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"Based on these findings, Peterson recommends junking the "elite culture-mass culture" distinction in favor of an "omnivore-univore" distinction. There is indeed a significant difference in the cultural tastes of high-status and low-status people; but it doesn't correspond to the elite-mass distinction previously postulated."
"We've put a self-perpetuating cycle in motion. The more anxious, isolated and time-deprived we are, the more likely we are to turn to paid personal services. To finance these extra services, we work longer hours."
"I think Murray and I are basically in agreement about the facts here. If you take narrow enough slices and focus on the media, academia, and civilian government, you can find groups of elites with liberal attitudes on economic and social issues. But I’m also interested in all those elites with conservative attitudes. Statistically, they outnumber the liberal elites. The conservative elites tend to live in different places than the liberal elites and they tend to have influence in different ways (consider, for example, decisions about where to build new highways, convention centers, etc., or pick your own examples), and those differences interest me."
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One way to see this is to consider Murray’s political quiz, “How thick is your bubble,” where he challenges his upper-class readers to assess their points in common to the ordinary Americans. One of Murray’s questions is, “Have you ever participated in a parade not involving global warming, a war protest, or gay rights?” The bit about gay rights is cute, but it also serves to separate out the liberals in the audience. After all, lots of non-elites go to gay rights parades. What if Murray had asked, “Have you ever participated in a parade not involving the pro-life or Tea Party movements?” This might not be the best example; my point is that there are lots of ways to separate the elites from the non-elites. Elites are more likely to know a business executive, more likely to buy a new SUV, more likely to fly business class, more likely to attend professional sporting events (those tickets are expensive!), less likely to rent rather than their homes, less likely to ride public transportation, and so on. Murray’s quiz is interesting but he chooses to separate elites from non-elites in a particular way that makes me think he’s sensitive to the attitudes of politically liberal elites in particular.
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The point of these examples is not that Murray is wrong, either in his prescriptions or in his recommendations—much here depends on one’s economic views about taxation and government spending—but rather that his argument keeps going in two opposite directions at once. From one side he argues that the upper class has good habits that they should transmit to ordinary Americans; on the other side he says that the upper class should become more like the rest of the country. But I can’t see how you can have it both ways. This connects to my earlier point that much could be gained by considering the diversity of attitudes among the upper class.
"Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is an important book that will have large influence. It is unfortunately not a good book—but its lack of merit in no way detracts from its importance. If anything, the book's flaws add to its power, by enhancing the book's appeal to the audience for whom it is intended. Coming Apart is an important book less because of what it says than because of what it omits; less for the information it contains than for the uses to which that information will be put."
"Which got me wondering whether the future that is already here might include a class for whom space travel is not merely an interesting idea, but one that is affordable."
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The diminishing marginal utility law dictates that the more money we have, the less utility we get from any additional incremental gain. And this bites the top 1% very hard indeed.
Examine the world around us from the point of view of someone with a net income of $5M/year ...
Food is essentially free; you can afford to spend $1000 per meal, three meals a day, in the most expensive restaurants in London or Tokyo or Manhattan, and not make a dent in your income. (Oddly, even the hyper-rich don't typically spend $1000 on lunch every day: a more realistic expectation might be to dine out expensively twice a week, for $100K/year, and have the best of everything in-house the rest of the time, with a live-in chef, for another $100K/year.)
Clothing is essentially free; want a different $5000 suit for every day of the week? That's going to set you back only $35K! Spouse wants a dozen designer evening gowns a year? That's still going to be on the low side of $200K.
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There are some things that having an income of $5M/year, or even $5Bn/year, can't buy you.
First on the list is health.
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First, writes Galbraith, it is important to understand that most of the current statistics on inequality are flawed. For while economists typically focus on income data – or measures such as the “gini coefficient” – these are extremely crude and tend to focus on outdated ideas about how economies work. Second, he adds, if you crunch the numbers in a more granular and up-to-date way, this challenges some orthodoxies. In particular, most economists (and politicians) have assumed in recent years that the US was becoming more unequal because of industrial change, such as a loss of manufacturing jobs to China.
But Galbraith sees little evidence of this. “At the global level, the data give no support to the vast outpouring in the professional literature arguing that changes in inequality are based on so-called ‘real factors’ such as a race between technology and education,” he writes. “On the contrary, financial factors explain a very large share (practically everything) that can be explained.”
"In other words, the end result of an explosion of freely available OER and education technology resources could be to widen the opportunity gaps between wealthy and poor students.
So if we think that's a problem, then we should not depend on the Internet to be a democratizing, equalizing platform for distributing learning tools and platforms. We need to think very carefully about how we can design learning tools and distribution pathways that serve students with the greatest needs. "
"The concrete idea is something I call the Gollum effect. It is a process by which regular humans are Gollumized: transformed into hollow shells of their former selves, defined almost entirely by their patterns of consumption."
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Our food choices are only a subset of our overall mode of consumption, which I call combinatorial consumption. Combinatorial consumption reduces the universe of human potential to a deeply-impoverished ghost of itself; a potentially infinite range of creative consumption behaviors reduced to paint-by-numbers consumption. Our lives are about choosing within the confines of a giant macro version of the Starbucks drink-construction decision tree. The dizzying, but finite variety on offer, helps distract us from the general impoverishment of what’s on the decision tree, with respect to the unbridled bounty of nature that is not on it.
We live in a cartoon universe where Claritas PRIZM psychographics categories have morphed from partial description of a population of human beings to a nearly-complete, Procrustean prescription for the construction of a universe of Gollums.
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On one side of the line separating those fighting for their souls and those who have lost it, you have the deadly game of existential chess played by the protagonists of Extreme Couponing, who exult every time they game the system and manage to buy $1000 worth of groceries for $20.
These are people who spend all their spare time collecting, organizing, investing in, and analyzing their coupon collections, to mount weekly attacks on grocery stores, like card-counting blackjack players at casinos. This is what Gollumized raving-fandom looks like.
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"Another reason is that I was (and remain to some extent) guilty of what science fiction writer Bruce Sterling calls acting dead: being irrationally averse to spending money where it matters, in a misguided attempt to “save” money to the point that the behavior paralyzes you. A large segment of the middle class is starting to act dead these days. Which makes sense since the class itself is dying. To stop acting dead, you have to resolve to exit the traditional middle class as well, unless you want to go down with it."
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Not acting dead involves a strategic spending pattern that marketers are starting to call trading up: buying premium in some areas of your life, while buying budget or entirely forgoing spending in other areas. This pattern of conscious, discriminating consumption defines the emerging replacement for the middle class. As the picture above illustrates, there isn’t really one “New Middle Class.” Instead, it is a fragmented social space, with each little island being defined by a specific pattern of trading-up, and an associated lifestyle design script.
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- Civil War generation (1870s): If I Go West as a Young Man, and work hard, I have as good a chance as anyone else of making it (gold miner, wildcatter)
- Gilded Age generation (1890s): If I work hard, I can make it (Horatio-Alger-inspired young people working for Robber Barons)
- Gatsby generation (1920s): Anybody can make it (Gatsby type easy money)
- New Deal generation (1930s): Together, we can make it* (worker building Hoover Dam)
- GI Bill generation (1940s): Any American can make it if he fights hard (WW II veteran, college-educated and starting high-responsibility job white collar job with young, growing American post-war companies)
- Organization Man generation (Silents, 1950s): I already have it; if I don’t screw it up, I can keep it (employee of mature, wealthy post-war company)
- Peace Corps generation (Boomers, 1960s): Americans already have it; we should share it (progressive, generous child of Cold War prosperity)
- Deregulation generation (X, 1980s): We’re losing it. If I keep my head down and step around the falling rubble smartly, I may escape (entering workforce among layoffs and uncertainty in manufacturing)
- Net generation (Y, late 1990s): We’re losing it. I don’t know what to do, I’ll go Occupy Wall Street (this generation lived through a boom and a bust and 9/11 while coming of age, turning the pig narrative into garbage at the starting gate, leaving a harsh, anomic landscape)
- Next generation (coming of age right now ): If I Go East as a Young Person, and work hard, I have as good a chance as anyone else of making it (lifestyle entrepreneur in Asia or Eastern Europe — this script will likely take shape with the 2016 election, when the generation is first courted by politicians).
That’s merely the brand. Here are the actual premises of the 9 scripts between the 1870s to the 1990s, and the archetypical life stories they informed. I am playing fast and loose with generational and cohort analysis here to make a broad point, so please don’t hold me to very precise sociological details.
Note that the dates are the coming-of-age windows for each generation (i.e. when they were between 15-21 and impressionable), not birth decade. Subtract 15-21 years to get the birth year range.
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- Risky vs. risk-free
- Effort-ful vs. effortless
- Individualist vs. collectivist
- Upturn vs. Downturn vs. Cusp
- Scarcity vs. Abundance vs. Surplus
- Mine to Make vs. Mine to Lose (Make/Lose) framing
The Key Narrative Variables
Hidden in this messy evolution, you can spot a few key variables that change value as the narrative gets tweaked generation by generation. Here are the main ones I can see (you can think of them as on/off variables or sliding scale).
"But it turns out that nobody hates a free market more than the capitalist class. It was Adam Smith who observed that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The unwillingness of really existing capitalism to face market competition goes beyond a complacent assumption of the right to cheap labor. It’s at the foundation of Ashwin Parameswaran’s far-reaching account of our current troubles, which he traces to a “system where incumbent corporates do not face competitive pressure to engage in risky exploratory investment.” "
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On this reading, a big part of the historical mission of the Left was to make capitalism as revolutionary in reality as it was in its own ideological self-conception. Marx wrote admiringly of the revolutionary élan of the bourgeoisie, which “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” But according to Tronti, the capitalist must be dragged kicking and screaming into this revolutionary fervor. Just as Corey Robin argues that right wing political theory borrows from its revolutionary antagonists in its defense of hierarchy, capitalist production adopts radical measures to defend the prerogatives of accumulation, but only in response to working class challenges. Creative destruction is only ignited by the sparks thrown off from class struggle.
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This perspective also casts the figure of the left neoliberal in a different light. The arguments I’ve described as left-neoliberal rely on certain free market tropes: competition, deregulation, efficiency. But taking such tropes seriously is perhaps more subversive than it appears, since actually existing neoliberal capitalism is not consistently based on any of these principles. It is instead, as David Harvey has said, a project of class power. In another of his essays, “Against Kamikaze Capitalism”, Graeber contends that “Whenever there is a choice between the political goal of undercutting social movements—especially, by convincing everyone there is no viable alternative to the capitalist order—and actually running a viable capitalist order, neoliberalism means always choosing the first.” So perhaps it’s not so surprising to see University of Chicago finance professors attempting to save capitalism from the capitalists, while two other mainstream economists express their hope that it will be Occupy Wall Street that ultimately helps save capitalism from itself.
"That’s just the way it is, these things happen, nothing to be done about it, and if it means that most of us have to spend our golden years pushing brooms or bagging groceries, well, at least we have the consolation of knowing we’re not as bad off as those children in China and we can stop off at McDonalds on our way home from work we’re damn lucky to have to pick up a Value Meal to eat while watching the flat screen TV that only has ten payments left on it until it’s ours."
Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
A series of studies conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto in Canada reveal something the well off may not want to hear. Individuals who are relatively high in social class are more likely to engage in a variety of unethical behaviors.
"I could, of course, put this more crudely. Economics is performative when it serves the interest of the powerful, and not performative when it doesn’t. In this sense, the problem is not with economics, but with a class structure that causes the “real world” to be a corrupted and perverted form of a market economy."
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If economics were always per formative, you would therefore expect there to be at least widespread markets in major contingencies.
And there are not. There’s a market for my labour (I hope), but not a market for my labour, contingent upon there being a great depression. Although I can insure my house losing value because of fire, I cannot insure against it losing value because of a fall in demand for houses in Rutland. I can insure against inflation, thanks to index-linked gilts, but not against recession or inequality. As Robert Shiller pointed out in his wonderful books, Macro Markets and The New Financial Order, markets for coping with major economic risks are lamentably under-developed.
Comments, mostly con, on "The precariat is a flexible workforce reliant on short-term employment. They’re temps, part-timers, seasonal laborers, freelancers, even interns — people without traditional unions to rely on. There is nothing below them, only the safety net’s tatters. “[Their] lives and identities are made up of disjointed bits, in which they cannot construct a desirable narrative or build a career, combining forms of work and labour, play and leisure in a sustainable way.”"
"To summarize the thesis: ordinary people hate partisanship, and elites hate ideology. Hence the elite is constantly attempting to misrepresent the latter as the former. And the masses sometimes respond by repudiating ideology when they mean to reject partisanship. "
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