Knowledge-labour, knowledge-capital, knowledge-surplus. Same old, same-old. There are always some arguments that "this time it's different" (Hardt & Negri), but the larger structure is accumulation turned to profits M-C-M' and this is the machine, not the assembly line.
Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism
4. I have preferred the term 'subsumption' to 'submission' because it better allows us to grasp the permanence of the opposition of capital to labour and the conflict for the control of the 'intellectual powers of production' in the unfolding of the different stages of the capitalist division of labour.
I need to load up the Carchedi, I suppose, because he refutes the new autonomists and handles k-labour very well. But I was supposed to start my Pimsleur today.
First of all, compared to somebody who made their money in a manufacturing or service-sector company the dot com companies had no visible group of exploited workers.
Nor even a product, in many cases. Or emissions. Bubbles are clean.
I see the turning point as Reagan, with increasing free-market giddiness increasing fairly steadily from 1980 to 2007, despite a near-disaster in 1987 and a fair-sized disaster in 2000 or so. Eventually the cargo cult saturated every area of American culture. Even my Stalinist friend had a dot-com scheme in the works.
increasing free-market giddiness increasing
1) It's the social relations not the commodity, although of course, the commodity is the social relation.
Carnegie and Rockefeller were not that different from Gates and Jobs, and were not considered so at the time. It wasn't steel or oil, it was the distribution system, the technologies etc, their "smarts" intellectual powers that made them rich. And yes, being in the right place at the right time, when vertical construction and the internal combustion engine made their commodities profitable.
Capitalism is, even more than steel and mortar, the accumulation of objectified knowledge-labour, whether that be in an electronic lathe or spreadsheet or CDS.
I was just wondering the other day, if someone can do data entry for forty years. If it is physically or mentally possible. The real point of Visicalc was not to create new software superstars, but to turn certain jobs or aspects of jobs, bookkeeping, from the property of a craftsperson into a manageable commodity and make the labour more simple and non-social. Rationalizing, creating machines with human components.
Social Network wasn't too bad. Even Zuckerberg was wholly capitalized.
jouzu ja arimasen
I remember the heady few months when the Ex's pre-IPO options were worth some ungodly amount. Good times.
Obviously there are probably many reasons but I wondered how much the dot com bubble, specifically, shifted the stereotypes about class and wealth in this county, and whether the rise of "the age of the geek" has served to blunt some of the class resentment and sense of class conflict.
I haven't noticed much change.
... Secondly there was a sense that people could be participate in this explosion of money without having to commit to toadying up to power or being "socially acceptable" to the traditional gatekeepers of wealth and privilege. ...
I think new money is often more resented than old money and not just by the old elite. Consider professional athletes and how many people reflexively side with the owners in salary disputes. Or find the idea that big time college athletes should be paid appalling.
It's the hegemony of economists that leads to politicians no longer saying things they supposedly believe.
Republicans and Tories can say things about how they want to shift power from the elite to the people in the street, because they are nihilists who see no reason to tell the truth.
Meanwhile, anyone with power in the other party finds it HARDER to say things like that, because they once believed them but now do not. Yes, it sounds good to have a minimum wage or pensions or whatever, but we now know that the free market dictates that those things are just impossible. What can we do? Who knows. At least you can vote for the non-racist party.
... but it's also easy to remember why there was so much that was likable about the early internet boom.
I suspect nerdy dot.com millionaires may be more attractive to other nerd types than to the population as a whole.
I haven't noticed much change.
I don't know how much of my premise is personal. In my life and social circles I feel like the way in which wealth was perceived changed a lot from 1988 to 1996 (say), but that might have been a result of views of the world changing as I and my friends went through out adolescences.
I see the turning point as Reagan, with increasing free-market giddiness increasing fairly steadily from 1980 to 2007
There are many things you could point to as turning points -- obviously public sympathies for unions has been in the decline since the mid 70s, and that has an obvious impact in the degree to which people are likely to be sensitive to class conflict as a important social dynamic.
You could also see the dot com bubble as the logical extension of Toffler's "de-massification of production" and it's no coincidence that the right are fond of Toffler (though not only the right, there is a progressive side to him as well).
As I say, the passage quoted in the OP caught my attention because it reminded me that I do sense a change of tone over that time period. But I don't know how broadly that applies.
I suspect nerdy dot.com millionaires may be more attractive to other nerd types than to the population as a whole.
And, to be fair, I kind of hated them at the time. But I didn't hate them because I thought they were stealing money from the rest of the country -- just because I resented their apparently unearned fortunes and because they seemed frivolous (which, as you say point out, is always the criticism of new money).
9
... obviously public sympathies for unions has been in the decline since the mid 70s, ...
Some polling data. Actually support has been pretty flat since the 70s until a sharp recent drop (which might be temporary in the economy recovers).
I'm having trouble with this, because I'm not sure if the postulated change in attitudes toward wealth is pro or anti, and over what time period. There's been a recent anti-wealth swing -- the whole 99% thing. And before that a much longer pro-wealth swing. Which are we talking about?
Which are we talking about?
The pro-wealth swing (and I now feel embarrassed that the post was that unclear).
11: I was going to say that it seems strange that support for unions would recover if the economy recovered, but your link supports that idea: "There has been an even larger jump in the percentage saying labor unions mostly hurt the U.S. economy, from 36% in 2006 to 51% today."
Some polling data.
Interesting. Thanks for the link. I hadn't realized there had been that much a bump during the late-90s/early 00s. I knew that leftish people seemed to be talking about unions more during that time but I hadn't realized it had coincided with that large an increase in support. According to that chart the percentage of people in '99 who said they approved of unions was the highest it had been since '66.
NickS, can I push for more demographics or personal history from you? I was 8 in '88 and so, yes, the way I viewed wealth changed drastically in the following decade but not necessarily because of how the world was changing, y'know? (I know you touch on this.) I should go back to the initial post, but there was one sentence about observed changes that made me say FOR WHOM? and I'm still curious about that. I'm not disagreeing at all, just curious. And generally I'm more interested in why it seems that way to you than whether it does/should/might seem that way as part of a greater demograpic trend, which I think is one reason I like this unfogged community.
16
... According to that chart the percentage of people in '99 who said they approved of unions was the highest it had been since '66.
You have to be a little careful here, the chart doesn't show error ranges, small differences probably aren't reliable.
"There has been an even larger jump in the percentage saying labor unions mostly hurt the U.S. economy, from 36% in 2006 to 51% today."
What is the psychology (psychopathology?) which leads people to be less in favour of organising to defend their own interests during times when those interests are under attack than in times when they aren't? Ils sont fous, ces Romains!
15
I was going to say that it seems strange that support for unions would recover if the economy recovered ...
People often look for scapegoats when times are bad.
NickS, can I push for more demographics or personal history from you?
I was 12 in 1988. Also I grew up in a medium-sized town in the NW corner of the Pacific NW which definitely had it's own vibe. It's a city which saw an an influx of artistically-minded or counter-culture young people during the 70s -- partially because it was close to the Canadian border and partially because it was a cheap place to live and beautiful. By 1988 there had been quite a bit of economic growth, but it still felt pretty isolated and like a place that people came and created their own jobs because there wasn't any existing work here.
There was a bunch of frustration, around that time, at people selling houses in California and moving up to the area with way too much money and no feel for the local culture.
I don't know how much any of that plays into the feeling I describe in the post. I also recall the late 80s as time when the general culture felt sort of cranky and prone to dark apocalyptic brooding (based on very lose impressions I think of there being some hang-over as the perceived risk of nuclear war receded people were still had the mental habits of thinking that the world might end in the near future).
The more I think about the more I might be inclined to back off the OP post and say that perhaps there isn't much difference between the yuppies of the 80s and the dot com programmers of the 90s.
But, I say again, when I saw that passage it was easy to feel like a candidate talking about racial and class divisions in 1988 would have a different appeal and claim to be talking about the important issues of the day than such a candidate would have now (prior to OWS).
So I just went looking on youtube to see if I could find anything from the Jackson campaign and watched this which is amazing.
In it's own way it is really charismatic and it's also really, really different than anything I could imagine being produced by a left-protest candidate today. "Jackson fights for the homeless."
One other striking thing from the video. When it shows footage of marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge the voice-over mentions that it was, "some twenty-four years ago."
It's amazing to think that 1988 is as far in the past today as the march in Selma was in 1988.
Union support dropping in hard times is counterproductive, but makes perfect sense -- the narrative that unions only benefit their own members, and that most poor people will never get a union job, is broadly believed. When someone in the US is out of work these days, they're just as likely not to blame the moneyed interests keeping the economy from growing, but instead to blame the guy down the street with a good enough salary at his union job that he's not terrified of his car breaking down.
that most poor people will never get a union job, is broadly believed
They won't if they don't organise. How do they think the people with union jobs got them? Dropped from heaven?
Another way to put that is that I think that the American working class (or maybe even the entire non-rich class) thinks of themselves as battling over a fixed amount of wealth. They can't possibly get a larger share of the whole economy -- rich people's share is completely inviolate -- but someone else in the working class who's doing okay, as in having a union job with benefits, has an unfairly large slice of the working-class pie, so they become the enemy.
21: Did you meet any of the famous serial killers?
Did you meet any of the famous serial killers?
Nope, don't spend enough time hanging out in the right(?) bar.
(and, just to say again, everybody should watch the video I linked in 22. It's fascinating.)
It's amazing to think that 1988 is as far in the past today as the march in Selma was in 1988.
I'm confused by the whole post, I'm afraid, but let's start with the above: why? I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure I'm at all clear on how you're gauging change over time.
When the unions stopped expanding and started contracting, their politics became understandably defensive and therefore came to seem like the defense of the privileges of existing members, rather than the fight for something that others would eventually benefit from.
Based on my scattered reading, unions fail without government support, though in some cases government neutrality is all that's needed. Republicans and the South have always been anti-union, and northern Democratic support has slackened, with the end result of weakening the Democrats. (Thanks TNR!) The weakening has been going on since the Taft-Hartley act of 1947 and the red scares of the 50s.
I'm confused by the whole post, I'm afraid, . . .
Yeah, I'm really not doing well with this one, am I? Ah well . . . they can't all be winners.
... but let's start with the above: why?
Eh, in this case I suspect the answer is as simple as, "I lived through the period from 1988 to 2012, whereas the period from 1964 to 1988 feels very remote."
In relation to the OP the thought was more that thinking of the period from 1964 to 1988 as an example of a 24-year historical period makes it clear how absurd it is to try to pick out one thread to explain broad changes that have taken place over twenty-four years.
I'm already backing off the OP, to some extent, because while I think there were meaningful changes since 1988 (and even from 1988 to 2000), and I'm interested in talking about them, I'm realizing that it's silly to offer an explanation -- even by the standard of proof accepted at unfogged.
"I lived through the period from 1988 to 2012, whereas the period from 1964 to 1988 feels very remote."
That's probably right. The past is a foreign country, but memory often feels like home.
I was born right after WWII and 19 years after the end of WWI, and both seemed prehistoric to me even 50 years ago.
I was born right after WWII and 19 years after the end of WWI, and both seemed prehistoric to me even 50 years ago.
In that case there are different psychologies: I'm four or five years younger than you and both wars seem recent because they were stuff people I know/knew had done.
My father never spoke of his rather small part in the war after about 1955, and very seldom before then.
Was your father the only person you knew who had participated? All my adult relatives, teachers and neighbours had - more or less every adult I knew.
That's a US/UK difference, don't you think? The US experience of WWII was soldiers going overseas to fight, but not all that much happening at home. "Not all that much" includes a whole lot of mobilization and so on, but life still pretty much went on. In the UK, even though there wasn't ground warfare going on, the war was much much more happening right there -- US soldiers cluttering up the country, bombs falling on London, evacuation to the countryside, much more severe rationing, and so forth and so on. Someone in the US in that generation might have a "I went to war, did lots of dull and some traumatic stuff, and there's not much I want to talk about" experience. But everyone in the UK had a "This was my daily wartime life" experience.
I voted for JJ in 1988. Wishing I had worked for him in 1984, when I had made a serious mistake of confusing sizzle and steak. It was a totally free shot for people of a certain bent in 1988 -- he absolutely was not going to win, especially since here (like in California in those days) we voted at the end of the process. Looking at the results, I see that JJ broke 30% in several counties (including the one I live in now) and 40% in the next county over from where I lived then.
I'd be pretty wary of assigning too much Zeitgeist value to this.
On the other hand, I think the shift in perceptions about wealth predated, by quite a bit, the publicly visible (ie to people as uninterested in geek culture as me) rise of the dot com zillionaires. That is, I think it was basically during the 1991 recession that people became quite willing to toss folks out of the wagon Mario Cuomo had spoken of in his 1984 Keynote. The contrast between Cuomo's wagon and Clinton's 1992 New Covenant tells this tale, I think.
I exclude older women from the generalisation in 37. But a large number of those that I knew had been bereaved in round one.
What is the psychology (psychopathology?) which leads people to be less in favour of organising to defend their own interests during times when those interests are under attack than in times when they aren't? Ils sont fous, ces Romains!
It's not really possible for most people to organize into unions here. They'll just all get fired and replaced by other people. Or the entire business branch will be shut down as a warning to others. "Unions" is a concept associated either with essential public-service workers or people over 60.
Yeah, I hate to put too much weight on a line from a movie, but I think the attitudinal shift was at least starting and maybe well underway with Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and that's 1987, well before any tech boom.
25
They won't if they don't organise. How do they think the people with union jobs got them? Dropped from heaven?
Very few union jobs in the US at present were nonunion during the term of employment of the current occupant. So the people with union jobs didn't generally get them by organizing.
35-38 -- I was quite taken aback the first time I visited my (future) in-laws in Germany in 1981 by the extent to which WWII still dominated people's memories/lives. My wife's 5 uncles had all been killed or captured (and the one in Soviet custody was quite changed by the experience). In contrast, while my grandfather and his brothers all participated, none was killed, and the one who was injured was shot in the butt, which, while I'm sure it was awful at the time, wasn't exactly considered tragic 20 years on.
Don't back off Nick! You may be on to something. Just because the material or social relations may not have changed, it doesn't mean the perception hasn't changed.
Secondly there was a sense that people could be participate in this explosion of money without having to commit to toadying up to power or being "socially acceptable" to the traditional gatekeepers of wealth and privilege.
"Lottery" society or mentality. We don't think lottery winners have earned their money, but neither do we deeply resent them. Is there an extent that we consider the "New Rich" be they dotcommers or hedge traders, lottery winners? Kid was born to the right family, got to Harvard etc. Chelsea Clinton makes us resent the unfair system, not resent her.
The change from the 60s (and there is a great recent post around that I can't find in my mental index) is that the "good life" my grandparents had is not available through hard work and frugal living. That will not get you defined benefit and lifetime unlimited healthcare. And much else. You can only get that by becoming rich, by winning the lottery.
Now what does the perception that the good life, or secure class position, is only available through luck mean to our perception of class relations?
The rich no longer the antagonists?
41: Not really possible is a self-fulfilling prophecy: back in the early 20th century people were organizing despite getting physically attacked for it, rather than just fired. If enough of the working population bought into the possibility of collective action, it'd have some results. I'm not blaming them for this; it'd be really hard and dangerous, but talking about it in terms of what's possible is wrong.
My dad and 3 or 4 uncles all served, but I haven't heard a single dramatic story from any of them. Whether they experienced anything serious I don't know.
Take the feeling of agency away from the poor, and the lack of agency is extended to the perception of rich and powerful.
Dukeness and monarchy acts of god, providence you know, just part of the unchangeable structure of things.
Both of my grandfathers were too young for WWI and technically too old for WWII; my maternal grandfather lied his way into the Navy, but spent the war steaming around the Caribbean without seeing any action.
In 1970 Chicago school economics, libertarianism, "public choice theory", and freemarketism generally were fringe and new, but supporters of those sorts of ideas had already geared up a propaganda campaign, and the Democrats never have responded effectively.
I still have a "New Jersey and Mike: Perfect Together" tshirt from the 88 primaries. I actually worked on that campaign into the general (until, back at college, I was sort of blocked out in the world's tiniest power play by a fellow student who decided it was "her thing" and didn't want any competition). The only thing I remember was that the governor was a very nice man and one of his advance dudes was the nephew of one of the more notorious former members of Sifu's department.
Denial of agency seems general in contemporary thought. Shit happens.
||
I am in small-town Ontario without access to good public transportation. Everything is closed. It's raining, and I don't have a car that either I or my BF can drive, since we're not Canadian residents and would not be covered on the insurance. Even if we were covered, my BF's Dad seems to be the only one who drives the minivan.
I got books for Christmas which I should read, but I don't have my reading glasses which makes longer paragraphs harder to read.
So bored.
|>
47. Hearing dramatic stories isn't the point. The point is that everybody of our parents' generation was in some way affected by the war, and (pretty much) everybody of our grandparents' generation was affected by the previous round. You guys had conscription too, remember?
Most of my dad's experiences in the war were extremely dull. He wasn't in a combat unit and he was a prisoner for three years. He only ever told the funny stories, and there weren't a lot. But EVERYBODY had lived through a huge, life changing experience - the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. When I was a kid, having been in the war was part of the definition of a grown up. Surely, if to a modified degree, that was also the case in America.
51 -- Looking at the results, I see that JJ got 32% in NJ, and broke 60% in Essex County.
46
Not really possible is a self-fulfilling prophecy: back in the early 20th century people were organizing despite getting physically attacked for it, rather than just fired. If enough of the working population bought into the possibility of collective action, it'd have some results. I'm not blaming them for this; it'd be really hard and dangerous, but talking about it in terms of what's possible is wrong.
I think this is misguided. The objective conditions for organizing are less favorable than they were 100 years and this does in fact change what is realistically possible. Ignoring this verges on what Yglesias labeled the Green Lantern theory of conflict, that the only thing that matters is will.
54 -- Oh sure, but I think it was all pretty well plowed under by subsequent events by the mid 1960s.
I got books for Christmas which I should read, but I don't have my reading glasses
"Time enough at last!"
55: I think Dukakis had clinched by then? The NJ primary was (is?) some time in June.
57. Probably, but I was arguing with John, and our experience was being children in the 50s. I don't expect you kids to have the same experience, apart from anything else, if you were American you had another major war brewing.
Nobody really talked about it at all. The war had few local effects, some of them favorable (ending the depression). For most people it was an interruption of their life.
This part of the country was isolationist and few wanted to go.
Veterans here are proud of their service, but growing up I didn't hear them talk about it. I don't even know if they talked about it in the veteran's organizations, which are a big deal here. "War stories" are not really part of the collective identity, I guess.
Further on JJ88, I see that in California he won only 1 county (Alameda) but also won 5 congressional districts.
Denial of agency seems general in contemporary thought. Shit happens.
Globalization and geographic mobility is a key part of this. All my life the concept of a "boycott" has sounded like something that could never possibly work. Great, maybe I could possibly get a thousand people to stop buying something they like if I spend a thousand hours trying to convince them. Why would the company care?
The objective conditions for organizing are less favorable than they were 100 years and this does in fact change what is realistically possible.
Correct. The only employers vulnerable to labor action are employers absolutely tied to a certain location, that can't immediately bus in replacement workers. Also, if people could go on strike, things would be different.
Objective conditions aren't different in Europe (global competition, etc.) but unions haven't been destroyed. Lack of political support is a major factor. Since Reagan labor law has often not been followed, with tacit governmental permission. Many state governments are anti-labor. There have been big anti-labor propaganda campaigns.
59 -- Yep, June. Same day as CA & MT.
Carnegie and Frick were bastards, but we could see how they got their money, tooth and claw and victims everywhere.
Anybody care to tell me how the CEO of BofA got his job and millions? What his work environment and work product was on the way to the top, that made him and not some other middle-manager a Master of the universe? Do you understand it, or does it look like chance...and the market
The marker. KeBron James id good and works his ass off, but we also understand free agency at the right time with the right openings and previous signings at his position etc.
Veblen's managerial capitalism means financial success and top salaries go to commodified technocrats. Late capitalism is when the fucking capitalists become commodities
NickS, can you believe that Pat Robertson won the 1988 Washington Republican caucus?
OT: I have heard enough about Portlandia now, thanks, media.
42: Before the internet tech boom, maybe, but in the middle of the PC tech boom, which I guess was more localized to Silicon Valley and Asia.
But EVERYBODY had lived through a huge, life changing experience
Including the women and children who sheltered from bombs (my mother and my brother, in Bristol); the child evacuees; and so on.
I was born just after the war -- The War -- I remember walking through bombed squares in Bath.
Yes, it touched everybody.
Happy New Year, all. It is the sort of morning that causes people to spend several months' cocktail budget to vacation here, and I am struggling to decide whether to have mimosas with breakfast or stay strictly sober so I can paddle later.
67: I remember talking about those caucuses with my parents at the time. They were pretty blown away by the ignorance and idiocy of the Robertson supporters. Unfortunately, their political evolution since has mostly been in the direction of getting along with those folks.
My Iowa cousins are Pat Robertson types, voting Santorum for all I know. The family is no longer close.
Unions: One of the things here is that, as Shearer points out, very few people in their working-years have seen a successful organizing campaign. Certainly far fewer than in 1970. However, one of the things my Fellow Workers in the IWW have reported from canvassing neighborhoods is that there are A LOT of people who are just itching to be asked to join a union right now. Of course, these are people like immigrant cab drivers or people who work 2 fast food jobs to get by, so they're probably underrepresented (at best) in opinion polls. Working-class people who hear about the IWW successes at Starbuck's and Jimmy John's are often extremely impressed and enthusiastic. No thanks to the pie-cards from the business unions, who wouldn't know a successful organizing strategy if it bit them in their health plan.
I believe that SEIU etc. have had success organizing janitors and other service workers.
61: A big percentage of my male relatives who were of age fought in WWII, and since they were mostly farm boys, many of them saw extensive combat. One fellow, a cousin to both of my grandparents, who were not themselves cousins, had been wounded by a piece of shrapnel that left one hand contorted into a strange shape. Allowances were made for him, as he was a bit tetched, although I'm not sure if that might have been the case even before his service. But other than that, no one really talked about anything that happened during the war, although we had a good song about The German Band to remind people which side Denmark was on.
74: Yeah, but it's pretty much just them and UNITE-HERE who are doing anything useful.
The first vote I ever cast was for Jesse Jackson.
Don't back off Nick! You may be on to something.
Oh, I think there's an interesting discussion to be had, I just think I did a poor job of locating it.
NickS, can you believe that Pat Robertson won the 1988 Washington Republican caucus?
I don't remember 1988, but it's interesting how issues of race place out here. I remember the chart in 2008 showing that Obama did well in states that had either a lot of black people or very few black people, and Washington definitely falls into the latter category.
Locally Obama did very well, but I also saw a lot of Ron Paul bumper stickers. I wonder if voters in Washington/Oregon are less likely to be motivated by racially charged appeals pro or con. There's certainly a significant presence of old school racism in the area (I vaguely recall that Oregon was one of the last states that had a KKK presence, but I'm not going to look that up at the moment), but I don't think that's a major voting block per se, as much as that the "controversies" around a candidate like Ron Paul aren't disqualifying because racial issues have less salience.
had been wounded by a piece of shrapnel that left one hand contorted into a strange shape. Allowances were made for him, as he was a bit tetched
Nati is related to Bob Dole!
Incidentally, have you seen this?
For some reason I can't get a grip on the OP -- because of its invocation of class and class conflict. Few people can agree on what economic class is anymore, and there's a lot of interesting work and discussion to be had there, but in the absence of an agreed sense in order to fix ideas, remarks seem like random stabs.
(I'll be the first to admit that I stayed up too late last night.)
Traditional technical definitions of class may not quite fit any more, but a lot of the difficulties in defining class comes from deliberate obfuscation by various Democratic and Republican ideologues. Relative income, relative wealth, and relative power are good criteria to start with.
For some reason I can't get a grip on the OP -- because of its invocation of class and class conflict.
LB and VW had the same reaction, so you're in good company. FWIW Bob's 66 does a good job of picking up what I was thinking of when I was talking about class conflict.
81: True, and true.
Bob's 66 is opaque to me. Income or economic mobility seems to be the way people discuss these things nowadays: the dotcom bubble presented us with a group of people who found themselves able to move up rapidly by being in the right place at the right time (with the right skills), as someone said upthread.
As for class resentment, LB's 26 is onto something: class resentment, to the extent we mean the same thing by it, has migrated to an intra-99% affair, given that everyone seems to consider him/herself middle class at this point. If anything, OWS is attempting to remind people that we've been duped into fighting amongst ourselves; there's value in that message, but it doesn't say anything about how we got here (not that it needs to).
the dot com companies had no visible group of exploited workers.
I think this was true in the early dot-com years, particularly because the "labor" in those companies came from largely the same demographic as the "management," i.e., young college-educated Americans. But it became less true as companies started to outsource manufacturing and software development overseas. However, a lot of the tension seemed to be about outsourcing and immigration issues (e.g., visa policy), rather than about wealth inequality.
My 83: class resentment, to the extent we mean the same thing by it, has migrated to an intra-99% affair, given that everyone seems to consider him/herself middle class at this point.
This is possibly unclear. I mean that economic resentment has migrated to an intra-middle class exercise.
I think the attitudinal shift was at least starting and maybe well underway with Gordon Gekko
Thinking about this, I'm not so sure. I don't have a personal memory of how yuppies were regarded at the time, but it was clear at the time that Wall Street greed was not without victims.
People hated Michael Milken enough that he was sentenced to ten years in prison for actions that (according to Michael Lewis) weren't even necessarily criminal.
For that matter Liar's Poker came out in 1989 and pretty directly blamed the S & L crisis on Wall Street greed and power.
People started saying that everyone is middle class during the 50s. Few admit to being upper class, no one wants to be lower class or working class, but there are multiple layers of delusion involved in the idea that everyone is middle class.
79: I'm afraid Frowner beat you to it.
Between the manarchists and the radfems*, I feel like there's hardly anyone I can relate to sometimes.
*If you have to ask, you better not mess with it.
78: Oregon was one of the last states that had a KKK presence
Which Klan do you mean? There's plenty of Klans around, most of them being pretty sad little affairs of a few guys who are friends with one guy in his mother's basement who has a website. The National Socialist Movement is the main avowed US fascist group right now, but there's no shortage of losers and assholes who identify as Klansmen.
85 etc. -- I'm not sure how much migration there's actually been. The Civil Rights movement brought new competitors to the table, but it's not like it created resentments that weren't already there. Just deprived one group of totally assured automatic victory over another in any competition. (That is, I think Jim Crow was based on resentment, and people who complain that getting rid of it has caused resentment are treating it like an act of nature, rather than the naked and immoral power play that it was).
89: I think he meant the Oregon clan during the 1920s.
The Gekko reference reminds me of the folks who identify with Nicholson in A Few Good Men. I don't think you're supposed to approve of Gekko in the least, or be sorry that he goes to jail. Hollywood being out of touch with "real" America, once again.
I mean, that's why they named him after a lizard, and show him living an indefensible lifestyle. Based it turns out of criminality.
Traditional technical definitions of class may not quite fit any more, but a lot of the difficulties in defining class comes from deliberate obfuscation by various Democratic and Republican ideologues.
This. See also Tory, NuLab, Parti Soclialiste, PSOE, SPD, etc. Traditional technical definitions of class remain explosive if understood as they were originally intended, which is why the ruling class devotes so much energy to obfuscating them.
91: That's kinda what I thought, but it seemed not to make sense in the context of the historical period under discussion.
And it's not just the final scene that's supposed to tell you that Nicholson is grotesque -- the way Cruise imitates him, protecting his distant outpost from a threat we all knew by the early 90s hadn't been real for 25 years.
But, you know, there's enough tribalistic 'our son of a bitch' feeling out there that these characters take on lives of their own.
Oregon was always WASPY, with an early Confederate flavor, and residential segregation lasted at least to 1960. No black population before WWII, and they were segregated in a little neighborhood which ended up washed away in a flood.
90: Okay, yes, understood. I felt equivocal as I wrote 85 and previous. I'm not sure how much of a change this actually is, no.
87: there are multiple layers of delusion involved in the idea that everyone is middle class.
Is it fair to say that we desperately need a new set of terms of discussion? "Class" isn't cutting it.
Apropos of that, there's a piece by Mark Lilla in a recent NYRB that's interesting for its attempt to provide new sets of terms in discussion of liberals and conservatives. Give me a sec while I find it. It's not quite on topic, but hey.
Like I said, class has been deliberately obfuscated for decades, and some find the term offensive. But it's not meaningless. Some people have a low income, no net worth, and no power. Call them lower class, or working class if they work. Some have a moderate to good income and some net worth but no power. Call them middle class, upper or lower perhaps. The upper class has more income, more net worth, and more power.
I disagree with the 99%ers in that I think that the upper class is bigger than 1%.
Bob can come along and give a more refined definition if he wishes.
Is it fair to say that we desperately need a new set of terms of discussion? "Class" isn't cutting it.
I don't think so -- I think we need to get people to understand class again. Relative wealth and power haven't become meaningless, they're as important as they ever were. And if that's what you're talking about, you're talking about class.
The Lilla piece is here.
Worth a read. The gist: we need to decouple the terms "liberal" and "conservative" from such things as "revolutionary" and, in particular, "reactionary." He sketches a distinction between restorative reactionaries and redemptive reactionaries, the former in search of a return to some imagined former state of societal bliss, the latter willing to throw the future to the winds (we'll figure it out after we destroy the now). Tea Party types, currently in the ascendent in the US Republican party, are a case of the latter, and it doesn't have a lot to do with being "conservative."
I appreciated the whole thing for its acknowledgment that current terms (liberal/conservative) are proving themselves inadequate to discussion. The whole piece says more about this.
98: Is it fair to say that we desperately need a new set of terms of discussion? "Class" isn't cutting it.
But this is part of the obfuscation! If you're not allowed to say the word "class", in part because no one knows what it means, then you're significantly impeded in the critique you can make about the status quo.
I've seen many, many people, who had no class consciousness whatsoever, become radicalized and start taking action once they'd done a little reading and talked to a few people, and most importantly, seen direct action at work. The middle-class fear of embarrassment is a big stumbling block on the road to effective, class-based organizing. You can talk about virtually any other method of dividing society that you like -- race, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc, etc -- without worrying that you're going to look silly, but start talking plainly about class and suddenly you're a nutter.
99: I disagree with the 99%ers in that I think that the upper class is bigger than 1%.
So do I. We've had discussion fights about this here before, though. The 10% and the 20% tend to take issue, which is mostly because we can't agree on what we mean by "class."
99 -- Even slippier is the concept of power. A shop steward has some power, and so does the captain of the bowling team. An alderman and the manager of the Burger King out by the interstate (especially if he was the quarterback in high school). On the other hand, a congressman is bound by all sorts of obligations, and often feels quite powerless. Same with a hedge fund manager.
I agree that there's tons of self-delusion. There's also a level of comfort in accepting limited ambitions. Beyond the basic level of human needs getting met, what is power actually for, and is the cost to get it (other than by birth) worth paying?
During the 50s a lot of workers ended up having a pretty good life, and bitter poverty ceased to define the working class. It was quite a startling change, if you read about factory conditions and slum living conditions of only 50 years older. So the old image of The Worker lost its plausibility -- someone who works 60 hours a week doing backbreaking work in a foundry and then lives in a cramped tenement apartment. But class didn't become unreal.
For awhile, too, the wealthy stopped flaunting their wealth and started to pretend to be just like you and me.
I used to know someone who would get in her plane, fly from Portland to San Francisco, have lunch in her favorite restaurant, do some shopping, and fly back the next night. Not middle class.
99, 102: To be clear, I do not at all suggest that the term "class" is offensive or that we shouldn't say it.
86
People hated Michael Milken enough that he was sentenced to ten years in prison for actions that (according to Michael Lewis) weren't even necessarily criminal.
He actually served less than two and the actions to which he pled guilty (as part of a plea bargain) were certainly crimes (if not perhaps high priority ones (as regards investigation and prosecution) under most circumstances).
For that matter Liar's Poker came out in 1989 and pretty directly blamed the S & L crisis on Wall Street greed and power.
I don't remember the book that way. In any case the S&L blowup just reflected the fact that 30 year fixed rate mortgages are an extremely dangerous product from the lender's point of view. In this case they were funded with short term deposits and disaster was inevitable when interest rates rose.
They won't if they don't organise. How do they think the people with union jobs got them? Dropped from heaven?
This may be an entirely Philadelphia-bound perspective, but with the exception of newer and more actively recruiting unions like UNITE and SEIU, that is indeed the perception among most people I know.
And the important thing is that they're not wrong -- trade unions especially in Philadelphia are highly closed shops, difficult to break into if you're not blood relatives or politically connected. Many of the people who currently hold those jobs did notdo the direct organizing necessary to create them, and indeed have often been front and center in creating barriers for new applicants.
The current mayor has just done about Round Thirty of "Now the trades will be open to women and racial minorities!" We'll see. I once knew a woman who had done intense organizing for tradeswomen in the early 1980s. She was as pro-labor as you can imagine, but boy hardy did she have the scars to prove that white men were very, very angry at the prospect of white women getting union jobs.
The middle-class fear of embarrassment is a big stumbling block on the road to effective, class-based organizing.
I hadn't put it in those terms, but wow, you are exactly, exactly right.
He actually served less than two and the actions to which he pled guilty (as part of a plea bargain) were certainly crimes (if not perhaps high priority ones (as regards investigation and prosecution) under most circumstances).
I was thinking, after I made that comment, that a simpler way to put it might be this:
Lately people have started calling Goldman Sachs the "vampire squid". It's easy for me to imagine people thinking of Milkin as a Vampire, it's much harder for me to think of people calling Bill Gates a Vampire (even the one's who hate him).
My point is that people thought of Milkin as causing real pain.
I don't remember the book that way.
You're correct to say that, in the 80s, the movement of interest rates was putting S & Ls in a bind. My memory of Liar's Poker is that he describes the investment banks coming along and saying, essentially, "you're already in trouble, why not give all your money to and maybe I'll be able to fix that for you."
Wall Street didn't cause the crises, that was an overstatement on my part, but they did take advantage of it to make large profits which were ultimately paid for by the taxpayer bailouts, before the size of the problem became obvious.
Congressmen seem to be zombie slaves by now. That's a function of the degradation of democracy, though, not of ambiguities in the word "power". I read something about freshman Congressman awhile back and they're apparently hazed, ignored, bullied, and ordered around. After all, they're just 1/435 of 1/2 of 1/3 of the formal government (= 1/ 2610 = .04%), and the entrenched bureaucracies and various fixers have power too.
I don't want to pick a fight, but I am a little puzzled by the claim that Americans don't talk, or don't talk enough, about class. Perhaps I am overgeneralizing from my own experience, but there seem to be legions of people who, at one end of the spectrum, never shut up about class, like it's an elementary particle or indie band with a girl bassist, and, at the other, are pretty damned upset that someone, somewhere, might once have thought himself or his circumstances better than them or theirs.
The North Korean politburo has a higher turnover rate than the US congress.
When people thing of the 1% I think that they mostly think of finance and CEOs, not founders.
111: I'm sticking by it. The only real discussions I've had about social class have either been in Sociology or Cult Studs courses, or with other radicals. Everyone else is just smile-and-nod, smile-and-nod.
There was an interaction I had a few months ago where an acquaintance, the president of a small local bank, was visibly upset by the glee with which other people were watching a video of an anti-bank protest. He's just about the nicest, most compassionate bank president you could ask for, but he genuinely had no idea why lower-middle and working-class people might be looking to banks as the villains in our current debacle. Maybe this was just a failure of imagination on his part, but I certainly got the impression that a lot of his dismay was due to not understanding how class divisions operated in his social networks.
102: But this is part of the obfuscation! If you're not allowed to say the word "class", in part because no one knows what it means, then you're significantly impeded in the critique you can make about the status quo.
I'm, uh, mostly quoting this here again because I'm taking it seriously. I meant what I said upthread about the decreasing utility of discussion in terms of class, but I'm taking this dissent seriously.
Flippanter has a point as well. Oh noes. I'm completely confused and must obviously regroup.
Some groups I belong to talk about class a lot, but they're politically-defined left groups. But a significant part of the left does NOT talk about class.
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't get the sense that outside a small minority of long-term success stories, dot.coms were very important in the overall scheme of wealth as such. The "information economy" grabbed headlines far out of proportion with its actual scale, and the bubble burst when it became clear that very little of any concrete worth underlay it; the bulk of the ephemeral wealth involved -- referred to disparagingly thereafter as the product of "dot.bombs" -- isn't much more memorable or influential than that of the French speculators of John Law's day. I don't see that it could have in itself had any very large impact on how class and class disparity was and is viewed.
What seems to me to have been much more important was a more general shift in sensibilities: a steadily-increased complacency about the gains of liberalism -- the popularity of such a thoroughly bone-headed ideology as libertarianism was only possible in a society in which the regulatory gains of liberalism had been around long enough that they seemed to come free, like the air -- along with a concomitant seeming inevitability of the growing power of corporations and financiers, to the point where people forgot that being stock-broker had once been a low-prestige and low-remuneration job. The "rise of Gordon Gekko" analysis seems right to me, right down to the role of "Gordon Gekko" himself as an at once perceptive and thoroughly ineffectual critique of a rising phenomenon.
I don't want to pick a fight, but I am a little puzzled by the claim that Americans don't talk, or don't talk enough, about class.
I'd characterize it less as "not talking about" and more as "unwilling to use a class lens" to analyze the world.
Here's an example. A while back, someone asked me what I thought of a piece of pending legislation. Now, we're professional colleagues, and broadly on the same side as these things go. She knows I follow legislative policy in more detail than she does; she was asking for a bottom-line box score, if you will.
And when I said "Well, the issue is really that supporting policy X is siding with capital, because they benefit from having workers dependent on them," there was a loud silence. It's just not a frame that makes any sense to most people I talk to.
The piece linked in 101 is kind of interesting, although I have to say I utterly disagree with this:
Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights.
116: Exactly. And they probably should have been. I remember the days when the Foucauldian "discursive formation" seemed important. Even then I had the sense that this was a luxury; now I'm sure of it.
92 93
I mean, that's why they named him after a lizard, and show him living an indefensible lifestyle. Based it turns out of criminality.
I think to many people (like me) his lifestyle in the movie came across as more glamorous and enviable than indefensible.
... I don't think you're supposed to approve of Gekko in the least, or be sorry that he goes to jail. ...
Maybe not but his character did have a certain appeal and it was predictable that some people would identify with him. Same as characters like Michael Corleone.
Harsh reality: Ruling class 1%; Middle class 12-15%; Working class 70-75%; Underclass 10-15%. Numbers vary, but those are about the ranges. The middle class is defined by the mean, not the median, and the mean is extremely skewed.
For a brief period of nearly one generation after WWII the US, and to a lesser extent the rest of the G7, was absolutely rich enough that a significant swathe of the working class could kid themselves that they'd joined the middle class. Well, now the mask has been well and truly ripped off, and that section of the working class has been well and truly ripped off too in the process.
The process of readjustment won't be easy or pretty, but wittering on about euphemisms isn't, in the end, going to help.
I agree with a lot of 117. In particular:
What seems to me to have been much more important was a more general shift in sensibilities: a steadily-increased complacency about the gains of liberalism -- the popularity of such a thoroughly bone-headed ideology as libertarianism was only possible in a society in which the regulatory gains of liberalism had been around long enough that they seemed to come free, like the air
really rings true to me. I well remember, circa 1999, when a teacher asked all of us to draw on the chalkboard our model of history. Mine was one of the very few that did not show a steady upward trajectory.
People were honestly befuddled when I tried to explain that no, I didn't think things were just getting steadily and unambiguously better like some kind of force of nature.
I don't want to pick a fight, but I am a little puzzled by the claim that Americans don't talk, or don't talk enough, about class. Perhaps I am overgeneralizing from my own experience, but there seem to be legions of people who, at one end of the spectrum, never shut up about class, like it's an elementary particle or indie band with a girl bassist, and, at the other, are pretty damned upset that someone, somewhere, might once have thought himself or his circumstances better than them or theirs.
This is wildly opposite of my experience - I almost tacked something to this effect onto the OP. Basically I felt like no one outside of my family cared at all about social issues. Or people had preferences, but weren't terribly informed or interested in discussions. I knew a few passionate people in college, more in grad school. But with them, it was half environmental, half concerns about social issues, and never ever about organized labor.
At this point I know two real live people who talk passionately about organized labor, and who I'm not related to, and one of them is Sir Kraab. Okay, four including m/tch and the other one's spouse.
Sometimes I talk about successful working class, unsuccessful working class, and the lower class or underclass. The successful working class calls itself middle class.
The successful working class calls itself middle class.
But learned the hard way in 2007-10 that it isn't.
121: For a brief period of nearly one generation after WWII the US, and to a lesser extent the rest of the G7, was absolutely rich enough that a significant swathe of the working class could kid themselves that they'd joined the middle class
This is, I think, extremely crucial to understanding the present situation. I remember talking to my parents once about the collapse of the iron (taconite) mining economy in Northern Minn. around the time that it got really bad. One of the things they pointed out was that it wasn't just that things were desperate up there, because in fact, they weren't nearly as bad as some other places, but that those workers had fallen so far. For years a young, working-class man had been able to graduate HS, walk down to the hiring office & get a job, and then in a few years he'd own a house and a boat and a cabin.
I think it's a testament to how ingrained the original organizing had been in the early part of the 20th century that we can still count on most of those folx to vote DFL every election. There's Finnish communist summer camps that are still in use as syndicalist retreats up north. Of course, you can't talk about class up there without understanding the way that race played into it.
121, 124 -- Natilo's bank president thinks he's middle class -- he's right -- and who is to say the the 'successful working class' guy isn't right as well? His kids go to the same school as the bank president's kids, and they likely go to the same church.
125 -- I don't think this is that widely recognized in the US.
His kids go to the same school as the bank president's kids, and they likely go to the same church.
But how many share options does he get?
To be fair, it's more complicated than that. If he's white collar, he probably does/did get some share options, but not enough for his holdings to affect his job choice or prospects.
Actually, though, I think it would be useful to have an understanding where chris y and JE are drawing lines. Where is a car salesman (not the owner of the dealership)? An auto insurance salesman? The manager of the meat department at the chain grocery store? Emergency room nurse (non-union)? Park ranger? Salaried construction bidder/scheduler at a multinational company?
In my town the banker does socialize with the regular people. But on the other hand, he owns homes in two states, donated $1,000,000 to his alma mater, drives a top of the line care (I forget which) and never worries about money. The realtor just told me that 60% of the homes here in town are under water, as my sister's is. In my sister's case she's lost 1/2 to 2/3 of her small net worth.
There's a big gap, and this is an ideal-case small town situation. The banker is not middle class, and most of the people who thought they were, never were either.
130 -- Oh, there's definitely a difference, and you can see it in the houses live in and the cars they drive. The successful working class guy doesn't have a lake house, not any more. But he also thinks of himself as invested, socially, in the same society as the bank president (who is a good guy, and widely respected in the community) and not with Natilo's police-fearing friends and radical theater goers.
133 -- There's a guy who's done awfully well for himself. Inherited money, or just right time right place?
I don't think it's profession-driven. It's about the cushion and the safety net you have. The bank president and the successful working class guy's kids may go to the same school and they may worship at the same church, but the working class guy is one health disaster away from unemployment, and six months of unemployment away from homelessness.
he also thinks of himself as invested, socially, in the same society as the bank president
I'm not clear on what the implications of this are. Do you mean he thinks he's a member of the same class as the bank president, or that he doesn't think about it but would disagree with or resent a statement that he wasn't, or that he thinks he's a member of a different class than the bank president but he's good with that, or what?
Well, people without net worth are not middle class, period. That's an easy line to draw, and that group just got a lot larger.
People living paycheck to paycheck are not middle class even if they're living fairly well. This gets fuzzy because some paycheck-to-paycheck workers do keep their jobs until retirement whereas a lot of others don't. But an increasing number of those jobs are now insecure and many are also facing wage cuts.
I'm inclined to say that if someone falls out of the middle class after a year or 18 months without a job never was in the middle class no matter how much they made, but just successful working class.
108
And the important thing is that they're not wrong -- trade unions especially in Philadelphia are highly closed shops, difficult to break into if you're not blood relatives or politically connected. ...
A long article about Philadelphia's construction unions which makes clear how they have long relied on illegal violence and intimidation (as also stated in the link in 63 about unions in general) which is less tolerated than it used to be.
Charley, I think you're speaking of a rare ideal situation which is becoming rarer. The banker's kids did go to the same school as everyone else, but their futures were always going to be different. That kind of split happens a lot at HS graduation, when one buddy goes off to college and the other ones goes to work at 3M.
This is touchy to me because my parents were social equals of the bankers of their generation, but no one of my generation is socially equal to the sons of my dad's friends. When my sister's house went underwater I even considered going and begging the bankers to help out, but we don't really know them well enough, and it would be a heft chunk of money.
132: OK, I'll put my hand up and admit I've been oversimplifying, because self-employed/contract/owner-managers are a category which doesn't map directly onto to main class structure, and I was semi-deliberately ignoring them for the sake of simplicity. I can see where this is an issue close to your heart, and fair play.
In general, car salesman, insurance salesman, ER nurse and park ranger, I'd expect to define as working class, unless conditions are very different in the US than what I'm familiar with. They are to all intents and purposes dependent on their salaries or fees to put food on the table from day to day, pay their car loan, etc. If that tap gets turned off, the only recourse they have is to find a similar position elsewhere. On the other hand, one job in their field is the same as any other.
The meat department manager is probably in the same boat. But she may have more transferable skills, and she may have an interest in her company through some kind of share purchase scheme. She's scratching at the bottom of the middle class.
The construction bidder may be salaried, but if that's the extent of her remuneration package she's doing herself no favours. She has probably bought into the fortunes of the company that employs her to a considerable depth, and her interests are thus aligned with its management as much or more than its hewers of wood and drawers of water: classically middle class.
The tricky areas are the people who own independent coffee shops and software consultants, etc. I'm too tired to think about this right now, but I don't think they affect the balance of power in society.
137
I'm not clear on what the implications of this are. Do you mean he thinks he's a member of the same class as the bank president, or that he doesn't think about it but would disagree with or resent a statement that he wasn't, or that he thinks he's a member of a different class than the bank president but he's good with that, or what?
I think it's clear enough, he will reflexively take the bank president's side in a dispute with an outsider just as he would expect the bank president to take his side.
Sure, you can stipulate that as a fact of interpersonal relations between the two of them, but that doesn't answer my question.
143
Sure, you can stipulate that as a fact of interpersonal relations between the two of them, but that doesn't answer my question.
Any of your suggestions are possible as the statement that he considers himself and the bank society members of the same society is consistent with any of them.
Like a statement that he considers both himself and the bank president to be fellow Americans would not imply or preclude other divisions between them.
I'd say it has most to do with actual property and the security that comes with that, and not much with personal associations, identifications, and consumption habits.
139: I'm uncomfortable even appearing to be on the same page as Shearer, so let me just say that the article he links comes from Philadelphia magazine, the poster child when it comes to being an apologist for capital. If information in that article is accurate, it's more or less by accident.
And to 142 last, he wouldn't expect the bank president to take his side. That's where the rubber meets the road, and why Emerson didn't go to him for help.
You do have some visibly self-made people who can be seen making the transitions, pop musicians. Someone starts as a wage-worker and child of wage workers. Unquestionably working class. Then they have some success, earn a bunch, bank some money, buy a nice house. Probably middle class. At some point their investments add up to a secure life of luxury upper class. A lot of pop musicians started out more or less middle class, but some of them were plainly working class.
I'm not really especially interested in the questions of labeling and dividing lines. There's a hierarchy of income, wealth, power (and maybe I should add security) which is real and objective and independent of self-definition, lifestyle, self-presentation, affiliation, identification, association, etc. Where you draw the lines, meh.
147: Although a much more common rags-to-riches story among pop musicians ends up back in rags, with the interval of big houses and toys and parties having been paid for by debt to the record company that turns out to be irredeemable.
146
And to 142 last, he wouldn't expect the bank president to take his side. That's where the rubber meets the road, and why Emerson didn't go to him for help.
We aren't talking about Emerson and Emerson wasn't talking about a dispute with an outsider.
In the US, distinguishing between working class and middle class is pointless. Maybe in strict Marxist terms everyone should think of themselves as working class, but in reality everyone thinks of themselves as middle class. So what? Americans have a nascent class consciousness of themselves as members of the same class. Start from there. The middle class is the 21st century proletariat.
Yeah, but as I've said consciousness isn't it. My own dividing line is between non-working poor, less successful workers, more successful workers, and the upper class (bigger than 1%). You really can't call less successful workers middle class and I doubt they think so themselves. If you want to call more successful workers middle class that's OK with me.
One hard line I *would* draw is that someone with no net worth is not middle class. This chart is hard to read, but it apparently says that 25% of Americans have no net worth, and the next 25% average something like $75,000 net worth.
The chart comes from here, which sums up the American class situation pretty well.
Went for a nice walk with the wife -- thanks, taxpayers, for providing a very nice spot where dogs can run free -- and she's convinced me (not that you folks wouldn't have) that it's really just about net worth.
We've got a huge problem of misidentification, as illustrated by the utter foolishness of the politics of estate and capital gains taxation. And with cultural factors so dominant, it's not at all clear how we get past that.
118: The piece linked in 101 is kind of interesting, although I have to say I utterly disagree with this
Yeah, I don't say I agree with the entirety of the Lilla piece. It should by rights be part of a longer series; you can almost feel the lacunae.
151: My own dividing line is between non-working poor, less successful workers, more successful workers, and the upper class (bigger than 1%). You really can't call less successful workers middle class and I doubt they think so themselves. If you want to call more successful workers middle class that's OK with me.
I think many people are heavily emotionally invested in calling themselves middle class. To be 'lower' or 'working' class -- a less successful worker -- is to be a loser, as these things have been painted in recent decades. There's little solidarity in it, certainly. OWS, whether we agree entirely with its 99%ism, is doing well to rebuild solidarity (among those who aren't immediately turned off by any sort of rabble-rousing).
I think we're approaching thread-meld here with Fungal Chet. I think I could pretty-much guarantee chris y that there are no new car salesmen in the US who would self-identify as working class, even if they only cleared $25,000 last year. Farm equipment salesmen might identify that way, but they'd be much more likely to talk about the urban-rural divide as the defining characteristic of their identity.
If we are just talking about net worth, then some 33-year old finance industry guy who makes $150,000 a year and spends $160,000 probably has negative net worth, and indeed, could very easily lose his job and fall into bankruptcy and penury. That's the point the Millionaire Next Door guy makes, and which NoMoreHarvardDebt seems to have embraced. By contrast, a couple of baby boomer public school teachers in a high cost-of-living area might be getting ready to retire as millionaires or close to it if they've been thrifty and built up equity in a property or two. So no, I don't see net worth as a very accurate class predictor.
The other thing, as touched on above, is that we've got so many middle-class people in this country who are considered independent contractors by their employer, and thus, like a family from the church I grew up in found out recently, you can be really fucked if you have a couple of bad years of commissions, and then suffer a major medical issue that isn't covered by shitty private insurance.
There was a book about Sloane Rangers that I believe I mentioned in the context of the discussion of that cartoon of the sexy female bike messenger that detailed all the ways that simply coming from a bona fide upper-class background in the UK meant not having to deal with working-class problems, even if your actual income and net worth were very low. Sometimes it works the same way in the US and sometimes it doesn't.
I had a feeling I should read the Chet thread.
There will obviously be anomalies, like the rock n roller or finance guy who makes tons of money and blows it on coke. Or semi-independent people with no personal money but with family money behind them. What proportion of the 25% with zero net worth (75 million people) fall into these categories?
As I've said, while self-identification isn't always wrong, it's not reliable. People who identify themselves as middle class don't become middle class by that. People who refuse to self-identify as working class don't stop being working class by that, if they are. Working in high-class restaurants my brother met tons of poor people (waiters, etc) who self-identified as rich.
Someone who retires as a millionaire would be borderline upper class -- top 10%. A million isn't that much any more.
The anomalies are why it makes sense to talk about class rather than only income or wealth. Some rich kids remain upper class even through periods when they don't personally have the income or wealth that upper class would normally mean; at the other end someone with an income that would put most people securely in the middle class might still have the kind of working class problems (families that need support, built-up debt, whatever) that means they're still functionally working class. There's not going to be a mathematical formula for placing everyone -- it's all a bunch of spectrums.
So what's proposed here? That we school people on their true class affiliation?
"You think you're middle class, but you're not: you're less successful working class."
"You think you're middle class, but you're not: you'll have $1 million at retirement, which puts you in the upper class."
I don't disagree with these sentiments. For better or worse, I issue reminders along those lines to those of my friends who are stubbornly confused about their status.
I'd begun to ask what the goal in any such schooling might be ... and I'm actually coming around to the idea that reintroducing class by moving it away from the muddled "everyone's middle class" has possibilities.
These questions are all answered in the Grundrisse an Economic & Political Manuscripts but only if you understand German. Just kidding.
Okay, think about alienated and commodity labour versus rents. The independent plumber does not think of himself as a tool; the 25 yr-old at the trading desk does (and is). Do you make your living from labor or capital;for labor or capital? Yes, the petit bourgeoise thinks itself part of capital while being labor:this is what makes them management, part of the structuring, their dual dynamic class position. But they are labor if they are paid in wages.
What is the self-perception of the person who makes money from rents, interest, dividends that make them different from the wage-laborer, like Tom Cruise?
The laborer thinks labor creates value;the capitalist thinks capital creates value.
I've often thought about what it would take to unionize my workplace, and I've discussed it with cow-orkers. The consensus? We'd be crushed, because Virginia's right-to-work laws are evil and vile.
109:My point is that people thought of Milkin as causing real pain.
Sure, people saw him as a villain, but a lot of people who went to see Wall Street looked at him (or the Sheen character) and said, 'Shit, I want to make oodles of money.' And those people were the upper class people. (At the time, in the Dallas Morning News they had an oped guy who specialized in whining about how Hollywood treated businessmen and there a whole lotta words wasted around then on how everybody was being mean to rich people.)
I think Emerson is (exactly!) right at 50:
In 1970 Chicago school economics, libertarianism, "public choice theory", and freemarketism generally were fringe and new, but supporters of those sorts of ideas had already geared up a propaganda campaign, and the Democrats never have responded effectively.
1970 being the year the Libertarian Party was founded. I think the actual date for the shift would be 1968 when everything converged very neatly. The people who had all along been pining for a return to pre-New Deal economics finally got into reach of political power when the North-South split in the Democratic party finally became permanent and Nixon won. The natural non-upper-class constituency for that viewpoint is in the South so they just went to town and it snowballed (even though in practice the Republican party did not subscribe to the actual practice of the theories).
The banging of the propaganda drum was continuous from that point on. 1987 basically represents a stock market crash, plus a mini-financial panic in a relatively deregulated financial sector and basically Wall Street got away with it. Ordinary people were disgusted and this translated in Congress (controlled by Democrats) deciding to take the point of view that the S&L crisis was caused by Texas bankers being morally bad people and yahoos. (That was true, but beside the point. When have bankers ever not been morally bad people and yahoos?) But they blamed the whole thing on idiot Texans (Wall Street pinstripers were different, see? On account they're respectable and conservative and shit, see? And you don't wanna reduce the financial innovation, do you? Or nobody would make no money and blood would run in the streets.) and thus 20 years later: Ha Ha!
Basically it's just a long process of normalizing the usual thefts by bankers.
max
['I should hit post instead of letting it just sit here, huh?']
but you're not: you'll have $1 million at retirement, which puts you in the upper class."
Emerson is right, a person retired at today's interest rates with a million invested makes what $20-50k a year? Not daddy warbucks. Course, they should annuity it and draw down another 50k a tear for twenty years...whoops they will need medical money. Keep the million. Not rich.
But is there a difference between the person with 1 million private capital earning 25k and the person with a pension and SS earning 25k? Of course there is, the kind of social relations and political economy each is dependent on and which class each identifies with.
And this was the purpose of the IRA's.
"You think you're middle class, but you're not: you'll have $1 million at retirement, which puts you in the upper class."
That's just not true. If you figure how much it would cost to buy an annuity to provide a pension, it doesn't come much lower than $1m.
I originally said income, net worth, and power, and later I added security. The cokehead making $200,000 had the income but failed to convert to net worth. He's very likely to fall out of the upper class and maybe the middle class too. That's a fairly common story, the burnout.
I really don't think that you have any upper class people without money. You do have hangers-on and people with dreams of past glory, but I don't see how (in America) you can call a poor person upper class. In Europe you have a tradition of impoverished nobility, but even there their pretensions aren't always taken very seriously.
The schoolteachers mentioned above never had the income, and most of their lives never had the net worth, but at the very end of their lives they had gradually gained net worth by a freak of history (the continually rising housing market, and getting out of it before 2006).
I think that money and power still are your best places to start.
166: It's a life cycle thing -- a kid who grew up rich but hasn't inherited money yet in their twenties, but could turn to family for help and luxuries if they needed or wanted anything, could be low income, no net worth, but still upper class. If the family spigot shuts off and the expected inheritance doesn't materialize, at some point there's a class transition, but you wouldn't call someone like that working class in their twenties.
1970 being the year the Libertarian Party was founded.... by my goddamn second cousin once removed, John Hospers. Why is it that my connections are so useless to me?
Why is it that my connections are so useless to me?
Did you try to jiggle the cables?
164, 165: I don't follow. I thought we were looking at the economic classes in relative terms: if Emerson's linked chart in 151 is correct, 50% of Americans have a net worth of under $75,000. Someone with $1 million at retirement can't be anything other than in the upper class, not the middle class.
171: I'd want to see a comparison of with other Americans at retirement, not all families. And I'd want to see pension income calculated considered at the cost of an annuity. $1 million will be on the high side of things, but not too high.
162: Most people at my company hate our jobs so much that we'd rather leave than spend time organizing. I work for a non-profit, but we contract with the state. That's mostly so that the state gets out of pensions and benefits. I think that if we unionized, we'd lose the Contract with the state. I think you'd have to get all the human services agencies to organize at the same time and get support from the older white guy unions.
At my last place of permanent residence in PDX I ended up meeting several ne'er-do-well heirs living off their parents at the age of 50 or so. Their class status was ambiguous too, because they weren't trusted to control their own money and weren't welcome in the world they were born into, and they wouldn't have anything to pass down to their kids if they had any.
172: I'd want to see a comparison of with other Americans at retirement, not all families.
Fair enough. Please grant, though, that $1 million at retirement is beyond the reach of many, if not most, Americans.
171: Are you thinking of upper, middle, and lower class as dividing the population into rough thirds? Because I think that doesn't work well -- something more like 50%, 40%, 10% works better. Better off than most people in the US doesn't equate to upper class; someone solidly in the middle class is better off than most people in the US.
We're arguing by dueling assertion here, of course -- I just don't think the rough-thirds model works well.
There was a nineteenth century British phrase, "the upper ten thousand", which included the aristocracy and the gentry: anyone you'd expect to find in a Trollope novel. Wikipedia says that the population of England went from eight million to thirty million over that century, so even taking the lower bound there, ten thousand is a little more than .1% of eight million. The phrase probably referred to the very upper reaches of the upper class, but still, it's a small part of the population.
175: I know that. But, with a bit of luck*, somebody earning a middle class salary could save it. My under my employer's plan, somebody making $50K would stand a very good shot at retiring with $1 million at age 65. You'd have to contribute 8%, the employer match is 12%. With a 4% return, you'd come close.
Most people don't have that kind of a match, but if you are going to replace an old-style pension with a 401k, that's what it takes.
*mostly avoiding unemployment, divorce, or disability.
mostly avoiding unemployment, divorce, or disability
That's a lot of luck, right there. I've never been unemployed, but the fear of it around 2007 had me shitting bricks.
It certainly isn't a gimme, but I was also only working with one person's income and not a household.
176 (and on preview, 177): Isn't that partly the question, how we should divide these things up?
I think that doesn't work well -- something more like 50%, 40%, 10% works better. Better off than most people in the US doesn't equate to upper class; someone solidly in the middle class is better off than most people in the US.
(I assume that the 50-40-10 is to correspond to lower-middle-upper?)
I understand. However, the problem with defining the solidly middle class as the top 50-90% is that it allows people making $200K to insist that they're not privileged at all, why, not at all, life is a struggle for them too, their lives are completely average. BUT THEY'RE NOT. And that's a problem for public policy. We've talked about this before: if policy is targeted to the middle class, and the middle class is the top 50-90%, well, the bottom 50% is left floundering.
I feel this thread is going around in circles with many other ones we've had on this topic, and I'm left with my original sentiment: we don't yet have a productive way to talk about (economic) class in this era. I haven't offered an alternative.
we don't yet have a productive way to talk about (economic) class in this era.
I'm kind of hoping that building yurts in public spaces near banks helps. I don't have a better idea and I assume living a in yurt increases wisdom.
I think you're creating a definitional problem for yourself because you get angry at people who aren't struggling calling themselves middle class. If the word 'middle class' applied to someone who feels (or rationally should feel) economically secure upsets you, then substitute whatever you like: 'non-struggling', 'affluent', 'those smug fucking bastards' -- pick your phrase. But conceptually, you still want to draw some kind of distinction at the top end between someone who retires with enough savings to bring in 25K in income annually, and the people at the top who are running the system.
In UK usage, 'middle class' very clearly means 'those smug fucking bastards' -- people who generally don't have scary financial problems.
Drawing the lines at 'people with scary financial problems'; 'people without scary financial problems, mostly'; and 'really rich people who run things and for whose benefit things are run' is a useful set of places to draw the lines. You can use whatever names you think are communicative and helpful for those groups, but I think those lines tell you something meaningful that dividing the population into thirds doesn't.
Can't it be framed in terms of security? Having resources to weather a calamity without financial anxiety makes you upper-middle class. If the crisis is so extended that you develop anxiety, you mat have shifted classes. That way the wealthy 20-something playboy is rightfully seen as secure, while the retirees with $1 million are seen as more middling.
Insomnia in Norway is convenient for finding stuff to do online.
I once argued that middle age starts at 25 as 25 to 50 was close the middle third of most lives. However, I was being an asshole to somebody who turned 25 a few months ahead of me.
The names these internet startups choose!
LB, if you don't mind my asking is your workplace unionized? I know DOJ lawyers who were union members.
184
I understand. However, the problem with defining the solidly middle class as the top 50-90% is that it allows people making $200K to insist that they're not privileged at all, why, not at all, life is a struggle for them too, their lives are completely average. BUT THEY'RE NOT. And that's a problem for public policy. We've talked about this before: if policy is targeted to the middle class, and the middle class is the top 50-90%, well, the bottom 50% is left floundering.
Isn't 200K going to put you in the top 10%?
And the thing is most politically active people whether liberal or conservative are from the top half. So issues important mostly to the lower 50% are likely to be neglected.
Oh, sorry for the all-caps moment up there. I do understand the 50-40-10 split, or the split described in 187.2. I find it absurd that the 'people without scary financial problems, mostly' should be viewed, or view themselves, as average, though, when they're not: that's why I dislike describing that set as middle class any more.*
There might be historical reasons to so describe them, of course: in order to say that once, it really was the average way of things not to have scary financial problems (or be borderline/marginal).
* I'm actually fine with upper middle class as a descriptor as long as people don't think that their UMC lives are average, since that tends to make them blind to the difficulties people in the lower 50% contend with.
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Good news! The lovely young woman for whom I'm writing a law school recommendation has just written to say she's done a lot of thinking since our conversation and is now also applying to the Peace Corps.
I have just now finished both recommendations. It is nice to be able to say with a clean heart that I know she will make a positive contribution to the world whatever path she chooses, and even nicer to be able to tell her that some people even go to law school after the Peace Corps (thanks, LB).
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192: Staff is, most lawyers aren't -- there's some byzantine job category which makes most of us in my office ineligible to unionize because we count as management, and I'm in that category (there are plenty of lawyers who work for the state who are eligible, and I'm frankly baffled by the difference). But we're effectively unionized in that stuff happens to us roughly in parallel with what gets worked out with the relevant union.
178: the employer match is 12%
Nice. Where can I get a job like that? (Seriously, though, it's been so long since I worked in circumstances that covered half or more of my health insurance, a match (or more) to my retirement savings, and so on, that I sometimes forget people think that's normal.)
197: Yeah, being a small-business owner is so different from being an employee that it must make these conversations a little disorienting.
198: You're kind; I'd been about to say that I'm clearly too grumpy to converse further. On the upside, I can't be fired. It's a mixed blessing. I do think some employees don't count the value of their benefits packages -- a woman I know was recently nearly in tears because she'd reduced her hours to 30/week, and her newly recalculated take-home pay meant she was living in virtual penury! she felt. I very mildly (really, I swear, mildly) asked whether her health insurance, retirement plan and so on were still provided by her employer, and it took her a few moments to focus again and say that sure, of course they were, but still....
NUH (narnia university hospital) has got good food! if you pick the crucial halal/vegetarian with chapatti and dal option. my head feels...better, though really they could come around with the demerol any time now. CT scan later, that's when they'll see if I actually have a brain tumor, I was expressing sentence confidence earlier.
You've sounded stressed about being self-employed before -- have you made a firm determination that the intangibles are worth the low pay, or is becoming an employee someplace not something you've seriously considered?
201: Yay on the head feeling better! It's got to be just some other lousy paratyphoid symptom -- now that they know what it is, they should be able to treat you more effectively.
if you pick the crucial halal/vegetarian with chapatti and dal option
For some reason, I now want to get a McRib. Hope you feel better.
202: I think that in this job environment it'd be foolish in the extreme to try to move to the employed world, in my mid-40s.
I'm chiefly worried about retirement at this point, is all: I'm not setting enough aside as yet, and need to get serious about maximizing return on what assets I do have. I've been pretty inattentive about it all, in part due to ignorance, in part due to risk aversion.
And the dal even means you get legumes for New Years!
201: yay for good healthcare and food! Here's hoping the CT scan and whatever other tests they need are rapid and hassle-free, leaving you to get back to the important business which hospitals are generally *not* so great at supporting...resting.
Yeah, I don't want to seem like a fussbudget, and I feel like we're rehashing a lot of the debate from that time we talked aboutKo the guy who blew $10 million of family money, but having a million in net worth, or even in cash, is just not "beyond the reach" of most people. Say you're a married couple with two secure jobs. One's public sector and comes with really good benefits (kids stay on the health plan until 25 etc.) and one's private sector and has a good company match for the 401k. If you live moderately frugally -- vacations are driving to grandma's house, kids go to state schools, drive Korean cars with good warranties, take the bus to work, etc. -- then having $1 million at age 65 is totally doable. Now, of course it could be argued that the circumstances for most people are deteriorating so rapidly that a two-stable-job family is now a pipe dream, but "out of reach" makes it sound like we're talking abou astronomical, lottery-winning odds, and we're just not.
Half a million net worth puts you in the top 25%. A million net worth must put you near the top 10%, which would be the top of the upper middle class if only net worth were considered. But we were talking about an edge case, a frugal couple with a moderate income who happened to buy in an area where values were increasing. If the income criteria were included, they wouldn't be so high on the chart.
A million isn't what it used to be. The internet calculator I just found says that a million in the roaring twenties when they started talking about millionaires would be worth 12 million plus today. Today's millionaire would have been worth 78000 in 1925.
209 -- It's no edge couple at 60 who've had some appreciation on their house bought in, say, 1990. They may well have been knocked back to their 2002 value by recent events, but so long as they weren't taking cash out over the 2000-2008 period, they ought to have some pretty substantial equity. Obviously, some places are worse, but I think average values now compared to 1990 are going to be positive in most places.
I just meant that most people with a net worth of a million aren't mostly going to be frugal people with a moderate income and an appreciated house.
It can only be in some places, too. Lots of places appreciation was small or negative (Rust Belt cities), and lots of places don't have million dollar houses (rural areas), and lots of people don't even buy at all.
211: Most people, no. But, most people at 65, maybe. Life stage matters a great deal here.
This is all guessing in the absence of data. But most might still be the wrong word: a million in net worth at retirement sounds to me like a not unusual outcome for a middle class couple with stable jobs for their entire working lives, and no financially important bad luck ever. That doesn't make them not middle class, but no financially important bad luck ever (no extended unemployment, no major health crises, no drop in asset values that should have been fairly secure) is probably less likely than the alternative.
I don't think a discussion of class that devolves into a tedious nitpicky discussion of exactly where to draw what are obviously arbitrary lines is all that useful. What exactly is a class analysis suppose to accomplish and why is it important to get the lines exactly right? I suppose if the plan is to line everyone in the wrong classes up against the wall and shoot them you want to be very careful who you include but that isn't actually the purpose is it?
Maybe we should just raise the threshold to $5 million. But I think that people are overestimating the number of these couples -- both the proportion of 65 year olds who are worth a million, and the proportion of people worth a million who are frugal retired couples with moderate incomes.
The median net worth for 65 year olds, according to this page, is $235,000. How many frugal retired couples would be worth 4x that?
Rich people aren't necessarily horrible and blameworthy, especially if they just squeaked under the wire at retirement. And they might be very plain in their habits. Nonetheless, some of these 65 year old retirees we're talking about really are pretty high up on the totem pole even if they seem like regular people to us.
It's multidimensional. You've got overall income, percentage of income obtained from investments, wealth, percentage of wealth that was inherited, age, education, and how big of an ass the person is. You can combine these into a FICO-like class score and then you know who should go against the wall.
I agree about the arbitrary lines, Shearer.
The class analysis is supposed to refocus attention on the economic aspects of politics, with special attention to the concentration of wealth in the top 1-10% and the immiserization of much of the bottom 50% during recent decades.
That all sounds very complicated. Here in the UK it'll be easier. We can start with everyone who was privately educated, and then worry about the fine gradations of class after that.
hat exactly is a class analysis suppose to accomplish and why is it important to get the lines exactly right?
But I think that people are overestimating the number of these couples
I think John answers your question. The point of a discussion like the current one is to try to get people's intuitions to match more closely to reality. There's a separate conversation to be had about what actions should be taken but there's value in just talking through the numbers and trying to get a feel for them.
Income and wealth is one of the categories for which people's day to day experience is very likely to be skewed (one way or the other) and so it takes an effort to have a realistic sense of who income and wealth are distributed.
A major issue is that people don't consider the concept of "net worth". You see statistics about how the top X people have more net worth than the bottom Y million people. Well, I would assume that I have more net worth than the bottom several million people, because my net worth isn't negative.
One theory of class (Teixera uses it) is that college grads are middle class and everyone else is working class or underclass. That's actually a cultural definition, though, which works because American politics is so culturalized. Part of what we're trying to do, or I am, is to deculturalize politics.
I haven't read Gelman's book, which is on the way, but it seems that the present political divides he sees are one between the socially conservative and socially liberal parts of the well-off group (upper half), and a second divide between rich (mostly urban and coastal) states and poor states (mostly interior and/or Southern). This approximates the educated / uneducated divide, though not closely. It doesn't have much to do with the class things we're talking about. According to one study, the bottom third economically speaking is ignored entirely when policy is made, and the second third is not very influential.
Estate and capital gains taxation are live issues where the politics depends very heavily on misidentification of class. It's not about putting people up against the wall, so much as getting the second quintile to realize that their interests on these two issues align with the 60% below them and not the 10 above them.
219
Income and wealth is one of the categories for which people's day to day experience is very likely to be skewed (one way or the other) and so it takes an effort to have a realistic sense of who income and wealth are distributed.
Well here are some wikipedia links (some a bit dated as noted):
Individual Income (2006) distribution age 25+ with income.
0k - 25k - 47%
25k - 50k - 28%
50k - 75k - 13%
75k - 100k - 5%
100k+ - 6%
Household Income (2003) distribution age 18+.
0k - 25k - 29%
25k - 50k - 27%
50k - 75k - 18%
75k - 100k - 11%
100k - 150k - 10%
150k - 200k - 3%
200k - 250k - 1.4%
250+k - 1.5%
0% - 25% -1.4K
25% - 50% 47k
50% - 75% 185k
75% - 90% 526k
90% - 100% 3114k
The wealth figures are a bit higher than I would have guessed. Perhaps they include the imputed value of pension benefits as Moby wanted. The figures are all somewhat dated, perhaps someone can find a better source.
I think that estate taxes have a lot to do with media coverage. Several major papers (Times, Post, Seattle Times, probably more) are family-owned, and one owner (of the Seattle Times) once said in so many words that the inheritance tax issue made him support Bush.
Note the big jump in the top tenth of Shearer's wealth data. It's a long-tail increase after 90%. A lot of people report 1%, .1%, and .01% too.
222
Estate and capital gains taxation are live issues where the politics depends very heavily on misidentification of class. It's not about putting people up against the wall, so much as getting the second quintile to realize that their interests on these two issues align with the 60% below them and not the 10 above them.
That's 20% above them of course. And what mistake do you think they are making?
Capital gains is a sensitive subject for me at the moment because my new employer is requiring me to sell my stock in my old employer because of some questionable conflict of interest worries and the result is even with the favorable treatment of capital gains (which only exists on the federal level) I will have to give up a big chunk of money which I was accustomed to thinking of as mine. The personal income tax is less painful in a way because the money disappears before I get my hands on it.
20, yes.
I'd be happy to have a fairly generous exclusion on capital gains, especially for one-time events like yours. I think the situation with one's principal residence is a decent compromise (although you'd want to have the thresholds much lower for stocks and commodities). But the principle that income earned in this way ought to be treated so much more favorably than the income most people earn is based, imo, on deceptive advertising about job creation, and on delusion about how someone in the second quintile is going to experience the tax system. It's much worse with the estate tax, of course.
215: The median net worth for 65 year olds, according to this page, is $235,000. How many frugal retired couples would be worth 4x that?
In the 2040s, when I'm retiring? Probably quite a few.
228
... But the principle that income earned in this way ought to be treated so much more favorably than the income most people earn is based ...
It's not uniformly more favorable as you can be taxed on "income" which just represents inflation. This is even more true of interest income of course.
Well, I meant now. As far as I know the numbers are after the recent de-bubbling. My guess is that if the mean is $235,000, less than 10% would have $1,000,000.
Haven't read this yet, but it's on-topic.
Any family earning today's average wage of $62,857 is very carefully spending every cent of their $49,067 take home pay and the details are disturbing. [big ...]Social Security is how average America saves for retirement. This fictional family socked away nearly $5,000 into the program last year. Do that for 40 years of work and it's $200,000; add amortization at just 5% annum and that's $475,127. No, it's not an entitlement; you've paid-in with real money.
I think that pretty much covers it. The Times spit this out today:
For members of Congress, Lichtblau wrote, median net worth "is $913,000 and climbing" while for families in the country at large, it's "$100,000 and has dropped significantly since 2004."
OK, Shearer's net worth computation is (value of house)-(mortgage debt)+everything else. So 500k net worth is fairly easy to make. (Here's the distribution chart.) Thus 500k of net worth (including house!) will just edge you above the 90% level. (Which implies that 90% of the country has very little in the way of non-housing assets.)
176: Because I think that doesn't work well -- something more like 50%, 40%, 10% works better. Better off than most people in the US doesn't equate to upper class; someone solidly in the middle class is better off than most people in the US.
OK, I can endorse that model (I was reluctant), if we go with net worth for the assessment.... well, for the upper-class cutoff anyways. (Calling 50% of the country lower class makes me itch. Working class seems like it falls between the two stools of the notion of country-music-loving plumbers and socialist realism notions of the proletariat.) {mutter} Works I suppose if you specify an underclass (or just 'poor').
170: 1970 being the year the Libertarian Party was founded.... by my goddamn second cousin once removed, John Hospers. Why is it that my connections are so useless to me?
You're supposed to use a Ouija Board man. That's how everybody gets aholt of Ron Paul.
max
['Uncle Ron! UN-CLE RON! Are we supposed ... gah... are we supposed to want to nuke the ECB or not?' 'E-U C-O-M-M-I-E-S G-O-L-D' 'I think that's 'hate 'em.' 'Maybe the Commies stole the gold.']
I can't tell if this discussion is still live, but I'm with Emerson in 209, 211, 215, etc.
In any case, NickS gets it exactly right in 219. Thanks, NickS.
233: Calling 50% of the country lower class makes me itch.
Doesn't it, though? And yet in the popular imagination's conception, it is so. (Just look at television portrayals of the 'average' family: it's "middle class" in the well-above-50% sense.)
I haven't read the full thread, but the OP and the comments seem interesting. I'd say I have the following thoughts about the dotcom millionaires:
1) It seems to me that by the late 1980s most thoughtful people were pretty much aware that the Reagan revolution meant that the rich got way richer and everyone else got stagnation or decline. I think that's what the quote from Nick S is picking up on. And by the early 1990s there were even signs that this consciousness had begun to spread through the population as a whole. And then, for about 5 years between 1995 and 2000, it really did seem as if the financialization/liberalization of the economy really would work for everyone -- it was kind of the Yglesias dream period, in which everyone's income was going up even as the rich got astoundingly wealthy, and it seemed as if the rising tide really would raise all boats. That collapsed after 2000 but the collapse was basically invisible because of rising home prices in many areas; hard to feel that the country was going to hell when your home price was going up. Then, the collapse happened, and thoughtful people were back where they were: the Reagan revolution/financialization of everything was a gigantic boondogle for the rich and a gigantic fuck you to everyone else.
2) The dot-com millionaires did have a definite and permanent change on corporate culture, that has lasted long after the dot-com boom itself (and may be more permanently important). I'm too young to really remember the pre-dot com days, but the shift to business casual was emblematic of a whole bunch of other changes in people's work environment. I'm also enough of a young fogey to believe that these changes were almost entirely for the worse; the old suit and hierarchy model at least encouraged a form of corporate paternalism while allowing folks to clearly see who the bosses were; the dot-com model fosters the worst kind of fungible treatment of employees as human beings, while pretending that everyone is having a kind of fake "fun" and that the bosses are something other than bosses, because they mountain bike rather than play golf at all white country clubs or whatever. (Flippanter-style: mumble disgusting lionization of Steve Jobs foosball table mumble stock options mumble outsourcing to India).
I think I could pretty-much guarantee chris y that there are no new car salesmen in the US who would self-identify as working class
This is well dead, but educational to me. I regard myself as solidly middle class (net worth calculation doesn't really apply, as Mrs y is still working), but the only person I know who has bought a new car in the last 40 years is a judge.
(The new/used car salesman distinction doesn't really apply here as most showrooms which sell new also sell both, and car salesman is the type of job where you'd warn your mates not to tell your mother what you do because she thinks you play piano in a whorehouse.)
237 suggests that my picture of contemporary Britain, which is largely informed by viewing Top Gear, may be somewhat inaccurate.
238. Can't disagree with that. A lot of people would tell their mothers the same story if they worked on Top Gear.
224
Some more data links.
US Census household income 2011.
0k - 24k - 20%
24k - 38k - 20%
38k - 62k - 20%
62k - 100k - 20%
100k - 181k - 15%
181k - - 5%
US Census Household net worth 2004 (which seems to be the most recent they have):
- 0k 16% 16%
0k - 10k 13% 29%
10k - 25k 6% 35%
25k - 50k 7% 42%
50k - 100k 12% 54%
100k - 250k 20% 74%
250k - 500k 13% 87%
500k - 13%
A few scattered thoughts...
Corporate culture. Rob Halford, you should check out Miss Manners collections from the first half of the '80s. You'll find she was onto pernicious crap like "business casual" and the trampling of lines between business and private life, and using her podium as best she could to warn against them. She wasn't heeded, of course, but she was onto them, and she wasn't the only one.
In terms of social impact, the dot-com boom was a tool. I grew up in techie culture and know a fair number of dot-com millionnaires, and it took me a while to realize this. Dot-com startups were very fruitful indeed for the venture capital firms that sponsored them. Lots of money flowed in, through, out, and around and the huge losses don't matter when it comes to the personal fortunes of the folks in key positions. The dot-coms themselves were real enough entities apart from their use to finance capital, but wow were they great convenient levers for wealth multiplication by some of the very people who went on to savage the mortgage system and so much else of the economy, and by their buddies.
I can't prove it, of course, but I feel pretty confident speculating that in the absence of the dot-coms, the lords of finance would have found some other exploitable development to turn into the same kind of bubble. They were geared to take advantage of it, once spotted, even if creation has never been one of their best things.
227: Would it be unacceptable to take a short position to net out to zero?
Alternately, if you have any desire to give money to a charity, now might be a good time to give away some stocks.
It only takes $34,000 a year, after taxes, to be among the richest 1% in the world. That's for each person living under the same roof, including children. (So a family of four, for example, needs to make $136,000.)
242
Would it be unacceptable to take a short position to net out to zero?
According to Ivestopedia this won't work.
... However, the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 (TRA97) no longer allows short selling against the box as a valid tax deferral practice. Under TRA97, capital gains or losses incurred from short selling against the box are not deferred. The tax implication is that any related capital gains taxes will be owed in the current year.
Anyway I am reluctant to do this sort of thing (complicated tax avoidance strategies) because I have read too many stories of people ending up worse off than if they had just paid the tax.
OK, good to know. Probably would have been operationally too difficult anyway.
My second suggestion still stands.
