If you were to look at the individual histories of most senior corporate executives, most of them were in various middle management positions at some point before they became executives...
The kinds of people who were able to move above each layer of middle management were basically those who were the most skilled at manipulating others for their own personal benefit; the simple game of taking credit whilst deflecting blame. It's not surprising that the kinds of people who are able to traverse several levels of the management hierarchy to become executives completely lack any self-awareness. Thinking about themselves would distract them from their main activity which is fooling others.
I've worked in enough companies to know that those who get promoted are not those who care about others' (or even the company's) well being. This is provably true because the contrapositive statement would create a contradiction because in such case, the manager would help others to get promoted and thus they would never get promoted themselves.
Forget for a moment about what we might think about people who succeed in business, and look critically at the ones who fail. People who fail in business are the ones who want friends, honour, fame, validation, sympathy, justice, social good, and esteem. They personalize failures against these needs and stop dealing with the higher level abstraction of the success of the venture. The ones who succeed want something else, either because they already have or self-fulfill those other things, or just don't care. We can moralize and say it's the latter, but it's more often the former.
It's easier when an institution has given you the conceit that you are not morally accountable to the uninitiated or uneducated. The thing about class is that barring crime, there is no downside to betraying someone who isn't a part of your tribe, which is usually from a school. If you believe people get what they deserve, they call that the "just world fallacy," for a reason. It's a noble lie. If it weren't, you'd see more nurses and veterans in business class seats.
Anyway, long topic, but in spite of my opinions, I think it is difficult to accurately criticize management and class without the perspective of an elite education, as (perhaps horrifically) what can instruments know of their players?
Instead of working their way up within a single institution, they make lots of “lateral” transfers.
The government/lobbyist revolving doors are a good example, but not the only one. How many tech workers go back and forth between big tech companies and startups, each time rising more than if they stayed put?
It creates an administrative class that has little commitment to the institutions they “serve”, and an overly valued senior class that is able to run out the door, taking the company with it.
Meanwhile people who stick with the same company - often for reasons beyond their control - end up in “lower management” positions at best.
BTW, my own experience with executives is that most have a sales or engineering background. Very few, of any, have a background in true middle management background (HR, accounting, governmental compliance, etc.)
And the real question I want to ask: Do you feel that especially the middlest of managers have to fear AI the most, because AI could theoretically replace exactly that middle layer and do it even better than a human could?
The problem is your reference is some kind of broken organisation where people are basically slave labour and managers only serve to dish out the work given from above. Sure bad managers of that description could be replaced by a good AI in the future but that would be awful because a good manager brings vitality to a team, helps individual team members and helps to filter and promote ideas up and down the organisation.
The middle class really isn't any less powerful today. Near as I can tell what happened isn't that the middle class became less powerful, but that journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class so they spread the perception that the middle class has lost its power because they themselves feel like they have lost power, especially economic power.
I suspect that society is most likely perceived as most stable when those with megaphones and that buy ink by the barrel feel most stable.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/th...
For most of the history of journalism in the U.S., journalists were not in the "upper middle class". Journalism was a poorly paid working class job for most of the 20th century. Maybe a couple decades at the end of it different.
Or maybe it's the reverse, because the field has high prestige and impact, it attracts upper class children who don't need the salary, causing a downward pressure for journalist wages.
"How journalism became a middle class profession for university graduates": https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2009/jul/21/new...
"The death of the working class reporter": https://blog.usejournal.com/the-death-of-the-working-class-r...
The original claim I was challenging was "journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class" -- I don't think they ever were, it's possible that MORE of them are now than previous -- as you say, even as salaries drop.
This article is just standard journalistic myth-making. The journalists cited as examples of success without college degrees, Carl Bernstein and Walter Cronkite (who both went to college, just dropped out), came from privileged backgrounds just like the privileged kids who fill the industy today.
Maybe 10-15 years ago that was true, but today the control of public discourse is no longer controlled by the elite class. Blogging completely ended that control.
Now because of blogging and commodification of the news, the money is no longer in journalism but in clickbait and it's a race to the bottom.
This article about the decline of Newsweek does a good job chronicling what is happening at news media companies all over the world:
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/newsweek.php
Journalists now find themselves among the precariat, especially those in the long tail of journalism working at clickbait factories like Business Insider, HuffPo, Jezebel, etc. News media is now a gig industry job.
I think colloquially it is called being severely butthurt. Not a phenomenon restricted to the US.
It sounds to me like you're allowing aesthetic considerations distract you from your common interests.
As a result, the managerialists double down on what makes them different from techs, which means being extra airy, vague, political, and what most working people interpret as untrustworthy. It's practically a shibboleth, as if to say they don't need to seem honest because they are powerful. I don't think this managerial class is as necessary as people who are a part of it think.
The class disconnect is more pronounced in recent years because of the stark differences in physical competence and the precarious status of people who imagine themselves as "elite." What they deride as populism is much more complex than they perceive. Working people expect their elites to at least be somewhat noble, and when they aren't, history is the story we tell about what happens to them.