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.
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 (1941):
See also Pacific Edge, 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As explained here, also from The Lion and the Unicorn:
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, 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.)
Companies lay people off because there is an economic reason to do so.
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.
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 put it, “You’re not men to the Company. You’re equipment.”
I don’t think that’s exactly what Keynes had in mind.
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.
