4 ms·
The real class war is within the rich
- LatteLazy 6y agoCan anyone post the article? I'm pay-walled and outline/archive/vpn countries aren't doing it for me...
- kungito 6y agoA really interesting read. I have always wondered how in the so called Start Trek sci-fi future which allegedly awaits us will we overcome the issue of there being only one ship captain on the whole humongous ship. The whole "infinite resources" only really works if literally any resource is infinite, even the captain positions. Otherwise we are just back to politics
- jjk166 6y agoBuild an arbitrarily large fleet of ships to captain. More realistically, between ceremony and bureaucracy you can just keep creating positions and titles until everyone at least feels like they're the king of something.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI think there is no amount of ceremony that will make a janitor feel like a king while he "captains" his mop around at the bottom of an enormous bureaucracy.
- dragonsky 6y agoThen you make sure that the person who is the janitor actually wants to be doing that and is given the resources to be able to be the best janitor he can be. There seems to be an assumption that everybody wants to be the captain of the ship. Nothing could be further from the case. Most people just want a job they can grow in and be allowed to manage to do their best at. I know a lot of technical people who die inside when they have to make the shift to management path just to get a little more money. Almost inevitably they make fairly poor managers because what they really want to be doing is the technical work and they see their subordinates having all the fun.
- setr 6y agoAs a general rule, there are usually more shitty jobs that need doing, than people who actively want to do those shitty jobs. In your scheme, you need one person to want to be captain, to support a thousand-crew ship. You'll probably need fifty people to specifically want to be janitors to support that one person. Five hundred to be generic crewmen. A few to CxO. Fifty to be middle managers. And so on. I'm not sure the ratios work out the way you'd expect. For every person who wants to be a captain, you need an army to support him, and I'm not sure you have so few people who want to be in charge (take any high school group activity: someone always pops out at the "leader" -- by choice or necessity -- even in groups as small as 3. Those groups that don't gain a leader inevitably fail, due to disorder and chaos). And if such a population ratio does not exist, and the man who wants to be captain cannot be captain, then you have scarcity, and politic. Even among the "hardcore engineers", who revel in their non-leadership roles, that only holds as long as the system itself does; a bad manager, captain, etc, can completely kill the joy of such engineering, at which point, you find a new leader, or an engineer attempts to become a leader by (perceived) necessity.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> As a general rule, there are usually more shitty jobs that need doing, than people who actively want to do those shitty jobs. I'd argue that's true by definition: a "shitty" job is one where the value of the job to others induces recruitment not only beyond people who actively want to do the job, but so far beyond as include people who strongly prefer to avoid the job but who can't (or, at least, perceive that they can't) afford to turn down the money. And not just to include the last group, but to include them as a sizable fraction of the people employed in the job.
- trianglem 6y agoEveryone is a king with AI subjects?
- trianglem 6y agoHow are you guys reading this? Does everyone have a ~$70 subscription to ft?
- kungito 6y agoThere's a twitter link to the unwalled article on the website
- timoth3y 6y ago> overcome the issue of there being only one ship captain on the whole humongous ship I always figured that would be balanced out by the fact that there would be very few who large numbers of people would follow as captain. Even if you have all of your physical needs met, you would still need to prove yourself competent to lead others and for them to allow them to make decisions on their behalf.
- john4532452 6y agoGood Point. In the democracy too some chosen leader is making decision for others, the change in the startrek world would be the individual has an option to not follow the leader, simply because it would be possible.
- tuatoru 6y agoThe article is a puff piece about Peter Turchin,[1] a historian who takes the long view - sort of similar to Braudel's Annales school. The relevant theses of Turchin's here are that political unrest goes in cycles of 60-70 years, and the idea of "elite overproduction" -- too many people who think they belong at the top of the heap and not enough prestigious positions for them, which leads to infighting among the political class and increasing irrelevance of politics to the world of ordinary citizens. 1. http://peterturchin.com/ http://peterturchin.com/
- raarts 6y agoRelated and more detailed article: https://quillette.com/2020/02/27/the-two-middle-classes/ https://quillette.com/2020/02/27/the-two-middle-classes/
- binarycodedhex 6y agoConvenient trash copy to distract people from the actual class war. $47 TRILLION is what's missing from the pockets of the middle-, lower-, and homeless-classes in America in particular, stolen from the bottom 90% by the rich 1% from 1975 to 2018 (RAND Corp. figure). https://newrepublic.com/article/159478/rich-people-hilariously-freaked-biden-presidency https://newrepublic.com/article/159478/rich-people-hilarious... It's been going on a lot longer than that and likely more.
- ttonkytonk 6y agoThe "lawyer glut" the article mentions is an opportunity in my mind: the law educated are essentially the "keepers of the elenchus" and with a personal realignment from financial to virtuous concerns, they could become great benefactors to society.