16 ms·

Crises of Elite Competition in the East and West

106 points by arexxbifs 5y ago

dustintrex 5y ago
Fascinating. TL;DR: What we think of as the Asian/Confucian/Tiger Mom school model of cramming every minute of your day actually originates from Prussia, while Western universities are rapidly going in the opposite direction and de-emphasizing book learning in favor of public demonstrations of virtue -- only it's not Confucian virtue, but wokeness. Is Europe the only stronghold of sanity left?
- derbOac 5y ago
  In my own area, as an American, I increasingly feel that way.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Hmm. So both western and eastern education systems are turning away from their cultural roots, trying to find some magic in the other's approach. > The situations of Asian countries and the United States differ substantially in the details, but both face the same core problem: how to offer as many people as possible a decent job with a family wage. This is the heart of the (rather length) article. Elite competition is so intense because the consequences of not making it into the elite are so stark. (Related: Even getting the elite degree doesn't mean that you get a decent job. The elite competition doesn't end when you get into college, or even when you get out.)
- mrkentutbabi 5y ago
  Is "offer as many people as possible a decent job with a family wage" even possible realistically? I am no philosopher but I find it hard to believe that this is possible.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    It’s certainly possible to offer as much as possible. The question is how much is possible?
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I don't know. Is it possible to do better than we are? Probably. How much better? I don't know. We could repudiate NAFTA and close off trade with China. This could bring back local manufacturing, and the possibility of a working-class job being a reasonable life. This could also lead to us falling behind the rest of the world, as they create economies of scale that we can't match. Is that better or worse than the current state of affairs? I don't know.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    I think if we don't know the answer, I'd rather try than assume it can't be done.
    - cinquemb 5y ago
      I'm not sure how far policy makers expect to get when the corner stone of public policy everywhere seems (to me at least) to hinge on forcing individuals to try in some particular way that they may not be willing to allocate resources (i.e time, money, labor, knowledge, skills, etc) for weak incentives in return.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  It's ultimately a result of increasing returns to scale from technology. If the top 1% of every class gets you marginally better competitiveness in the market as a firm and you can feasibly capture 100% of the market (or a large majority) across billions of customers with a few thousand employees then you're going to pay for the top 1%. On top of that, increasing adoption of technology means that more of the economy becomes driven by engineers. Computer science is one of the few fields where a top 1% individual can actually be 10x more productive than the median. Combine these two things together - being able to instantaneously scale improvements across billions of customers for almost free because of the Internet, and technology's growth resulting in more jobs having a wider productivity gap between median and top 1% - and you get massive salaries for the top 1% and comparative peanuts for everyone else. The exact same dynamic plays out in finance, Hollywood, YouTube content creation, and other winner takes all markets.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    But in some ways, it's worse than that, because these evaluations aren't based on the top 1%, they're based on some proxy, and that proxy is assumed to be static. So, to simplify things, you have some placement exam. You're only allowed to take it once, twice, or a few times at a critical point in your life. We know that exam is only correlated like 0.30 at best with actual aptitude, which fluctuates over time. And yet that exam is treated as if it is correlated 0.90 or greater with aptitude, and that aptitude cannot change. This is part of the problem too. Some (much?) of this winner-takes-all phenomenon is due to societal structures around these occupations, nothing inherent to the occupations or activities themselves. It's rent-seeking and protectionism. My guess is at some level it's not a whole lot different from economic dynamics pre-world-wars era, but justified through different means, where society is blind for whatever reason to the errors in economic assumptions that the world works around, and the serious consequences those errors bring. Increases in scale from technology undoubtedly play a role, but I doubt that's all of it. The NY Times once published an article about income distributions across fields, and you could see this winner-takes all phenomenon in all sorts of places. To me, it seems to have something to do with salary and benefits distributions more than anything else. If you take medicine just as one example (which could be an entire book into itself), it's true that there have been technological advances that scale all sorts of things. But there's also little natural competition, due to overregulation. So you have a hierarchy, with medical administrators on top, physicians below, nurses below that, and then everyone else at increasing degrees of separation. This occurs in part because of the tendency for the administrators to control cash flows toward themselves, but also because the regulations make it impossible for cost structures to exist in any way but one where physicians get paid the most. There's lots of examples of this. In my mind, the problem really is income distribution. It's not a matter of equality in the stereotypical communist sense, but more about fair or rational evaluation in an economic sense. Everyone can point to bubbles in markets and say "this is way too overvaluated." That's something that has a clear meaning, even if it's hard to define at times. To me this overvaluation is everywhere. We live in an era of monopolies, and we rationalize it everywhere.
- Bayart 5y ago
  What the author refers to "Prussian" education is hardly the Western tradition, quite the opposite.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Fair. It's the western tradition of the last 100 years, though.
1cvmask 5y ago
Isn't the vast majority of the true problems caused by not enough supply of all KINDS of NEW housing being built to accompany both massive population growth (including immigrants in some areas), massive wealth increase among the global rich (who can now own multiple empty properties in marquee cities), landlords eating up more of your income AND in the US case government rules and regulations creating a predatory medical system that consumes over 18 percent of GDP. In the 70s a blue collar worker could buy a house and look after their family. Now we have massive asset price inflation due to low interest rates and not enough growth in housing assets. This can lead to future social unrest on a massive scale (not just occasional riots/protests).
- nradov 5y ago
  There are many places in the US where a skilled blue collar worker can buy a house and look after a family. But HN users tend to have a distorted perspective since most of them live in the SF Bay Area and other expensive areas.
  - YesThatTom2 5y ago
    Where? Where in the US can someone live on blue collar salary and afford a mortgage?
    - b9a2cab5 5y ago
      Plenty of places in the Midwest/South if you're a tradesman. Obviously a McDonald's worker or Starbucks barista is probably not going to be able to afford a mortgage.
      - stefan_ 5y ago
        This is obvious because? We certainly have the wealth for it.
        b9a2cab5 5y ago
bendbro 5y ago
> The retreat by much of the Right into localism or an exclusive focus on personal virtue is a tacit admission that individuals simply have to look out for themselves, an equally empty response No you can't just take your ball and leave!
smilekzs 5y ago
My rephrase of a key take-away point: As long as the underlying incentives remain misaligned, individual policy changes aimed to disrupt the competition landscape across the board would inevitably play the whack-a-mole game.
chillacy 5y ago
This is a very well reasoned article. The central thesis is that if culture follows economic realities (a notion I first encountered in Sapiens but have come to strongly believe), then readers (seems the audience consists of US cultural conservatives) should focus their efforts on changing the underlying economics, not waging the culture war. > No amount of snappy YouTube videos decrying the “degeneracy” of current elite trends, no amount of influencers selling the “trad lifestyle” to Instagram followers, no amount of pithy arguments aimed at defeating some imagined foe with “facts and logic” will affect these issues in any meaningful way > In the struggle between tradition and economic reality, tradition simply ends up being destroyed, excepting the few parts that can be adapted to serve completely new ends. I would posit that a 3rd option exists that the author dismissed, but it would be to move to a new system (which is self-sustaining, unlike birth + immigration that the author dismisses) to match the new realities. I get that conservative thought is that it's safest to cling to that which we know, but with all the changes so far (and to come with automation), it might be as fruitless as running a knowledge economy like a feudal monarchy.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  > I would posit that a 3rd option exists that the author dismissed, but it would be to move to a new system Do you mean changing the American system, or do you mean moving, as an individual, from America? If "changing the American system", then I think that's what he wants. He seems to want industrial policy, possibly state control of industry -- whatever it takes to employ everyone and give them good wages. A Republican pivot to the working class. (Or even a Democratic one? (Though that's arguably what the Green New Deal is supposed to be about, even if it ends up being modest.)) If "moving from America", then I agree that's the option he didn't even consider. It may be possible to simply escape the competition. Doing this would rest on geographic arbitrage and the privilege of having been born in a developed country. That might make it "bad" in some peoples' eyes, but it might work for the individual. Even a fairly poor American could be a fairly rich person in another part of the world, by taking their (unfair) Fedbucks with them.
  - chillacy 5y ago
    > If "changing the American system", then I think that's what he wants. He seems to want industrial policy, possibly state control of industry -- whatever it takes to employ everyone and give them good wages. A Republican pivot to the working class. Yea I also read it that way. Reading between the lines a bit, I see some of a desire for the America in the 50s and 60s, not super uncommon of a sentiment for a variety of reasons. In retrospect I should have just co-opted the author's language: > In the struggle between tradition and economic reality, tradition simply ends up being destroyed If there are two dependent variables: economic reality and tradition, the author wants to fix tradition and find the economic reality which allows for that. I would posit that historically, the long term trend is for tradition to change to match economic realities, so the way out of this might be to find new traditions which are self sustaining (positive birth rates or birth+immigration as the author says).
frazbin 5y ago
An essay on the theme "compare and contrast SK/JP/CN educational cutthroatism with 21st century woke culture." Good enough if that's the question assigned but.. why? Aoparently to push the zero sum narrative of elite overproduction, and pretending we all wanna go to Harvard when state schools are still perfectly adequate, then additionally pretending that you have to be a multi-intersectional individual to get into Harvard... seems like this guy just wants to have his culture war.
BariumBlue 5y ago
I'm finding it interesting that all of the comments so far seem to have drawn very different conclusions about what the article was about. I think this article has many unique viewpoints that people aren't used to and think of the point that stuck out to them the most as "the point" of the article
- Barrin92 5y ago
  yes it's a good piece. As a non-American reader I'm kind of impressed with the stuff they're putting out because they're representing a much missing view in US discourse which is a Marxist economic point of view for a Conservative audience, basically what you'd call a 'Red Tory' in the UK or a 'Christdemokrat' in Germany. It's getting people to think and at the same time it's also a reasonable antidote for the 'culture-war' steeped people.
- fullshark 5y ago
  To me it’s clear in the concluding paragraph: > The situations of Asian countries and the United States differ substantially in the details, but both face the same core problem: how to offer as many people as possible a decent job with a family wage. The argument is everything stems from this failing (declining birth rates, cutthroat testing culture, woke language games to signal elite status etc)
- pydry 5y ago
  The article itself lurches all over the place and takes some bizarre turns - e.g. the weird conspiracy theory thrown out about how attempts at more egalitarian college admissions are simply a backhanded dig at Jews and Asians, the barely concealed indignation at anything "woke" and the re-definition of elite to mean "literally anyone with a college degree". The views he holds seem pretty average among worried Beltway center-right elites (actual elites), although not in any way representative of average Americans.
  - ctchocula 5y ago
    Agree with most of your analysis. However, one place I take issue with is your claim that "the weird conspiracy theory thrown out about how attempts at more egalitarian college admissions are simply a backhanded dig at Jews and Asians". Given that we have it on good historical evidence the up and rising Jewish population in elite colleges in early 20th century made Caucasians in those institutions feel threatened, which caused them to change applications to add extra-curriculars as a metric, which was the mechanism to decrease the number of Jewish students admitted---given it's played out this way before where a rising racial minority group has been discriminated against in favour of White applicants, surely you cannot blame people for suspecting the admission process is again being made (a) less meritocratic, (b) decreasing number of Asian and Jewish admissions, and (c) increasing White admissions all in the name of racial equity?
nazgulnarsil 5y ago
The four major black holes of modernity are not the result of incorrectly tuned policy levers but the result of fundamental cultural blindspots. These four areas: education, medicine, housing, and prison, all relate to one central problem. An incoherent philosophy when it comes to the concept of 'responsibility.' When I say black holes I mean that they are capable of sucking up arbitrary amounts of capital as we fight over them fruitlessly. And to be absolutely clear: the claim here is not that personal responsiibity should be 'higher' or 'lower' (whatever those mean) than they are now, that's what I mean by fighting over them. I genuinely mean that the incoherence of the concept itself is the problem. Consider the following questions: how responsible is a criminal for their actions? how responsible are young people for making good decisions about their education? to what degree are NIMBYs responsible for the housing crisis? how can externalities of housing be assigned responsibility to various parties? does the medicalization of problems, and thus the denial of agency lead to more problems than it solves? You've seen debates about these and they never go anywhere because there aren't final answers. There is no algorithm for 'blame' that is perfectly equitable. Neither holding people to high standards nor relaxing those standards is stable or workable. Reality is always multicausal and situations are different. The traditional answer to this is the discretion of judges to adjust to what is happening. But law still has to deal with the fundamental incoherence and it has been deprived of one of the historical ways it has dealt with it. The idea that different people might have differing capabilities to take responsibility for things, whatever the reason, is in untenable tension with the notion that all men are created equal. We have a few categories that recognize that not everyone can hold the same privileges such as child, felon, or legally mentally unable to grant consent. There are also the only semi legible ways that money and access grant privileges while that very same hidden nature frees the beneficiaries of any responsibility for the poor exercise of said privilege. Now we're seeing other countries find their own ways forward in creating a tiered society like China's social credit system or the soft classism of inscrutable and gameable admission to elite colleges (whereas before lower class people got in on merit). These are terrible solutions and we had better find better ones before the march of history declares a shitty winner for us. We can find a way to more tightly couple privileges and responsibilities or we can continue reaping the externalities of allowing incentives to drive a stronger wedge between them.
- 5y ago
syndacks 5y ago
Holy smokes, pull up a bag of popcorn, pour a glass of Pinot, and heat up that Volcano! This heavy hitter brings the cultural pith of a Franzen novel and the citation-laden academic register of an SEO educated academic behind a pseudonym. Wokeness, SATs, Xi, culture wars, and Marx -- oh my!
- pfkurtz 5y ago
  For. Real. What pathetic nonsense.
joe_the_user 5y ago
Student loan forgiveness may be a handout to a certain sector but it's a way to shape the economy. The problem the US has is vastly expanded educational sector that's also, uh, crap. A more rigorous but less inflated system would be appropriate. But how you get that is hard to see. The thing is, you have huge sectors; education, public transit, health care etc, that would be reasonable to improve but where privatization based capital investment have resulted in huge, costly and, well, shitty systems. The only way out is removing a huge group of corrupt operators at the heart of each of these sectors. I don't know what hope there is of this tbh.
- eru 5y ago
  Yes, student loan forgiveness would bloat the education sector even more. You could shrink the education sector by removing subsidies and tax discounts for it. (Of course, that's politically hard to do.) > The thing is, you have huge sectors; education, public transit, health care etc, that would be reasonable to improve but where privatization based capital investment have resulted in huge, costly and, well, shitty systems. I'm not so sure. Eg talk to any 'right-thinking' Brit and they will tell you how horrible British Rail privatisation was. Then compare the graphs in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_... See also https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SurfaceFreightTransportationDeregulation.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SurfaceFreightTransporta... and https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html Or look into the recent-ish success of German legalising long distance bus travel.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    > student loan forgiveness would bloat the education sector even more this is remarkably one-sided
    - eru 5y ago
      How so? If you replace the slightly loaded term 'bloat', you would get something fairly unobjectionable: 'Forgiving loans people take out for an activity, would lead to more of that activity.' Or what do you mean?
mherdeg 5y ago
I've been reading a Neil Gaiman book to the youngest kid every now and then which goes like: > Ladies of Light & Ladies of Darkness, > & Ladies of Never-You-Mind, > this is a prayer for a Blueberry Girl. > First, May you ladies be kind. > … > Dull days at forty, false friends at fifteen; > Let her have brave days and truth. > Let her go places that we’ve never been; > Trust and delight in her youth. And then I read stuff like this, or articles about the grim reality of private schools (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private...), and I wonder … how did we get here? is this what it means to want your kids to go places we've never been? Is this ... good? From Flanagan's Atlantic article: > Why do these parents need so much reassurance? They “are finding that it’s harder and harder to get their children through the eye of the needle”—admitted into the best programs, all the way from kindergarten to college. But it’s more than that. The parents have a sense that their kids will be emerging into a bleaker landscape than they did. The brutal, winner-take-all economy won’t come for them—they’ve been grandfathered in. But they fear that it’s coming for their children, and that even a good education might not secure them a professional-class career. > … > Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, coined the term meritocracy trap—a system that rewards an ever-growing share of society’s riches to an ever-shrinking pool of winners. “Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone,” he has written in these pages. “In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite.” This is a system that screws the poor, hollows out the middle class, and turns rich kids into exhausted, anxious, and maximally stressed-out adolescents who believe their future depends on getting into one of a very small group of colleges that routinely reject upwards of 90 percent of their applicants. Is that all there is? Is it just, work work work, get the kids into a good school, line up their tutors and extracurricular enrichment, watch them graduate, maybe meet the grandkids, die? Why do so many people want this so much?
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Not everyone does — many of us are enjoying our lives rather than writing about them. These stories of job anxiety are dramatic and that sells ads. What they don’t show you are the corporate middle manager who does the 9-5 and ducks out of work at noon on Friday to go ride dirt bikes with his kids.
pfkurtz 5y ago
How can an article about "elite competition" not mention anything about how, during a few decades in the 20th Century, labor's share of profits increased, and since 1980 has flatlined, with all rewards accruing to capital? What analysis of elites doesn't include reference to Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch? The author seems to get that the ruthless competition in our world is destroying lives, but he seems to blame the competitors and those who seek to improve things.
- wmf 5y ago
  To be fair it does mention "Retreads of the Reagan program today serve as a stale punchline rather than a serious attempt at politics. ...adding more free-market Reaganism to combat the fallout from free-market Reaganism".
  - pfkurtz 5y ago
    Yeah I know, but this seems like a throwaway line designed to add "both sides" cover, in between several paragraphs of shadowboxing the Left. The owners of the system seem curiously left out of most analysis.
  - hogFeast 5y ago
    It explicitly criticises the inability of the economy to create enough jobs. It says that Marx was correct about capitalism (btw, contrary to what people think, this is a fairly common view amongst conservatives who tend to be well-read enough to know that Marx's critiques of capitalism are quite distinct from Marxism). It is a fairly traditional conservative critique of capitalism that actually predates Marx by five decades (capitalism is dehumanizing, it breaks down traditional relations, capitalism is destructive socially/culturally).
    - pfkurtz 5y ago
      The US jobless is at record lows. That is a bad criticism of our economic system, because it isn't true. It might be the case that some powerful economic actors work to undermine full employment some of the time (for instance). But the specifics matter. What matters is the kinds of jobs and how much of the pie is being distributed, a fact completely left out of their article. Do conservatives care about having an economy that's actually just and equitable? That's a pretty big part of what Marx was getting at; much bigger than the one point about how it undermines traditional religious belief (a good thing). That would probably solve their concerns about not enough young people starting families. I've heard a lot of rhetoric, and I've seen what literally every "conservative" politician actually does: enrich entrenched elites, undermine democracy, and make the violent parts of the state less accountable to the public.
ilaksh 5y ago
The concluding sentence is the key takeaway for me. > Unless the productive forces driving spiraling competition for diminishing social and economic resources are resolved, social atomization, cultural conflict, and their many effects will continue, in one guise or another. My take is that most of the apparent social problems are related to problems like economic inequality and insufficiency. And the best hope we have to improve them is actually logistical/technical. Better application of technology, such as for enhanced collaborative monitoring and reporting of resource usage and more sophisticated distribution systems (including high-tech forms of money) should make a big difference.

106 points by arexxbifs 5y ago

Fascinating. TL;DR: What we think of as the Asian/Confucian/Tiger Mom school model of cramming every minute of your day actually originates from Prussia, while Western universities are rapidly going in the opposite direction and de-emphasizing book learning in favor of public demonstrations of virtue -- only it's not Confucian virtue, but wokeness. Is Europe the only stronghold of sanity left?

derbOac 5y ago
In my own area, as an American, I increasingly feel that way.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

Hmm. So both western and eastern education systems are turning away from their cultural roots, trying to find some magic in the other's approach. > The situations of Asian countries and the United States differ substantially in the details, but both face the same core problem: how to offer as many people as possible a decent job with a family wage. This is the heart of the (rather length) article. Elite competition is so intense because the consequences of not making it into the elite are so stark. (Related: Even getting the elite degree doesn't mean that you get a decent job. The elite competition doesn't end when you get into college, or even when you get out.)

mrkentutbabi 5y ago
Is "offer as many people as possible a decent job with a family wage" even possible realistically? I am no philosopher but I find it hard to believe that this is possible.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  It’s certainly possible to offer as much as possible. The question is how much is possible?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I don't know. Is it possible to do better than we are? Probably. How much better? I don't know. We could repudiate NAFTA and close off trade with China. This could bring back local manufacturing, and the possibility of a working-class job being a reasonable life. This could also lead to us falling behind the rest of the world, as they create economies of scale that we can't match. Is that better or worse than the current state of affairs? I don't know.
- derbOac 5y ago
  I think if we don't know the answer, I'd rather try than assume it can't be done.
  - cinquemb 5y ago
    I'm not sure how far policy makers expect to get when the corner stone of public policy everywhere seems (to me at least) to hinge on forcing individuals to try in some particular way that they may not be willing to allocate resources (i.e time, money, labor, knowledge, skills, etc) for weak incentives in return.
b9a2cab5 5y ago
It's ultimately a result of increasing returns to scale from technology. If the top 1% of every class gets you marginally better competitiveness in the market as a firm and you can feasibly capture 100% of the market (or a large majority) across billions of customers with a few thousand employees then you're going to pay for the top 1%. On top of that, increasing adoption of technology means that more of the economy becomes driven by engineers. Computer science is one of the few fields where a top 1% individual can actually be 10x more productive than the median. Combine these two things together - being able to instantaneously scale improvements across billions of customers for almost free because of the Internet, and technology's growth resulting in more jobs having a wider productivity gap between median and top 1% - and you get massive salaries for the top 1% and comparative peanuts for everyone else. The exact same dynamic plays out in finance, Hollywood, YouTube content creation, and other winner takes all markets.
- derbOac 5y ago
  But in some ways, it's worse than that, because these evaluations aren't based on the top 1%, they're based on some proxy, and that proxy is assumed to be static. So, to simplify things, you have some placement exam. You're only allowed to take it once, twice, or a few times at a critical point in your life. We know that exam is only correlated like 0.30 at best with actual aptitude, which fluctuates over time. And yet that exam is treated as if it is correlated 0.90 or greater with aptitude, and that aptitude cannot change. This is part of the problem too. Some (much?) of this winner-takes-all phenomenon is due to societal structures around these occupations, nothing inherent to the occupations or activities themselves. It's rent-seeking and protectionism. My guess is at some level it's not a whole lot different from economic dynamics pre-world-wars era, but justified through different means, where society is blind for whatever reason to the errors in economic assumptions that the world works around, and the serious consequences those errors bring. Increases in scale from technology undoubtedly play a role, but I doubt that's all of it. The NY Times once published an article about income distributions across fields, and you could see this winner-takes all phenomenon in all sorts of places. To me, it seems to have something to do with salary and benefits distributions more than anything else. If you take medicine just as one example (which could be an entire book into itself), it's true that there have been technological advances that scale all sorts of things. But there's also little natural competition, due to overregulation. So you have a hierarchy, with medical administrators on top, physicians below, nurses below that, and then everyone else at increasing degrees of separation. This occurs in part because of the tendency for the administrators to control cash flows toward themselves, but also because the regulations make it impossible for cost structures to exist in any way but one where physicians get paid the most. There's lots of examples of this. In my mind, the problem really is income distribution. It's not a matter of equality in the stereotypical communist sense, but more about fair or rational evaluation in an economic sense. Everyone can point to bubbles in markets and say "this is way too overvaluated." That's something that has a clear meaning, even if it's hard to define at times. To me this overvaluation is everywhere. We live in an era of monopolies, and we rationalize it everywhere.
Bayart 5y ago
What the author refers to "Prussian" education is hardly the Western tradition, quite the opposite.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Fair. It's the western tradition of the last 100 years, though.

1cvmask 5y ago

Isn't the vast majority of the true problems caused by not enough supply of all KINDS of NEW housing being built to accompany both massive population growth (including immigrants in some areas), massive wealth increase among the global rich (who can now own multiple empty properties in marquee cities), landlords eating up more of your income AND in the US case government rules and regulations creating a predatory medical system that consumes over 18 percent of GDP. In the 70s a blue collar worker could buy a house and look after their family. Now we have massive asset price inflation due to low interest rates and not enough growth in housing assets. This can lead to future social unrest on a massive scale (not just occasional riots/protests).

nradov 5y ago
There are many places in the US where a skilled blue collar worker can buy a house and look after a family. But HN users tend to have a distorted perspective since most of them live in the SF Bay Area and other expensive areas.
- YesThatTom2 5y ago
  Where? Where in the US can someone live on blue collar salary and afford a mortgage?
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    Plenty of places in the Midwest/South if you're a tradesman. Obviously a McDonald's worker or Starbucks barista is probably not going to be able to afford a mortgage.
    - stefan_ 5y ago
      This is obvious because? We certainly have the wealth for it.
      - b9a2cab5 5y ago

bendbro 5y ago

> The retreat by much of the Right into localism or an exclusive focus on personal virtue is a tacit admission that individuals simply have to look out for themselves, an equally empty response No you can't just take your ball and leave!

smilekzs 5y ago

My rephrase of a key take-away point: As long as the underlying incentives remain misaligned, individual policy changes aimed to disrupt the competition landscape across the board would inevitably play the whack-a-mole game.

chillacy 5y ago

This is a very well reasoned article. The central thesis is that if culture follows economic realities (a notion I first encountered in Sapiens but have come to strongly believe), then readers (seems the audience consists of US cultural conservatives) should focus their efforts on changing the underlying economics, not waging the culture war. > No amount of snappy YouTube videos decrying the “degeneracy” of current elite trends, no amount of influencers selling the “trad lifestyle” to Instagram followers, no amount of pithy arguments aimed at defeating some imagined foe with “facts and logic” will affect these issues in any meaningful way > In the struggle between tradition and economic reality, tradition simply ends up being destroyed, excepting the few parts that can be adapted to serve completely new ends. I would posit that a 3rd option exists that the author dismissed, but it would be to move to a new system (which is self-sustaining, unlike birth + immigration that the author dismisses) to match the new realities. I get that conservative thought is that it's safest to cling to that which we know, but with all the changes so far (and to come with automation), it might be as fruitless as running a knowledge economy like a feudal monarchy.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
> I would posit that a 3rd option exists that the author dismissed, but it would be to move to a new system Do you mean changing the American system, or do you mean moving, as an individual, from America? If "changing the American system", then I think that's what he wants. He seems to want industrial policy, possibly state control of industry -- whatever it takes to employ everyone and give them good wages. A Republican pivot to the working class. (Or even a Democratic one? (Though that's arguably what the Green New Deal is supposed to be about, even if it ends up being modest.)) If "moving from America", then I agree that's the option he didn't even consider. It may be possible to simply escape the competition. Doing this would rest on geographic arbitrage and the privilege of having been born in a developed country. That might make it "bad" in some peoples' eyes, but it might work for the individual. Even a fairly poor American could be a fairly rich person in another part of the world, by taking their (unfair) Fedbucks with them.
- chillacy 5y ago
  > If "changing the American system", then I think that's what he wants. He seems to want industrial policy, possibly state control of industry -- whatever it takes to employ everyone and give them good wages. A Republican pivot to the working class. Yea I also read it that way. Reading between the lines a bit, I see some of a desire for the America in the 50s and 60s, not super uncommon of a sentiment for a variety of reasons. In retrospect I should have just co-opted the author's language: > In the struggle between tradition and economic reality, tradition simply ends up being destroyed If there are two dependent variables: economic reality and tradition, the author wants to fix tradition and find the economic reality which allows for that. I would posit that historically, the long term trend is for tradition to change to match economic realities, so the way out of this might be to find new traditions which are self sustaining (positive birth rates or birth+immigration as the author says).

frazbin 5y ago

An essay on the theme "compare and contrast SK/JP/CN educational cutthroatism with 21st century woke culture." Good enough if that's the question assigned but.. why? Aoparently to push the zero sum narrative of elite overproduction, and pretending we all wanna go to Harvard when state schools are still perfectly adequate, then additionally pretending that you have to be a multi-intersectional individual to get into Harvard... seems like this guy just wants to have his culture war.

BariumBlue 5y ago

I'm finding it interesting that all of the comments so far seem to have drawn very different conclusions about what the article was about. I think this article has many unique viewpoints that people aren't used to and think of the point that stuck out to them the most as "the point" of the article

Barrin92 5y ago
yes it's a good piece. As a non-American reader I'm kind of impressed with the stuff they're putting out because they're representing a much missing view in US discourse which is a Marxist economic point of view for a Conservative audience, basically what you'd call a 'Red Tory' in the UK or a 'Christdemokrat' in Germany. It's getting people to think and at the same time it's also a reasonable antidote for the 'culture-war' steeped people.
fullshark 5y ago
To me it’s clear in the concluding paragraph: > The situations of Asian countries and the United States differ substantially in the details, but both face the same core problem: how to offer as many people as possible a decent job with a family wage. The argument is everything stems from this failing (declining birth rates, cutthroat testing culture, woke language games to signal elite status etc)
pydry 5y ago
The article itself lurches all over the place and takes some bizarre turns - e.g. the weird conspiracy theory thrown out about how attempts at more egalitarian college admissions are simply a backhanded dig at Jews and Asians, the barely concealed indignation at anything "woke" and the re-definition of elite to mean "literally anyone with a college degree". The views he holds seem pretty average among worried Beltway center-right elites (actual elites), although not in any way representative of average Americans.
- ctchocula 5y ago
  Agree with most of your analysis. However, one place I take issue with is your claim that "the weird conspiracy theory thrown out about how attempts at more egalitarian college admissions are simply a backhanded dig at Jews and Asians". Given that we have it on good historical evidence the up and rising Jewish population in elite colleges in early 20th century made Caucasians in those institutions feel threatened, which caused them to change applications to add extra-curriculars as a metric, which was the mechanism to decrease the number of Jewish students admitted---given it's played out this way before where a rising racial minority group has been discriminated against in favour of White applicants, surely you cannot blame people for suspecting the admission process is again being made (a) less meritocratic, (b) decreasing number of Asian and Jewish admissions, and (c) increasing White admissions all in the name of racial equity?

nazgulnarsil 5y ago

The four major black holes of modernity are not the result of incorrectly tuned policy levers but the result of fundamental cultural blindspots. These four areas: education, medicine, housing, and prison, all relate to one central problem. An incoherent philosophy when it comes to the concept of 'responsibility.' When I say black holes I mean that they are capable of sucking up arbitrary amounts of capital as we fight over them fruitlessly. And to be absolutely clear: the claim here is not that personal responsiibity should be 'higher' or 'lower' (whatever those mean) than they are now, that's what I mean by fighting over them. I genuinely mean that the incoherence of the concept itself is the problem. Consider the following questions: how responsible is a criminal for their actions? how responsible are young people for making good decisions about their education? to what degree are NIMBYs responsible for the housing crisis? how can externalities of housing be assigned responsibility to various parties? does the medicalization of problems, and thus the denial of agency lead to more problems than it solves? You've seen debates about these and they never go anywhere because there aren't final answers. There is no algorithm for 'blame' that is perfectly equitable. Neither holding people to high standards nor relaxing those standards is stable or workable. Reality is always multicausal and situations are different. The traditional answer to this is the discretion of judges to adjust to what is happening. But law still has to deal with the fundamental incoherence and it has been deprived of one of the historical ways it has dealt with it. The idea that different people might have differing capabilities to take responsibility for things, whatever the reason, is in untenable tension with the notion that all men are created equal. We have a few categories that recognize that not everyone can hold the same privileges such as child, felon, or legally mentally unable to grant consent. There are also the only semi legible ways that money and access grant privileges while that very same hidden nature frees the beneficiaries of any responsibility for the poor exercise of said privilege. Now we're seeing other countries find their own ways forward in creating a tiered society like China's social credit system or the soft classism of inscrutable and gameable admission to elite colleges (whereas before lower class people got in on merit). These are terrible solutions and we had better find better ones before the march of history declares a shitty winner for us. We can find a way to more tightly couple privileges and responsibilities or we can continue reaping the externalities of allowing incentives to drive a stronger wedge between them.

5y ago

syndacks 5y ago

Holy smokes, pull up a bag of popcorn, pour a glass of Pinot, and heat up that Volcano! This heavy hitter brings the cultural pith of a Franzen novel and the citation-laden academic register of an SEO educated academic behind a pseudonym. Wokeness, SATs, Xi, culture wars, and Marx -- oh my!

pfkurtz 5y ago
For. Real. What pathetic nonsense.

joe_the_user 5y ago

Student loan forgiveness may be a handout to a certain sector but it's a way to shape the economy. The problem the US has is vastly expanded educational sector that's also, uh, crap. A more rigorous but less inflated system would be appropriate. But how you get that is hard to see. The thing is, you have huge sectors; education, public transit, health care etc, that would be reasonable to improve but where privatization based capital investment have resulted in huge, costly and, well, shitty systems. The only way out is removing a huge group of corrupt operators at the heart of each of these sectors. I don't know what hope there is of this tbh.

eru 5y ago
Yes, student loan forgiveness would bloat the education sector even more. You could shrink the education sector by removing subsidies and tax discounts for it. (Of course, that's politically hard to do.) > The thing is, you have huge sectors; education, public transit, health care etc, that would be reasonable to improve but where privatization based capital investment have resulted in huge, costly and, well, shitty systems. I'm not so sure. Eg talk to any 'right-thinking' Brit and they will tell you how horrible British Rail privatisation was. Then compare the graphs in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_... See also https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SurfaceFreightTransportationDeregulation.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SurfaceFreightTransporta... and https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html Or look into the recent-ish success of German legalising long distance bus travel.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  > student loan forgiveness would bloat the education sector even more this is remarkably one-sided
  - eru 5y ago
    How so? If you replace the slightly loaded term 'bloat', you would get something fairly unobjectionable: 'Forgiving loans people take out for an activity, would lead to more of that activity.' Or what do you mean?

mherdeg 5y ago

I've been reading a Neil Gaiman book to the youngest kid every now and then which goes like: > Ladies of Light & Ladies of Darkness, > & Ladies of Never-You-Mind, > this is a prayer for a Blueberry Girl. > First, May you ladies be kind. > … > Dull days at forty, false friends at fifteen; > Let her have brave days and truth. > Let her go places that we’ve never been; > Trust and delight in her youth. And then I read stuff like this, or articles about the grim reality of private schools (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private...), and I wonder … how did we get here? is this what it means to want your kids to go places we've never been? Is this ... good? From Flanagan's Atlantic article: > Why do these parents need so much reassurance? They “are finding that it’s harder and harder to get their children through the eye of the needle”—admitted into the best programs, all the way from kindergarten to college. But it’s more than that. The parents have a sense that their kids will be emerging into a bleaker landscape than they did. The brutal, winner-take-all economy won’t come for them—they’ve been grandfathered in. But they fear that it’s coming for their children, and that even a good education might not secure them a professional-class career. > … > Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, coined the term meritocracy trap—a system that rewards an ever-growing share of society’s riches to an ever-shrinking pool of winners. “Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone,” he has written in these pages. “In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite.” This is a system that screws the poor, hollows out the middle class, and turns rich kids into exhausted, anxious, and maximally stressed-out adolescents who believe their future depends on getting into one of a very small group of colleges that routinely reject upwards of 90 percent of their applicants. Is that all there is? Is it just, work work work, get the kids into a good school, line up their tutors and extracurricular enrichment, watch them graduate, maybe meet the grandkids, die? Why do so many people want this so much?

wayoutthere 5y ago
Not everyone does — many of us are enjoying our lives rather than writing about them. These stories of job anxiety are dramatic and that sells ads. What they don’t show you are the corporate middle manager who does the 9-5 and ducks out of work at noon on Friday to go ride dirt bikes with his kids.

pfkurtz 5y ago

How can an article about "elite competition" not mention anything about how, during a few decades in the 20th Century, labor's share of profits increased, and since 1980 has flatlined, with all rewards accruing to capital? What analysis of elites doesn't include reference to Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch? The author seems to get that the ruthless competition in our world is destroying lives, but he seems to blame the competitors and those who seek to improve things.

wmf 5y ago
To be fair it does mention "Retreads of the Reagan program today serve as a stale punchline rather than a serious attempt at politics. ...adding more free-market Reaganism to combat the fallout from free-market Reaganism".
- pfkurtz 5y ago
  Yeah I know, but this seems like a throwaway line designed to add "both sides" cover, in between several paragraphs of shadowboxing the Left. The owners of the system seem curiously left out of most analysis.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  It explicitly criticises the inability of the economy to create enough jobs. It says that Marx was correct about capitalism (btw, contrary to what people think, this is a fairly common view amongst conservatives who tend to be well-read enough to know that Marx's critiques of capitalism are quite distinct from Marxism). It is a fairly traditional conservative critique of capitalism that actually predates Marx by five decades (capitalism is dehumanizing, it breaks down traditional relations, capitalism is destructive socially/culturally).
  - pfkurtz 5y ago
    The US jobless is at record lows. That is a bad criticism of our economic system, because it isn't true. It might be the case that some powerful economic actors work to undermine full employment some of the time (for instance). But the specifics matter. What matters is the kinds of jobs and how much of the pie is being distributed, a fact completely left out of their article. Do conservatives care about having an economy that's actually just and equitable? That's a pretty big part of what Marx was getting at; much bigger than the one point about how it undermines traditional religious belief (a good thing). That would probably solve their concerns about not enough young people starting families. I've heard a lot of rhetoric, and I've seen what literally every "conservative" politician actually does: enrich entrenched elites, undermine democracy, and make the violent parts of the state less accountable to the public.

ilaksh 5y ago

The concluding sentence is the key takeaway for me. > Unless the productive forces driving spiraling competition for diminishing social and economic resources are resolved, social atomization, cultural conflict, and their many effects will continue, in one guise or another. My take is that most of the apparent social problems are related to problems like economic inequality and insufficiency. And the best hope we have to improve them is actually logistical/technical. Better application of technology, such as for enhanced collaborative monitoring and reporting of resource usage and more sophisticated distribution systems (including high-tech forms of money) should make a big difference.