# Under Class, Lower Class, Working Class,Middle Class **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 22, 2009, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132 "2009-09-22T20:18:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/61 "2009-10-02T12:57:11Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > There is a bit of confusion over what the “overclass” is supposed to be and their relationship to the “institutional elites”. There is a larger “overclass” because there are more jobs that require highly educated and talented people than there were in the past. These are jobs in accounting, law, finance, marketing, PR, advertising, engineering, medicine, media, technology and so on. These are the so called jobs in “large downtown office building in an East or West Coast metropolis” requiring a “graduate or professional degree from an expensive university”. The “overclass” doesn’t occupy just the top few tiers in these jobs. They occupy EVERY tier. As a general rule, don’t get a first year law associate, banking analyst, Big 4 CPA accountant or Silicon Valley start up job unless you have the right background, education and experience. I would agree with this, but point out that the “right” background is these days available to a very large percentage of the population. While I’ll not argue that having rich, well-connected and educated parents isn’t a very great advantage, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for obtaining the necessary experience and education. Certainly there are barriers to entry - for example, the ability to fund a law school education - but these are not insurmountable by the ambitious. For this reason, the “overclass” lacks sustained coherence. It is not a heriditary status, as social mobility both upwards and, just as important, downwards is a very real possibility - I just have to think of all my friends who scorned their parents’ careers in law and medicine, went to university to pursue “film studies” or vague “english lit” degrees, and ended up working as well educated waiters or taxi drivers … Becomming a member of the "overclass’ ain’t easy, and it involves as you note considerable sacrifices - like a willingness to devote oneself to possibly grinding work rather than more enjoyable artistic or literary pursuits (or, more commonly, partying a lot). Those who grow up with "overclass’ parents have an advantage it is true, but only if they _choose_ to pursue it - and in many cases they lack the ambition to do so. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/62 "2009-10-02T15:32:46Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > I do not. I don’t see why stupid, lazy people who make horrible life decisions based on poor impulse control should enjoy the same standard of living as people who are highly skilled and highly motivated. People should be able to rise or settle into what social strata they feel comfortible with. You may not want to work an 80 hour week or deal with difficult clients and tight deadlines. But don’t expect to make $150000 a year. Yes, of course there will always be gods and clods; but, in a rich society, why do the clods have to be so damned **poor?** Anyway, a classless society does not necessarily require **absolute** equality of wealth or income. George Orwell addressed this in [_The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius_](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part14) (1941): > [@](#): > > I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we need. The first three points deal with England’s internal policy, the other three with the Empire and the world: > > 1. Nationalisation of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries. > > 2. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest taxfree income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one. > > 3. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines. > > 4. Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the war is over. > > 5. Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the coloured peoples are to be represented. > > 6. Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all other victims of the Fascist powers. > > \ > > 1. INCOMES. Limitation of incomes implies the fixing of a minimum wage, which implies a managed internal currency based simply on the amount of consumption goods available. And this again implies a stricter rationing scheme than is now in operation. It is no use at this stage of the world’s history to suggest that all human beings should have EXACTLY equal incomes. It has been shown over and over again that without some kind of money reward there is no incentive to undertake certain jobs. On the other hand the money reward need not be very large. In practice it is impossible that earnings should be limited quite as rigidly as I have suggested. There will always be anomalies and evasions. But there is no reason why ten to one should not be the maximum normal variation. And within those limits some sense of equality is possible. A man with £3 a week and a man with £1,500 a year can feel themselves fellow creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment benches cannot. See also [_Pacific Edge,_](http://www.challengingdestiny.com/reviews/pacificedge.htm) by Kim Stanley Robinson, a utopian novel which is surprisingly persuasive as utopian novels go. It is set in Orange County, CA, in a future America after a Green revolution (apparently a nonviolent revolution, but the details are never discussed). The system is not state socialism, the economy is practically all in private hands; the government merely (1) breaks up any business enterprise that has grown too large for all persons involved in it to know each other personally, on “small is beautiful” grounds, and (2) provides a basic unearned income of $10,000 a year to everybody, while forbidding or taxing away any income above $100,000. In the book, this works as intended: In the post-revolution economy, you can **live** on $10,000 a year, at a very basic level, if you’re disinclined to work, or unable to work, or want to spend your time working on non-remunerative intellectual or artistic occupations; but there’s still plenty of room for enterprise and ambition – “Everybody wants to be a Hundred.” (Whether it would work IRL is of course another question.) Obviously, such a society would be for all practical purposes classless, and it would be by no means unusual for a child of a Ten family and a child of a Hundred family to marry. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/63 "2009-10-02T20:11:59Z")
**BrainGlutton** , most of those ideas are terrible. I just don’t even know where to begin tearing them apart. They are completely contrary to anything I have ever learned in economics. They sound great if you want to create a world just like Orwells more famous book - 1984. Are you sure he wasn’t being ironic? Suffice to say, wealth is not created by the government giving everyone an allowance to live off of and it’s not redistributed by forbidding people from earning a significant income. And why are small businesses better than large ones? Have you ever heard of a thing called “economies of scale”? And some businesses can’t be small. What is the fewest number of workers you need to run an automobile plant? Or a shipyard? Or a telecom network? ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/64 "2009-10-02T21:06:51Z")
And of course, plenty of small companies rely on large companies to exist. How many small businesses would go belly-up without UPS and FedEx? And how can you run a national package delivery system without a national organization? ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/65 "2009-10-02T21:11:12Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > **BrainGlutton** , most of those ideas are terrible. I just don’t even know where to begin tearing them apart. They are completely contrary to anything I have ever learned in economics. They sound great if you want to create a world just like Orwells more famous book - 1984. Are you sure he wasn’t being ironic? Nope, Orwell was a full-on socialist, he honestly believed that the government should nationalize all industry. He was even against private ownership of land, and thought the government should nationalize all farms and turn the farmers into state employees. In WWII he was convinced that unless Britain turned socialist there was no way they could win the war. Nice guy, but a bit of a dolt. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/66 "2009-10-02T21:13:06Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > And I seriously disagree that it was common for a middle class professional man to marry a working class woman who worked under him. A lawyer didn’t marry his secretary, he married the daughter of his boss. That was a dream, but there are relatively few bosses daughters to go around. Especially ones who would meet and want to marry junior execs. > [@](#): > > And the reason for the old saw of the secretary who really ran the business, was that women weren’t allowed to run the business. Nowadays a hypercompetent secretary doesn’t exist, because if she’s hypercompetent she’s not working as a secretary, she’s working as a manager. I know of a couple of hypercompetent admins, all working for at least VPs, and all older. It wasn’t a myth. When a friend of mine wanted to stop being a math major at MIT, he negotiated the deal with the department secretary. I had a director at Bell Labs who made it a point, when going to a new location, to introducing himself to the secretaries first. He said that it got him access to the people he wanted to talk to. When he took over a factory, I followed his advice when visiting him, and it kept me from having to sleep on a bench at Stapledon Airport during a blizzard. Today you are correct - women like this go into higher prestige jobs as a rule. Then businessmen married secretaries and doctors married nurses. Today businessmen marry businesswomen and doctors marry other doctors. > [@](#): > > Businessmen rarely married secretaries in the old days, because they didn’t marry out of their class. And they don’t marry the secretary nowadays because they don’t have secretaries any more. I worked for years at Microsoft and never met one secretary. I suppose Steve Ballmer and that ilk might have had secretaries, I wouldn’t know. But in the old days, everyone who got the title of “manager” had a secretary. Nowadays, at least in the technology sector that I’m familiar with, nobody does. Ever see “How to Succeed at Business Without Really Trying”? Marrying a secretary was not considered to be marrying outside your class (assuming you weren’t a millionaire) since there was no room for women in your class to work at jobs other than secretary. I think you may be underestimating the respect secretaries were (and still are) given. When I first became a manager I got half a secretary for about 14 people. Today in my company (which is roughly equivalent to Microsoft in the tech sense) there is one secretary for my VP, covering well over 100 people. When my VP doubled his group size he got no more support. Part of that is cost cutting, but a lot is the fact that in the old days a man typing was considered demeaning, while today a male programmer who can’t use Office really well is considered a boob. Look at the fact that it was news that Obama was going to have a laptop on his desk. Much of the workload a secretary used to have has gone away. When I became a manager, a vacation request of a snow day generated a piece of paper which my secretary prepared and I signed. Today it is all done on-line. Travel arrangements involved a call to our in-house travel agent, which I was happy to have my secretary do, but today I can log into our travel portal and do it myself. > [@](#): > > There are still working class people around–the guys who do the landscaping, the cleaning staff, and so on. But they don’t mingle intimately with the managers the way secretaries and valets and butlers used to. The modern overclass household doesn’t have live-in servants, they hire a housekeeper who comes in once a week, and a gardener who comes in once a week, they eat at restaurants instead of a live-in cook. The only exception is the nanny might be live-in, because who wants to get up in the middle of the night to change a wet diaper? But while the overclass husband might have an affair with the Venezeulan nanny, he sure isn’t going to marry her. Unless your name is Robin Williams. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/67 "2009-10-02T21:24:03Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Nope, Orwell was a full-on socialist . . . **To the end of his life.** It’s amazing how many conservatives who give him iconic status for _Animal Farm_ and _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ don’t seem to know that. He never even, at any point, grew “disillusioned” with Stalinism – if you read his accounts of the Spanish Civil War you’ll find he had no illusions to begin with. It was simply that his idea of socialism was different, more democratic. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/68 "2009-10-02T21:28:52Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > And why are small businesses better than large ones? Have you ever heard of a thing called “economies of scale”? And some businesses can’t be small. What is the fewest number of workers you need to run an automobile plant? Or a shipyard? Or a telecom network? Well, it’s just a novel and Robinson makes no pretense of being an economist. The basic idea seems to be that small enterprise is less cold and impersonal, more human-scale, and if management gets to the point where it has to consider layoffs, the employees are more to them than names on a list, and, in any case, the distinction between “labor” and “management” is not so very sharp in a small business. Perhaps the scale problem could be solved by associative or contractual relationships between independent companies with the same size and the same functions as a big company’s various departments. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/69 "2009-10-02T21:30:29Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > In WWII he was convinced that unless Britain turned socialist there was no way they could win the war. Which they did, kindasorta, but it was emergency “war socialism,” abandoned after victory. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/70 "2009-10-02T21:48:57Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > **To the end of his life.** It’s amazing how many conservatives who give him iconic status for _Animal Farm_ and _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ don’t seem to know that. He never even, at any point, grew “disillusioned” with Stalinism – if you read his accounts of the Spanish Civil War you’ll find he had no illusions to begin with. It was simply that his idea of socialism was different, more democratic. As explained here, also from _The Lion and the Unicorn:_ > [@](#): > > What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism, that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit—DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result. > > When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddlesteamer of equal horse-power stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened on the fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one. But it is necessary here to give some kind of definition to those much-abused words, Socialism and Fascism. > > Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does NOT mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the moment. > > However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money. If this sounds incredibly naive in hindsight, as we can look back on the history of Communist systems’ economic performance in the 20th Century, measure against it a much more recent analysis by Lester Thurow, who **is** an economist. In [_Economics Explained,_](http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Explained-Everything-About-Economy/dp/0684846411) having carefully analyzed the incredible practical problems of an economy based on centralized planning without the constant corrective feedback provided by the law of supply and demand, he concludes that, nevertheless, **Stalinism works** – for limited but nevertheless very important purposes, such as heavy-capital formation. And look at the evidence: Stalin took over a country that had never been heavily industrialized to begin with, and that limited industrial infrastructure devastated by World War I and the subsequent Russian Civil War. By means incredibly brutal and incredibly wasteful, he spurred the USSR to develop at breakneck speed to the point where, scarcely more than a decade later, it was an industrial power capable of going head-to-head with Hitler’s Germany. **No way** could that have happened, if Russia had had a free-market system during that period. (And Hitler likewise, as Orwell observed, had put Germany on a war footing unprecedented in history by drafting industry to the purpose – not in as thoroughgoing a way as the Stalin had, but with exactly as much state control over private enterprise as seemed good to the Nazis at any given moment; and it worked.) From _Economics Explained:_ > [@](#): > > The reason it [the Soviet system] did last [as long as it did] is that in the beginning the system very much resembled a military operation. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin confronted an almost totally disorganized society, and tried at first to build a “socialism” that was partly capitalist – private farming and private small enterprise – and partly socialist, in the form of state-owned banks and large centers of production. Russia staggered along under this mixed system for a few years, without either great success or great failure, but after Lenin’s death in 1927, Stalin took command and rapidly instituted the highly centralized system we have sketched in. > > Stalin’s methods were ferocious and bloody, but they were successful in bringing about an immense accumulation of wealth, much as did the ruthless ways of the ancient pharoahs of Egypt and emperors of Rome or China. The difference was that whereas the latter built palaces and cities, Stalin built factories, steel mills, hydroelectric plants, and railway systems – the ingredients of an industrial economy. The fact that Stalin’s Russia was strong enough to resist Hitler’s armies – and efficient enough, after its reconstruction following World War II, to impress the world with its industrial and military capabilities – shows that Soviet central planning was by no means a failure in its initial years. That is why “military socialism” may yet be a model for development efforts in the future. China is today a semi-military socialism which appears to be successfully negotiating the early stages of industrialization, much aided by a carefully supervised free market sector attached to the planned core. Hence the collapse of the Soviet system should not lead us to the snap judgment that centralized socialism is no longer on the agenda of the coming century. That is indeed likely to be the case with the North, but it is not a foregone conclusion in the troubled countries of the South. > > THE COLLAPSE > > But we are ahead of ourselves. After so successful a beginning, why did Soviet socialism finally break down? The answer is that it is a great deal easier to design and build the skeleton of a mighty economy than to run it. Building a steel plant requires good industrial draftsmanship, but running a steel plant requires good industrial management. Management, in turn, depends on the ability to adapt flows of production to ever-changing conditions – the unforeseen contingencies, mistakes, mismatches, shortages, and overruns that are inescapable in any complex undertaking. > > In a market system, these mistakes are repaired and remedied as soon as possible because they cost the factory or store money. Hence suppliers are told to hurry up, or to hold back on shipments, unprofitable items are canceled and profitable ones run overtime, the Yellow Pages are searched for last-minute necessities. None of this can happen in a society planned from top to bottom. When mistakes are made, they bring about a kind of gridlock in the flow of production, so that the pace of Soviet economic production was a never-ending sequence of feast or famine, too much or too little, with no way of remedying the errors other than recasting next year’s plan or seeking the semi-illegal channels of “tolkachi” – fixers. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/71 "2009-10-02T21:59:11Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Nope, Orwell was a full-on socialist, he honestly believed that the government should nationalize all industry. He was even against private ownership of land, and thought the government should nationalize all farms and turn the farmers into state employees. In WWII he was convinced that unless Britain turned socialist there was no way they could win the war. Nice guy, but a bit of a dolt. Maybe 1984 was the ironic book? > [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Well, it’s just a novel and Robinson makes no pretense of being an economist. The basic idea seems to be that small enterprise is less cold and impersonal, more human-scale, and if management gets to the point where it has to consider layoffs, the employees are more to them than names on a list, and, in any case, the distinction between “labor” and “management” is not so very sharp in a small business. Companies lay people off because there is an economic reason to do so. > [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Perhaps the scale problem could be solved by associative or contractual relationships between independent companies with the same size and the same functions as a big company’s various departments. So your cure is collusion? Economies of scale are not a “problem”. Companies large and small have a size that is naturally most efficient. For example, it’s more efficient to have a modern autmotive factory that can crank out tens of thousands of cars instead of a couple hundred. The only time a company’s size is problematic is when it is so large it either prevents comeptition or it’s failure would have too much of an effect on the economy. Personally I think creating all this beurocracy and regulation creates more of a class society, not less. ---
**Author:** ![Animastryfe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8797f3/32.png) [@Animastryfe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Animastryfe)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/72 "2009-10-02T22:06:49Z")
> [@PatriotGrrrl](#): > > This guy sure as hell doesn’t know many programmers or engineers! I agree. At least, the Silicon Valley-esque programmers and engineers are definitely not like that. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/73 "2009-10-02T22:15:26Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Maybe 1984 was the ironic book? Not in any respect. > [@msmith537](#): > > Companies lay people off because there is an economic reason to do so. :dubious: Very reassuring to the laid-off, I’m sure. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2009, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/74 "2009-10-03T04:50:31Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > :dubious: Very reassuring to the laid-off, I’m sure. So what? What is your alternative? Pay people to do work that isn’t necessary? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2009, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/75 "2009-10-03T18:00:03Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > So what? What is your alternative? Pay people to do work that isn’t necessary? Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – that is the best alternative; Keynes knew it very well. But the real problem is that the layoff decision in a big company is usually being made from on high by an exec whose own job is not threatened, saying, **"I** have decided that **you** are not necessary to this company." And the laid-off have **no say in that decision at all.** Or, as the labor organizer in the film [_Matewan_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matewan) put it, “You’re not men to the Company. You’re equipment.” ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2009, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132/76 "2009-10-03T23:38:14Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – that is the best alternative; Keynes knew it very well. I don’t think that’s exactly what Keynes had in mind. > [@BrainGlutton](#): > > But the real problem is that the layoff decision in a big company is usually being made from on high by an exec whose own job is not threatened, saying, **"I** have decided that **you** are not necessary to this company." And the laid-off have **no say in that decision at all.** Or, as the labor organizer in the film [_Matewan_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matewan) put it, “You’re not men to the Company. You’re equipment.” Actually your point of view is pretty one-sided. Often those exec’s jobs ARE threatened. They may need to cut costs in their department. Their entire department may face elimination. Often layoffs are necessary to keep the company in business. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/under-class-lower-class-working-class-middle-class/511132.md?page=3)