe. What changed is the mid-20C gave people a chance to work their way up in the West - this is now being taken away again. Americans are getting a shock but really only one generation got to have a decent shot at it.
Yep, that was a very historically fortunate generation!
I agree. I'd add two things.
The cost of that generation's wellbeing was the plunder of the "global south" so it was a fortunate generation for a very small part of the world population.
Also, a lot of boomers are now passing away and transferring that wealth to their children. We're probably better off restricting inheritances as they create extremely unfair advantages for the beneficiaries.
Agreed.
I often wonder what could have happened if technology just stopped advancing at this point or another. How the regimes of say the 1890s or 80s could have ossified and settled down without new technology to shake things up.
A fanciful thought, given technological improvement is and was widely accepted throughout these various societies. Just something I've always found interesting. In this case we may not get to see what a PMC society would look like on scales outside of decades. At least theres dynastic china to see what stable bureaucratic governance looked like.
Good point, MR! I supposed you could make a case the earliest members of the PMC were the ones who passed Imperial China's famously meritocratic civil servants exam a millennia ago.
Thanks for a great essay, very fun, much smartness. I especially liked the riff on all the “priors” talk, which I found almost unbelievable. Also, I hadn’t considered that all the PMCs are gonna need plumbing or carpentry apprenticeships, but we NEED more plumbers and carpenters (maybe that will bring their prices down.) I will opt in for an unpaid subscription. Well done. I feel MUCH better about AI than I did this morning.
I believed ten years ago that robotic embodiment to that level would be impossible - things I heard on podcasts whose validity I had no way of judging and still don’t. It’s unnerving to be unsure how far it could go. Until now the technology stretch seems to have been about human convenience.
Thanks for your kind comments, David, and welcome to the Precariat Musings family! As flagged elsewhere in the comments, humanoid robots - which are currently eye-wateringly expensive and not very capable – are likely to be come a lot cheaper and more sophisticated in the near future. Once that happens, the demand for human tradesmen will also presumably collapse
"I can assure you that I am every bit as clever as I think I am."
That's the spirit, Willy! (The many brilliant schemes of we PMCers can never fail, only be failed by lesser mortals.)
I frequently recertify my credentials with the experts (which are me) to sustain and maintain an unimpeachable and unassailable authority and reputation.
It is tough to respond to such a scattershot post, but I do want to push back on your belief that the working class has it awful.
Even a quick data search will reveal that the wealthy do pay almost all income tax, that unemployment has recently been historically low, and that incomes for the middle and lower classes are substantially higher in the US than other developed nations and rising a bit faster to boot. Lifespans, health, home ownership, education and about twenty other stats are at or damn close to all time highs as well.
Sure there are some negative headwinds too, but they tend to be on social rather than economic factors, or at least social factors that drag down economic results. For example, lower and later marriage rates, higher rates of immigration, cost of living in coastal cities, the demise of communism in China, and so on.
The trouble with statistics covering hundreds of millions of people across their lifespans is that it obscures real life experiences of real individuals. Granted. But the benefit of statistics is to take all that messiness and take a bit of a step back to a higher level of abstraction.
And yes, life has gotten better for most people on most dimensions, including those considered lower or working class. Not all. Just most, especially compared to any other developed nation.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, Swami! You make some valid points – the US remains the world's richest country (even if that wealth is concentrated at the top) and, as Pinker often points out, life has gotten longer/safer/healthier for pretty much everyone over time. But I think it's difficult to make a case that the working class hasn't been left behind as the plutocrats and (large sections of) the PMC have prospered.
The CBO estimates that the bottom quintile has seen income growth after taxes and transfers of 69% from 1980 to 2014 (with more since). The middle three quintiles have seen increases of 42%. Yes, both are lower than what the top quintile gained, but calling this “left behind” seems inaccurate, especially since the working class in the US have done notably better than most of the rest of the developed world.
My summary of the situation over the past 4 or 5 decades is that vast expansions in market size and technology have led to an era where capital, entrepreneurial activity and skilled labor have become much more valuable (scarce and important). Workers, especially less skilled, became less in demand, but in nations that responded dynamically to the challenges and opportunities, most people have benefited, especially when considering reductions in taxes and increases in transfers.
I've got a day job (for the next few months, at least) so I can't spend too much more time arguing my corner, Swami. But to briefly respond to your responses:
A reasonable case can certainly be made that an average blue-collar American is better off materially in 2025 than they were in, say, 1965. For example, they probably have a big-screen TV, air-conditioning and a car that breaks down far less than cars manufactured in the 1960s did. There is a degree of truth in that old classic – 'a rising tide lifts all boats'.
But if the American working class is doing so well, why are so many of them committing slow-motion suicide through substance abuse? Or just outright committing suicide, especially if they're men? Why do they believe that they are doing far worse than their parents and grandparents? And why did they feel the system was so irretrievably corrupt and broken that they risked electing an ill-disciplined change agent like Trump not once but twice? Despite being endlessly warned about his Hitlerian tendencies by Ivy League-educated academics, journalists and 'respectable' politicians?
You make a good point; maybe the most important point. But you know how I know you’ve never worked at Walmart, and how I know you don’t work in the service industry now? Because you wrote this post. This kind of “those sods don’t know how good they’ve got it” philosophy is limited to the PMC.
I agree with your point, and I do think that Nigel may be overstating the case for the immiseration of the lower classes here. But I think his fundamental point is rock solid: we’ve (us fellow professionals) have made extremely good livings incommensurate with the actual value of our work. When you add in a lengthy period of extremely unpopular social demands with the power to back them up, and now the first technological threat to our positions since the war, we may be headed for trouble.
Yes, there may be trouble ahead.
I disagree though that most professionals, skilled workers, entrepreneurs or capitalists earned incomes incommensurate with their work. As my note above to NB claims, the past two generations have been an unprecedented era of vastly expanding markets with the introduction of billions of lower skilled workers. This put higher skills, capital and entrepreneurial talents at a premium. The market is signaling what it wants and needs more of and is rewarding that. This is exactly what has happened.
Not only is this not a problem. It is a good thing. The problem would be not responding to the market signals and incentives.
With AI, Knowldge workers may soon be the ones less in demand. The market may begin signaling that we need more plumbers, repairmen, nurses and landscapers and rewarding those jobs more relative to accountants and lawyers.
To quickly add my two cents, I think we may, in the short term, see the labour market responding to demand in the way you outline, Swami. But the imminent appearance of cheap and sophisticated robots mean the jobs of tradesmen are also likely to be automated away, albeit rather more slowly than those of laptop class knowledge workers.
Yes, it seems big changes are on the way.
Another thing that AI will make easier is actually evaluating the real productivity/competence of PMW workers. This will make credentialism a thing of the past.
Once again, I suspect you're on the money. Of course, employers have long surveilled staff (just as governments surveil their citizens) but AI will take things to a whole new level.
A rising tide lifts all mega yachts. It drowns the rest of us. I agree that the AI revolution will throw a lot of the nomenklatura out of work, in large part because so much of what those jobs entail is either bullshit or endeavoring to maintain archaic business processes together with masking tape where welds are needed.
Yep!
Very timely - we just saw 1984 last night which continues to be on HSC reading lists for good reason!
Yes, I really should get round to re-reading it (shamefully, for the first time since my own high school years)
i find it tremendously strange that you would write an entire piece on the back of liu’s bastardized notion of the “PMC” only to turn around and cite ehrenreich at the end with no regard to her correct diagnosis that the PMC died in the 2008 recession. lest we forget that ehrenreich indicated the end of the PMC would be its capitulation to corporate capital, how much of our derision is pointed not at their “supposed repository of civic virtue and occupational dedication” but at a phantom?
You're a hard taskmistress, Johanna! I'm a big fan of Ehrenreich but wasn't aware she'd proclaimed the death of the PMC in 2008. Are you referring to this article - https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/sonst_publikationen/ehrenreich_death_of_a_yuppie_dream90.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com?
Most of the PMC is basically of average or slightly above intelligence. But in general, they excel at two things: Rule following and Office politics. There will still be managerial and technical jobs, but AI will make the bar a lot higher to get those fewer jobs. But on the other side, higher intelligence people are usually way less arrogant than those midwits and care less about office politics, as well as sharing with the worker class the same hate for bureaucracy.
Well, that's one skerrick of good news to cling on to!