Chris Arnade on the out of touch elites

[Dan '82]

[Ragnarök_62]

(09-16-2016, 01:00 AM)Dan Wrote:

?  5 blank comments, man.

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Oh, maybe one the thingies below, eh?  
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[Dan '82]

(09-16-2016, 01:39 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(09-16-2016, 01:00 AM)Dan Wrote:

?  5 blank comments, man.

........

Oh, maybe one the thingies below, eh?  
127.0.0.1    localhost
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# unwanted connections here
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0.0.0.0 atl14s39-in-f4.1e100.net
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0.0.0.0 google.com
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They did load for you? what browser are you using?

[Ragnarök_62]

(09-16-2016, 02:20 AM)Dan Wrote:

(09-16-2016, 01:39 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(09-16-2016, 01:00 AM)Dan Wrote:

https://twitter.com/Chris_arnade/status/...3244342273

?  5 blank comments, man.

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0.0.0.0 twitter.com
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They did load for you?  what browser are you using?

No worries Dan.   They don't load because of the above entry in my /etc/hosts file.  The "0.0.0.0 twitter.com tells my puter to replace the real IP address of twitter to be my own box which of course displays nothing. I figured it out after doing a "reply to" an saw that the blank stuff was from twitter.

[Bob Butler 54]

OK, maybe I'm one of the 'elite' sorts.  My father was not a millionaire, he was a foreman for the old Bell System, a low level manager installing the relay generation of central switches.  Well, he wasn't a millionaire until late in his life.  He saved, and he bought every single stock option made available, and New England Telephone made a lot of stock options available.  And then they broke up Ma Bell, and he ended up holding a whole bunch of digital communications stocks as the country went into the dot com boom era.  He and my mother wound up asking each other how they became millionaire...

Anyway, I grew up thinking that if I got my grades in school and put in solid hours at work I'd end up OK.  That's the way the world works.  At least, that's how it worked for me, my father, my uncles, my sisters...  Anyway, that how things worked.

Reading Hillbilly Eulogy, there are folks who didn't work on grades in school, and who didn't put solid hours in at work, and who thought they'd end up OK too.  They often don't end up OK.  The heroin and meth don't help, but from their point of view it isn't their fault that they're not millionaires, it's the fault of Big Government.

To some degree there is some fraction of truth in an elite notion that you can get out of the system what you put into it.  If you end up as an elite, yes, you got something out of the system so obviously the system is working just fine.  The world is what one sees of the world, and what the elite see works just fine.  If it ain't broke, why fix it?

This doesn't mean everyone is willing to put the effort in.  Not everyone's father will lend the next generation a million to continue the family real estate empire.

But in a lot of places it is hard to get that education, to get a job that leads further than nowhere.  I would agree that there are many elites who have lived too long on Easy Street who can't conceive of that reality.  They have just never lived it, and when building a world view that which one hasn't lived doesn't exist at a values level.

[Eric the Green]

The peasants need to vote for Hillary. She is the change agent. The charges that are used by the 1% against her are all bogus. The peasants are throwing their chance for change out the window. It should be obvious to them that the Republicans have been in charge for the last 6 years, and with only a 1 year break, for 9 years before THAT. So is it "change" to put another Republican in the White House? More trickle-down economics that caused the inequality? Come on, Americans; don't be deplorable. Don't be sucked in by Republican deception. Vote for change. Vote for Hillary.

[Bob Butler 54]

(09-16-2016, 08:53 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: The peasants need to vote for Hillary. She is the change agent. The charges that are used by the 1% against her are all bogus. The peasants are throwing their chance for change out the window. It should be obvious to them that the Republicans have been in charge for the last 6 years, and with only a 1 year break, for 9 years before THAT. So is it "change" to put another Republican in the White House? More trickle-down economics that caused the inequality? Come on, Americans; don't be deplorable. Don't be sucked in by Republican deception. Vote for change. Vote for Hillary.

While I'm in favor of voting for Hillary, you have missed the point here.  If the hillbilly subculture is not going to push education, is not going to encourage putting honest effort into one's work, if heroin, meth and brawling remain major forms of entertainment, Hillary can only do so much for them.  The failure runs far deeper than the political choice.

[pbrower2a]

(09-16-2016, 01:00 AM)Dan Wrote: (twitter messages)

1. Maybe the economic elites care only about themselves and their indulgence. The world must have looked very good to the Bourbons at the Palais de Versailles or from the Imperial Court at St. Petersburg while the masses hated their lives and saw fundamental change as a necessity for having any satisfaction in life. Maybe they just don't care that the world sucks so badly for people managed largely by fear.

So if the bounty of a rich society goes largely to people who are guaranteed easy, large profits and everyone else must struggle ferociously for the scraps, we have a sick society at least in formation. Measures of GNP per capita will not matter if people live on the brink of starvation at worst and in thrall of loan-sharks at best.

2. The elites would rather that the People have no meaningful vote, but racist votes and votes manipulates by religious bigotry really are 'dumb' votes.  But ensuring that mass education is awful might be a good way to ensure that people vote 'dumb' or vote 'scared'.

3. Few people want to be known exclusively for their economic function. People who are nothing more than their economic function might be highly-successful business-people and professionals, but I can assure you that nobody wants to be known only as a salesclerk, farm laborer, or warehouse worker. Those jobs are often far too small for the human spirit of many who do them. People often identify themselves as "Yankee fans", "Baptists", "someone who bowled a 300 game", alumni of Southern Michigan University, or the maker of the best lasagna in Springfield.

Is there any question of whether people find their economic role so inadequate when they hate their jobs? Slaves were identified exclusively by their economic role.

Is there any surprise?

4. The system undeniably works for the elites, if for nobody else. That is nothing praiseworthy. That's how things were in France before 1789, Russia before 1917, or Romania before 1989. All hierarchical orders except the Catholic Church end up having a hereditary method   of passing down power and its perquisites. Even in the alleged "workers' states", the Commie bosses made sure that their kids didn't have to become farm laborers on a kolkhoz or 'mere' factory workers. I see much the same a near certainty with America's executive elite which operates little differently from the old Soviet nomenklatura. It will go similarly badly.

5. The kids in the middle rows know that their chances are under threat. Those in the back never thought that they had a chance, which explains why they can get along unless they show something that remotely resembles a gun upon a cop, commits an armed robbery, or deals in the drugs that the elites hold in disdain. Maybe there is some welfare so that one does not see people dying of starvation in unglamorous part of town. Those in the back row know that they will survive. Those in the middle row do not know the terms of their survival and have legitimate fear. Attending an overpriced college with the prospect of being in debt while having to work at a fast food counter isn't so great as attending a heavily-subsidized college with the prospect of at least having a low-level profession.

6. The Trump voters are extremely angry. Sanders? Don't be so sure. Sanders' supporters don't beat people up.

7. Middle-class blacks , Asians, and Hispanics still have some faith in liberalism. When liberalism fails, the non-white component of the middle class disintegrates.  When the white middle class gets the same message before the disintegration of the middle class is well under way, then the game is up for the elites. Something like Henry George's single tax (a tax upon economic rents) could solve many problems, one of which is economic inequality. Easy money deserves to be taxed more heavily than hard-earned money. Exploiting a contrived scarcity of property, as Donald Trump does, is easy money. Doing oil changes or putting up sheet rock is not easy money.

8. It is easy to see what people would go first in large numbers to the equivalent of the guillotine -- people who have gotten fantastically rich by treating others badly. What will be necessary is creating a frontier-like free-for-all that really does reward talent, probity, and competence instead of being well connected by birth or marriage.

9 and 10. The economic, bureaucratic, and political elites overthrown in revolutions typically have no clue that things are going badly for those other than themselves, and that those elites are the cause of rightful dissent that explodes as a revolution. Those elites see nothing more natural than that their noble selves should wallow in selfish indulgence and be seen as benefactors to those that they exploit. The masses hate such people and have no use for them. Louis XVI and Nicolae Ceausescu had much the same flippant view of the initial unrest that eventually toppled them. Our economic elites could be much the same.

Donald Trump has much more in common with Louis XVI than with Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- that is beyond any doubt. Donald Trump loves the fools of America -- but not smart people who can see through him.

[Eric the Green]

Hillbillery can't fix the hillbillies, I get it

You would think some of them would at least get it that voting Republican might soothe their fears, but that it hurts them and keeps them in chains to pollution and bosses. The cultural deprivation/ignorance and the political foolery go together; which comes first I'm not sure. At least the HillBillies in the White House would advocate for education and help people get it.

The Clintoon is pretty good on "the plight of the middle income silent majority," if we hear what she says and what she does, as opposed to what her opponents say she says and does. Hillary had expressed interest in helping these people; who knows, she might be the next JFK and turn WV blue again, as it reliably was for 36 years after JFK focused attention on them and helped them.

[Mikebert]

(09-16-2016, 11:20 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: While I'm in favor of voting for Hillary, you have missed the point here.  If the hillbilly subculture is not going to push education, is not going to encourage putting honest effort into one's work, if heroin, meth and brawling remain major forms of entertainment, Hillary can only do so much for them.  The failure runs far deeper than the political choice.

Education is not a panacea, not is it any kind of solution.  It's part of the snake oil Democrats have pushed for three decades now.  It's not as toxic as the Republican tax-cut snake oil, but it is no solution to our problems.  Don't get me wrong, I myself took the education route into the "New Class" elite. My strategy as a 17 yo was simple.  Pick a field (chemistry--I was good at that in HS). Get the top score or the next to top (as a fall back) in your college classes, thus racking up a good GPA in your field.  Ace your standardized tests.  I went to a local commuter campus and lived at home.  This school was part of the Wisconsin system and its classes directly translated into classes that the flagship campus in Madison where I went to grad school, which had top chemistry and chemical engineering departments.  I was an average student there.  I finished got a job with Upjohn (now Pfizer), met my wife and got married and we have been there in Kalamazoo ever since and now plan to retire in 3 years with a pension, retiree health benefits and a shitload in savings (she retired in 2004 with a nice package--Pfizer merger).

But not everyone can do what I did. Most people do not score in the top 75 out of 15000 in their PSATs.

Of course lots of people who score way lower that I have gone through college gotten degrees and have done way better than me.  Today there are lots more jobs that require a college degree that folks of more average academic ability can do.  I've talked about the many quality, business excellence, EHS, and other type of professional positions now exist at my manufacturing facility that did not exist when I started, while we do the same sort things (make chemicals, often in the same equipment) that we did then.  Just why do we need all these people to make a kg of neomycin today whereas we needed none of them to make the same kg of neomycin in 1955?  The reason is the "regulatory burden" conservatives are always complaining about.  Those regulatory burdens = jobs for people with college degrees (aka the "bicoastal elites"--even if they are not on the coasts).  Once you see regulatory burdens as "jobs programs for the cognitive elites" (who vote by the way) you can see they ain't going away--even if the Republicans are in charge (their voters have these jobs too--if you work(ed) in the military or intelligence agencies, their contractors, or the defense industry-even if you are blue collar--this qualifies as a political make-work job).

About 17 years ago I speculated on whether we could build an economy on the "Nike effect".  The idea was based on the concept of branding creating value out of nothing, a more tangible version of what is known as financial alchemy. The idea was we could have a two tier economy in which poor people would buy inexpensive products, while rich people would buy the same product (functionally) but which would be branded with a signifier of "coolness" and which would be much much more expensive. The price differential would pay for all sorts of make-work jobs for college education people, designers, IR professionals. businessmen, financial specialists etc. But it seemed to me that sooner or later people would figure out they could get the same stuff for a lot less if they just bought the basic item--or better still, the designer item at the Salvation Army or other thrift store.  What I could not figure out is what about the expensive-to-produce stuff like health care, education and housing--how is that to be handled?

This is more or less what we have today.  What do you do if your are like B, A, M, T, D or V (members of my family who are working poor just poor).  First they earn a little more than minimum wage and so have health insurance.  The health insurance benefit I get from my employer costs about as much or more than most of them earn. So they are on Medicaid.  You cannot work at a lower-end working class job today and have good health insurance.  If we don't want poor folks dying in the street from lack of medical care then we need something like Medicaid--which is why we have it.  The Medicaid expansion from Obamacare means M, T and D have insurance whereas they otherwise would not. T's kids, my great-grandchildren) and A's kids (my grandkids) already had it thanks to the Clintons.  (Can you see why I vote D?).

Education is something they do without--they cannot afford it.  Sure they could go to college on loans and end up working a shit job with huge non-dischargeable debt. To get a good job that justifies loans they would have to be like me. But they can't be like me, they did not grow up in the sort of neighborhood I did.  Back then, the son of a truck driver (my #2 best friend), the son of a corporate executive (my best friend) and the son of a school teacher (me) all grew up together and formed my adolescent environment that shaped me and them.  And we all made it, none of us ended up falling out of the middle class. But neighborhoods like that no longer exist, corporate executives now life in gated neighborhoods. Trucks driver live in working class poor neighborhoods (B's husband is a truck driver).   Executive's kids now are socialized by other executives kids, and the truck driver's kids by other poor kids.  So people are more tracked today and there is less upward mobility.

[pbrower2a]

(09-16-2016, 12:08 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: One problem is the elites of both the center Right and center Left bought in early and aggressively to the "Flat World" / "electronic herd" / "plugged in world" bullshit of Thomas L. Friedman and others of that ilk. Such bullshit went along the lines of "we are globalizing, get over it" and "if only you join the electronic herd / retrain yourself, the rising tide will lift your boat too."

Well ... not so fast. Even the so called knowledge workers are in a race for the bottom, just like what has hit blue collar ones.

Middle-class techies and intellectuals believed that they could profit greatly from the technological world that would marginalize work but make gadgets and entertainment cheap and amazing. We would be able to exchange ideas as if we were college professors. Such, for a time, was a well-remunerated delusion. In the end, middle-class techies and intellectuals would themselves be marginalized just as had industrial workers.  Then came HB-1A workers who could be imported to be paid like soldiers and live in barracks so that the profiteers of the tech industry could really make profits.

I don't have any problem with the techs from foreign countries so long as they get paid well; in fact I want them living the American Dream and joining our gene pool! But American-born kids are learning that they will have to compete with people on the exploitative HB-1A visas.

In the meantime, housing prices would skyrocket in places in which the techies and intellectuals congregated, high rents becoming in effect a tax that the urban landlords could exact upon those who got above-average incomes. Say what you want about opportunities for technical wizards, it is far easier to make money gouging such people for rent than to do hardware design or to create software.

Unlike public taxes for which politicians have some accountability for what they do with the revenues, real-estate gougers have few responsibilities to renters. Complain about the rent? There's always another taker, and one can always to to the rural Midwest where rent is cheap... but the opportunities are few. Does anyone with a college degree who has held a well-paying job really want to be a front desk clerk at a motel at Exit 317 on Interstate 69 in Indiana just because the living costs are much lower?

I can almost see the smear on those who make the easy money gouging us -- they tax, we have no representation, and they have no accountability. For the American Revolution one slogan was "No taxation without representation".

In many respects the 1950s were better (so long as one ignores polio, leaded gasoline, Blood Alley highways, McCarthyism, male supremacy, and the last few years of Jim Crow before its demise. The mass medium of television would kill Jim Crow dead. People lived in spacious, if austere housing with far fewer gadgets and far less software.  That said, the housing of the 2030s will be stylistically austere because there won't be so much clutter. A reader or laptop will suffice for thousands of books and pieces of recorded music and video. Video screens might be gigantic, but they will often be concealed as something else, as behind a painting or cabinet doors. 1950s life was comfortable enough for middle-income groups that then included assembly-line workers. Take away the vile practices and replace the obsolete infrastructure and replace the 25" cabinet television (most likely black-and-white) with a television/computer screen and have one laptop per person to supplant records and books but add video and you might have the 2030s. Also go from debt-funded consumerism to the pay-as-you-go consumerism of the 1950s and the world will even seem mentally much like the 1950s, complete with the common man as a saver instead of a customer heavily in hock to loanshark lenders, and American political life will be much more placid and far less polarized.  

Quote:There need to be controls and protections. The fact that Komrade Drumpf has been willing to at least mouth the words attracts many angry middle income people. I am not talking about the dysfunctional types of Hillbilly Elegy. I'm talking about hard working reasonably educated people. Where it went wrong was when the middle income white collar population started to feel the sting of globalony.

Government must mitigate the disputes that without check can balloon into conflict. Good government sponsors or at least imitates a wholesome give-and-take. Bad government serves the highest bidder, and we now begin to see how that works. This Crisis will have major reforms of the economic order or it will culminate in violent revolution.

Quote:To offer an alternative to demagogues like Komrade Drumpf, a politician with intellectual depth, and yet, attuned to the plight of the middle income silent majority, needs to step forward. Too late for this cycle. At best, we get Clintoon, warts and all. Worst case, we get Komrade Drumpf and a shop of horrors.

It is not too late. The Crisis will continue until that alternative arises or is forcefully and brutally precluded. Demagogue  Don is practically everything wrong with America, and the rejection of his ilk by Americans or ejection by military force (coup or conquest) will make America much more livable, if for survivors only.

[Mikebert]

(09-16-2016, 12:08 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: One problem is the elites of both the center Right and center Left bought in early and aggressively to the "Flat World" / "electronic herd" / "plugged in world" bullshit of Thomas L. Friedman and others of that ilk. Such bullshit went along the lines of "we are globalizing, get over it" and "if only you join the electronic herd / retrain yourself, the rising tide will lift your boat too."

It's not bullshit elites bought into.  Look at the people who advocated for these policies--especially those involved in them.  How have they done for themselves?  Seems to me pretty damn well.  What people want you to think is that economies grow organically.  How they unfold, who becomes winners and losers, are the result of "natural forces".  They want you to believe that the post-war era of widely shared growth was a one-time effect of America being the sole remaining industrial nation in the aftermath of WW II. I believed this BS in the nineties.  Obama did too, it was in his Audacity book.

In actuality economies do not grow by themselves.  They develop on a framework established by the state.  There is no such social science known as "economics", the actual science is "political economy" something of which the field's founders were aware, but which was llost over the last century and a quarter.

[Eric the Green]

(09-16-2016, 03:24 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: I wish I could be as optimistic as you. Defaulting to my usual realist self, at best, HRC would probably throw a few bones to the educated middle income groups. My main hope is, anyone-but-Trump. Since coming to Washington and then moving to the NYC upper crust burbs, HRC has been part of the bubble world of Friedman et al. All we can hope for is, some of the experiences of her early career (I'm talking way long time ago, when she was a new grad) will well up from the old memory banks and influence her world view.

Yes, it will, and from her more recent years too. She is not Bill, and I certainly would not lump HRC in with Friedman; they are poles apart (well, I see you mean Thomas, not Milton; I can see that. But they aren't the same either). The main thrust of her life and career is to lift up those who are hurting and left outside, not tout the new high-tech global economy. I am more optimistic about her, if she's elected; which I have predicted she will be. I'll stick with that, just as I did when Romney was up 4 very short years ago at this time against Obama. My scoring system now says that Romney had no chance at all against Obama. It's tighter with Hillary, but on balance I think she'll make it, and do OK. She is never really popular, and the lies said about her continue, thanks to whom the opposition is; but that doesn't mean she can't do the job.

What she needs to do to win is create more enthusiasm about herself and where she wants to take the country, not just run down the other guy, as bad as he is. That's tough, it seems, because there isn't much to say that hasn't already been said. Trump's destructive direction seems a bit novel. His supporters say they want a bull in a China shop to shake things up. But we NEED that China, and we need the shop to be functional. They don't see that it's the Republicans who created today's situation; who need changing and shaking out. We need to deal with climate change, not make it worse. We need to deal with inequality and economic stagnation, not make it worse as Trump would do with more of the same supply-side nonsense that ruined the economy in the first place, and got us to where we are. Those are the issues, but the problem is, it's all been said and everyone knows it. So how does Hillary make that into a shining city on a hill? She needs a mythmaker to sing a song that will lift the spirits of the country. I'm not sure what that would be at the moment.

Maybe she should hire Bieber.

[pbrower2a]

(09-16-2016, 08:52 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: OK, maybe I'm one of the 'elite' sorts.  My father was not a millionaire, he was a foreman for the old Bell System, a low level manager installing the relay generation of central switches.  Well, he wasn't a millionaire until late in his life.  He saved, and he bought every single stock option made available, and New England Telephone made a lot of stock options available.  And then they broke up Ma Bell, and he ended up holding a whole bunch of digital communications stocks as the country went into the dot com boom era.  He and my mother wound up asking each other how they became millionaire...


Anyway, I grew up thinking that if I got my grades in school and put in solid hours at work I'd end up OK.  That's the way the world works.  At least, that's how it worked for me, my father, my uncles, my sisters...  Anyway, that how things worked.

Those halcyon days could be over, never to return. The elites may want people to fail economically despite their efforts. Money flows practically free from the Federal Reserve to those already rich those who need money in large quantities.

Quote:Reading Hillbilly Eulogy, there are folks who didn't work on grades in school, and who didn't put solid hours in at work, and who thought they'd end up OK too.  They often don't end up OK.  The heroin and meth don't help, but from their point of view it isn't their fault that they're not millionaires, it's the fault of Big Government.

No institution can make the improvident, lazy, and especially the chemically-dependent (add booze to the mix) successful. Even in good times children must pay attention to their schoolwork to have a chance. But if you are a white kid in Appalachia or the Ozarks who attends bad schools whose teachers do nothing to inculcate the value of learning, 'white privilege' is empty. One might as well be non-white and have parents who push one to succeed in school and then recognize the need to work for its own sake.

Quote:To some degree there is some fraction of truth in an elite notion that you can get out of the system what you put into it.  If you end up as an elite, yes, you got something out of the system so obviously the system is working just fine.  The world is what one sees of the world, and what the elite see works just fine.  If it ain't broke, why fix it?

Donald Trump is smart enough that if he didn't come from a rich family he might have been a successful salesman. He might be selling furniture, cars, or real estate and doing well at that. Having advantages to which one is born might push one more quickly or further into one's level of incompetence. "President of the United States" is clearly into his level of incompetence, and he doesn't have a clue.

Quote:This doesn't mean everyone is willing to put the effort in.  Not everyone's father will lend the next generation a million to continue the family real estate empire.

Most people end up with responsibilities to enrich the elites and few rewards for that, at least since about 1980. Class privilege can decide not only who gets the rewards, but also who gets the opportunities. The United States has become an extreme example of a class-based social order. That does not change until America endures some calamity that forces it to offer more equality in opportunity (face it -- World War II forced equality of opportunity as a means of determining who had the ability, resolve, and overall competence to meet the definitive menace to everything that Americans cherished, which may have allowed such people as Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans to join the economic mainstream). Until then, all that may matter in America is that a few people get to make gigantic incomes off economic rents and others work largely to pay those economic rents to their 'betters'.  Other alternatives to resolving the issue of gross inequality include those elites getting America into a war for profits that goes badly or some proletarian insurrection.

Quote:But in a lot of places it is hard to get that education, to get a job that leads further than nowhere.  I would agree that there are many elites who have lived too long on Easy Street who can't conceive of that reality.  They have just never lived it, and when building a world view that which one hasn't lived doesn't exist at a values level.

We have more college graduates, and I don't mean graduates of junk schools like 'bible academies' and suspect 'technical institutes', than there are middle-income jobs awaiting them. That's not to say that there aren't fine religious schools like Notre Dame and Brigham Young Universities and of course MIT and Caltech. Connections are easier to make if one is already part of the economic elite.