I am favorably impressed by this piece. I have relevant observations of life in the South in the 50s and 60s and how the “War on Poverty” guaranteed the outcome we see today. Think I will read some more of your stuff.
What a great article! The American Left's repackaging of Marxist's class division theory into race division theory and explaining majority of issues in the US through its lenses is delusional and dysfunctional. I think any governing theory based on animosity between groups of people is going to hurt all groups. And it will not be conducive to economic or political progress.
I am finding your more recent set of posts exploring some of these social science aspects very interesting, especially as you still have a direct or indirect link back to your core progress supporting factors.
My own experience sort of confirms your comments on social homogenization after 1940. As a child in the 50s/60s, I moved from the midwest to the NE, then to the NW, and to the South for HS, before returning to the midwest for college. My perception in these widely distant locations was that everything was pretty much the same, in general. As a child with a nonreligious upbringing, I also perceived the various religious groups as just one overall set of believers and was pretty ignorant of the interpretive differences that might have exercised members of one group vs. another. I had Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish friends in HS.
I knew Germans were a major element of American citizenry from Revolutionary times, but was surprised by just how large and impactful that "national" or ethnic group was across so much of the country, rather than just more localized influence in PA, IL, MO, and TX. Plus my parents (and thus I) were of German heritage, with 3 of 4 grandparents US citizens by 1890 or so. And the religious mixing was personal, as my mother was raised Catholic and my father Methodist. But I never asked them how they managed to get together across that divide :-).
Great article. I think the intra-American homogenization described, which is increasingly spreading to the rest of the world, can best be viewed as a kind of mass extinction / genetic diversity problem.
Western values "work," so they've spread and driven the competition to the margins, or into extinction. But everyone can understand the risk of having just one cultivar of apple or wheat — when the plague comes along it can be devastating and hard to recover from. You want a thousand land races mutating and increasing the genetic stock/diversity.
It's the same with cultural homogeneity. You want ideas, cultures, preferences, and styles warring against and breeding with each other and finding niches to dominate. From this friction, great things emerge. That's how it's always happened.
In the US context, having legally and financially sovereign states — as we haven't had since the 1930s — allows more bets, more experiments, more cross-breeding. It's messy. People who demand that their ideas hold sway everywhere find this intolerable. But historically, this is how we found new ideas, new policies, new ways of thinking and being.
Ref The New Upper American Class: "3. Massive bureaucratization of our institutions that just happened to provide the new upper class with cushy jobs that are relatively isolated from the need to produce results."
This certainly applies to a fair number of humanities and social science employment slots, but I have to admit even engineering has not been excused from opportunities for bureaucratic wastage.
I have to admit that the "hard" sciences are actually easier to find or make definitive conclusions, while the variability of humanity in the "soft" sciences makes achieving meaningful statistical conclusions more difficult, especially with smallish sized study populations, often cosnsisting only of college students. None the less, we now see a major lack of repeatability in too many scientific and medical studies, too.
The latest excuse for overturning established findings in the soft sciences is something called "population stratification." In other words your results turned out like that because the population sample hadn't been controlled for stratification. Which I say is just another name, or a proxy, for other previously respected categories such as SES, educational attainment, and employment status. The typical paper in the soft sciences uses some novel statistical method to tease a signal out of the data that wasn't there before.
You start with an interesting, and true, observation about the ethnic makeup of the nation and segue directly into totally unsupported opinion. Your bullet point list is nothing more than a series of assertions. I could assert the opposite and be just as right because there's no factual basis for any of it.
And I'm not upper class nor college educated. I'm a low wage Italian roofer from New York. Your assertions about the competence and values of the new upper class aren't just unsubstantiated by any cited facts they're contradicted by things you cite.
Economic growth has continued at a slower but still historically excellent pace (indeed, world leading for a developed economy). The foreign policy values have stayed remarkably consistent since the very early 20th century. The values of civic engagement are unchanged. You simply state as fact that the welfare state hinders upward mobility while noting that upward mobility and economic prosperity exploded AFTER the creation of the welfare state.
You make a totally unsubstantiated statement about the values of the upper classes that has no real basis in fact. The values you're describing do seem to be very prevalent in academia but notably absent amongst those who hold actual political power.
And the neighborhoods you're describing still exist. They're just not in the city anymore. Long Island still has ethnic neighborhoods or coalition neighborhoods.
Either way that interesting factor about the slow disappearing of ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods doesn't relate to your ultimate conclusion. They've turned into mixed neighborhoods. In New York the Italians married the Irish and created Italian Irish neighborhoods with remarkably similar values to the ones they replaced. And I can't seem to find any connection to the relative competence of the ruling class and the fact that the area around Yankees stadium is now an ethnically homogeneous Dominican neighborhood and not an Italian one. It's totally unrelated.
Seems to me that a totally uneducated roofer shouldn't be able to so easily find flaws in your argument.
Keep in mind that this article is one of many articles. If I added an exhaustive list of evidence for each of the bullet points, readers would stop reading. The point of this article is to outline key changes that have occurred over the last 60 years. My guess is that much of this is quite new to most readers.
What bullet points do you believe are incorrect? Which have "no factual basis?". Did you actually click the links to articles that go into more detail?
I will address your points in order.
I think that is it very well documented that substantial sections of the professional class has adopted Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies as a foundation for their values. The evidence of change of voting behaviors is very clear. Here is one example:
I will let you decide on their competence, but clearly trust in American institutions have declined radically in the last 60 years so apparently many people agree with me.
Yes, I am glad that economic growth has continued, but that does not mean that public policies are not undermining that growth.
I never mentioned "foreign policy values" and I am not sure what that means.
Nor did I mention civic engagement (although there is plenty of evidence that it has declined over the last 60 years).
Yes, there are still some ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods in existence, but it is an important trend that this used to be the dominant form and it is now rare.
I have entire series of articles on Upward Mobility and how our welfare state at the very least is not promoting it and likely undermining it:
I never claimed that "the relative competence of the ruling class" is related to "the fact that the area around Yankees stadium is now an ethnically homogeneous Dominican neighborhood and not an Italian one."
Where did you get the idea that I claimed that?
I do not know what you mean by "my ultimate conclusion." The main points are summarized in the beginning of the article not in the conclusion. Remember those bulleted points that you dislike.
'A strong divergence of political views, cultural views, and consumption habits of the professional class from the rest of America. The traditional views of the old WASP upper class were replaced by a Post-Modern Left-of-Center worldview'
This is also an interesting and popular phenomenon of inquiry but there hasn't been a consensus of its origins. Some people argue it is due to leftist/Marxist in key positions of power,but economic progressive policies like some of European nations haven't been implemented. Some argue it is due to racial income inequalities,particularly with African blacks who suffered from slavery and Jim Crow. Some argue it is due to higher participation of women who are generally more sensitive and agreeable,and potentially more reluctant to enforce authority. But men in institutions also seem to have adopted more of those traits.
My personal interest speaking honestly is how academic institutions as Pinker calls it 'replaced a culture of valor with a culture of victimhood'
There is quite a bit of "direct experience" writing about the nation we were before WW2. Here is just one tiny example from the deep south state of Minnesota where we celebrate our hyphenated identities just as fervently as did our grandparents and great-grandparents. https://www.amazon.com/Around-World-Paul-Alice-Sickels/dp/B0007EGGUW
I read this with interest. I’m puzzled by many of the assertions. For example the assertion that the federal government has become larger and more bureaucratic. It is smaller today (pre-Trump than at any time in the last half century. As for elites not modeling behavior for the rest of society . . . how do higher rates of marriage, lower rates of divorce, more education etc. support that assertion? There are more people going to college, but the signals remain the same: getting into and receiving a degree from a subset of schools signals intelligence as well as the “college graduate” designation did in the past. It’s disappointing to see what appeared to be a more thoughtful analysis of the evolution of our society devolve into a screed against “the left”. It’s all too easy. Hoping to see you build more on your initial insights in the future.
As measured by government spending as a percentage of GDP and number of regulations, the American government and particularly the federal government is bigger than ever before. And the number of regulations is a good metric for "bureaucratization."
Trump has only made minor changes (so far).
I am not sure that this essay ever mentioned "modeling behavior for the rest of society." I think what is key is what they say is very different from what they actually do. As I said in the article:
"The traditional views of the old WASP upper class were replaced by a Post-Modern Left-of-Center worldview:
1) Patriotism has been replaced by cosmopolitanism, and often downright anti-patriotism.
2) A self-confident belief in progress has been replaced by a post-modern skepticism of or even opposition to progress.
3) Partisan identification has shifted from Republican to Democratic, particularly in the large metro areas in the Northeast and Pacific coast.
4) Ideology has shifted from conservatism to varying degrees of Left-of-Center ideology. The percentage of the professional class who are very Left-of-Center has increased dramatically, particularly since 2010."
This article is not "a screed."
What is your evidence, that this is a screed?"
You can evaluate for yourselves whether the transformation has been good or bad, but I think that it has clearly happened.
Your informative review of how the identity of the various groups in the US evolved over time drew me into your piece. I know it took a lot of work to put together, thank you for that.
The piece I commented on was the first of yours that I read, I now know you are quite prolific and I cannot say that I’ve done your writings justice. That said my comment was in response to your Occam’s Razor – the Left has destroyed everything argument. Your piece piled assertion upon assertion of what “the Left” is in support of that argument. These assertions strike me as straw man arguments where the most extreme views of a marginal (albeit media magnetizing) part of what could be called the Democratic Coalition are put forward as being representative of the whole when it just ain’t so. I can find agreement with you on a lot of particulars, for example attempts to redress social injustice took a toxic and counterproductive form. Or that failing to acknowledge policy failure and change course is a problem – a problem that is not unique to the Left.
As the introduction to your piece illustrated, we live in an extremely complex society and the challenges we face are no less complex. As soon as we mischaracterize the facts and the positions of those whose views differ from our own the more difficult it becomes to effectively meet our challenges. Your position is that the widespread use of fossil fuels is a condition of progress. It would be wrong of me to a) ignore the fact that this has been the case for over a century, b) assume the only reason you make that argument is because you own oil company stock and are looking to profit, c) that you are entirely indifferent to the impact of climate change on human society. Your piece “There is a better alternative to Green Energy policies” paints a picture of a green movement that rejects nuclear and hydro power and the use of natural gas. Furthermore, you contend that “they claim there is no alternative policy,” yet this overlooks the reality that Democratic administration proposed and adopted policies follow an “all of the above” approach—steadily advancing toward a diversified energy mix that reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
In making your assertions you a) ignore the fact that the cost of renewables has been dropping like a stone and is on track to be cheaper than natural gas, b) that solar/wind in some geographies is just a better power source than fossil fuels, c) ignore the fact that while it may not be realistic to get to Net Zero every climate model out there shows that a difference of one degree in global temperatures is significant and meaningful in terms of prosperity as you define it.
The piece I commented on repeatedly hammers away at an easy narrative followed by easy conclusions – at length. That is what I meant by screed. I exempt the first section of your piece from the critique – it was excellent. Picking more bones and demonstrating my own ability to be tedious . . .
Regarding the statement “as measured by government spending as a percentage of GDP and number of regulations, the American government and particularly the federal government is bigger than ever before” in support of your thesis that virtually all programs that are now administered at the federal level be devolved to the states. I guess it depends on how you think of government. If government = bureaucracy the federal bureaucracy as a percentage of GDP is about half of what it was in 1970 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A823RE1Q156NBEA. When I cite that figure from FRED it excludes transfer payments and investments. If your argument is that transfer payments are part of the problem fair enough. We ARE spending beyond our means. What accounts for that? Profligate spending is one argument. Another view is that beginning in 1980 (with a brief reset from 1992-2000) we kept reducing tax rates without making corresponding expense reductions, leading to large deficits that have now reached the level where the service on the debt exceeds our entire defense budget. If you do a thought experiment (and the analysis) you’ll see that if those tax cuts hadn’t been made, we wouldn’t have piled up those massive deficits and their corresponding debt service expense and while we’d still have a budget deficit it would only be around $100 billion annually. Of course, you could argue that in the absence of those tax cuts GDP would not have grown as much. The counter argument to that can be found in the data – US GDP growth has been quite consistent https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP: tax rates were elevated from 1992-2000 but GDP growth kept chugging along (and the deficit disappeared).
Regarding the number of regulations being a proxy for judging whether the size of the federal government is appropriate or not I don’t think it’s that simple. Good regulations at the federal level can and do reduce complexity and facilitate doing business, bad ones do the opposite. Regulations are accretive and therefore will increase over time. I think we can all agree that regulations should be revisited to determine whether they are having the intended effect or if they are still needed at all.
Please keep your comments to the topic of the article. That is a commenting rule of this Substack, and I will enforce it.
I am not going to read through a long stream listing every objection that you have to other articles that I have written.
I never proposed: "Occam’s Razor – the Left has destroyed everything argument." Ironically, you accuse me of making simplistic statements and then summarize this article in such a way.
The actual argument I made in this article is very clearly stated in the second paragraph:
"This is the transformation of the United States:
1) From a highly decentralized society with huge ethnic, racial, religious, and regional differences.
2) Into a highly centralized society with one big class cleavage between the professional class and the rest of society, plus
3) A transformation of the claimed values of the American upper class."
I never claimed "government = bureaucracy." I think that it is an overly simplistic description. You can lower the number of bureaucrats, and that has little to no impact. If one institution compels the action of all other individuals or institutions in a society, that is clearly centralization. It does not matter how many people are enforcing that compulsion.
Yes, "regulation grows by accretion." That is just another way of saying increased centralization of power via the mechanism of regulation. Each regulation compels other individuals and institutions, and the number keep growing, so you are making my case for me.
Apologies for bringing some of your other articles up, I read them because I was trying to get a better understanding of your thinking.
The first two points you cite are indisputable facts. Your third point “transformation of the claimed values of the American upper class” is one you expand on later detailing “their Post-Modern Left of Center world view” going on to state that it undermines the foundations of material progress.
Simply stated I feel you are overstating the case by conflating the noise of the most outspoken on “the Left” with the substantive center of power on “the Left”. Barack Obama’s rhetoric and the conservative (small c) way in which he governed illustrate the point (of course you may view Obama as a dangerous radical). Please note: I agree with you that neither of our political parties are serving us well. And oddly enough I find your proposal to strip down the federal government and put most things onto the States seductive - probably because I’m resentful of the fact that I’ve lived in States that send more to the federal government than they receive. That said, while I honor the States for their role as “the laboratories of democracy and I’d like to believe in the proposition that effective policies will be copied I’m skeptical. And I’m just patriotic enough to disfavor allowing our more disadvantaged States to slide further down the slippery pole. Probably because I’m somewhat infected by valuing that naive idea called “equality”.
I actually don’t believe in equality. I do believe that there is such a thing as excessive inequality. I wish I shared your confidence in greater material prosperity “lifting all boats”. That was certainly the case in the US until later in the 20th century. Unfortunately the record of the last quarter century is one where all the benefits of growth went to a very small slice of the citizenry. I think that is natural in a capitalist system where network and scale effects more of less predetermine that outcome. Which is why I’m a believer in limited redistribution via taxation to invest in what I’ll call “socially and economically productive” policies.
You give no evidence that "the most outspoken on the Left" and "the substantive center of power on “the Left” have no common goals. They clearly do, and they constantly tell you: it is Equality.
Do you believe the term "Left-of-Center" has any meaning? I certainly do. So by definition, to understand the term "Left-of-Center," one must conflate the most outspoken and the substantive center of power. If you cannot conflate them, then the term ""Left-of-Center" has no meaning.
Obama was clearly not a conservative.
Obama publicly stated that "inequality is the defining challenge of our time." He clearly acknowledged that the quest for equality was central to his political vision. That is exactly the same as the "the noise of the most outspoken on “the Left”.
Obama's health care reform (he biggest achievement) was clearly motivated by equality of health care access. You cannot understand Obama or anyone else "Left of Center" without the concept of the Equality.
That does not mean that I consider Obama to be a "dangerous radical."
Based on your last sentence, you believe in promoting Upward Mobility, not Equality. That is exactly what I believe.
It is just that few people are willing to honestly take on the impossibility of equality and how there are much better goals.
If that is the goal, then the levels of inequality are irrelevant. Investing socially and economically productive” policies conflicts with the goal of creating equality (or at least is completely separate from it).
As long as the goal is to reduce inequality, you bump up against the Center Moral Dilemma of the Left:
I guess I feel that broad labels is one of the problems that gets in the way of our society continuing to develop in a desirable way. Conflating opposite ends of a continuum tends to result in people throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I agree with you that equality is an impossibility. Upward Mobility is a proven good. That said "then levels of inequality are irrelevant" assumes (?) that the status quo is a good place to start from, no? Decades ago I visited Equatorial Guinea when it was the poorest country on earth. Thanks to oil it is has an impressive GDP today, yet the financial benefits have gone to a vanishingly small number of individuals who have no idea of how to extract oil. Call me mildly mentally disordered, but that seems wrong to me.
You are clearly NOT "uninformed, ignorant, immoral, corrupt, or stupid." You've clearly given a lot of thought to how to promote Upward Mobility and I find much to agree with in your proposals. I suspect your affiliation with Brown resulted in you encountering "preference falsification" and toxic personalities. That's enough to cause anyone to recoil.
My original response to your piece was my own feeling that what I (a card carrying Leftist) believe in was being misrepresented, which is neither here nor there. What is relevant is that misrepresentation has historically served as a way of dismissing a wide range of policy prescriptions rather than engaging them. I think we can both agree that is a problem.
I appreciate the thoroughness of the article. These reforms are much needed. Maybe implicit in your 5th point for change but we've got to get rid of the agencies that create the bureaucratic rules. The abdication of its law making responsibilities to agencies is a major impediment to returning the power to the states. Thank you for the work on this article really pulls together a number of factors and shows how the cumulative effect is delivered.
I enjoyed the article. I don’t see how we can get back to a more decentralized merit based system without changing the debt based money that powers those at the top and enslaves the rest in debt.
If you are referring to the national debt, the annual deficit, and the interest payments on that debt, I agree that they are very serious problems that neither party is confronting.
I see a more decentralized merit based system as key to maintaining long-term economic growth that is essential for lowering the annual deficit.
To an extent but I am specially referring to the fact our currency is created out of thin air by a central bank that is private. Furthermore it is part of global network of private central banks under the BIS. If we don’t return to either a constitutional bi-metallic system or some other non debt based system we are not a sovereign nation.
Huge differences in the degree of diversity in the 30s vs today. How many groups in the 30s followed an ideology such as Isalm incompatible with a Republic, constitution and Bill of Rights? How many groups were entirely tribal in outlook? How many were groups raised with 3rd world values? The extreme differences in values within today's diversity is incomparable to the differences in the 30s.
Not true at all. There plenty of those groups back then plus far greater ethnic, regional, and religious diversity. What you are neglecting is the FAR greater homogeneity of white Americans today compared to in the past. We just forget about it today.
Regarding Islamism, the inventor of that ideology, Sayyid Qtub, lived in Colorado:
And the tribalism in American politics was much stronger back then than today. It was particularly strong within the Democratic party. The two parties were essentially coalitions of ethno-religious minorities.
I am favorably impressed by this piece. I have relevant observations of life in the South in the 50s and 60s and how the “War on Poverty” guaranteed the outcome we see today. Think I will read some more of your stuff.
I'd enjoy reading your relevant observations.
What a great article! The American Left's repackaging of Marxist's class division theory into race division theory and explaining majority of issues in the US through its lenses is delusional and dysfunctional. I think any governing theory based on animosity between groups of people is going to hurt all groups. And it will not be conducive to economic or political progress.
I am finding your more recent set of posts exploring some of these social science aspects very interesting, especially as you still have a direct or indirect link back to your core progress supporting factors.
My own experience sort of confirms your comments on social homogenization after 1940. As a child in the 50s/60s, I moved from the midwest to the NE, then to the NW, and to the South for HS, before returning to the midwest for college. My perception in these widely distant locations was that everything was pretty much the same, in general. As a child with a nonreligious upbringing, I also perceived the various religious groups as just one overall set of believers and was pretty ignorant of the interpretive differences that might have exercised members of one group vs. another. I had Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish friends in HS.
I knew Germans were a major element of American citizenry from Revolutionary times, but was surprised by just how large and impactful that "national" or ethnic group was across so much of the country, rather than just more localized influence in PA, IL, MO, and TX. Plus my parents (and thus I) were of German heritage, with 3 of 4 grandparents US citizens by 1890 or so. And the religious mixing was personal, as my mother was raised Catholic and my father Methodist. But I never asked them how they managed to get together across that divide :-).
Thanks for sharing.
Great article. I think the intra-American homogenization described, which is increasingly spreading to the rest of the world, can best be viewed as a kind of mass extinction / genetic diversity problem.
Western values "work," so they've spread and driven the competition to the margins, or into extinction. But everyone can understand the risk of having just one cultivar of apple or wheat — when the plague comes along it can be devastating and hard to recover from. You want a thousand land races mutating and increasing the genetic stock/diversity.
It's the same with cultural homogeneity. You want ideas, cultures, preferences, and styles warring against and breeding with each other and finding niches to dominate. From this friction, great things emerge. That's how it's always happened.
In the US context, having legally and financially sovereign states — as we haven't had since the 1930s — allows more bets, more experiments, more cross-breeding. It's messy. People who demand that their ideas hold sway everywhere find this intolerable. But historically, this is how we found new ideas, new policies, new ways of thinking and being.
Ref The New Upper American Class: "3. Massive bureaucratization of our institutions that just happened to provide the new upper class with cushy jobs that are relatively isolated from the need to produce results."
This certainly applies to a fair number of humanities and social science employment slots, but I have to admit even engineering has not been excused from opportunities for bureaucratic wastage.
I have to admit that the "hard" sciences are actually easier to find or make definitive conclusions, while the variability of humanity in the "soft" sciences makes achieving meaningful statistical conclusions more difficult, especially with smallish sized study populations, often cosnsisting only of college students. None the less, we now see a major lack of repeatability in too many scientific and medical studies, too.
The latest excuse for overturning established findings in the soft sciences is something called "population stratification." In other words your results turned out like that because the population sample hadn't been controlled for stratification. Which I say is just another name, or a proxy, for other previously respected categories such as SES, educational attainment, and employment status. The typical paper in the soft sciences uses some novel statistical method to tease a signal out of the data that wasn't there before.
The soft sciences are in a total mess.
You start with an interesting, and true, observation about the ethnic makeup of the nation and segue directly into totally unsupported opinion. Your bullet point list is nothing more than a series of assertions. I could assert the opposite and be just as right because there's no factual basis for any of it.
And I'm not upper class nor college educated. I'm a low wage Italian roofer from New York. Your assertions about the competence and values of the new upper class aren't just unsubstantiated by any cited facts they're contradicted by things you cite.
Economic growth has continued at a slower but still historically excellent pace (indeed, world leading for a developed economy). The foreign policy values have stayed remarkably consistent since the very early 20th century. The values of civic engagement are unchanged. You simply state as fact that the welfare state hinders upward mobility while noting that upward mobility and economic prosperity exploded AFTER the creation of the welfare state.
You make a totally unsubstantiated statement about the values of the upper classes that has no real basis in fact. The values you're describing do seem to be very prevalent in academia but notably absent amongst those who hold actual political power.
And the neighborhoods you're describing still exist. They're just not in the city anymore. Long Island still has ethnic neighborhoods or coalition neighborhoods.
Either way that interesting factor about the slow disappearing of ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods doesn't relate to your ultimate conclusion. They've turned into mixed neighborhoods. In New York the Italians married the Irish and created Italian Irish neighborhoods with remarkably similar values to the ones they replaced. And I can't seem to find any connection to the relative competence of the ruling class and the fact that the area around Yankees stadium is now an ethnically homogeneous Dominican neighborhood and not an Italian one. It's totally unrelated.
Seems to me that a totally uneducated roofer shouldn't be able to so easily find flaws in your argument.
Just sayin.
Keep in mind that this article is one of many articles. If I added an exhaustive list of evidence for each of the bullet points, readers would stop reading. The point of this article is to outline key changes that have occurred over the last 60 years. My guess is that much of this is quite new to most readers.
What bullet points do you believe are incorrect? Which have "no factual basis?". Did you actually click the links to articles that go into more detail?
I will address your points in order.
I think that is it very well documented that substantial sections of the professional class has adopted Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies as a foundation for their values. The evidence of change of voting behaviors is very clear. Here is one example:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-democratic-partys-internal-revolution
I will let you decide on their competence, but clearly trust in American institutions have declined radically in the last 60 years so apparently many people agree with me.
Yes, I am glad that economic growth has continued, but that does not mean that public policies are not undermining that growth.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-the-left-undermines-progress
I never mentioned "foreign policy values" and I am not sure what that means.
Nor did I mention civic engagement (although there is plenty of evidence that it has declined over the last 60 years).
Yes, there are still some ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods in existence, but it is an important trend that this used to be the dominant form and it is now rare.
I have entire series of articles on Upward Mobility and how our welfare state at the very least is not promoting it and likely undermining it:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/s/upward-mobility
I never claimed that "the relative competence of the ruling class" is related to "the fact that the area around Yankees stadium is now an ethnically homogeneous Dominican neighborhood and not an Italian one."
Where did you get the idea that I claimed that?
I do not know what you mean by "my ultimate conclusion." The main points are summarized in the beginning of the article not in the conclusion. Remember those bulleted points that you dislike.
Just sayin.
Shouldn’t the article end “Ex uno, multis” instead of “e pluribus unum”?
'A strong divergence of political views, cultural views, and consumption habits of the professional class from the rest of America. The traditional views of the old WASP upper class were replaced by a Post-Modern Left-of-Center worldview'
This is also an interesting and popular phenomenon of inquiry but there hasn't been a consensus of its origins. Some people argue it is due to leftist/Marxist in key positions of power,but economic progressive policies like some of European nations haven't been implemented. Some argue it is due to racial income inequalities,particularly with African blacks who suffered from slavery and Jim Crow. Some argue it is due to higher participation of women who are generally more sensitive and agreeable,and potentially more reluctant to enforce authority. But men in institutions also seem to have adopted more of those traits.
My personal interest speaking honestly is how academic institutions as Pinker calls it 'replaced a culture of valor with a culture of victimhood'
I think that it was many different causes coming together instead of one big cause. I will be writing a lot more about this in the coming months.
There is quite a bit of "direct experience" writing about the nation we were before WW2. Here is just one tiny example from the deep south state of Minnesota where we celebrate our hyphenated identities just as fervently as did our grandparents and great-grandparents. https://www.amazon.com/Around-World-Paul-Alice-Sickels/dp/B0007EGGUW
Forcing people to apply through Workday and contend with Affirmative Action do more to harm American society than anything else.
I read this with interest. I’m puzzled by many of the assertions. For example the assertion that the federal government has become larger and more bureaucratic. It is smaller today (pre-Trump than at any time in the last half century. As for elites not modeling behavior for the rest of society . . . how do higher rates of marriage, lower rates of divorce, more education etc. support that assertion? There are more people going to college, but the signals remain the same: getting into and receiving a degree from a subset of schools signals intelligence as well as the “college graduate” designation did in the past. It’s disappointing to see what appeared to be a more thoughtful analysis of the evolution of our society devolve into a screed against “the left”. It’s all too easy. Hoping to see you build more on your initial insights in the future.
As measured by government spending as a percentage of GDP and number of regulations, the American government and particularly the federal government is bigger than ever before. And the number of regulations is a good metric for "bureaucratization."
Trump has only made minor changes (so far).
I am not sure that this essay ever mentioned "modeling behavior for the rest of society." I think what is key is what they say is very different from what they actually do. As I said in the article:
"The traditional views of the old WASP upper class were replaced by a Post-Modern Left-of-Center worldview:
1) Patriotism has been replaced by cosmopolitanism, and often downright anti-patriotism.
2) A self-confident belief in progress has been replaced by a post-modern skepticism of or even opposition to progress.
3) Partisan identification has shifted from Republican to Democratic, particularly in the large metro areas in the Northeast and Pacific coast.
4) Ideology has shifted from conservatism to varying degrees of Left-of-Center ideology. The percentage of the professional class who are very Left-of-Center has increased dramatically, particularly since 2010."
This article is not "a screed."
What is your evidence, that this is a screed?"
You can evaluate for yourselves whether the transformation has been good or bad, but I think that it has clearly happened.
Your informative review of how the identity of the various groups in the US evolved over time drew me into your piece. I know it took a lot of work to put together, thank you for that.
The piece I commented on was the first of yours that I read, I now know you are quite prolific and I cannot say that I’ve done your writings justice. That said my comment was in response to your Occam’s Razor – the Left has destroyed everything argument. Your piece piled assertion upon assertion of what “the Left” is in support of that argument. These assertions strike me as straw man arguments where the most extreme views of a marginal (albeit media magnetizing) part of what could be called the Democratic Coalition are put forward as being representative of the whole when it just ain’t so. I can find agreement with you on a lot of particulars, for example attempts to redress social injustice took a toxic and counterproductive form. Or that failing to acknowledge policy failure and change course is a problem – a problem that is not unique to the Left.
As the introduction to your piece illustrated, we live in an extremely complex society and the challenges we face are no less complex. As soon as we mischaracterize the facts and the positions of those whose views differ from our own the more difficult it becomes to effectively meet our challenges. Your position is that the widespread use of fossil fuels is a condition of progress. It would be wrong of me to a) ignore the fact that this has been the case for over a century, b) assume the only reason you make that argument is because you own oil company stock and are looking to profit, c) that you are entirely indifferent to the impact of climate change on human society. Your piece “There is a better alternative to Green Energy policies” paints a picture of a green movement that rejects nuclear and hydro power and the use of natural gas. Furthermore, you contend that “they claim there is no alternative policy,” yet this overlooks the reality that Democratic administration proposed and adopted policies follow an “all of the above” approach—steadily advancing toward a diversified energy mix that reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
In making your assertions you a) ignore the fact that the cost of renewables has been dropping like a stone and is on track to be cheaper than natural gas, b) that solar/wind in some geographies is just a better power source than fossil fuels, c) ignore the fact that while it may not be realistic to get to Net Zero every climate model out there shows that a difference of one degree in global temperatures is significant and meaningful in terms of prosperity as you define it.
The piece I commented on repeatedly hammers away at an easy narrative followed by easy conclusions – at length. That is what I meant by screed. I exempt the first section of your piece from the critique – it was excellent. Picking more bones and demonstrating my own ability to be tedious . . .
Regarding the statement “as measured by government spending as a percentage of GDP and number of regulations, the American government and particularly the federal government is bigger than ever before” in support of your thesis that virtually all programs that are now administered at the federal level be devolved to the states. I guess it depends on how you think of government. If government = bureaucracy the federal bureaucracy as a percentage of GDP is about half of what it was in 1970 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A823RE1Q156NBEA. When I cite that figure from FRED it excludes transfer payments and investments. If your argument is that transfer payments are part of the problem fair enough. We ARE spending beyond our means. What accounts for that? Profligate spending is one argument. Another view is that beginning in 1980 (with a brief reset from 1992-2000) we kept reducing tax rates without making corresponding expense reductions, leading to large deficits that have now reached the level where the service on the debt exceeds our entire defense budget. If you do a thought experiment (and the analysis) you’ll see that if those tax cuts hadn’t been made, we wouldn’t have piled up those massive deficits and their corresponding debt service expense and while we’d still have a budget deficit it would only be around $100 billion annually. Of course, you could argue that in the absence of those tax cuts GDP would not have grown as much. The counter argument to that can be found in the data – US GDP growth has been quite consistent https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP: tax rates were elevated from 1992-2000 but GDP growth kept chugging along (and the deficit disappeared).
Regarding the number of regulations being a proxy for judging whether the size of the federal government is appropriate or not I don’t think it’s that simple. Good regulations at the federal level can and do reduce complexity and facilitate doing business, bad ones do the opposite. Regulations are accretive and therefore will increase over time. I think we can all agree that regulations should be revisited to determine whether they are having the intended effect or if they are still needed at all.
Please keep your comments to the topic of the article. That is a commenting rule of this Substack, and I will enforce it.
I am not going to read through a long stream listing every objection that you have to other articles that I have written.
I never proposed: "Occam’s Razor – the Left has destroyed everything argument." Ironically, you accuse me of making simplistic statements and then summarize this article in such a way.
The actual argument I made in this article is very clearly stated in the second paragraph:
"This is the transformation of the United States:
1) From a highly decentralized society with huge ethnic, racial, religious, and regional differences.
2) Into a highly centralized society with one big class cleavage between the professional class and the rest of society, plus
3) A transformation of the claimed values of the American upper class."
I never claimed "government = bureaucracy." I think that it is an overly simplistic description. You can lower the number of bureaucrats, and that has little to no impact. If one institution compels the action of all other individuals or institutions in a society, that is clearly centralization. It does not matter how many people are enforcing that compulsion.
Yes, "regulation grows by accretion." That is just another way of saying increased centralization of power via the mechanism of regulation. Each regulation compels other individuals and institutions, and the number keep growing, so you are making my case for me.
Apologies for bringing some of your other articles up, I read them because I was trying to get a better understanding of your thinking.
The first two points you cite are indisputable facts. Your third point “transformation of the claimed values of the American upper class” is one you expand on later detailing “their Post-Modern Left of Center world view” going on to state that it undermines the foundations of material progress.
Simply stated I feel you are overstating the case by conflating the noise of the most outspoken on “the Left” with the substantive center of power on “the Left”. Barack Obama’s rhetoric and the conservative (small c) way in which he governed illustrate the point (of course you may view Obama as a dangerous radical). Please note: I agree with you that neither of our political parties are serving us well. And oddly enough I find your proposal to strip down the federal government and put most things onto the States seductive - probably because I’m resentful of the fact that I’ve lived in States that send more to the federal government than they receive. That said, while I honor the States for their role as “the laboratories of democracy and I’d like to believe in the proposition that effective policies will be copied I’m skeptical. And I’m just patriotic enough to disfavor allowing our more disadvantaged States to slide further down the slippery pole. Probably because I’m somewhat infected by valuing that naive idea called “equality”.
I actually don’t believe in equality. I do believe that there is such a thing as excessive inequality. I wish I shared your confidence in greater material prosperity “lifting all boats”. That was certainly the case in the US until later in the 20th century. Unfortunately the record of the last quarter century is one where all the benefits of growth went to a very small slice of the citizenry. I think that is natural in a capitalist system where network and scale effects more of less predetermine that outcome. Which is why I’m a believer in limited redistribution via taxation to invest in what I’ll call “socially and economically productive” policies.
You give no evidence that "the most outspoken on the Left" and "the substantive center of power on “the Left” have no common goals. They clearly do, and they constantly tell you: it is Equality.
Do you believe the term "Left-of-Center" has any meaning? I certainly do. So by definition, to understand the term "Left-of-Center," one must conflate the most outspoken and the substantive center of power. If you cannot conflate them, then the term ""Left-of-Center" has no meaning.
Obama was clearly not a conservative.
Obama publicly stated that "inequality is the defining challenge of our time." He clearly acknowledged that the quest for equality was central to his political vision. That is exactly the same as the "the noise of the most outspoken on “the Left”.
Obama's health care reform (he biggest achievement) was clearly motivated by equality of health care access. You cannot understand Obama or anyone else "Left of Center" without the concept of the Equality.
That does not mean that I consider Obama to be a "dangerous radical."
Based on your last sentence, you believe in promoting Upward Mobility, not Equality. That is exactly what I believe.
It is just that few people are willing to honestly take on the impossibility of equality and how there are much better goals.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-progress-and-upward-mobility
If that is the goal, then the levels of inequality are irrelevant. Investing socially and economically productive” policies conflicts with the goal of creating equality (or at least is completely separate from it).
As long as the goal is to reduce inequality, you bump up against the Center Moral Dilemma of the Left:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-central-moral-dilemma-of-the
I guess I feel that broad labels is one of the problems that gets in the way of our society continuing to develop in a desirable way. Conflating opposite ends of a continuum tends to result in people throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I agree with you that equality is an impossibility. Upward Mobility is a proven good. That said "then levels of inequality are irrelevant" assumes (?) that the status quo is a good place to start from, no? Decades ago I visited Equatorial Guinea when it was the poorest country on earth. Thanks to oil it is has an impressive GDP today, yet the financial benefits have gone to a vanishingly small number of individuals who have no idea of how to extract oil. Call me mildly mentally disordered, but that seems wrong to me.
You are clearly NOT "uninformed, ignorant, immoral, corrupt, or stupid." You've clearly given a lot of thought to how to promote Upward Mobility and I find much to agree with in your proposals. I suspect your affiliation with Brown resulted in you encountering "preference falsification" and toxic personalities. That's enough to cause anyone to recoil.
My original response to your piece was my own feeling that what I (a card carrying Leftist) believe in was being misrepresented, which is neither here nor there. What is relevant is that misrepresentation has historically served as a way of dismissing a wide range of policy prescriptions rather than engaging them. I think we can both agree that is a problem.
I appreciate the thoroughness of the article. These reforms are much needed. Maybe implicit in your 5th point for change but we've got to get rid of the agencies that create the bureaucratic rules. The abdication of its law making responsibilities to agencies is a major impediment to returning the power to the states. Thank you for the work on this article really pulls together a number of factors and shows how the cumulative effect is delivered.
I enjoyed the article. I don’t see how we can get back to a more decentralized merit based system without changing the debt based money that powers those at the top and enslaves the rest in debt.
Thanks for the comment.
If you are referring to the national debt, the annual deficit, and the interest payments on that debt, I agree that they are very serious problems that neither party is confronting.
I see a more decentralized merit based system as key to maintaining long-term economic growth that is essential for lowering the annual deficit.
I have a plan for how to do both:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/one-radical-reform-to-solve-all-our
To an extent but I am specially referring to the fact our currency is created out of thin air by a central bank that is private. Furthermore it is part of global network of private central banks under the BIS. If we don’t return to either a constitutional bi-metallic system or some other non debt based system we are not a sovereign nation.
This is way off the topic of the article. In the future, keep your comments to the topic of the article. It is a commenting rule of this Substack.
Ok noted. Imo it is THE issue. Nevertheless I agree with your main points around bringing the power back to the states.
Huge differences in the degree of diversity in the 30s vs today. How many groups in the 30s followed an ideology such as Isalm incompatible with a Republic, constitution and Bill of Rights? How many groups were entirely tribal in outlook? How many were groups raised with 3rd world values? The extreme differences in values within today's diversity is incomparable to the differences in the 30s.
Not true at all. There plenty of those groups back then plus far greater ethnic, regional, and religious diversity. What you are neglecting is the FAR greater homogeneity of white Americans today compared to in the past. We just forget about it today.
Regarding Islamism, the inventor of that ideology, Sayyid Qtub, lived in Colorado:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb
There is no such thing as “3rd world values.”
And the tribalism in American politics was much stronger back then than today. It was particularly strong within the Democratic party. The two parties were essentially coalitions of ethno-religious minorities.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-american-political
This is another great "direct experience" presentation that was on educational television in 1960 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxacFVnElrU
No, the United States does not "exhibits all hallmarks of Mussolini's corporate fascist state."
You are just trying to change the subject. It is a commenting rule in this Substack that all comments must be on the topic of the article.