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The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates and business schools teaching that the people who do the real work

The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates and business schools teaching that the people who do the real work should be treated as expendable cogs. Given the choice between doing back-breaking construction work at the crack of dawn, or sitting on your ass processing TPS report type A into TPS report type B while listening to corporate kool-aid sermons for higher pay, which would you choose? My aunt recently hired a plumber, who decided that ~12 feet of drain pipe needed to be replaced (exposed in basement, not the main stack). The bill, with "senior discount", came to something like $1200! I stopped by to look over his shoulder and inspect. Looking at the guy and how he worked, I knew he wasn't taking home much of that at all. It's the entire management structure cancer that's sitting above him, skimming the majority of his pay, while treating the person doing the skilled job as some mere implementation detail. FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose. It's taken us a few decades to get into this mess, so it will probably take a few more decades to get out. Assuming LLMs can lay bare the unnecessary complexity that is TPS reports, and continued political will for the existence of interest rates.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates Rates are tangential, IMO. College educated white collar professionals are the managerial class. They. Are. Us. The fact that we don't all have "manager" in our job title at any one time is not a meaningful distinction because the minority who do at any time get their ideas and their values and their norms from the whole culture. The problem is in the mirror. It is our cultural values and norms that have created this situation in the same way that if we positively valued patronage and nepotism we would have only ourselves to blame when every bureaucracy wound up chock full of incompetents who knew a guy. The reason your plumber has so much overhead is because that's what the cultural norms demand. Our culture is allergic to being responsible for mistakes and taking credit for one's self so we've created a culture of diffusing responsibility as much as possible wherever possible so that everyone has plausible deniability when things go wrong and everyone shares credit when they go right. Being able to shift and spread blame around when the job isn't right or the invoice isn't right is a valued cultural norm and behavior expected of business in the same way that a concrete crew in Iraq says a prayer before the pour. >FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose. Yes that's exactly what's happening across our economy. Depending on your industry it may be more or less sanctioned by your employer but favor trading is becoming more and more normal. It used to be that professionals used to only trade with each other, the electrician wires the plumbers house and vise versa. I think over the last 20yr it's expanded, the electrician wires the plumber's mom's house and the plumber's mom makes her other son do some mechanic work for the electrician's brother. The bigger the cost of compliance with regulatory and cultural norms the more incentive there is for this kind of economic activity to exist. Kind of like how high tax rates on legal weed keep the dealers in business. The cost savings are just so great that the sketchy system is still viable.
- mindslight 4y ago
  You've got a great point about culture, but I'd say low rates (or more accurately, large undirected outflows from the Fed) are important for supporting most of the white collar meta jobs that enable said culture in the first place. The biggest sector of the tech industry isn't factory automation or product development (physical world application), but rather self-justifying centralizing surveillance/control - capital is desperately trying to invest today's dollar to create any type of future recurring revenue stream, because that is what low rates demand. The overfinancialization is also what keeps the productive workers trapped under unproductive structures. They can do informal jobs for friends of friends, but what keeps them from setting up a web page, doing some marketing, and offering their services publicly at drastically better rates? I'd think one of the issues is the carrying cost of insurance - another malignant growth of the financial industry - which ties right into your "diffuse responsibility" culture point. To expand on my last point - while I'd believe that bona fide tradespeople are doing more informal trading, I think there's a larger contingent of amateur DIY replacing professionals, and perhaps trading for that. Lets say someone wants to add another electrical receptacle somewhere, and they don't want to pay an electrician $1000 or whatever it costs for one to get out of bed these days. They can search "how to install receptacle" and other basic wiring things and get a video that shows clear instruction of how to do it, plus social encouragement telling them they can! (And yeah I know that's a pretty simple example for most DIYers, that's actually part of my point)

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

>The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates Rates are tangential, IMO. College educated white collar professionals are the managerial class. They. Are. Us. The fact that we don't all have "manager" in our job title at any one time is not a meaningful distinction because the minority who do at any time get their ideas and their values and their norms from the whole culture. The problem is in the mirror. It is our cultural values and norms that have created this situation in the same way that if we positively valued patronage and nepotism we would have only ourselves to blame when every bureaucracy wound up chock full of incompetents who knew a guy. The reason your plumber has so much overhead is because that's what the cultural norms demand. Our culture is allergic to being responsible for mistakes and taking credit for one's self so we've created a culture of diffusing responsibility as much as possible wherever possible so that everyone has plausible deniability when things go wrong and everyone shares credit when they go right. Being able to shift and spread blame around when the job isn't right or the invoice isn't right is a valued cultural norm and behavior expected of business in the same way that a concrete crew in Iraq says a prayer before the pour. >FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose. Yes that's exactly what's happening across our economy. Depending on your industry it may be more or less sanctioned by your employer but favor trading is becoming more and more normal. It used to be that professionals used to only trade with each other, the electrician wires the plumbers house and vise versa. I think over the last 20yr it's expanded, the electrician wires the plumber's mom's house and the plumber's mom makes her other son do some mechanic work for the electrician's brother. The bigger the cost of compliance with regulatory and cultural norms the more incentive there is for this kind of economic activity to exist. Kind of like how high tax rates on legal weed keep the dealers in business. The cost savings are just so great that the sketchy system is still viable.

mindslight 4y ago
You've got a great point about culture, but I'd say low rates (or more accurately, large undirected outflows from the Fed) are important for supporting most of the white collar meta jobs that enable said culture in the first place. The biggest sector of the tech industry isn't factory automation or product development (physical world application), but rather self-justifying centralizing surveillance/control - capital is desperately trying to invest today's dollar to create any type of future recurring revenue stream, because that is what low rates demand. The overfinancialization is also what keeps the productive workers trapped under unproductive structures. They can do informal jobs for friends of friends, but what keeps them from setting up a web page, doing some marketing, and offering their services publicly at drastically better rates? I'd think one of the issues is the carrying cost of insurance - another malignant growth of the financial industry - which ties right into your "diffuse responsibility" culture point. To expand on my last point - while I'd believe that bona fide tradespeople are doing more informal trading, I think there's a larger contingent of amateur DIY replacing professionals, and perhaps trading for that. Lets say someone wants to add another electrical receptacle somewhere, and they don't want to pay an electrician $1000 or whatever it costs for one to get out of bed these days. They can search "how to install receptacle" and other basic wiring things and get a video that shows clear instruction of how to do it, plus social encouragement telling them they can! (And yeah I know that's a pretty simple example for most DIYers, that's actually part of my point)