Interesting post from Hugh at Gapingvoid, here. He is kind enough to wonder what I think, and so here it is.
Hugh's basic point is that the middle class have been living in an environment that allows people without any specific entrepreneurial or other talents to make a living off of the artificially high degree of communication and process friction that exists in an organisation pre-Internet, email, mobile phone, etc. Think middle manager. Think local marketing chief in a multinational, who is really only pushing a slightly localised version of the main brand, etc.
When communication is effective and cheap, two things happen. One is that the top doesn't need to have the middle to be able to talk to each other. the second is that talented people can co-operate and find each other more easily. So dumb retards that you would have had to put up with before are now people that you can bypass and go and talk to someone interesting instead.
(Perils of low unemployment - the baker's shop in my village has to recruit in Geneva, which has low employment, like 3-5% or at least low compared to Germany. Consequence, people who are unbelievably stupid get work, which is good from a social viewpoint, but does mean that you have to smile a lot and be very nice when trying to do anything more complex than buying one loaf of bread. )
So, the argument from the top is that all jobs are now either talent or low priced commodity, and that this is a good thing. Now, I have noticed that my opinions are getting further and further out of step with this orthodoxy. I do not see that the economic good of the stockholders is the good of society. Now, I am no bleeding heart liberal, but I do see the dismantling of a societies entire relationship has having unintended and grave consequences.
I was reading Harpers on the plane, which is its usually mixture of hit and miss articles, some of which are truly brilliant, and some of which are so off the mark it makes my teeth rotate in their sockets, when I read about something that came out of the Grandes Ecoles in France. the students who were being taught neo-classical economics, all just suddenly went "hello, this is all bollocks!" Except being Grandes Ecoles students they said it in French, at length, and a lot more elegantly, with supporting diagrams.
And the name of this new school of thought. Post-Autistic Economics. Bless the French. they can be frustrating, but they do value education and thinking in a way that is deeply, deeply unfashionable in the Anglo-Saxon world at the moment. (Chirac may be a venal, corrupt bastard, but he is an educated, sophisticated, venal, corrupt bastard, and the French in general like it that way better than trying to find an honest fool.)
The main website is here.
I found this movement with a great sigh of relief. I am not a trained economist, but I am a businessman, and a social being, and a lot of what was being spouted as orthodoxy struck me as being suspect. It is a relief to find that those who have looked at it in depth have found the current world view wanting.
So, the current view that cutting the middle class down to size is a great idea are really either honestly missing the point, or doing so in conscious knowledge, and so are committing the Western way of life to death for their own short term gains.
And I find it easy to know what I would think of either of those.
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