> This class has become increasingly hereditary, in part due to the phenomena of well-educated people marrying each other—between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 – 48 percent.
A large part of that may be due to availability. In 1959 (closest year to 1960 I found data for [1]), 6% of US women had degrees, and 10.3% of men.
If every person wanted to marry someone with a degree, there would only be enough women with degrees for about 60% of men with degrees to marry women with degrees.
If the actual number was 25%, then men with degrees were marrying women with degrees about 42% as often as was theoretically possible.
In 2005, it was 26.5% of women and 28.9% of men with degrees, allowing in theory for about 93% of men with degrees to marry women with degrees, if everyone with a degree wanted to marry someone else with a degree.
If it is actually 48%, then men with degrees were marrying women with degrees about 52% as often as was theoretically possible, up from 42% in 1959.
The article focuses a little bit on homeownership, and its supposed relationship to opposing feudalism, but fails to realise that the current system of land ownership is what has caused this concentration of land, as well as creating a new feudal system. See Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) for an explanation of this idea, something thinkers as early as Adam Smith contemplated (in a less developed form).
It's an interesting and somewhat useful take on things, but like a dog wearing pants, things just don't seem to fit very well.
First, I do think it's ridiculous that he takes it as a given that Oligarchs favour climate policy. Yes, I can see how someone can point to Musk and .... I dunno Al Gore? and try to make the point, but for every Musk-a-like, there are many dozens of rich people very deeply vested in the fossil industry. I don't think any serious survey of the financial interests of the global superrich will support this view.
Second, while he alludes to the lack of homeownership amongst the young the fact that the single biggest cost-of-living expense (and it's incredible growth during the last decade) is large controlled by his embattled "yeomanry" gets ignored. It very much complicates his story to realize that his supposed victims are in fact profiting handsomely and generally cause much pain to the supposedly superior "clerisy". Just think of the typical academic renting from an older person in any large city today and you get a good sense of how wrong his story is.
> First, I do think it's ridiculous that he takes it as a given that Oligarchs favour climate policy.
> I don't think any serious survey of the financial interests of the global superrich will support this view.
There is a subtlety here - one possible outcome is oligarchs cynically favouring climate policy while simultaneously having deep vested interests in fossil fuels.
The article isn't saying that the oligarchs want to do anything about climate change; the idea is that they are very keen on the principle of using centralised power to control others and will attach the things they want controlled to climate policies as implemented.
If I owned an oil company then backbreaking legislation that means nobody can start a new oil company would be strategically interesting; for example. Big companies don't fight regulation tooth and nail. They accept the regulation then lobby for loopholes that favour them and restrictions that disadvantage competition.
It is, in fact, rare to see a corporation moving to deregulate industries. They often fight changes, but rarely organise to reverse reverse things once they are in compliance with new rules.
The oil oligarchs strongly opposed renewable energy because it would simply replace oil, gas and coal consumption. New governmental regulations that forbid their companies from selling their products are of no use to them. If you don't believe me, do a google search on: fossil fuels stranded assets.
And one more point. There are a lot of big companies in the renewable energy field, but they are for the most part a whole different set of companies than the fossil fuel ones. And the fossil fuel companies know this, and that they are going to get replaced, so they have been denying global climate change for decades.
I just turned on the television for the first time in years. There was an ad from an oil company talking about climate change as if it’s a given, and how they’re taking measures to stop it.
Is the ad superficial, meaningless bullshit? Of course.
But the presence of hypocritical financial interests is irrelevant. Or rather, it supports the thesis that the clerisy are interested in power rather than actual morality.
Regarding the poor academics, the conflict between members of the middle class is the point of the article.
Tenured professors v. adjuncts might be the best possible example of the authors point.
You are assuming the "yeomanry" mainly consists of the old, but I think that's an overly narrow and basically false assumption. The participants in the yellow vest protests in France - largely members of "yeomanry" I would think - are as much Gen X and Millenial as they are Baby Boomers.
As for the oligarchs, there are certainly wealthy individuals entrenched in the traditional fossil fuel industries, but the number of these individuals is dwarfed by the oligarchs in Media, Finance, Government, Technology etc, who are much farther removed both in business and culture from traditional modes of energy production and as such are able to take and advocate for radical positions on environmental policy without regard to the consequences for the "yeomanry".
This story plays out across the spectrum of issues that society contends with today. In general, sometimes for the same and sometimes for different reasons, elites in the corporate world and also members of the "clerisy" both desire a breakdown of traditional society to further their own agendas. In the case of the former that agenda is defined by profit seeking and in the case of the latter it is defined by philosophical and social beliefs.
So you see, I think while this piece is vague and steps on its own toes at points, it is addressing a real conflict that exists and is growing in contemporary society.
If you draw lines in society, you'll always be able to find scenarios where people on one side have a conflict with people on the other side. The question is whether the lines are drawn to reflect real differences, or to stuff all the author's political opponents in the same bucket.
This is certainly true for the Netherlands (alluded to in the article): the yellow vests (and the supporters of right wing populists in general) are overwhelmingly poor, both in terms of education and in terms of wealth.
This is a cut-and-paste patchwork of stock right-wing talking points - written by someone who is part of what he calls the clerisy, and who conveniently ignores the fact that the people who "hand down policy" are not university professors and academics, but a huge network of privately funded PR companies, social influencers, think tanks, and carefully on-message media outlets.
In short, it's a propaganda piece for that operation - designed to set up fake anti-intellectual resentment against a group with very little political influence.
The reality is that far from setting climate policy, social policy, or economic policy, left-wing academics and scientists have to fight tooth and nail to create any policy push back at all against the distorting influence of this organised and toxic lie machine.
Corporate and political power is under no serious threat from this academic "clerisy". Suggesting they're somehow complicit with the interests of oppressive oligarchs, especially about climate change, is so far from the truth it's practically crank talk, and is also - conveniently - a stock variation on the old trope that climate scientists are only in it for the money, while brave and noble fossil fuel corporations are there to help protect innocent citizens from their corrupting influence.
The article claims the surprise result of the last Australian election as a rejection of action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The consensus in Australia is that people simply didn't like the leader of the opposition as a TV personality. Also, Australian attitudes to climate change have been rather dramatically modified by events since that election.
Whilst I don't doubt the truth of this, I find there's often a deeper reason why people "just don't like" someone. Sometimes it's because that someone has ideals which challenge the assumptions of too many people. Other times it's because the media has an agenda which is at odds with that person's principles, and therefore choose to portray that person in a particularly negative light.
As an Australian I would say this is correct. The last election was not a choice between two leaders with charisma, but a case of choosing the least worse of a bad lot.
This article is a bit confused. It pits the left and right middle classes against each other and also against the oligarchy, and then brings up how Trump stands against the left middle class without mentioning how much he represents and supports the oligarchy that systematically takes advantage of both the right and the left.
It also tries to cast the left middle class as allies of the oligarchy by bringing populist green energy fearmongering, without mentioning that it is in fact fossil fuels that a) enrich and entrench the oligarchy, and b) reinforce centralized infrastructure tendencies over distributed ones. Lots of communities have space for renewable energy generation on-site; almost no communities could produce their own fossil fuels.
Finally, scarcity drives most of the forces that oligarchs benefit from, so naturally the oligarchy wants us to stay on fossil fuels. Renewables are the populist, conservative solution that’s better for families and communities than for corporations, but the mega-rich right-wing fossil fuel magnates have fooled their poorer and less-educated right-wing compatriots into thinking otherwise.
It’s interesting the way you equate fossil fuels with scarcity and renewable energy with abundance, when renewables are still a tiny minority of the world energy supply. In reality, it’s fossil fuels that allow for energy abundance, while the movement to transition to renewables is accompanied by energy austerity: less driving, less air travel, less meat consumption.
Our fossil-fuel-backed energy “abundance” is the same as the mortgage-backed financial “abundance” we had in 2007 and the international-kidnapping-backed labor “abundance” of pre-Civil-War America. It’s a loan the oligarchy takes out with no intent to pay it back. The alternative is not “austerity”, just living within one’s means and not externalizing one’s own cost of living.
> A remarkable 57 percent of people who owned their own home supported Johnson compared to barely 22 percent for Labour.
This analysis is deeply superficial. Let me suggest a trivial alternative to the suggested interpretation: that people are more likely to own a home as they grow older, and that the primary division between Conservative and Labour voters in the last election was by age.
Now, my writing this doesn't prove my claim, but I've already demonstrated an alternative take on political "allegiance" that seems at least as likely as the groupings suggested in the article.
It's lovely to wave one's hands around like this Quillette article does, painting broad strokes and telling big stories. But the handful of citations at the end do almost nothing to prop up his story, which while not implausible, really needs more substantial evidence to make it believable.
Class tension has been a fact of life since the dawn of civilization. But in healthy societies, different classes are able to work together to bring about positive change. There's no reason in principle why small business owners, engineers, reporters, professors, priests, police, soldiers, teachers, and even oligarchs, shouldn't want to work together for the betterment of all. The real question, to which I didn't find an answer in the article, is why in our current society these class tensions have become so much more vicious.
I was expecting a piece covering the growing gap between the traditional middle class, which seems to be falling, and the upper-middle class, which seems to be doing better in recent decades.
Instead, what we have is a attempt to separate out the middle class into left and right sections. I don't really see it.
> No president has ever incurred the wrath of the clerisy—the media, the entertainment industry, academia—more than Donald Trump. But Trump retains record support among the small business people on Main Street, particularly in the manufacturing and energy-dependent parts of the country.
Perhaps the author has failed to see the split between "mainstream" media and right-wing media over the last decade, and the massive reach the right-wing media has these days - with the largest cable news shows, the largest radio news/commentary shows, and frequently the most interactions on social media. One could reasonably conclude there is a "right" clerisy, with academia replaced by think-tanks, that is very competitive with the "left" version he defines, though this might cause problems with his entire premise.
> The climatistas’ appeal is not likely to improve as they increasingly advocate the elimination of ownership of single-family houses...
Ah yes, the proposals of a single random professor does seem like a good representation of a "climate-friendly density regime".
There's other issues to pick at with this piece ("ultra-green policies", climate policy supported by oligarchs, etc.), but I think it's better to point to someone who covers the same issues to some degree in more convincing manner.
Stoller takes a look at the current state of the economy through the lens of monopoly and big business, and I find his analysis to match the world I see with much greater accuracy. Kotkin mentions a lot of the issues in his section on "the embattled yeomanry", but fails to consider causes that lead to this. He'll talk about concentration of wealth, but fails to conclude any negative effects it might have. And it's truly curious how he moves from increasing corporate concentration in one paragraph to fighting against climate policy in the next.
This is a publication with a long history of presenting both interesting and sloppy thinking, sometimes in the same article. It tends to value libertarian (or -ish) takes relatively uncritically, and have some bizarre obsessions (by which I mean, topics taken up with a frequency all out of proportion to any impact).
That isn't to say they aren't worth reading, but that this article is flawed in a characteristic way.
Yeah this essay is a mess. Smacks of sociopolitical myth-making, not credible analysis. The thing it seems most like is a vehicle to lump scientists into the same category as religious figures. Bare tribalism wearing the clothes of public intellectualism
I think the modern term for the clerisy is the Professional Managerial Class or “PMC” — and the definition of the working class has been expanded to include “service industry” workers.
Not sure that's accurate. The article suggests the "clerisy" operates largely outside the market system, e.g. doctors, lawyers, with the exception possibly being consultants. The PMC is very much a class in the market system.
Not at all. The large majority of the PMC works in the context of large corporations. Although the corporations themselves might be subject to market forces, individuals within them navigate bureaucracies and politics just as much as a random government employee. Moreover, all of these large corporations closely cooperate with government.
The fact that a corporation has an exterior interface with the market doesn't change that most people in it don't deal with the market day-to-day. Even those who do form that interface are relatively insulated from it: a market analyst working to set prices still is evaluated by an internal bureaucracy, not the market itself. Only people in sales really end up exposed to the market because it's so easy to come up with a metric of their performance that's legible to the interior bureaucracy.
Honestly, working in a large corporation is very different to working in a public institution. For example, in my experience, your salary is much more of a negotiation between yourself and your direct superiors. You can highlight the value/profit your bring to the company, and if they underestimate you the you can change to a higher paying job somewhere else. That opportunity just doesn't exist in public industries where pay scales are rigidly set to the number of years of experience you have, or the specific job title. You can argue all you want but unless you're absolutely exceptional (undergrad paper in Nature level exceptional) you'll get nowhere.
One of the reasons that teachers and doctors have such absurdly poor working conditions and pay (in the UK at least) relative to the value they bring to society, is that they're mostly paid via the state so the only way they can demonstrate their value is through striking. If the government takes a hard line of strikes and public spending then those industries suffer.
Indeed. School teachers (not particularly well paid or managerial) are definitely part of the clerisy, supporting things like an [edit: added missing word "energy"] transition and, no surprises there, a greater role for education. Managers in companies that operate in the market: not so much.
The term “clerisy” to me rings clearer than “professional middle class” as he latter ignores [edit: removed autocorrect nonsense word] very real distinctions between corporate lawyers and directors of NGOs.
This essay is a total mess. This “neo-clerisy” thing to me smacks of tribalism dressed up, ironically, as public intellectualism. It’s a fractal of cognitive dissonance
The most interesting point made is that secular societies still have a clerisy (or clergy? What's the difference?). People who are powerful but not rich; deriving their power from moral authority; and highly dogmatic.
The details of the piece don't have quite enough support given how contraversial they are. That doesn't mean the author is wrong though. Worth more exploration and discussion.
Think of two middle-classes like Industrial vs Tech.
The atoms world of America is a world of decline and tech for now is on ascendance. That will not continue perpetually, sooner or later the tech boom will end and re-industrialization of US will begin. But that will need us going through lot of pain, suffering and healing.
You can see the same problems even within technology, look how dominant companies like Apple or Google have become whilst the rest of us are gleaning for leftovers.
This distinction is pointless for the people it purports to classify. An HVAC engineer working for a university is no different than an HVAC engineer working for a market driven company. Pretending that they are in two different middle classes is bullshit.
This article is a big struggle to fit people into bad classifications and suffers readability (and a point in general) because of it. An article grouping middle class members based on toilet paper orientation would be more interesting.
> An HVAC engineer working for a university is no different than an HVAC engineer working for a market driven company.
Mostly true, but not completely. The private company has to serve customers at least as well as the competition; the university's outfit has to do not too much worse than what they could get from an outside supplier.
Compare the university administrator to the HVAC company manager, and the difference widens. Compare the university president to the HVAC company owner, and it widens a lot further.
The only correct orientation for toilet paper is to keep it off the holder. Then you can hold the roll and "dual spool" to accumulate a nice fibrous lather with haste.
I'm always surprised to see Quillette show up here. For all the complaints about partisan bickering, politics in tech, etc. Quillette is an obviously biased political opinion page. (Not that I have a problem with bias in media -- in fact I'd much rather have opinionated media rather than the milquetoast 'both sides in equal measure' media we seem to strive for today.)
I wouldn't say they really stand for anything other than "opposiste of political correctness" regardless of the topic. They post articles that would never be allowed in other media.
Yep. They're only breaking into the main page a couple times a month. Still surprises me.
And judging by the replies here, seems like it surprises a bunch of other people. I'm not sure what the "opposite of political correctness" is except tilting at a strawman.
It describes a part of the middle class that gets its income from the market and another part that gets its income from non-market sources such as universities and the government and I found it a useful lens through which to view current events.
A more cynical, but illuminating, depiction of the way this class came to be recognized and criticized was given in an old New Yorker article about why Americans don't like Hillary Clinton -- from 1996:
>In the sixties and seventies, neoconservatives liked to talk about the ascent of “the New Class,” consisting of highly educated professionals who were, in Norman Podhoretz’s words, “making a serious bid to dislodge and replace the business and commercial class which had on the whole dominated the country for nearly a century.” Podhoretz ascribes to Irving Kristol (father of William) the insight that the New Class “represented itself as concerned only with the general good, the good of others (especially the poor and the blacks), but what it really wanted was to aggrandize its own power.” As the only First Lady thus far to have come from its ranks, Hillary Clinton has suffered the fluctuating fortunes of the New Class itself. Among her peers, you’ll hear, variously expressed, a very basic sentiment: finally, a First Lady who’s one of us. “It was just as if we’d known each other all our lives,” says Carly Simon, who has spent time at Martha’s Vineyard with the First Lady; when Hillary admired a naïve Haitian painting in Simon’s house, Simon made a present of it. “It was an easy, Ivy League kind of camaraderie. Like, ‘You went to Wellesley? Oh, I went to Sarah Lawrence.’ And, ‘Oh, you like that kind of art? I like that kind of art.’ ” But if you do not feel part of that “us”—if, indeed, the very idea of Haitian folk art on the Vineyard makes you shift uneasily—you may feel the tug of an answering sentiment: that this First Lady is one of them.
Both this Quillette piece and the New Yorker article are presaged and, in my opinion, upstaged by Hayek's 1960 diatribe "The Intellectuals and Socialism":
Hayek's piece seems to me to be the founding treatise of modern libertarianism, with regard to the parts that are valuable at least. The central hypocrisy of modern liberalism is the way in which it serves the selfish interests of its most powerful proponents -- the managerial state -- while supposing to be egalitarian. Unfortunately, Hayek himself simply became increasingly cynical and decreasingly coherent towards the end of his life, after publishing his most famous works from a more moderate perspective, so we didn't get to hear a conclusion to this train of thought.
It's not obvious how to overcome this limitation; all ideologies need a base of support, and people on average tend to be selfish enough that we notice it. Andrew Yang's proposal to give citizens money earmarked for political donations ("Democracy Dollars") seems, to me, the most practical step currently available towards making politics more participatory and less hierarchical: it can foster the growth of competition among political campaigns for ordinary people's support with floating prices, reminiscent of a system we usually think of as reliable. Innovation in politics is already happening (c.f. Cambridge Analytica) and the IP is being monetized, but only a few people are currently allowed to play.
While I have not read the Hayek work you mention, it is probably drawn from the same philosophical waters as a work that I recommend to anyone with an interest in this sort of thinking: "The Opium of the Intellectuals" by Raymond Aron. Aron was a French philosopher who contemplated the Intellectuals' fascination and infatuation with socialism and, at the time and place of writing (1950's France), Communism.
Of course the motivation for your comment is easy to deduce. It's okay, WalterBright gets downvoted sometimes too.
I assume I am being downvoted because I didn't read far enough to hear the author pivot into a tangent about green energy (which was apparently wrong, and which seems to be everyone else's focus). While Quillette's mission to highlight well-formed ideas that are unpopular may seem admirable, it cannot escape the fact that most people simply don't like to make public statements — which means that people who want to talk for the wrong reason are over-represented, no matter your ideology.
I just had a serious case of "read this one before" syndrome and I think both of those links are enlightening (and less distracted).
I didn’t downvote you. I appreciate the links, though not your dig at liberalism (“central hypocrisy”, etc.) and apparent affinity for libertarianism. My guess is that most of your downvotes come from Quillette defenders, who like to think of themselves as a cut above Daily Stormer readers (albeit perhaps less honest).
I was rather more negative about libertarianism than I was about liberalism, if you read carefully. I'm not a libertarian, but I do see the movement as a more meaningful criticism of modern politics than whatever the "right" is up to.
The last 2,000 years has seen countless civilisations rise and fall; so many and of such complexity it is basically impossible to learn all the lessons they have to teach about prosperity. Gotta spend a lot of time relearning old lessons and reorganising how we expect the thing to run.
This article is to represent the faction of people (not named, I'll call them Quilletians) who think that power and influence resting with small businesses and normal-but-wealthy families (identified as middle class yeomanry) is likely the secret sauce of why English-speaking countries have done so well so far.
The thesis here is that the yeomanry are being opposed by government or oligarchic policy and their perspective is being mitigated by a group of people called the 'clerisy'. The article is demarcating who this clerisy are and aren't so that there is a common language for Quilletians to work out what to think and then do about them.
Basically, it's a long-winded way of dividing the middle class into white-collar and blue-collar and pointing out that blue-collar has taken it in the shorts and is angry.
It's not wrong. But, as always, it projects nothing actionable. What does that blue-collar cohort DO to regain economic well-being?
While Brahmins are "white-collar" pretty much by definition, Vaishyas/yeomanry clearly encompasses both blue-collar and white-collar groups. So I don't think the traditional "blue- vs. white-collar" distinction is quite the same thing as what this article is about.
I think it would be close to how people in the clerisy (well payed employees with a secure job) take less risk and therefore are able to support left wing measures. If the economy as a whole crashes they stand to lose little or nothing at all. Meanwhile, if the "main street shop owners" take similar risks ins similar situations they not only stand to lose their business, but their current and future livelihood. This makes them conservative and against progressive policy.
Is this the same guy who got fired (or resigned?) from Google a week after getting hired for something silly like refusing to sign the employee code of conduct?
Is this a publication that normally publishes articles that are clearly well outside their authors' area of expertise and presents them in a semi-academic style after clearly doing no fact-checking?
Never mind silliness like analyzing Trump's "record support" in a survey begun during Trump's tenure, the way he presents wrong statistics with the help of the word "particularly" is downright ridiculous. People who like pizza tend to be shorter, particularly children.
A large part of that may be due to availability. In 1959 (closest year to 1960 I found data for [1]), 6% of US women had degrees, and 10.3% of men.
If every person wanted to marry someone with a degree, there would only be enough women with degrees for about 60% of men with degrees to marry women with degrees.
If the actual number was 25%, then men with degrees were marrying women with degrees about 42% as often as was theoretically possible.
In 2005, it was 26.5% of women and 28.9% of men with degrees, allowing in theory for about 93% of men with degrees to marry women with degrees, if everyone with a degree wanted to marry someone else with a degree.
If it is actually 48%, then men with degrees were marrying women with degrees about 52% as often as was theoretically possible, up from 42% in 1959.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...