
The Two Middle Classes - paulpauper
https://quillette.com/2020/02/27/the-two-middle-classes/
======
tzs
> This class has become increasingly hereditary, in part due to the phenomena
> of well-educated people marrying each other—between 1960 and 2005, the share
> of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees
> nearly doubled, from 25 – 48 percent.

A large part of that may be due to availability. In 1959 (closest year to 1960
I found data for [1]), 6% of US women had degrees, and 10.3% of men.

If every person wanted to marry someone with a degree, there would only be
enough women with degrees for about 60% of men with degrees to marry women
with degrees.

If the actual number was 25%, then men with degrees were marrying women with
degrees about 42% as often as was theoretically possible.

In 2005, it was 26.5% of women and 28.9% of men with degrees, allowing in
theory for about 93% of men with degrees to marry women with degrees, if
everyone with a degree wanted to marry someone else with a degree.

If it is actually 48%, then men with degrees were marrying women with degrees
about 52% as often as was theoretically possible, up from 42% in 1959.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-
attai...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment-
of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/)

------
neilparikh
The article focuses a little bit on homeownership, and its supposed
relationship to opposing feudalism, but fails to realise that the current
system of land ownership is what has caused this concentration of land, as
well as creating a new feudal system. See Georgism
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism))
for an explanation of this idea, something thinkers as early as Adam Smith
contemplated (in a less developed form).

------
martythemaniak
It's an interesting and somewhat useful take on things, but like a dog wearing
pants, things just don't seem to fit very well.

First, I do think it's ridiculous that he takes it as a given that Oligarchs
favour climate policy. Yes, I can see how someone can point to Musk and .... I
dunno Al Gore? and try to make the point, but for every Musk-a-like, there are
many dozens of rich people very deeply vested in the fossil industry. I don't
think any serious survey of the financial interests of the global superrich
will support this view.

Second, while he alludes to the lack of homeownership amongst the young the
fact that the single biggest cost-of-living expense (and it's incredible
growth during the last decade) is large controlled by his embattled "yeomanry"
gets ignored. It very much complicates his story to realize that his supposed
victims are in fact profiting handsomely and generally cause much pain to the
supposedly superior "clerisy". Just think of the typical academic renting from
an older person in any large city today and you get a good sense of how wrong
his story is.

~~~
tic_tac
You are assuming the "yeomanry" mainly consists of the old, but I think that's
an overly narrow and basically false assumption. The participants in the
yellow vest protests in France - largely members of "yeomanry" I would think -
are as much Gen X and Millenial as they are Baby Boomers.

As for the oligarchs, there are certainly wealthy individuals entrenched in
the traditional fossil fuel industries, but the number of these individuals is
dwarfed by the oligarchs in Media, Finance, Government, Technology etc, who
are much farther removed both in business and culture from traditional modes
of energy production and as such are able to take and advocate for radical
positions on environmental policy without regard to the consequences for the
"yeomanry".

This story plays out across the spectrum of issues that society contends with
today. In general, sometimes for the same and sometimes for different reasons,
elites in the corporate world and also members of the "clerisy" both desire a
breakdown of traditional society to further their own agendas. In the case of
the former that agenda is defined by profit seeking and in the case of the
latter it is defined by philosophical and social beliefs.

So you see, I think while this piece is vague and steps on its own toes at
points, it is addressing a real conflict that exists and is growing in
contemporary society.

~~~
walshemj
But the yellow vests are overwhelmingly lower class - and in France you might
even say peasantry.

Weather or not some rich people are using these people by manipulating them is
another question

~~~
tic_tac
That hasn't been my impression. While they may not be business owners, I think
many of the yellow vests could be considered working middle class.

~~~
walshemj
Not by the normal definitions

------
thisrod
The article claims the surprise result of the last Australian election as a
rejection of action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The consensus in
Australia is that people simply didn't like the leader of the opposition as a
TV personality. Also, Australian attitudes to climate change have been rather
dramatically modified by events since that election.

~~~
n4r9
Whilst I don't doubt the truth of this, I find there's often a deeper reason
why people "just don't like" someone. Sometimes it's because that someone has
ideals which challenge the assumptions of too many people. Other times it's
because the media has an agenda which is at odds with that person's
principles, and therefore choose to portray that person in a particularly
negative light.

------
notduncansmith
This article is a bit confused. It pits the left and right middle classes
against each other and also against the oligarchy, and then brings up how
Trump stands against the left middle class without mentioning how much he
represents and supports the oligarchy that systematically takes advantage of
both the right and the left.

It also tries to cast the left middle class as allies of the oligarchy by
bringing populist green energy fearmongering, without mentioning that it is in
fact fossil fuels that a) enrich and entrench the oligarchy, and b) reinforce
centralized infrastructure tendencies over distributed ones. Lots of
communities have space for renewable energy generation on-site; almost no
communities could produce their own fossil fuels.

Finally, scarcity drives most of the forces that oligarchs benefit from, so
naturally the oligarchy wants us to stay on fossil fuels. Renewables are the
populist, conservative solution that’s better for families and communities
than for corporations, but the mega-rich right-wing fossil fuel magnates have
fooled their poorer and less-educated right-wing compatriots into thinking
otherwise.

~~~
philwelch
It’s interesting the way you equate fossil fuels with scarcity and renewable
energy with abundance, when renewables are still a tiny minority of the world
energy supply. In reality, it’s fossil fuels that allow for energy abundance,
while the movement to transition to renewables is accompanied by energy
austerity: less driving, less air travel, less meat consumption.

~~~
notduncansmith
Our fossil-fuel-backed energy “abundance” is the same as the mortgage-backed
financial “abundance” we had in 2007 and the international-kidnapping-backed
labor “abundance” of pre-Civil-War America. It’s a loan the oligarchy takes
out with no intent to pay it back. The alternative is not “austerity”, just
living within one’s means and not externalizing one’s own cost of living.

~~~
philwelch
That’s a fair argument to make, it’s just completely different from the
original argument you were making.

------
typ
It is absurdly contradictory to attribute declining homeownership to
"homeowners did poorly in asset-based prosperity".

------
PaulDavisThe1st
From the article:

> A remarkable 57 percent of people who owned their own home supported Johnson
> compared to barely 22 percent for Labour.

This analysis is deeply superficial. Let me suggest a trivial alternative to
the suggested interpretation: that people are more likely to own a home as
they grow older, and that the primary division between Conservative and Labour
voters in the last election was by age.

e.g.
[https://twitter.com/drmuig/status/1205796472194830336](https://twitter.com/drmuig/status/1205796472194830336)

Now, my writing this doesn't prove my claim, but I've already demonstrated an
alternative take on political "allegiance" that seems at least as likely as
the groupings suggested in the article.

It's lovely to wave one's hands around like this Quillette article does,
painting broad strokes and telling big stories. But the handful of citations
at the end do almost nothing to prop up his story, which while not
implausible, really needs more substantial evidence to make it believable.

------
d_burfoot
Class tension has been a fact of life since the dawn of civilization. But in
healthy societies, different classes are able to work together to bring about
positive change. There's no reason in principle why small business owners,
engineers, reporters, professors, priests, police, soldiers, teachers, and
even oligarchs, shouldn't want to work together for the betterment of all. The
real question, to which I didn't find an answer in the article, is why in our
current society these class tensions have become so much more vicious.

------
rndmize
I was expecting a piece covering the growing gap between the traditional
middle class, which seems to be falling, and the upper-middle class, which
seems to be doing better in recent decades.

Instead, what we have is a attempt to separate out the middle class into left
and right sections. I don't really see it.

> No president has ever incurred the wrath of the clerisy—the media, the
> entertainment industry, academia—more than Donald Trump. But Trump retains
> record support among the small business people on Main Street, particularly
> in the manufacturing and energy-dependent parts of the country.

Perhaps the author has failed to see the split between "mainstream" media and
right-wing media over the last decade, and the massive reach the right-wing
media has these days - with the largest cable news shows, the largest radio
news/commentary shows, and frequently the most interactions on social media.
One could reasonably conclude there is a "right" clerisy, with academia
replaced by think-tanks, that is very competitive with the "left" version he
defines, though this might cause problems with his entire premise.

> The climatistas’ appeal is not likely to improve as they increasingly
> advocate the elimination of ownership of single-family houses...

Ah yes, the proposals of a single random professor does seem like a good
representation of a "climate-friendly density regime".

There's other issues to pick at with this piece ("ultra-green policies",
climate policy supported by oligarchs, etc.), but I think it's better to point
to someone who covers the same issues to some degree in more convincing
manner.

[https://mattstoller.substack.com/](https://mattstoller.substack.com/)

Stoller takes a look at the current state of the economy through the lens of
monopoly and big business, and I find his analysis to match the world I see
with much greater accuracy. Kotkin mentions a lot of the issues in his section
on "the embattled yeomanry", but fails to consider causes that lead to this.
He'll talk about concentration of wealth, but fails to conclude any negative
effects it might have. And it's truly curious how he moves from increasing
corporate concentration in one paragraph to fighting against climate policy in
the next.

------
ska
This is a publication with a long history of presenting both interesting and
sloppy thinking, sometimes in the same article. It tends to value libertarian
(or -ish) takes relatively uncritically, and have some bizarre obsessions (by
which I mean, topics taken up with a frequency all out of proportion to any
impact).

That isn't to say they aren't worth reading, but that this article is flawed
in a characteristic way.

~~~
modwest
Yeah this essay is a mess. Smacks of sociopolitical myth-making, not credible
analysis. The thing it seems most like is a vehicle to lump scientists into
the same category as religious figures. Bare tribalism wearing the clothes of
public intellectualism

------
spamizbad
I think the modern term for the clerisy is the Professional Managerial Class
or “PMC” — and the definition of the working class has been expanded to
include “service industry” workers.

~~~
n4r9
Not sure that's accurate. The article suggests the "clerisy" operates largely
outside the market system, e.g. doctors, lawyers, with the exception possibly
being consultants. The PMC is very much a class in the market system.

~~~
scarmig
Not at all. The large majority of the PMC works in the context of large
corporations. Although the corporations themselves might be subject to market
forces, individuals within them navigate bureaucracies and politics just as
much as a random government employee. Moreover, all of these large
corporations closely cooperate with government.

The fact that a corporation has an exterior interface with the market doesn't
change that most people in it don't deal with the market day-to-day. Even
those who do form that interface are relatively insulated from it: a market
analyst working to set prices still is evaluated by an internal bureaucracy,
not the market itself. Only people in sales really end up exposed to the
market because it's so easy to come up with a metric of their performance
that's legible to the interior bureaucracy.

~~~
n4r9
Honestly, working in a large corporation is very different to working in a
public institution. For example, in my experience, your salary is much more of
a negotiation between yourself and your direct superiors. You can highlight
the value/profit your bring to the company, and if they underestimate you the
you can change to a higher paying job somewhere else. That opportunity just
doesn't exist in public industries where pay scales are rigidly set to the
number of years of experience you have, or the specific job title. You can
argue all you want but unless you're absolutely exceptional (undergrad paper
in Nature level exceptional) you'll get nowhere.

One of the reasons that teachers and doctors have such absurdly poor working
conditions and pay (in the UK at least) relative to the value they bring to
society, is that they're mostly paid via the state so the only way they can
demonstrate their value is through striking. If the government takes a hard
line of strikes and public spending then those industries suffer.

------
modwest
This essay is a total mess. This “neo-clerisy” thing to me smacks of tribalism
dressed up, ironically, as public intellectualism. It’s a fractal of cognitive
dissonance

------
jeffdavis
The most interesting point made is that secular societies still have a clerisy
(or clergy? What's the difference?). People who are powerful but not rich;
deriving their power from moral authority; and highly dogmatic.

The details of the piece don't have quite enough support given how
contraversial they are. That doesn't mean the author is wrong though. Worth
more exploration and discussion.

------
sremani
Think of two middle-classes like Industrial vs Tech. The atoms world of
America is a world of decline and tech for now is on ascendance. That will not
continue perpetually, sooner or later the tech boom will end and re-
industrialization of US will begin. But that will need us going through lot of
pain, suffering and healing.

~~~
BigBubbleButt
> That will not continue perpetually, sooner or later the tech boom will end
> and re-industrialization of US will begin.

What makes you think the US is going to ramp up manufacturing again?

~~~
sremani
Unsustainability of long supply chains. The coronavirus is just chapter 1.

------
kortilla
This distinction is pointless for the people it purports to classify. An HVAC
engineer working for a university is no different than an HVAC engineer
working for a market driven company. Pretending that they are in two different
middle classes is bullshit.

This article is a big struggle to fit people into bad classifications and
suffers readability (and a point in general) because of it. An article
grouping middle class members based on toilet paper orientation would be more
interesting.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> An HVAC engineer working for a university is no different than an HVAC
> engineer working for a market driven company.

Mostly true, but not completely. The private company has to serve customers at
least as well as the competition; the university's outfit has to do not _too_
much worse than what they could get from an outside supplier.

Compare the university administrator to the HVAC company manager, and the
difference widens. Compare the university president to the HVAC company owner,
and it widens a lot further.

------
Pfhreak
I'm always surprised to see Quillette show up here. For all the complaints
about partisan bickering, politics in tech, etc. Quillette is an obviously
biased political opinion page. (Not that I have a problem with bias in media
-- in fact I'd much rather have opinionated media rather than the milquetoast
'both sides in equal measure' media we seem to strive for today.)

~~~
seibelj
There aren't a ton of quillette posts upvoted:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=quillette.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=quillette.com)

I wouldn't say they really stand for anything other than "opposiste of
political correctness" regardless of the topic. They post articles that would
never be allowed in other media.

~~~
Pfhreak
Yep. They're only breaking into the main page a couple times a month. Still
surprises me.

And judging by the replies here, seems like it surprises a bunch of other
people. I'm not sure what the "opposite of political correctness" is except
tilting at a strawman.

------
foundart
It describes a part of the middle class that gets its income from the market
and another part that gets its income from non-market sources such as
universities and the government and I found it a useful lens through which to
view current events.

~~~
walshemj
Um middle class university jobs are badly paid compared to professionals
working at say a FANG

~~~
xenihn
They're secure though.

~~~
walshemj
Not really there are lots and lots of academics going from short term contract
to short term contract.

------
peteretep
People seem surprised that the article is a confused polemic meant to generate
clicks. Is this the first time they’ve heard of Quillette or something?

------
throwaway713
Is there a term for this flowery, overwrought writing style that takes half a
page to make a point?

~~~
Waterluvian
Bloviation.

------
iron0013
I thought Quillette had been blacklisted on HN. It’s a right-wing rag and
never leads to any interesting discussion.

~~~
klingonopera
I neither condone nor condemn your assessment, but I do agree it's somewhat
relevant to keep these things in mind:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web)

------
scythe
The "class of public intellectuals" that Quillete likens to the Second Estate
largely parallels the formation of the _nomenklatura_ in the Soviet Union:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura)

A more cynical, but illuminating, depiction of the way this class came to be
recognized and criticized was given in an old _New Yorker_ article about why
Americans don't like Hillary Clinton -- _from 1996_ :

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/02/26/hating-
hillary](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/02/26/hating-hillary)

>In the sixties and seventies, neoconservatives liked to talk about the ascent
of “the New Class,” consisting of highly educated professionals who were, in
Norman Podhoretz’s words, “making a serious bid to dislodge and replace the
business and commercial class which had on the whole dominated the country for
nearly a century.” Podhoretz ascribes to Irving Kristol (father of William)
the insight that the New Class “represented itself as concerned only with the
general good, the good of others (especially the poor and the blacks), but
what it really wanted was to aggrandize its own power.” As the only First Lady
thus far to have come from its ranks, Hillary Clinton has suffered the
fluctuating fortunes of the New Class itself. Among her peers, you’ll hear,
variously expressed, a very basic sentiment: finally, a First Lady who’s one
of us. “It was just as if we’d known each other all our lives,” says Carly
Simon, who has spent time at Martha’s Vineyard with the First Lady; when
Hillary admired a naïve Haitian painting in Simon’s house, Simon made a
present of it. “It was an easy, Ivy League kind of camaraderie. Like, ‘You
went to Wellesley? Oh, I went to Sarah Lawrence.’ And, ‘Oh, you like that kind
of art? I like that kind of art.’ ” But if you do not feel part of that
“us”—if, indeed, the very idea of Haitian folk art on the Vineyard makes you
shift uneasily—you may feel the tug of an answering sentiment: that this First
Lady is _one of them_.

Both this _Quillette_ piece and the _New Yorker_ article are presaged and, in
my opinion, upstaged by Hayek's 1960 diatribe "The Intellectuals and
Socialism":

[https://mises-
media.s3.amazonaws.com/Intellectuals%20and%20S...](https://mises-
media.s3.amazonaws.com/Intellectuals%20and%20Socialism_4.pdf)

Hayek's piece seems to me to be the founding treatise of modern
libertarianism, with regard to the parts that are valuable at least. The
central hypocrisy of modern liberalism is the way in which it serves the
selfish interests of its most powerful proponents -- the managerial state --
while supposing to be egalitarian. Unfortunately, Hayek himself simply became
increasingly cynical and decreasingly coherent towards the end of his life,
after publishing his most famous works from a more moderate perspective, so we
didn't get to hear a conclusion to this train of thought.

It's not obvious how to overcome this limitation; all ideologies need a base
of support, and people on average tend to be selfish enough that we notice it.
Andrew Yang's proposal to give citizens money earmarked for political
donations ( _" Democracy Dollars"_) seems, to me, the most practical step
currently available towards making politics more participatory and less
hierarchical: it can foster the growth of competition among political
campaigns for ordinary people's support with floating prices, reminiscent of a
system we usually think of as reliable. Innovation in politics is already
happening (c.f. _Cambridge Analytica_ ) and the IP is being monetized, but
only a few people are currently allowed to play.

~~~
tic_tac
While I have not read the Hayek work you mention, it is probably drawn from
the same philosophical waters as a work that I recommend to anyone with an
interest in this sort of thinking: "The Opium of the Intellectuals" by Raymond
Aron. Aron was a French philosopher who contemplated the Intellectuals'
fascination and infatuation with socialism and, at the time and place of
writing (1950's France), Communism.

------
war1025
I saw the title and really wanted to like this article, but I have to say I
got lost in the flowery language and don't really get the point.

~~~
bsder
Basically, it's a long-winded way of dividing the middle class into white-
collar and blue-collar and pointing out that blue-collar has taken it in the
shorts and is angry.

It's not wrong. But, as always, it projects nothing _actionable_. What does
that blue-collar cohort _DO_ to regain economic well-being?

~~~
zozbot234
While Brahmins are "white-collar" pretty much by definition, Vaishyas/yeomanry
clearly encompasses both blue-collar and white-collar groups. So I don't think
the traditional "blue- vs. white-collar" distinction is quite the same thing
as what this article is about.

------
mLuby
So does Michael O Chruch's "3-ladder system of social class in the U.S." need
revising?

[https://web.archive.org/web/20151006183427/https://michaeloc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20151006183427/https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-3-ladder-
system-of-social-class-in-the-u-s/)

~~~
oarabbus_
He's just an opinionated software engineer, not a forefront of sociological
and economic thought.

~~~
jdm2212
Is this the same guy who got fired (or resigned?) from Google a week after
getting hired for something silly like refusing to sign the employee code of
conduct?

~~~
yongjik
No, that's a different guy.

------
tus88
Like the upper middle class? Novel concept.

------
pron
Is this a publication that normally publishes articles that are clearly well
outside their authors' area of expertise and presents them in a semi-academic
style after clearly doing no fact-checking?

Never mind silliness like analyzing Trump's "record support" in a survey begun
during Trump's tenure, the way he presents wrong statistics with the help of
the word "particularly" is downright ridiculous. People who like pizza tend to
be shorter, particularly children.

------
michaelbrave
This felt very close to right wing propaganda. Had to stop reading about 2/3
of the way in.

~~~
lonelappde
It's Quillete -- libertarian right wing.

