>What analysis of elites doesn't include reference to Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch?

Analysis is a bit generous. It's a retread of some pretty stale ideas. It's flagship idea is a redefinition of the word elite to include "even a college degree holder working at Starbucks".

He doesn't outright say it because it's so transparently self serving but it's very obviously painted.

Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch would approve.

It's a reactionary piece designed to protect and promote elite power by, in essence, rhetorically disguising it.

It mirrors somewhat the way that "boomer" has cleverly been positioned as a sponge for the post-occupy fury directed at the 1%.

If it draws on Turchin's idea of elite overproduction, calling the degreed Starbucks baristas elites is sensible. Turchin's thesis is that society can only productively assimilate so many people with certain kinds of degrees, or academics in general. Past that, training academics creates a class of people who expect to have status, but cannot have it because there's no productive thing for them to do. Partly numbers, partly due to the nature of the degrees involved. So we end up with degreed people serving coffee at Starbucks.

But serving coffee at Starbucks isn't high status, as academic jobs should be, which creates a frustration in these failed mandarins: They don't treat the status as something they took a shot at and missed, like you would when trying for a three-pointed in basketball. They have the degree, they feel the status belongs to them, so ending up at Starbucks is a loss, not a miss, and humans take losses like that badly. Turchin contends that overproduction of these kinds of people is a key cause of social instability.

That's a bingo.

If there's a list of elite billionaires you'd like bashed on in a piece like this, why limit it to arbitrarily to Murdoch and Koch? Respectfully, your political biases are coming through just as much as the author of this article's.

The media and communication spending efforts of these two families were instrumental in electing specific individuals that directly enabled the shifting of GDP accrual from labour away to capital. (In particular getting people elected who reduce corporate tax/capital gains tax/upper-decile income tax, limit unions, limit minimum wages and individual social protection.)

Yes, lots of other billionaires are individually union-busting, underpaying, colluding against workers in their companies - but the ones above suborn legislation in multiple countries to do it for them.

Rupert Murdoch owns the centerpiece of the right wing media empire and has used it relentlessly to radicalize right wing people and undermine democracy.

Charles Koch is one of the great oil magnates and uses his immense wealth to fund, among other evil things, the climate denial movement in politics and the media, especially in the United States.

It's not just these two men, obviously. But they are the real leading figures in the destruction of our society. George Soros isn't even close. Musk and Bezos might be a net positive; I'd at least consider the argument. This isn't just hating the rich. One side is evil and bent on the destruction of our species.

Because capex is what drives productivity and profits as opposed to the individual talent of labor in the majority of cases. US Steel went down the drain from its prime due to failure to invest in new technology.

While you may need to pay more for a high school educated worker who can read instruction manuals to operate heavy machinery than very common illiterate subsistence farmers. Notice that where productivity is based upon worker skill more than tools are still doing very well in wages. This is because the role of capital is more recruiting than direct productivity boosting. And well capital is good at self perpetuation.

> How can an article about "elite competition" not mention anything about how, during a few decades in the 20th Century, labor's share of profits increased, and since 1980 has flatlined, with all rewards accruing to capital?

As far as I can tell, the share accruing to land increased. The share accruing to capital stayed roughly flat.

In any case, the labour share didn't drop all that much. A few percentage points.

The bigger deal is perhaps the change in distribution of that labour share amongst workers.

Here's McKinsey in 2019:

"Labor’s share of national income—that is, the amount of GDP paid out in wages, salaries, and benefits—has been declining in developed and, to a lesser extent, emerging economies since the 1980s."

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-gr...

This divergence since 1980 is the subject of Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century.

Yes, the labour share of income has slightly declined. I agreed with that?

But the extra has gone to land, not capital.

Piketty fails to make that distinction. See eg https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/07/22/piketty-... or https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...

Interesting. There seems to be some debate among the critics, but putting that aside...

If it's all gone to land, the situation seems worse as far as inequality goes. The top 1% of households own 40% of land in the US as of 2017. The next 9 percent own 42%.

So maybe it's inexact to call it "capital" vs. "labor", but... a class of people is dominating.

> So maybe it's inexact to call it "capital" vs. "labor", but... a class of people is dominating.

Not sure about 'class'.

But the policy implications are quite different:

Land value taxation can capture all that extra rent going to land without hurting the economy one bit. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

By contrast, taxing capital is a really bad idea. Eg capital gains taxes hamper productivity growth.

I was not aware of this paper, I will read it and see what further work has said, thanks (it's from 2015 there's gotta be something).

To be fair it does mention "Retreads of the Reagan program today serve as a stale punchline rather than a serious attempt at politics. ...adding more free-market Reaganism to combat the fallout from free-market Reaganism".

Incredible how Reagan also caused the same problems in countries like Canada where wages are flat and housing is more expensive than the US! Damn you Republicans!

Canada had Mulroney and Britain had Thatcher with Reagan.

  Reagan declared that he had come to Washington to “drain the swamp” of bureaucracy, and set up the Grace Commission to investigate the operation of the U.S. government. Thatcher and Mulroney were equally committed to reform and initiated wide-ranging changes. By the end of the 1990s, the changes were dramatic. Many governments operations had been privatized in all three countries, and new management techniques had been introduced. In Great Britain, one observer judged that the changes were historically as important as the collapse of Keynesian economics. Is government now better in these countries, and was political leadership right in focusing on management of the bureaucracy as the villain? Savoie suggests that the reforms overlooked problems now urgently requiring attention and, at the same time, attempted to address non-existent problems. He combines theory and research based on sixty-two interviews, nearly all with members of the executive branch of the governments of Britain, Canada and the United States.
  --Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney, In Search of a New Bureaucracy By Donald J. Savoie

It's spooky that all these countries did the same thing at the same time.

Also arguably, in the US, it started under Carter (though Reagan became the face of it).

Kind of like how Trump is the face of the "decoupling" from China, but this built on the "Obama Pivot", and seems to be being continued (maybe a little better) by Biden?

The paranoid part of me wants to blame whatever happens at Davos and whatnot, but it's probably just "the intellectual spirit of the times".

Yes, the conservative-neoliberal alliance that has produced terrible inequality and political institutions incapable of solving problems because they aren't actually responsive to the public... succeeded everywhere.

Yeah I know, but this seems like a throwaway line designed to add "both sides" cover, in between several paragraphs of shadowboxing the Left.

The owners of the system seem curiously left out of most analysis.

It explicitly criticises the inability of the economy to create enough jobs. It says that Marx was correct about capitalism (btw, contrary to what people think, this is a fairly common view amongst conservatives who tend to be well-read enough to know that Marx's critiques of capitalism are quite distinct from Marxism). It is a fairly traditional conservative critique of capitalism that actually predates Marx by five decades (capitalism is dehumanizing, it breaks down traditional relations, capitalism is destructive socially/culturally).

The US jobless is at record lows. That is a bad criticism of our economic system, because it isn't true. It might be the case that some powerful economic actors work to undermine full employment some of the time (for instance). But the specifics matter. What matters is the kinds of jobs and how much of the pie is being distributed, a fact completely left out of their article.

Do conservatives care about having an economy that's actually just and equitable? That's a pretty big part of what Marx was getting at; much bigger than the one point about how it undermines traditional religious belief (a good thing). That would probably solve their concerns about not enough young people starting families.

I've heard a lot of rhetoric, and I've seen what literally every "conservative" politician actually does: enrich entrenched elites, undermine democracy, and make the violent parts of the state less accountable to the public.

> But the specifics matter. What matters is the kinds of jobs

From the article, emphasis mine:

> Only by actually addressing problems at the point of production—for example, by ensuring decent jobs that allow workers to support a family—can one honestly hope to address these problems in a permanent way.

Maybe not as specific as you'd like, but I don't think it's accurate to say the article doesn't go beyond employment numbers on their face. In fact, in the context of SK, it's explicitly critical of the sorts of "jobs" one might suspect these days of putting a pretty coat of lipstick on the pig that is our job market:

> Though the official unemployment rate in South Korea is below 4 percent, an enviable number in any advanced economy, rosy figures such as these mask a growing structural and social malaise in the country. The rate of “self-employment” in South Korea was estimated to be over 25 percent before the pandemic, compared to 10 percent in the United States. This phenomenon of self-employment, much like the oft-hyped switch to “the gig economy” in America, has little to do with individual freedom and entrepreneurship and more to do with underemployment, a lack of job retraining, and worsening prospects especially for older members of the workforce. On top of this, the South Korean middle classes find themselves not only threatened by a potential shrinking of opportunity, but face constantly growing costs as well, including education and housing prices, especially in Seoul, where median apartment prices have nearly doubled since 2016.

> What matters is the kinds of jobs and how much of the pie is being distributed, a fact completely left out of their article.

Again, this is not left out. This point is explicitly mentioned.

> Do conservatives care about have an economy that's actually just and equitable?

Yes, that is what the article is arguing for. I am not actually sure that Marx did say this because the notion of justice and equity is inherently subjective. What he said is that capitalism changes the nature of social and cultural relations.

Okay, that is what you have seen, it doesn't make it true because your point of view is: conservative people are bad. If you actually think more carefully about what you are saying, you would understand why this is wrong (conservative thought in the US was founded on the principle of challenging an accountable state, challenging entrenched elites, and creating democracy).

There have always been Kochs and Soroses.

What’s new post 1960 is:

1. Massive increase in the college-educated.

2. Women getting educated and entering the workforce in large numbers.

I didn't say Soros, and I didn't say "Koches". I said Charles Koch and Rupert Murdoch because they are the men destroying the fabric of our society by 1) fueling non-stop culture wars and hatred (about a trillion dollars has been spent on right wing media since it's inception as big business) and 2) destroying our environment, which is already a crisis for many people around the globe if it's not for you.

These are the real problems we face. Not "wokeness" (basically just a nouveau slur).

More educated people aren't a problem, this has driven the greatest economic boom in history. It has driven the greatest reduction in interpersonal violence in history. Education is an unalloyed good. Political, cultural and economic equality for women and however many other categories of people you want to add to that list are unalloyed goods.

The problem is that all rewards are distributed to the top, because of the dominance of a small number of evil men over our political and economic system since about 1980. That is why competition to become an elite is so intense: only elites benefit from the current system. It is why we cannot get Democrats to govern properly, and why Republicans govern only with malice.

I agree with your analysis that inequality is a big problem facing the world. However, I also don't see wokeness as an unalloyed good.

I'm a pretty liberal guy, but I'm seeing a rash of articles talking about some real harm wokeness has been causing lately when taken to an extreme. For example:

- California pushing new math framework that recommends no Algebra before Grade 9 in the name of racial justice. This is bordering on Harrison Bergeron territory.

- UC schools eliminating SAT as admission criteria, which is used to disproportionally hurts Asian applicants.

- Elite colleges like Harvard making their admissions less meritocratic and trying to limit Asian and Jewish admissions in favour of White, Black and Hispanic admissions. This is reminiscent of adding extra-curriculars to discriminate against Jewish students in first half of 20th century.

- Cancel culture taking things too far.

Funding the campaigns of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute crimes sounds like it falls into the destroying the fabric of society bucket.

Charles Koch and Rupert Murdoch are the ones destroying our environment? Can you explain or justify why you single out those two? Because from where I sit, that claim seems to be completely divorced from reality.

The lobbying efforts of the Kochs were famously inspired by their battles with the EPA. They spent half of their careers fighting environmentalism in service of profit.

Is it that from where you're sitting my points 1) and 2) a) aren't true, b) are true but aren't really harmful to society, or c) aren't the particular fault of the man who sits atop the right wing media ecosystem (which creates constant cultural conflict), and the biggest funder of climate change denial (because he's an oil baron)?

I don't think that your point 2) is true of Murdoch. The right wing media ecosystem is not the prime driver of environmental destruction. People (on all sides) wanting more stuff, and in particular more energy, is the culprit.

Also lots more restrictions on building residential housing.

This is a real problem, and a direct consequence of elite competition: keep other competitors out.

There should be enough places to live built as there are humans.

Have a look at 'Why are there NIMBYs?' (Eg http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.981... )

I wouldn't exactly call your typical middle class home owner an elite. Would you?

> There should be enough places to live built as there are humans.

We have the technology to build high and stack apartments, and the wealth to afford it. In many places, we just don't have the regulatory environment to do so legally.

Yes NIMBY is a problem and may be more about human nature.

The broken regulatory environment that exacerbates the problem is a consequence of elite competition: government not working for the public is caused by being captured by narrow interests, who work to corrupt its purpose.

The (upper) middle class homeowners who don't want apartments built nearby? They are, for various reasons, better represented by local governments than people who want to do new things. I agree that the concept of "elite" doesn't cover what's going on here, but there are echoes, because power is a spectrum.

That's the point I actually wanted to make.

> The broken regulatory environment that exacerbates the problem is a consequence of elite competition: government not working for the public is caused by being captured by narrow interests, who work to corrupt its purpose.

Alas, not necessarily. Normal voters are perfectly capable of demanding broken stuff all by themselves. Voters (somewhat rationally!) behave like idiots.

Because it's a conservative journal. Their entire world view basically doesn't consider that as something to be concerned about to begin with.

Yeah I know. I wish more people noticed that the most powerful people keep being left out of diagnoses of our problems.

You should have read to the end...you also probably should have actually read more about what conservatives think, rather than what people who aren't conservatives say conservatives think.

As a matter of fact I did read to the end, since other than the eye-rollingly dumb rhetoric around wokeness it did raise interesting points.

They get the root cause completely wrong, but of course that's expected.

Conservatives are free to talk about their agenda whenever they like. The fact of the matter is elite conservative thought is wildly unpopular, and they know it. So all this culture war crap is all they have.

Yeah, it's funny, I read to the end; it's not a bad piece of writing though I suspect I wouldn't see eye to eye with the writer on some economic issues; I hold opinions that you might call classical Marxist, or Marxian, and to be honest, the analysis seemed almost "historical materialist" and he even uses Marx in his argumentation, and this quote "If politics is indeed downstream of culture, then it must be added that culture finds itself perched snugly downstream from the realm of production." could come straight out of an old issue of Monthly Review or Capital & Class.

Anyways, not easy to pigeon-hole. But maybe not super coherent either.

And yeah, his quip about "what passes for the left" -- indeed. The left -- and its bread and butter based economic critique -- is mostly unidentifiable in North American politics today. To the point that most educated Americans can't distinguish between neoliberalism and "socialism" anymore.

It is easy to pigeon-hole because conservative writers were writing about this kind of thing before Marx (about five decades before in fact, this is a slightly complex point because politics then wasn't so linear but a lot of the critique of capitalism came from the wealthiest, it was the new rich Liberal factory owners that were the advocates for capitalism, the traditional land-owning elites, for example Disraeli, were making identical points to the OP).

I think the problem today is that people view Marxism within the context of a discussion that postdates Marx by one century. Historical materialism is also something quite distinct from Marxism. Marx wasn't a Marxist (or so Engels said), and there are lots of historical materialist historians (particularly economic historians) who aren't Marxist either.

On your final paragraph, I think much of the discussion today is totally reductive. You are right there is no difference between neoliberalism and socialism but that is because there is no difference between neoliberals and socialists. I am not actually opposed to "Third Way" politics but there is no real representation for working people. And yes, part of that is because the left has the moral authority and wealthy people have hijacked that moral authority in order to fight their culture wars about social causes that are largely irrelevant to most working people (the enemy doesn't exist, it is just a way for wealthy people to shed their guilt and obtain self-justification). It is telling that working class reaction in the US was led by an orange billionaire, it makes no sense (and btw, I don't think people like Sanders or Warren are particularly compelling or effective leaders, the reason orange man won was because, for all his grievous faults, he actually seemed like a normal human being...as weird as that sounds when talking about someone who is so obviously abnormal in many ways).

I think that you're missing that one of the co-authors of the original piece is in fact an ex-Marxist, and uses Marx and Marxian frameworks in this piece of writing.

Except the piece of writing focused on education/hierarchy/social standing rather than on class analysis.

I also never said that neoliberalism and socialism are the same thing or whatever; I said that among the average American, they don't know what socialism is, and often mislabel liberals/neoliberals with this label, nonsensically. And among the right in the US, this is a frequent talking point -- that somehow Biden is "socialist".. which is preposterous.

There is no effectively organized "left" in the traditional sense in American politics. Not even a social democratic party. Just a repressed minority within the Democrats (a right wing party) that is forced into a forever subservient position to neoliberal elites.

Malcom Kyeyune, at least, is a one-time socialist. Now he seems to be more of a (right) populist, albeit still heavily influenced by Marxism. According to this blog post[0], he believes that the populist right is the actual party of the working class, since leftist parties have invariably begun to advocate for the interests of the professional-managerial class, who are their primary clients these days.

[0] https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/on-strasserism-and...

>he believes that the populist right is the actual party of the working class

A pretty neat way of ingratiating himself with right wing elites and a promising route to political power.

And, if you are on the left, shouldn't you kind-of want the "bad guys" to start borrowing your ideas? That should make things less-bad when they win, right? As far as I can tell, the problem, apart from Trump winning, was that he didn't do enough of this Bannonesque stuff, and instead remained too-much a (typical, apart from the incompetence) Big Business Republican.

??

This is the two wings of the business party arguing over which one of them better represents actual people.

Yeah, Trump attempted some left wing populist rhetoric just before he won but it was just rhetoric.

I was expressing the hope that the populist right could be steered away from its worst impulses, and that, if that could be done, it might be a better partner for getting certain kinds of policy enacted than Reagan Republicans would be.

But instead, that wing has been taken over by white ethnic stuff and culture war (like right populist parties in other countries), which makes that sort of alliance very difficult.

Big business would seem to be the beneficiary of this situation.

Though obviously yes, in the voting booth, "Republicans bad" is a sufficient level of nuance.

Really not sure how that would be possible. The Republican party is fairly evenly split between corporate/Reaganesque Republicans and the populist right. There are no other power blocs that could enact the kind of steering you're hoping for. Even electoral defeat doesnt seem to phase them much (they're all voting against popular progressive bills in lockstep).

The best we could probably hope for is that those two wings of the party turn on each other but as Trump demonstrated they seem to be able to find enough common ground to work together.