Fascinating! Definitely witnessed this schism in my middle class family of origin. One sibling who went into corporate law zoomed up the status scale while the teacher and social worker siblings fell into low middle. The individualist values of the elite are apparent in the lawyer family who puts little value on kinship bonds of loyalty. Family obligations are considered "emotional labor" and a hindrance to their pursuit of extraordinary lives. Not their brother's keeper. Social status and sibling competition will always be with us, but the hyper consumerism of recent decades and the decline of religious moral influence has led to a lot of shallow and insecure lives.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the USA undertook and intensive economic and political centralization, from the 1830s until then it used to have interstate capital flow inhibitors and institutionalized local capital biases, it also has a moderate but if used well then still substantial ability for state and to an extent even local government to utilize trade frictions, these things granted a limited but still significant amount of local economic agency to communities….
One thing that gets me, as a child of the working-class who finds myself in the educated upper-middle-class, is how unextraordinary most of their lives are.
They don’t do interesting things, for the most part. They just have bigger houses with higher quality fittings, furniture, and appliances, along with more expensive, newer cars.
They get to take vacations, but rarely go anywhere interesting to have different experiences. A staggering number of my peers have never been to Mexico or Europe. Of the ones that have been to Europe, few traveled further east than Italy or Germany.
They’ve got the money and the power, but they’re boring and unaccountable. Most have positions high enough in management to have a suitable underling to throw under the bus if their bad ideas fail, and they almost never learn from their failures because they view the bad outcomes as the failure of others to execute their “vision.”
I agree on the boring part…for those who thought they would get paid for their passion…it is an ironic frustration- they get paid really well to be bored…and sit in meetings.
We get paid really well mostly for decision making and organization/communication. At least in the corporate world; I can’t speak to academia or government. But it is often very dull, especially after you’ve been doing it long enough for it to become rote.
This resonates: “they almost never learn from their failures because they view the bad outcomes as the failure of others to execute their ‘vision.’”
Many also seem pretty unimaginative. Some seem to work hard and even volunteer, but it’s not really clear what they’re working toward, either personally or in their careers. They just stay busy with no clear purpose other than making money. And it doesn’t seem to make them happier.
Changes on tax rates and banning stock buybacks will accomplish most of what you want. America once created the sort of society you desire though this mechanism. It happens spontaneously through cultural evolution (see link 1). Link 2 describes how tax changes made after 1980 affected the incentive structure for corporate executives leading to different behavior and the evolution of a shareholder-focused culture. Also described are effects on innovation and growth.
Interesting! One way to do would to be to undo the changes which have made the concerns about so called "elites" so pressing in the first place. The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
And have we really had an increase in "education" as most people define it? Or have we had an increase in centrally directed socialization and a centralization of our information ecosystem that, in part, used that socialization and associated credentialism, to achieve its goals? Some years back the Flynn Effect was challenged in a way that I would bet most people would say completely discredited it, and they way that it was done was a great many people showing examples of books, school tests, job description, etc. across a very wide array of subjects and how commonly they were known, it *appears* there was indeed a minority of the population that for a variety of reasons (some physical, such as childhood nutrition, exposure to toxins, whatever) may have been cognitively left behind (so could Flynn have picked up a shift on variance instead of mean?), but if any thing a majority of the population was smarter than people today in-general...
There has been an explosion of credentialism more than a rise in education.
There’s the stereotype of an MBA running a good team into the ground for a reason. All too often they’re promoted above their skill level and none of the thought-leader blogs and books they’ve read prepare them for real business challenges. But they create a nice presentation, dare their subordinates to challenge their terrible plans, and then hold their subordinates accountable when their poorly thought out initiatives fail.
Then they put “Responsible for inception and execution of $800,000 project to increase the efficiency of business processes” on their resume and fuck off to their next gig before they accumulate enough failures for leadership to notice that they’re not good at their jobs.
Interesting- but I continue to be flummoxed by the argument that the answer is to reduce the elite class rather than raising the lower classes to the elite level. Isn’t that progress- raising the floor? What are the benefits of dumbing down society?
You didn't provide any support for the claim that the elite is more bubbled though. One could argue that a larger elite has more surface area to interact with ordinary people. Note also that part of why your post is interesting is because this elite you describe doesn't particularly think of itself as an elite.
Actually, your claims appear somewhat contradictory, because you also accuse the elites of using populism to stir up non-elites, which is something they could only do if they had contact with non-elites, and understood their psychology.
I think he discusses two kinds of elites - one of which is more likely to be able to 'connect' with the masses via populism, than the other - which seeks to breathe more and more rarefied air.
A lot of men don’t want to work in offices where achievement is created in excel spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. And outside of growing your own business, white collar jobs are where the opportunities for high income are.
I’m a white collar educated upper-middle-class guy and I wish I’d been an electrician or some sort of skilled trade technician instead.
I don’t have much in common with these bougie people, their inflated egos, and their nonsense belief that they’re more useful to society than the people who keep the lights on and the water flowing.
I’ve seen how helpless and useless they are when the power is out, and I am not impressed.
I'd argue that higher-education does not necessarily imply being smarter. And if you keep raising the floor, the folks at the top will keep raising the ceiling. The whole point of being elite is to be 'above' - which is the striking characteristic of this well-educated well-off class.
And going by what has actually happened in the last 10-12Y, the 'smarter' class actually comes off as being seriously 'dumber'.
This dovetails well with Amy Chua’s ideas about “market dominant minorities.”
She argues that over the last 30 years, well educated Americans are effectively forming a new ethnicity, with its own cultural morays, which is breeding a lot of resentment.
I am in that group (shocker) and when I think about my son (5 yo), I can’t even conceive of him dating someone who didn’t go to college (or whose parents didn’t go to college).
He likely won’t really meet anyone whose parents didn’t go to college because of the schools he’s attending and the neighborhood he lives in.
It also dovetails well with David Runcimen’s ideas about how the foundational assumptions of representative government are breaking down.
The relevant one is that our elected officials are not better educated then we are at this point. I’d even go so far as to hazard that virtually everyone reading this comment accurately believes that elected officials have no real capacity advantages over us, which erodes trust (if the people we’re electing are a bunch of jibbering mouthbreathers, why should be tolerate that.
Companies are not hiring Harvard MBAs like they used to, which could be an early sign of the decline of Higher Ed. Some Silicon Valley tycoons are recommending their children not go to college, and instead apprentice with them in their Venture Capital Funds, or whatever.
ChatGPT and other LLMs may be replacing college professors, and you can even now have a verbal back-and-forth conversation with LLMs.
The easy class divider of the "college educated" vs. the "non-college educated" may be disappearing.
I’m not sure I agree with your stance that this group has so little interaction with everyday Americans (largest SES). As but one example - I have a MS in IS, worked at IBM for 16 yrs. I was then laid off and had to retrain as a RN. As you point out, I grew up in a lower middle class hh. And when I first started working , I was def lower middle class. Through work in 90s and early aughts, and married lifestyle - we did obtain upper middle class SES. But we got divorced with 2 young children in 2006, lived through financial crisis of 2008-2009, and I was eventually laid off-> this moves you back down in SES- both divorce and lay off. I went back to school to train as a RN- at a community college with 2 yr pgm, and then a 4 yr urban univ. many many students at 2 yr comm colleges in nursing pgms are not in the upper SES, nor are students at the univ. let’s now look at healthcare professions specifically - in my capacity as RN I’ve worked in providing home health to the indigent , and at a major public school district . In that capacity I interact regularly with fellow staff who are lowerSES, and many students and families from all SES. In regards to health professions - many many people who are in upper SES started in lower SES, and perhaps more importantly , they interact regularly with all SES. Same with say attornies/legal profession . I’m sure I can think of others. Oh - > professional athletes , etc they’re wealthy , still interacting with people from SES etc. I’m back up where I was , but it took me over a decade and some estate $ to get there. It’s all been quite the struggle. That doesn’t leave you - ever. Just like my dads youth in western KS in the 1930s forever changed him. Even if one becomes educated and wealthy , what SES you started at matters, even when you attain education and greater income (climb the ladder). You can still fall back through divorce, death of spouse, chronic illness , etc And there’s still a lot of SES mingling , in general . In agreement with the stats that the lower strata often never see the light of day in this country - which is nothing short of criminal.
I'm not sure how much of the economy consists of "marketing" and "sales". But I can certainly say that the municipal government I worked for went from the managers and engineers answering questions to some 400 "Communications" staff in a separate department. Rather like Finance or HR, the Communications staff were in *every* department by 2009, and handled all external reports and calls.
With the most-limited, most-positive-spin "Communications" possible.
In short, a whole lot of that "educated" class are either being paid to lie to the public (well, "market" to them, or "sales" to them, or, "Communications" management...stuff not entirely true...) or are staff that know the truth about products or services, and see the official story...
Absolutely nothing can stop or even slightly impede this trend. This is only the beginning, elites will eventually become a completely disembodied superclass. The rich will live their entire lives without the inconvenience of seeing the poor.
What about all the elites who accepted the party line re:Covid. I’m thinking specifically of the idea that natural immunity-something broadly understood for over a millennia-didn’t apply to Covid. I was also astonished that the same group concerned about hormones in milk, etc, wasn’t also concerned about a brand new vaccine and new vaccine technology. I was also shocked that people who were progressive & cared about social justice absolutely did not care that school children of the working class were essentially left out of school for over a year while nearly all the private schools started back in person.
So my broader question is—-
When do elites question authority? When do they fall in line? To what kinds of narratives are they more susceptible?
Also-for thousands of years there have been elites in many civilizations-can you make the case that is somehow unique? Or are there specific patterns we can glean?
thanks for your thoughts. Our elite's unprecedented share of the population is historically unique in the U.S. and probably Europe. Highly educated people want their opinions acted on, and so creating a vast upper-middle-class, most of whom have authority over nothing but a Substack, is politically risky for a democracy. It's a scaled-up version of the sudden expansion of the French mercantile class in the 18th century (who voted with the peasants, i.e., no special treatment from the aristocracy).
Of course, part of the explanation for elite growth is the explosion in complexity of modern life. Imperial China needed a relatively small number of functionaries who passed examinations to run things. But “things” were simple then—nothing changed for many centuries, matters could be calculated and recorded with abaci and brushes.
Today, high-speed computers, interconnected energy grids, metal flying machines that carry people over oceans, heart surgery conducted with microscope cameras and robotically-controlled instruments, warfare waged remotely from video-game consoles in offices located in former shopping malls, toys and gadgets and clothes and furniture available to everyone, even the non-elite, at the click of a button…well, that doesn’t happen by magic. It happens thanks to the combined efforts of the current elite. Even if what many of them do seems to the naked eyeperipheral or orthogonal or even nonsensically asinine.
I would argue that modern life requires this multi-celled organism we call the elite to function. Like all sophisticated organisms, its many parts are on the surface incomprehensible or even repulsive. There are elite jobs who function as the equivalent of a body’s signaling mechanism to consume something. Call such jobs “marketing and advertising,” perhaps.
I leave it to the reader to extend my metaphor. The point, briefly, is: which would you prefer? Small elites along with life that is bleak, brutal and short? Or life-saving drugs you can purchase on Amazon?
This was great! So I’m not necessarily a proponent of UBI, but how do you think it would influence this dynamic, if at all? What if high school, too, was mostly civics and how to be a better, less selfish person (and tons of physical, interpersonal activities)?
It’s natural for people to want to spend time around people like themselves, who share common values and common cultural frames of reference. I live in a nicer area so that my kids can go to a public school with other kids who were raised with an achievement orientation and proper standards of behavior (e.g. respect of teachers and non-violence). Not saying this doesn’t exist outside of elite areas, but not as universally. And I know because I grew up in a very middle-class, non-elite area and have witnessed the differences in habits firsthand.
I don’t think my job is more valuable than blue collar work, and recognize that it is mostly bullshit. But I followed the path laid out for me and did what I had to do to be comfortable and set my kids up for a good future. I feel zero guilt about it.
I've been lucky enough for my own material circumstances to have moved from upper middle class to upper class over my lifetime, but I've had a couple of specific periods where my social circle didn't follow that trajectory.
My parents were both college educated when I was a child, but were also both the first in their families to do so. Despite some personal tragedies (I lost my father to cancer at 12), I'd say I stayed in that bubble up until after college. Mostly I hung out with college educated kids who's parents also went to college. My elders and relatives weren't that, but my social circle certainly was.
After college I ended up going into tech, on what would eventually turn into a fairly straightforward march up to executive leadership. That's always kept my work based social life very class segregated, but my personal life has varied. Soon after starting working, I fell in with a crew that threw raves in NY, and that put me in contact with a lot of poverty, drug addiction and starving artists. I think that kept me grounded through my 20s.
In my early 30s I kind of detached from that part of my life, focused on my career and basically only assorted with college educated professionals. Got married, had a kid, built a house. Got rich. I checked all the boxes in my life.
Then at 38 my mom died from cancer, leaving me without parents or siblings (I was an only child). And suddenly the scripts in my life weren't enough. I ended up realizing I was transgender, getting divorced and realigining my social life around queer and trans people. Who are, on average, as close to poverty as the raver friends from my 20s.
My ses always kept going up, but I've spent about 10 years of my adulthood fully bubbled. And another 10 or so fully unbubbled. And I've got close friendships I continue to appreciate on both sides.
But all the meaning I've ever known. The feeling of being truly seen in a community. That's all come when I was socializing on the margin. It's where I've loved harder, given and been given more, and where all of my own self actualization has comes from. It's also a million times scarier and riskier than fully aligning with capital and embodying a rational economic actor.
When I spend too much time around work friends, I can feel the megalomania creep in, even with the most grounded and kind people. Once you get used to directing millions in capital flows, and controlling people's lives you will never know, it gets hard to remember what you, personally, are supposed to be doing in life. Your consciousness steers a vast machine, and obstacles are always mechanistic problems to solve. It's intellectually stimulating, but soulless.
Loving people who are unemployed and worried about housing reminds me that we are loved for who we are, not for what we do. And that we are not better, or more worthy of love, for climbing to the top of the heap. It's hard not to think that, about yourself and others, if everyone you respect around you lives as if the opposite is true.
My controversial opinion as well…stop suckering people so universities can pad revenue…be more transparent and elitist like Europe. And do a better job selling public service careers…create more of them.
Not sure if I missed the point, but this seems extremely reductive and flatly wrong. The argument about the elite as hyper-individualistic and distrustful of institutions completely misrepresents the current political and cultural landscape. While some aspects of the analysis—like the focus on self-optimization—are accurate, they fail to account for the collective, progressive tendencies of educated elites in politics. Meanwhile, the traits attributed to the elite are more accurately reflected in the populist, MAGA-oriented right, whose distrust of institutions and emphasis on personal freedom have become defining characteristics. By oversimplifying these dynamics, there is a complete absence of discussion of the complex interplay of class, education, and ideology shaping American society today.
In case you didn't know and care, when the auto audio voice gets to that line you tried to draw to separate sections of your piece, it says "underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore" which gets a little tedious. Otherwise thanks for the post :)
Fascinating! Definitely witnessed this schism in my middle class family of origin. One sibling who went into corporate law zoomed up the status scale while the teacher and social worker siblings fell into low middle. The individualist values of the elite are apparent in the lawyer family who puts little value on kinship bonds of loyalty. Family obligations are considered "emotional labor" and a hindrance to their pursuit of extraordinary lives. Not their brother's keeper. Social status and sibling competition will always be with us, but the hyper consumerism of recent decades and the decline of religious moral influence has led to a lot of shallow and insecure lives.
Agreed…
In the 1970s and 1980s, the USA undertook and intensive economic and political centralization, from the 1830s until then it used to have interstate capital flow inhibitors and institutionalized local capital biases, it also has a moderate but if used well then still substantial ability for state and to an extent even local government to utilize trade frictions, these things granted a limited but still significant amount of local economic agency to communities….
One thing that gets me, as a child of the working-class who finds myself in the educated upper-middle-class, is how unextraordinary most of their lives are.
They don’t do interesting things, for the most part. They just have bigger houses with higher quality fittings, furniture, and appliances, along with more expensive, newer cars.
They get to take vacations, but rarely go anywhere interesting to have different experiences. A staggering number of my peers have never been to Mexico or Europe. Of the ones that have been to Europe, few traveled further east than Italy or Germany.
They’ve got the money and the power, but they’re boring and unaccountable. Most have positions high enough in management to have a suitable underling to throw under the bus if their bad ideas fail, and they almost never learn from their failures because they view the bad outcomes as the failure of others to execute their “vision.”
I agree on the boring part…for those who thought they would get paid for their passion…it is an ironic frustration- they get paid really well to be bored…and sit in meetings.
We get paid really well mostly for decision making and organization/communication. At least in the corporate world; I can’t speak to academia or government. But it is often very dull, especially after you’ve been doing it long enough for it to become rote.
Lots of them have bullshit jobs, too
This resonates: “they almost never learn from their failures because they view the bad outcomes as the failure of others to execute their ‘vision.’”
Many also seem pretty unimaginative. Some seem to work hard and even volunteer, but it’s not really clear what they’re working toward, either personally or in their careers. They just stay busy with no clear purpose other than making money. And it doesn’t seem to make them happier.
Changes on tax rates and banning stock buybacks will accomplish most of what you want. America once created the sort of society you desire though this mechanism. It happens spontaneously through cultural evolution (see link 1). Link 2 describes how tax changes made after 1980 affected the incentive structure for corporate executives leading to different behavior and the evolution of a shareholder-focused culture. Also described are effects on innovation and growth.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-is-neoliberalism-an-empirical#:~:text=So%2C%20what%20is%20going%20on%3F
Interesting! One way to do would to be to undo the changes which have made the concerns about so called "elites" so pressing in the first place. The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
And have we really had an increase in "education" as most people define it? Or have we had an increase in centrally directed socialization and a centralization of our information ecosystem that, in part, used that socialization and associated credentialism, to achieve its goals? Some years back the Flynn Effect was challenged in a way that I would bet most people would say completely discredited it, and they way that it was done was a great many people showing examples of books, school tests, job description, etc. across a very wide array of subjects and how commonly they were known, it *appears* there was indeed a minority of the population that for a variety of reasons (some physical, such as childhood nutrition, exposure to toxins, whatever) may have been cognitively left behind (so could Flynn have picked up a shift on variance instead of mean?), but if any thing a majority of the population was smarter than people today in-general...
There has been an explosion of credentialism more than a rise in education.
There’s the stereotype of an MBA running a good team into the ground for a reason. All too often they’re promoted above their skill level and none of the thought-leader blogs and books they’ve read prepare them for real business challenges. But they create a nice presentation, dare their subordinates to challenge their terrible plans, and then hold their subordinates accountable when their poorly thought out initiatives fail.
Then they put “Responsible for inception and execution of $800,000 project to increase the efficiency of business processes” on their resume and fuck off to their next gig before they accumulate enough failures for leadership to notice that they’re not good at their jobs.
Interesting- but I continue to be flummoxed by the argument that the answer is to reduce the elite class rather than raising the lower classes to the elite level. Isn’t that progress- raising the floor? What are the benefits of dumbing down society?
I think we can do both…but we should at least find ways to get highly educated people out of their bubbles…
Yes- I agree the co-mingling is important
A simple way to do this is go to your local (non-fancy) bar and talk to people. I have made friends and had amazing conversations just doing this.
You didn't provide any support for the claim that the elite is more bubbled though. One could argue that a larger elite has more surface area to interact with ordinary people. Note also that part of why your post is interesting is because this elite you describe doesn't particularly think of itself as an elite.
Actually, your claims appear somewhat contradictory, because you also accuse the elites of using populism to stir up non-elites, which is something they could only do if they had contact with non-elites, and understood their psychology.
I think he discusses two kinds of elites - one of which is more likely to be able to 'connect' with the masses via populism, than the other - which seeks to breathe more and more rarefied air.
A lot of men don’t want to work in offices where achievement is created in excel spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. And outside of growing your own business, white collar jobs are where the opportunities for high income are.
I’m a white collar educated upper-middle-class guy and I wish I’d been an electrician or some sort of skilled trade technician instead.
I don’t have much in common with these bougie people, their inflated egos, and their nonsense belief that they’re more useful to society than the people who keep the lights on and the water flowing.
I’ve seen how helpless and useless they are when the power is out, and I am not impressed.
I'd argue that higher-education does not necessarily imply being smarter. And if you keep raising the floor, the folks at the top will keep raising the ceiling. The whole point of being elite is to be 'above' - which is the striking characteristic of this well-educated well-off class.
And going by what has actually happened in the last 10-12Y, the 'smarter' class actually comes off as being seriously 'dumber'.
This dovetails well with Amy Chua’s ideas about “market dominant minorities.”
She argues that over the last 30 years, well educated Americans are effectively forming a new ethnicity, with its own cultural morays, which is breeding a lot of resentment.
I am in that group (shocker) and when I think about my son (5 yo), I can’t even conceive of him dating someone who didn’t go to college (or whose parents didn’t go to college).
He likely won’t really meet anyone whose parents didn’t go to college because of the schools he’s attending and the neighborhood he lives in.
It also dovetails well with David Runcimen’s ideas about how the foundational assumptions of representative government are breaking down.
The relevant one is that our elected officials are not better educated then we are at this point. I’d even go so far as to hazard that virtually everyone reading this comment accurately believes that elected officials have no real capacity advantages over us, which erodes trust (if the people we’re electing are a bunch of jibbering mouthbreathers, why should be tolerate that.
Excellent article, thank you
Companies are not hiring Harvard MBAs like they used to, which could be an early sign of the decline of Higher Ed. Some Silicon Valley tycoons are recommending their children not go to college, and instead apprentice with them in their Venture Capital Funds, or whatever.
ChatGPT and other LLMs may be replacing college professors, and you can even now have a verbal back-and-forth conversation with LLMs.
The easy class divider of the "college educated" vs. the "non-college educated" may be disappearing.
This is fantastic. Thank you so much
I’m not sure I agree with your stance that this group has so little interaction with everyday Americans (largest SES). As but one example - I have a MS in IS, worked at IBM for 16 yrs. I was then laid off and had to retrain as a RN. As you point out, I grew up in a lower middle class hh. And when I first started working , I was def lower middle class. Through work in 90s and early aughts, and married lifestyle - we did obtain upper middle class SES. But we got divorced with 2 young children in 2006, lived through financial crisis of 2008-2009, and I was eventually laid off-> this moves you back down in SES- both divorce and lay off. I went back to school to train as a RN- at a community college with 2 yr pgm, and then a 4 yr urban univ. many many students at 2 yr comm colleges in nursing pgms are not in the upper SES, nor are students at the univ. let’s now look at healthcare professions specifically - in my capacity as RN I’ve worked in providing home health to the indigent , and at a major public school district . In that capacity I interact regularly with fellow staff who are lowerSES, and many students and families from all SES. In regards to health professions - many many people who are in upper SES started in lower SES, and perhaps more importantly , they interact regularly with all SES. Same with say attornies/legal profession . I’m sure I can think of others. Oh - > professional athletes , etc they’re wealthy , still interacting with people from SES etc. I’m back up where I was , but it took me over a decade and some estate $ to get there. It’s all been quite the struggle. That doesn’t leave you - ever. Just like my dads youth in western KS in the 1930s forever changed him. Even if one becomes educated and wealthy , what SES you started at matters, even when you attain education and greater income (climb the ladder). You can still fall back through divorce, death of spouse, chronic illness , etc And there’s still a lot of SES mingling , in general . In agreement with the stats that the lower strata often never see the light of day in this country - which is nothing short of criminal.
I'm not sure how much of the economy consists of "marketing" and "sales". But I can certainly say that the municipal government I worked for went from the managers and engineers answering questions to some 400 "Communications" staff in a separate department. Rather like Finance or HR, the Communications staff were in *every* department by 2009, and handled all external reports and calls.
With the most-limited, most-positive-spin "Communications" possible.
In short, a whole lot of that "educated" class are either being paid to lie to the public (well, "market" to them, or "sales" to them, or, "Communications" management...stuff not entirely true...) or are staff that know the truth about products or services, and see the official story...
Makes it easy to be cynical.
Absolutely nothing can stop or even slightly impede this trend. This is only the beginning, elites will eventually become a completely disembodied superclass. The rich will live their entire lives without the inconvenience of seeing the poor.
What about all the elites who accepted the party line re:Covid. I’m thinking specifically of the idea that natural immunity-something broadly understood for over a millennia-didn’t apply to Covid. I was also astonished that the same group concerned about hormones in milk, etc, wasn’t also concerned about a brand new vaccine and new vaccine technology. I was also shocked that people who were progressive & cared about social justice absolutely did not care that school children of the working class were essentially left out of school for over a year while nearly all the private schools started back in person.
So my broader question is—-
When do elites question authority? When do they fall in line? To what kinds of narratives are they more susceptible?
Also-for thousands of years there have been elites in many civilizations-can you make the case that is somehow unique? Or are there specific patterns we can glean?
thanks for your thoughts. Our elite's unprecedented share of the population is historically unique in the U.S. and probably Europe. Highly educated people want their opinions acted on, and so creating a vast upper-middle-class, most of whom have authority over nothing but a Substack, is politically risky for a democracy. It's a scaled-up version of the sudden expansion of the French mercantile class in the 18th century (who voted with the peasants, i.e., no special treatment from the aristocracy).
Of course, part of the explanation for elite growth is the explosion in complexity of modern life. Imperial China needed a relatively small number of functionaries who passed examinations to run things. But “things” were simple then—nothing changed for many centuries, matters could be calculated and recorded with abaci and brushes.
Today, high-speed computers, interconnected energy grids, metal flying machines that carry people over oceans, heart surgery conducted with microscope cameras and robotically-controlled instruments, warfare waged remotely from video-game consoles in offices located in former shopping malls, toys and gadgets and clothes and furniture available to everyone, even the non-elite, at the click of a button…well, that doesn’t happen by magic. It happens thanks to the combined efforts of the current elite. Even if what many of them do seems to the naked eyeperipheral or orthogonal or even nonsensically asinine.
I would argue that modern life requires this multi-celled organism we call the elite to function. Like all sophisticated organisms, its many parts are on the surface incomprehensible or even repulsive. There are elite jobs who function as the equivalent of a body’s signaling mechanism to consume something. Call such jobs “marketing and advertising,” perhaps.
I leave it to the reader to extend my metaphor. The point, briefly, is: which would you prefer? Small elites along with life that is bleak, brutal and short? Or life-saving drugs you can purchase on Amazon?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7831753/
This was great! So I’m not necessarily a proponent of UBI, but how do you think it would influence this dynamic, if at all? What if high school, too, was mostly civics and how to be a better, less selfish person (and tons of physical, interpersonal activities)?
It’s natural for people to want to spend time around people like themselves, who share common values and common cultural frames of reference. I live in a nicer area so that my kids can go to a public school with other kids who were raised with an achievement orientation and proper standards of behavior (e.g. respect of teachers and non-violence). Not saying this doesn’t exist outside of elite areas, but not as universally. And I know because I grew up in a very middle-class, non-elite area and have witnessed the differences in habits firsthand.
I don’t think my job is more valuable than blue collar work, and recognize that it is mostly bullshit. But I followed the path laid out for me and did what I had to do to be comfortable and set my kids up for a good future. I feel zero guilt about it.
This resonates.
I've been lucky enough for my own material circumstances to have moved from upper middle class to upper class over my lifetime, but I've had a couple of specific periods where my social circle didn't follow that trajectory.
My parents were both college educated when I was a child, but were also both the first in their families to do so. Despite some personal tragedies (I lost my father to cancer at 12), I'd say I stayed in that bubble up until after college. Mostly I hung out with college educated kids who's parents also went to college. My elders and relatives weren't that, but my social circle certainly was.
After college I ended up going into tech, on what would eventually turn into a fairly straightforward march up to executive leadership. That's always kept my work based social life very class segregated, but my personal life has varied. Soon after starting working, I fell in with a crew that threw raves in NY, and that put me in contact with a lot of poverty, drug addiction and starving artists. I think that kept me grounded through my 20s.
In my early 30s I kind of detached from that part of my life, focused on my career and basically only assorted with college educated professionals. Got married, had a kid, built a house. Got rich. I checked all the boxes in my life.
Then at 38 my mom died from cancer, leaving me without parents or siblings (I was an only child). And suddenly the scripts in my life weren't enough. I ended up realizing I was transgender, getting divorced and realigining my social life around queer and trans people. Who are, on average, as close to poverty as the raver friends from my 20s.
My ses always kept going up, but I've spent about 10 years of my adulthood fully bubbled. And another 10 or so fully unbubbled. And I've got close friendships I continue to appreciate on both sides.
But all the meaning I've ever known. The feeling of being truly seen in a community. That's all come when I was socializing on the margin. It's where I've loved harder, given and been given more, and where all of my own self actualization has comes from. It's also a million times scarier and riskier than fully aligning with capital and embodying a rational economic actor.
When I spend too much time around work friends, I can feel the megalomania creep in, even with the most grounded and kind people. Once you get used to directing millions in capital flows, and controlling people's lives you will never know, it gets hard to remember what you, personally, are supposed to be doing in life. Your consciousness steers a vast machine, and obstacles are always mechanistic problems to solve. It's intellectually stimulating, but soulless.
Loving people who are unemployed and worried about housing reminds me that we are loved for who we are, not for what we do. And that we are not better, or more worthy of love, for climbing to the top of the heap. It's hard not to think that, about yourself and others, if everyone you respect around you lives as if the opposite is true.
How do we shrink the elite to strengthen the majority?
Easy.
Strict limits on who can go to college and earn an elite credential.
My controversial opinion as well…stop suckering people so universities can pad revenue…be more transparent and elitist like Europe. And do a better job selling public service careers…create more of them.
Not sure if I missed the point, but this seems extremely reductive and flatly wrong. The argument about the elite as hyper-individualistic and distrustful of institutions completely misrepresents the current political and cultural landscape. While some aspects of the analysis—like the focus on self-optimization—are accurate, they fail to account for the collective, progressive tendencies of educated elites in politics. Meanwhile, the traits attributed to the elite are more accurately reflected in the populist, MAGA-oriented right, whose distrust of institutions and emphasis on personal freedom have become defining characteristics. By oversimplifying these dynamics, there is a complete absence of discussion of the complex interplay of class, education, and ideology shaping American society today.
In case you didn't know and care, when the auto audio voice gets to that line you tried to draw to separate sections of your piece, it says "underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore" which gets a little tedious. Otherwise thanks for the post :)
Thanks…I need to turn that off!
Please don't turn the auto reading off. I'll sit through the underscore, underscores. But there might be a way to improve on the horizontal line :)