The PMC has spent decades throwing the lower orders under the bus. Can it now win the working class back over to rein in the growing power of the ruling class?
Good piece! When I wrote an article encouraging our PMC brothers and sisters to defect from Cluster-B leftism (to get ahead of that anti-PMC backlash before it messily explodes)
I came up with an almost identical group of modern socioeconomic classes, but didn't really quantify it the way you did.
(I also don't think there are that many blue collar jobs left that can be automated that weren't automated already, so we differ there)
1) The Shareholder Class. The billionaires and centimillionaires. Numerically insignificant for electoral purposes, but wielding outsized economic power.
2) The Laptop Class. Affluent but not necessarily wealthy; they manage and oversee the bureaucracies/corporations/foundations owned by the Shareholder Class. A politically dominant plurality in major cities across developed countries, but nowhere near a national majority in any country. They do however have hegemonic control over nearly all major institutions and sites of cultural production.
3) The Physical Class. They don’t have the luxury of working from home, and don’t hold your breath for them to be able to name 70 different genders, but they’re the reason modern societies are still able to function. They’re the largest voting demographic by class, though they typically don’t vote as a single bloc for various reasons such as urban/rural divides.
4) The Welfare Class. Chronically unemployed for various reasons, they are entirely dependent on the state (or else live off petty crime) and have skyhigh rates of substance abuse. Voter turnout is generally low to nonexistent.
Great minds think alike, Miles! I'm not even sure we differ that much about 'blue collar' jobs, though we might be defining the term differently. The blue-collar manufacturing jobs aren't coming back, even if Anglosphere nations reshore their manufacturing sectors. But I suspect it will be a while before we see robot plumbers.
in the specific case of the USA (which the author referenced), these categories are in-general much more fuzzy and in some important specific instances quite wrong. One example of the latter, is that so called manufacturing and other forms of physical industry, dont just have simple manual labor, they also have a wide number of advanced trades and technical jobs, and beyond that they all have parts and services suppliers, combined they make up most of the physical world where applied science and engineering relate to, and so so their degradation in turn greatly degraded much -- at this point in time I think it can be strong argued most -- of our scientific and engineering ecosystems, and therefore really harmed the career prospects of many scientists and engineers in most fields. And that one example goes further, all these industries have huge amounts of construction and building and infrastructure requirements, so their degradation greatly reduced corresponding areas that in turn degraded the career prospects of architects, civil engineers, etc. And even just those example can go a lot further. And so these economic -- and what should be, by extension political (and actually was for the first 200 years of Americas existence until deep centralizations in our politics with de-democratizations, and deep centralizations in our information ecosystem including education and news, and other centralization, which occurred after WW2, enabled the rise of the Neoliberal Era) -- categories are much more complicated than they may appear at first glance
Hi. I was trying to say that, in the specific case of America at least, respectfully, you're inadvertently oversimplifying class divisions and missing economic and political interdependencies. Jobs related to manufacturing and physical industries aren’t only manual labor, they have advanced trades, technical jobs, and both they and their supply chains generate applied science and engineering. Their decline didn’t just decrease basic blue collar work but also degraded scientific, engineering, and infrastructure-related fields, harming career prospects across a fairly wide spectrum of society. The political implications of all this was once central to American democracy but became overrided by forces during the post WW2 centralizations and the rise of Neoliberalism.
I just read your article. You misunderstand both the history and structure of education and inter-social group politics in the US. The shift in political coalitions you refer to describes wasnt just a function of the so called rise of the "knowledge economy" (which never happened, the idea that there wasnt a knowledge economy prior to the post war era is very ahistorical, in fact, by the time you get through computers/digital advancements in the 50s/60s there was actually somewhat on relative basis less need for so called "knowledge work) but a result of deep structural changes that consolidated and centralized what was once a pluralistic, decentralized system of education, training, and economic organization. The 10% college graduation rate you referenc is quite misleading because it both undercounts many forms of education and training that previously existed while overcounting institutions that have since been reshaped into something very different from what they once were, so that number, as you present it, is at once way too high and way too low. Prior to the post WW2 transformations, the USa had a highly diversified and regionally varied system that a wider array of public/government schools, far more independent professional schools, internal industry institutions, and far, far more alternative pathways into technical and scientific fields. And also, the primary medium of inter social group political relations were are former -- and completely different than today's versions -- decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties (and BTW those parties also gave working and middle-class Americans direct influence over economic and political structures). The rise of a centralized university model (the "department store" model, many called it at the time), along with the consolidation of industry and finance and then by extension science and engineering ecosystems, along with news media, didn’t produce "elite overproduction" like Turchin describes (at least not too the extent he sees it), it fundamentally restructured the economy to favor bureaucratic credentialism, de-democratized access to professional and economic mobility, and sidelined entire sectors that once provided stable and innovative career paths. The author's you cite's frameworks misses how these changes were driven by centralization rather than an inevitable evolution of the economy, and how what he calls the "Physical Class" was not just displaced by automation or obsolescence (his automation arguments, btw, come across as quite ignorant of the subject matter) but actively undermined by policy shifts that reshaped labor markets, moved away from the intentional redundancy that had defined the US economy for hundreds of years, and a lot more
The knowledge economy was tiny pre-WWII; the rise of what David Graeber called "Bullshit Jobs" is very much a post-war development.
When western societies, as you put it, "fundamentally restructured the economy to favor bureaucratic credentialism, de-democratized access to professional and economic mobility, and sidelined entire sectors that once provided stable and innovative career paths", THAT created new socioeconomic class divides that replaced earlier class divides like aristocrats-vs-peasants, workers-vs-capitalists, etc. Nigel and I both landed on roughly the same 4 groups that coalesced together as socioeconomic classes in the newly "restructured" economy; of COURSE there would always be borderline cases.
Pretty much all categories are "much more complicated than they may appear at first glance", but that doesn't mean they're not coherent and empirically supported.
You seem like somebody who would object to the statement "horses are bigger than dogs", just because in theory a REALLY big dog could potentially grow larger than a really small horse.
> The second seachange was the abandonment of Keynesian social democracy and the embrace of a form of economic and social hyperliberalism that has come to be known as neoliberalism. For the sake of convenience, let’s mark the beginning of that era as 1980, when Reagan took office.
Slightly slowing down the growth of the Keynesian state does not constitute "hyperliberalism".
In the case of the USA, not necessarily other places such as Britain, I've come to learn that we've been verifiably lied to about the USA's past, the past, the 1930s was provably absolutely not a centralized project as described nor a Keynesian state as I was taught, and the post war decades were a sort of phase space between the Old Republic and what we have now -- what we have now rose with the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era -- and so the latter time period of that phase space could be described as something *close* to Keynesian state in the senses as we're taught it here in America, but even at at the end it wasnt all the way there, we just did a multidecadal transition from the Old Republic to the Neoliberal Era
after WW2 the USA entered into a surreptitious transformation period, a phase space, by he time the latter 1970s/early 1980s arrived, it had mostly completed its transformation from being a politically, economically, governmentally, and scientifically DECENTRALIZED republic whose economic activity was mostly, but not exclusively (it never was exclusively, btw) generated by a private sector that was decentralized, deliberately redundant, heterogenous, mostly not-coordinated and primarily governed by competitive market structures; and whose governmental activity was dominated by two decentralized and publicly accessible mass member parties, into a politically, economically, governmentally, and scientifically CENTRALIZED system whose private sector was — the private sector end took some time to fully die from this point, so there are exceptions in the 80s/90s, but it was mostly the case by late mid 1980s — cartelized and primarily governed by centralized private sector central planning, and whose governmental structures were dominated by two parties that had transformed into centrally managed and publicly inaccessible exclusionary membership parties. I use the word Neoliberal Era because so many others do, but I like to say “so called Neoliberal Era” because it aint new, schemes to do deep and illegitimate centralization of political and economic power and decision making are unfortunately old as man, and much of our current systems structures resemble old Old Europe’s….
If the PMC offers the masses higher wages and cuts out the cluster B garbage then they can unite with the masses against the plutocrats. But they won’t get anywhere without raising wages.
in the specific case of the USA (which you reference), these categories are in-general much more fuzzy and in some important specific instances quite wrong. One example of the latter, is that so called manufacturing and other forms of physical industry, dont just have simple manual labor, they also have a wide number of advanced trades and technical jobs, and beyond that they all have parts and services suppliers, combined they make up most of the physical world where applied science and engineering relate to, and so so their degradation in turn greatly degraded much -- at this point in time I think it can be strong argued most -- of our scientific and engineering ecosystems, and therefore really harmed the career prospects of many scientists and engineers in most fields. And that one example goes further, all these industries have huge amounts of construction and building and infrastructure requirements, so their degradation greatly reduced corresponding areas that in turn degraded the career prospects of architects, civil engineers, etc. And even just those example can go a lot further. And so these economic -- and what should be, by extension political (and actually was for the first 200 years of Americas existence until deep centralizations in our politics with de-democratizations, and deep centralizations in our information ecosystem including education and news, and other centralization, which occurred after WW2, enabled the rise of the Neoliberal Era) -- categories are much more complicated than they may appear at first glance
Well written. But I would not that, at least in the specific case of the USA, these categories are in-general much more fuzzy and in some important specific instances quite wrong. One example of the latter, is that so called manufacturing and other forms of physical industry, dont just have simple manual labor, they also have a wide number of advanced trades and technical jobs, and beyond that they all have parts and services suppliers, combined they make up most of the physical world where applied science and engineering relate to, and so so their degradation in turn greatly degraded much -- at this point in time I think it can be strong argued most -- of our scientific and engineering ecosystems, and therefore really harmed the career prospects of many scientists and engineers in most fields. And that one example goes further, all these industries have huge amounts of construction and building and infrastructure requirements, so their degradation greatly reduced corresponding areas that in turn degraded the career prospects of architects, civil engineers, etc. And even just those example can go a lot further. And so these economic -- and what should be, by extension political (and actually was for the first 200 years of Americas existence until deep centralizations in our politics with de-democratizations, and deep centralizations in our information ecosystem including education and news, and other centralization, which occurred after WW2, enabled the rise of the Neoliberal Era) -- categories are much more complicated than they may appear at first glance
A stimulating discussion as always. Reading your column probably remains my best strategy for avoiding Alzheimers because I really have to concentrate hard to understand all your references and follow the line of argument. And yes, you have been issuing regular warnings in your sub stack, if only the right people had been listening and taken heed!
Good piece! When I wrote an article encouraging our PMC brothers and sisters to defect from Cluster-B leftism (to get ahead of that anti-PMC backlash before it messily explodes)
I came up with an almost identical group of modern socioeconomic classes, but didn't really quantify it the way you did.
(I also don't think there are that many blue collar jobs left that can be automated that weren't automated already, so we differ there)
https://milesmcstylez.substack.com/p/embrace-your-inner-barbarian
1) The Shareholder Class. The billionaires and centimillionaires. Numerically insignificant for electoral purposes, but wielding outsized economic power.
2) The Laptop Class. Affluent but not necessarily wealthy; they manage and oversee the bureaucracies/corporations/foundations owned by the Shareholder Class. A politically dominant plurality in major cities across developed countries, but nowhere near a national majority in any country. They do however have hegemonic control over nearly all major institutions and sites of cultural production.
3) The Physical Class. They don’t have the luxury of working from home, and don’t hold your breath for them to be able to name 70 different genders, but they’re the reason modern societies are still able to function. They’re the largest voting demographic by class, though they typically don’t vote as a single bloc for various reasons such as urban/rural divides.
4) The Welfare Class. Chronically unemployed for various reasons, they are entirely dependent on the state (or else live off petty crime) and have skyhigh rates of substance abuse. Voter turnout is generally low to nonexistent.
Great minds think alike, Miles! I'm not even sure we differ that much about 'blue collar' jobs, though we might be defining the term differently. The blue-collar manufacturing jobs aren't coming back, even if Anglosphere nations reshore their manufacturing sectors. But I suspect it will be a while before we see robot plumbers.
in the specific case of the USA (which the author referenced), these categories are in-general much more fuzzy and in some important specific instances quite wrong. One example of the latter, is that so called manufacturing and other forms of physical industry, dont just have simple manual labor, they also have a wide number of advanced trades and technical jobs, and beyond that they all have parts and services suppliers, combined they make up most of the physical world where applied science and engineering relate to, and so so their degradation in turn greatly degraded much -- at this point in time I think it can be strong argued most -- of our scientific and engineering ecosystems, and therefore really harmed the career prospects of many scientists and engineers in most fields. And that one example goes further, all these industries have huge amounts of construction and building and infrastructure requirements, so their degradation greatly reduced corresponding areas that in turn degraded the career prospects of architects, civil engineers, etc. And even just those example can go a lot further. And so these economic -- and what should be, by extension political (and actually was for the first 200 years of Americas existence until deep centralizations in our politics with de-democratizations, and deep centralizations in our information ecosystem including education and news, and other centralization, which occurred after WW2, enabled the rise of the Neoliberal Era) -- categories are much more complicated than they may appear at first glance
You posted this comment like 3 times and I still don't know what the hell you're trying to say. Are you having a stroke?
Hi. I was trying to say that, in the specific case of America at least, respectfully, you're inadvertently oversimplifying class divisions and missing economic and political interdependencies. Jobs related to manufacturing and physical industries aren’t only manual labor, they have advanced trades, technical jobs, and both they and their supply chains generate applied science and engineering. Their decline didn’t just decrease basic blue collar work but also degraded scientific, engineering, and infrastructure-related fields, harming career prospects across a fairly wide spectrum of society. The political implications of all this was once central to American democracy but became overrided by forces during the post WW2 centralizations and the rise of Neoliberalism.
Pretty sure you haven't actually read my article I linked to or else you wouldn't think that.
I just read your article. You misunderstand both the history and structure of education and inter-social group politics in the US. The shift in political coalitions you refer to describes wasnt just a function of the so called rise of the "knowledge economy" (which never happened, the idea that there wasnt a knowledge economy prior to the post war era is very ahistorical, in fact, by the time you get through computers/digital advancements in the 50s/60s there was actually somewhat on relative basis less need for so called "knowledge work) but a result of deep structural changes that consolidated and centralized what was once a pluralistic, decentralized system of education, training, and economic organization. The 10% college graduation rate you referenc is quite misleading because it both undercounts many forms of education and training that previously existed while overcounting institutions that have since been reshaped into something very different from what they once were, so that number, as you present it, is at once way too high and way too low. Prior to the post WW2 transformations, the USa had a highly diversified and regionally varied system that a wider array of public/government schools, far more independent professional schools, internal industry institutions, and far, far more alternative pathways into technical and scientific fields. And also, the primary medium of inter social group political relations were are former -- and completely different than today's versions -- decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties (and BTW those parties also gave working and middle-class Americans direct influence over economic and political structures). The rise of a centralized university model (the "department store" model, many called it at the time), along with the consolidation of industry and finance and then by extension science and engineering ecosystems, along with news media, didn’t produce "elite overproduction" like Turchin describes (at least not too the extent he sees it), it fundamentally restructured the economy to favor bureaucratic credentialism, de-democratized access to professional and economic mobility, and sidelined entire sectors that once provided stable and innovative career paths. The author's you cite's frameworks misses how these changes were driven by centralization rather than an inevitable evolution of the economy, and how what he calls the "Physical Class" was not just displaced by automation or obsolescence (his automation arguments, btw, come across as quite ignorant of the subject matter) but actively undermined by policy shifts that reshaped labor markets, moved away from the intentional redundancy that had defined the US economy for hundreds of years, and a lot more
The knowledge economy was tiny pre-WWII; the rise of what David Graeber called "Bullshit Jobs" is very much a post-war development.
When western societies, as you put it, "fundamentally restructured the economy to favor bureaucratic credentialism, de-democratized access to professional and economic mobility, and sidelined entire sectors that once provided stable and innovative career paths", THAT created new socioeconomic class divides that replaced earlier class divides like aristocrats-vs-peasants, workers-vs-capitalists, etc. Nigel and I both landed on roughly the same 4 groups that coalesced together as socioeconomic classes in the newly "restructured" economy; of COURSE there would always be borderline cases.
Pretty much all categories are "much more complicated than they may appear at first glance", but that doesn't mean they're not coherent and empirically supported.
You seem like somebody who would object to the statement "horses are bigger than dogs", just because in theory a REALLY big dog could potentially grow larger than a really small horse.
> The second seachange was the abandonment of Keynesian social democracy and the embrace of a form of economic and social hyperliberalism that has come to be known as neoliberalism. For the sake of convenience, let’s mark the beginning of that era as 1980, when Reagan took office.
Slightly slowing down the growth of the Keynesian state does not constitute "hyperliberalism".
In the case of the USA, not necessarily other places such as Britain, I've come to learn that we've been verifiably lied to about the USA's past, the past, the 1930s was provably absolutely not a centralized project as described nor a Keynesian state as I was taught, and the post war decades were a sort of phase space between the Old Republic and what we have now -- what we have now rose with the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era -- and so the latter time period of that phase space could be described as something *close* to Keynesian state in the senses as we're taught it here in America, but even at at the end it wasnt all the way there, we just did a multidecadal transition from the Old Republic to the Neoliberal Era
What exactly do you mean? "Neoliberal" tends to mean "any part of the status quo I don't like."
after WW2 the USA entered into a surreptitious transformation period, a phase space, by he time the latter 1970s/early 1980s arrived, it had mostly completed its transformation from being a politically, economically, governmentally, and scientifically DECENTRALIZED republic whose economic activity was mostly, but not exclusively (it never was exclusively, btw) generated by a private sector that was decentralized, deliberately redundant, heterogenous, mostly not-coordinated and primarily governed by competitive market structures; and whose governmental activity was dominated by two decentralized and publicly accessible mass member parties, into a politically, economically, governmentally, and scientifically CENTRALIZED system whose private sector was — the private sector end took some time to fully die from this point, so there are exceptions in the 80s/90s, but it was mostly the case by late mid 1980s — cartelized and primarily governed by centralized private sector central planning, and whose governmental structures were dominated by two parties that had transformed into centrally managed and publicly inaccessible exclusionary membership parties. I use the word Neoliberal Era because so many others do, but I like to say “so called Neoliberal Era” because it aint new, schemes to do deep and illegitimate centralization of political and economic power and decision making are unfortunately old as man, and much of our current systems structures resemble old Old Europe’s….
Gods I hope not
If the PMC offers the masses higher wages and cuts out the cluster B garbage then they can unite with the masses against the plutocrats. But they won’t get anywhere without raising wages.
Couldn’t help but notice how your 1% plutocrat, 19% PMC, 80% masses+underclass looks like Orwell’s Inner Party, Outer Party, and proles.
Hope lies in the proles indeed… that’s where MAGA and the European “far right” bubbled up from, after all.
That hadn't occurred to me, but I'm always delighted to be compared to Orwell!
I hope not.
Lots of ranting and whining, yet no solutions offered
I sure hope not.
Ha!
in the specific case of the USA (which you reference), these categories are in-general much more fuzzy and in some important specific instances quite wrong. One example of the latter, is that so called manufacturing and other forms of physical industry, dont just have simple manual labor, they also have a wide number of advanced trades and technical jobs, and beyond that they all have parts and services suppliers, combined they make up most of the physical world where applied science and engineering relate to, and so so their degradation in turn greatly degraded much -- at this point in time I think it can be strong argued most -- of our scientific and engineering ecosystems, and therefore really harmed the career prospects of many scientists and engineers in most fields. And that one example goes further, all these industries have huge amounts of construction and building and infrastructure requirements, so their degradation greatly reduced corresponding areas that in turn degraded the career prospects of architects, civil engineers, etc. And even just those example can go a lot further. And so these economic -- and what should be, by extension political (and actually was for the first 200 years of Americas existence until deep centralizations in our politics with de-democratizations, and deep centralizations in our information ecosystem including education and news, and other centralization, which occurred after WW2, enabled the rise of the Neoliberal Era) -- categories are much more complicated than they may appear at first glance
Well written. But I would not that, at least in the specific case of the USA, these categories are in-general much more fuzzy and in some important specific instances quite wrong. One example of the latter, is that so called manufacturing and other forms of physical industry, dont just have simple manual labor, they also have a wide number of advanced trades and technical jobs, and beyond that they all have parts and services suppliers, combined they make up most of the physical world where applied science and engineering relate to, and so so their degradation in turn greatly degraded much -- at this point in time I think it can be strong argued most -- of our scientific and engineering ecosystems, and therefore really harmed the career prospects of many scientists and engineers in most fields. And that one example goes further, all these industries have huge amounts of construction and building and infrastructure requirements, so their degradation greatly reduced corresponding areas that in turn degraded the career prospects of architects, civil engineers, etc. And even just those example can go a lot further. And so these economic -- and what should be, by extension political (and actually was for the first 200 years of Americas existence until deep centralizations in our politics with de-democratizations, and deep centralizations in our information ecosystem including education and news, and other centralization, which occurred after WW2, enabled the rise of the Neoliberal Era) -- categories are much more complicated than they may appear at first glance
Fair point! I definitely had to oversimplify things, otherwise the piece would have needed to be much longer. Thanks for your feedback.
Nigel i still call BS on this AI super intelligence stuff
its the same smoke and mirrors used to pump and dump all new tech imo....
yeah its good for efficiency / data research but how are those smart self driving cars going?
I am still yet to see much more than an "AI agent "....
Aren’t the self-driving cars being rolled out right now, at least in digitally mature nations such as the USA?
the ones in play to begin with were agents from India with joysticks
i keep reading Tesla can't Hey it safe enough
guys i follow inside the space think it's yet another dump and pump
not discounting the expected push back on copy right infringement ..
No.
A stimulating discussion as always. Reading your column probably remains my best strategy for avoiding Alzheimers because I really have to concentrate hard to understand all your references and follow the line of argument. And yes, you have been issuing regular warnings in your sub stack, if only the right people had been listening and taken heed!
It is the curse of the Cassandra to be both correct and completely ignored!