10 ms·

The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy (2018)

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Quotables past: As I got older, the holiday pomp of patriotic luncheons and bridge-playing rituals came to seem faintly ridiculous and even offensive, like an endless birthday party for people whose chief accomplishment in life was just showing up. I came into many advantages by birth, but money was not among them. present: The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy. Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents. We tend to think that the victims of our success are just the people excluded from the club. But history shows quite clearly that, in the kind of game we’re playing, everybody loses badly in the end.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  not read the posted article yet BUT comment here -- people with a moral compass, and people with a sense of social fairness, are sometimes quick to judge societal developments as .. a failing of moral compass and social fairness (!) As one skilled in building machines, I tend to elevate the mechanistic outcomes of game rules when the numbers of parts get so large. Other large mechanistic factors include - What effect does the opiate years in USA have on economic consolidation? What about good old databases connected to networks? seems like both would tip the overall game outcomes quite a bit. How do you measure the economic output of a person developing a writing approach in literature? When you measure the economic outcomes, where does the individual show up? hint - not much.. other examples of individuals doing important things, and not showing up at all in aggregate statistics available on request :-) Class tension in society is an easy target, and may or may not explain game outcomes in a large system of active parts. "Our delusions of merit " seems like a personal therapy topic more than an explanation of game outcomes, to me.
  - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
    Maybe you should read the fucking article before you spout off then.
stephc_int13 5y ago
My intuition is that the emergence of classes is an inherent property of unperturbed social structures, amplified by the scale, regardless of the underlying political system. Perturbations are what shake the structure and prevent privilege to be passed and social structure from being reinforced at each generation. Peace, order, and stability are only good up to a point. Some chaos is needed to prevent societies to become too unequal. Successful technological innovations tend to bring perturbation to the system, as do wars, ecological catastrophes, and pandemics.
- minikites 5y ago
  Why does it need to be chaos instead of more methodical changes to society, such as much higher taxes on the very wealthy to be used by society for the benefit of all?
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    Given a series of proposed changes, those with wealth will seek to "game" those changes to retain that wealth. Jump down the double-Irish rabbit hole for a bit and think of the motivations of the people involved, all of them.
  - stephc_int13 5y ago
    Because changes will likely be made by people who are close to the political power, they will easily work around the rules.
    - minikites 5y ago
      So we shouldn't even try to rein in the wealthy?
      - stephc_int13 5y ago
        Yes, but asking politely won't do much, unfortunately. I am not suggesting violence, as this will only be temporary. In my opinion, a golden age society would have so much perpetual change that it would be extremely difficult to pass privilege from a generation to the next.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Quotes about meritocracy vs reality you will often hear ... in the United States everyone has an opportunity to make the leap: Mobility justifies inequality. As a matter of principle, this isn’t true. In the United States, it also turns out not to be true as a factual matter. Contrary to popular myth, economic mobility in the land of opportunity is not high, and it’s going down. Imagine yourself on the socioeconomic ladder with one end of a rubber band around your ankle and the other around your parents’ rung. The strength of the rubber determines how hard it is for you to escape the rung on which you were born. If your parents are high on the ladder, the band will pull you up should you fall; if they are low, it will drag you down when you start to rise. With these quotes are stats; they evidence how there is little mobility between socioeconomic classes. With limited exception, people tend to stay where they were born.
- minikites 5y ago
  The myths by Horatio Alger and his imitators have done a lot of damage to society, as it is typically used to blame people for matters outside of their personal control. According to that line of thinking, poor people deserve to be poor, because it's entirely within their control to not be poor.
gedy 5y ago
This seems to put blame on people who have avoided the meltdown in manufacturing and other blue collar jobs, rise in housing and medical costs, etc as if it were a zero sum game, and blaming it on "meritocracy".
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  I can think of no rational reading of this article that could bring you to such a summary. The problem is not that they aren't destroyed by the wider social or economic instability that destroys the lower class. It's that they are cutting rungs off of the socioeconomic ladder by the policies that they support. Ironically, your response is addressed in the body of the article. In part what we have here is a listening problem. Americans have trouble telling the difference between a social critique and a personal insult. Thus, a writer points to a broad social problem with complex origins, and the reader responds with, “What, you want to punish me for my success?”
  - gedy 5y ago
    Perhaps I'm focusing on the "9.9%" aspect in terms of salary, but many tech folks I know are there and certainly not the ones "cutting the runs off the ladder" nor do they support many of these policies. In fact, many are from lower classes and it's unfair to blame them for the real elites failings.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  He also seems to think that bringing everyone up to a prosperous and stable level (ignore the nuts and bolts of how) would reduce strife/polarization and increase unity. Some people without real problems tend to make mountains out of their mole-hills and be very petty over what are little differences. But I guess living in the moneyed Boston bubble it's hard to fathom that there exist people who, given the requisite good health and economist stability, would rather rip around on a dirt-bike than paddle a kayak up the Charles or would rather buy fireworks and cheap beef than impossible burger. Mr. Steward doesn't seem to understand that his tile guy and hair stylist won't magically act and think like him if their healthcare and kid's college becomes genuinely affordable. Say nothing of their opinions on the more touchy social issues or more contentions issues about how society should be run. I'm all for making things better for the lower classes (who isn't?). But solving their problems freeing them to care about others is a stick of societal dynamite. I don't care where it goes off. I want to see it go off, I think we'll be better off for it in the long run. I don't get the feeling the author understands the full implications of what he's asking for.
nfnbc 5y ago
Another author notices the Pareto curve as it applies to wealth and gawks What makes this HN content at all? It's not curious, it's self flagellation from the Coastal class You want to understand the other half? Talk to Trump voters.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  From the HN guidelines[1]: "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. ... If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. "Eschew flamebait. ... Please don't post shallow dismissals ... Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle." [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
bagacrap 5y ago
This long and rambling article starts with an anecdote about the author's own merit and class ascendance, only to move on to point out that class mobility is worse now than ever. It is written with no nod towards personal responsibility and instead argues that every outcome was predestined at birth (despite the author's humble brag to the contrary). I'm not sure what the thesis is, because as a person with a day job, I don't have time to read more than a half dozen paragraphs. It seems the author is motivated, at least to a degree, by guilt. I will say that I'm conflicted about passing privilege onto children. Should I be allowed to work hard to make money to give my kids a head start (tutors, for example)? It seems preposterous to say no, that I must treat my children as badly as the worst parent in the name of equality. OTOH maybe it's ok to institute a larger estate tax so that the next generation does have to contribute to society with all that knowledge we've collectively bestowed on them. It seems rather wasteful as a society to spend tons of resources educating funemployed/under-employed trust funders.
- svantana 5y ago
  > I must treat my children as badly as the worst parent in the name of equality This is close to the right-wing trope "the left wants everyone to be equally poor", when in reality it's more about gaining support for progressive policies such as free high-quality daycare, schools, health care for everybody. And realizing that it's super-expensive but still better for everyone in the long run. Beyond that, of course every parent should do their best to raise their kids right.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > it's more about gaining support for progressive policies such as free high-quality daycare, schools, health care for everybody I haven’t heard the left talk much about these things for a long time. These days it’s about defunding the police, blaming billionaires and tech, gun control etc.
    - DangitBobby 5y ago
      Strange, I hear about them all the time. Aren't they literally trying to pass affordable daycare as part of an infrastructure bill as we speak [1]? Wasn't a significant portion of the progressive platform during the Democratic primaries (not to be confused with Biden's platform) Medicare for All and other such progressive healthcare reform? I'm curious who you are listening to, because it's not progressive leadership (or would-be leadership). 1. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/27/991061868/democrats-outline-care-infrastructure-plan-with-paid-leave-and-child-care https://www.npr.org/2021/04/27/991061868/democrats-outline-c...
motohagiography 5y ago
This tactic of people not quite there saying they have it but don't deserve it (offering personal anecdotes in the Atlantic no less) seems a bit much. The trouble with the new meritocratic elite the author describes is that it isn't broadly recognized as an elite by the people outside it, which is arguably the source of cultural tensions now. It lacks a certain legitimacy, as though some people arrived and collected the symbols of an establishment and pretended to become them, like driving your own limousine and telling people you are rich. They have seized institutions certainly, but dying ones. Personally I don't have much patience for writers who forfeit the stewardship of the culture they inherited, especially to signal they have somehow transcended it. It's a kind of moral bargaining that avoids accepting they have failed to build and sustain the freedoms and opportunities of their culture, and these are the self justifying stories they tell themselves. Being more concerned with how to distribute wealth than how to build, grow, and sustain it is a cheap substitute activity. They are nice words that provide comfort to some readers I'm sure, but I can't afford such cheap ideas.
- frazbin 5y ago
  I'm sure you don't have time for this; none of us strugglers do. Gotta do it anyway though-- can't save the republic without saving a few voters. Please recognize that the culture we've inherited comes with a lot of liberal values and also massive amount of hypocrisy-- strong values loosely held if you like; and that liberal whiners necessary to align those values with actions in a real nation. Making money is the bottom line.. unless you're approaching a failed state; then all of a sudden avoiding instability is the bottom line. Spitting on someone who is trying to gently and sensitively remind you that we are starting to look a little more like a failed state... seems really disrespectful of the process that got us here.
  - motohagiography 5y ago
    I can't quite parse this. What does this mean? Not sure whether anyone has asked for this gentle sensitivity, that we are somehow obliged to the author for it, or that we should sustain their pretenses. My comment was to assert that in spite of the author's contortions, their concern for others seemed self-interested, aspirational, and insincere.

Quotables past: As I got older, the holiday pomp of patriotic luncheons and bridge-playing rituals came to seem faintly ridiculous and even offensive, like an endless birthday party for people whose chief accomplishment in life was just showing up. I came into many advantages by birth, but money was not among them. present: The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy. Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents. We tend to think that the victims of our success are just the people excluded from the club. But history shows quite clearly that, in the kind of game we’re playing, everybody loses badly in the end.

mistrial9 5y ago
not read the posted article yet BUT comment here -- people with a moral compass, and people with a sense of social fairness, are sometimes quick to judge societal developments as .. a failing of moral compass and social fairness (!) As one skilled in building machines, I tend to elevate the mechanistic outcomes of game rules when the numbers of parts get so large. Other large mechanistic factors include - What effect does the opiate years in USA have on economic consolidation? What about good old databases connected to networks? seems like both would tip the overall game outcomes quite a bit. How do you measure the economic output of a person developing a writing approach in literature? When you measure the economic outcomes, where does the individual show up? hint - not much.. other examples of individuals doing important things, and not showing up at all in aggregate statistics available on request :-) Class tension in society is an easy target, and may or may not explain game outcomes in a large system of active parts. "Our delusions of merit " seems like a personal therapy topic more than an explanation of game outcomes, to me.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
  Maybe you should read the fucking article before you spout off then.

stephc_int13 5y ago

My intuition is that the emergence of classes is an inherent property of unperturbed social structures, amplified by the scale, regardless of the underlying political system. Perturbations are what shake the structure and prevent privilege to be passed and social structure from being reinforced at each generation. Peace, order, and stability are only good up to a point. Some chaos is needed to prevent societies to become too unequal. Successful technological innovations tend to bring perturbation to the system, as do wars, ecological catastrophes, and pandemics.

minikites 5y ago
Why does it need to be chaos instead of more methodical changes to society, such as much higher taxes on the very wealthy to be used by society for the benefit of all?
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  Given a series of proposed changes, those with wealth will seek to "game" those changes to retain that wealth. Jump down the double-Irish rabbit hole for a bit and think of the motivations of the people involved, all of them.
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  Because changes will likely be made by people who are close to the political power, they will easily work around the rules.
  - minikites 5y ago
    So we shouldn't even try to rein in the wealthy?
    - stephc_int13 5y ago
      Yes, but asking politely won't do much, unfortunately. I am not suggesting violence, as this will only be temporary. In my opinion, a golden age society would have so much perpetual change that it would be extremely difficult to pass privilege from a generation to the next.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

Quotes about meritocracy vs reality you will often hear ... in the United States everyone has an opportunity to make the leap: Mobility justifies inequality. As a matter of principle, this isn’t true. In the United States, it also turns out not to be true as a factual matter. Contrary to popular myth, economic mobility in the land of opportunity is not high, and it’s going down. Imagine yourself on the socioeconomic ladder with one end of a rubber band around your ankle and the other around your parents’ rung. The strength of the rubber determines how hard it is for you to escape the rung on which you were born. If your parents are high on the ladder, the band will pull you up should you fall; if they are low, it will drag you down when you start to rise. With these quotes are stats; they evidence how there is little mobility between socioeconomic classes. With limited exception, people tend to stay where they were born.

minikites 5y ago
The myths by Horatio Alger and his imitators have done a lot of damage to society, as it is typically used to blame people for matters outside of their personal control. According to that line of thinking, poor people deserve to be poor, because it's entirely within their control to not be poor.

gedy 5y ago

This seems to put blame on people who have avoided the meltdown in manufacturing and other blue collar jobs, rise in housing and medical costs, etc as if it were a zero sum game, and blaming it on "meritocracy".

DangitBobby 5y ago
I can think of no rational reading of this article that could bring you to such a summary. The problem is not that they aren't destroyed by the wider social or economic instability that destroys the lower class. It's that they are cutting rungs off of the socioeconomic ladder by the policies that they support. Ironically, your response is addressed in the body of the article. In part what we have here is a listening problem. Americans have trouble telling the difference between a social critique and a personal insult. Thus, a writer points to a broad social problem with complex origins, and the reader responds with, “What, you want to punish me for my success?”
- gedy 5y ago
  Perhaps I'm focusing on the "9.9%" aspect in terms of salary, but many tech folks I know are there and certainly not the ones "cutting the runs off the ladder" nor do they support many of these policies. In fact, many are from lower classes and it's unfair to blame them for the real elites failings.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
He also seems to think that bringing everyone up to a prosperous and stable level (ignore the nuts and bolts of how) would reduce strife/polarization and increase unity. Some people without real problems tend to make mountains out of their mole-hills and be very petty over what are little differences. But I guess living in the moneyed Boston bubble it's hard to fathom that there exist people who, given the requisite good health and economist stability, would rather rip around on a dirt-bike than paddle a kayak up the Charles or would rather buy fireworks and cheap beef than impossible burger. Mr. Steward doesn't seem to understand that his tile guy and hair stylist won't magically act and think like him if their healthcare and kid's college becomes genuinely affordable. Say nothing of their opinions on the more touchy social issues or more contentions issues about how society should be run. I'm all for making things better for the lower classes (who isn't?). But solving their problems freeing them to care about others is a stick of societal dynamite. I don't care where it goes off. I want to see it go off, I think we'll be better off for it in the long run. I don't get the feeling the author understands the full implications of what he's asking for.

nfnbc 5y ago

Another author notices the Pareto curve as it applies to wealth and gawks What makes this HN content at all? It's not curious, it's self flagellation from the Coastal class You want to understand the other half? Talk to Trump voters.

pmoriarty 5y ago
From the HN guidelines[1]: "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. ... If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. "Eschew flamebait. ... Please don't post shallow dismissals ... Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle." [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bagacrap 5y ago

This long and rambling article starts with an anecdote about the author's own merit and class ascendance, only to move on to point out that class mobility is worse now than ever. It is written with no nod towards personal responsibility and instead argues that every outcome was predestined at birth (despite the author's humble brag to the contrary). I'm not sure what the thesis is, because as a person with a day job, I don't have time to read more than a half dozen paragraphs. It seems the author is motivated, at least to a degree, by guilt. I will say that I'm conflicted about passing privilege onto children. Should I be allowed to work hard to make money to give my kids a head start (tutors, for example)? It seems preposterous to say no, that I must treat my children as badly as the worst parent in the name of equality. OTOH maybe it's ok to institute a larger estate tax so that the next generation does have to contribute to society with all that knowledge we've collectively bestowed on them. It seems rather wasteful as a society to spend tons of resources educating funemployed/under-employed trust funders.

svantana 5y ago
> I must treat my children as badly as the worst parent in the name of equality This is close to the right-wing trope "the left wants everyone to be equally poor", when in reality it's more about gaining support for progressive policies such as free high-quality daycare, schools, health care for everybody. And realizing that it's super-expensive but still better for everyone in the long run. Beyond that, of course every parent should do their best to raise their kids right.
- zepto 5y ago
  > it's more about gaining support for progressive policies such as free high-quality daycare, schools, health care for everybody I haven’t heard the left talk much about these things for a long time. These days it’s about defunding the police, blaming billionaires and tech, gun control etc.
  - DangitBobby 5y ago
    Strange, I hear about them all the time. Aren't they literally trying to pass affordable daycare as part of an infrastructure bill as we speak [1]? Wasn't a significant portion of the progressive platform during the Democratic primaries (not to be confused with Biden's platform) Medicare for All and other such progressive healthcare reform? I'm curious who you are listening to, because it's not progressive leadership (or would-be leadership). 1. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/27/991061868/democrats-outline-care-infrastructure-plan-with-paid-leave-and-child-care https://www.npr.org/2021/04/27/991061868/democrats-outline-c...

motohagiography 5y ago

This tactic of people not quite there saying they have it but don't deserve it (offering personal anecdotes in the Atlantic no less) seems a bit much. The trouble with the new meritocratic elite the author describes is that it isn't broadly recognized as an elite by the people outside it, which is arguably the source of cultural tensions now. It lacks a certain legitimacy, as though some people arrived and collected the symbols of an establishment and pretended to become them, like driving your own limousine and telling people you are rich. They have seized institutions certainly, but dying ones. Personally I don't have much patience for writers who forfeit the stewardship of the culture they inherited, especially to signal they have somehow transcended it. It's a kind of moral bargaining that avoids accepting they have failed to build and sustain the freedoms and opportunities of their culture, and these are the self justifying stories they tell themselves. Being more concerned with how to distribute wealth than how to build, grow, and sustain it is a cheap substitute activity. They are nice words that provide comfort to some readers I'm sure, but I can't afford such cheap ideas.

frazbin 5y ago
I'm sure you don't have time for this; none of us strugglers do. Gotta do it anyway though-- can't save the republic without saving a few voters. Please recognize that the culture we've inherited comes with a lot of liberal values and also massive amount of hypocrisy-- strong values loosely held if you like; and that liberal whiners necessary to align those values with actions in a real nation. Making money is the bottom line.. unless you're approaching a failed state; then all of a sudden avoiding instability is the bottom line. Spitting on someone who is trying to gently and sensitively remind you that we are starting to look a little more like a failed state... seems really disrespectful of the process that got us here.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  I can't quite parse this. What does this mean? Not sure whether anyone has asked for this gentle sensitivity, that we are somehow obliged to the author for it, or that we should sustain their pretenses. My comment was to assert that in spite of the author's contortions, their concern for others seemed self-interested, aspirational, and insincere.