"households earning in the top 25 percent nationally are actually classified as “low income” in San Francisco. The household “low income” threshold in the Golden Gate City is now approximately $117,000.19
Conversation
"...By comparison, a household needs to earn about $100,000 to make it into the top 31 percent nationally; the national top 10 percent household income threshold is approximately $178,000."
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"Since 2000, the combination of stagnation, widening inequality, and the increasing cost of maintaining elite status has arguably had a more pronounced impact on the professional elite than on the working class, which was already largely marginalized by that point. "
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"Elites outside of the very top found themselves falling further behind their supposed cultural peers, without being able to look forward to rapidly rising incomes for themselves."
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🎯 "Any new realignment of the professional class, however, is complicated by the legacy of its previous turn toward neoliberalism. For this group, the embrace of markets and consumerism **did not work out the way either its proponents or critics predicted.**"
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"Republicans offered the professional class one increasingly attractive inducement: a chance to become, essentially, financial managers in the new shareholder economy. In the 1980s, these “yuppies” contributed to two Reagan landslides." = "we were promised flying cars", $ edition
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"Finance and tech billionaires began replacing unions as the most important Democratic donors, both to campaigns and to the growing network of liberal NGOs." <--- A key point that doesn't surprise me but I didn't take note of myself either
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"Sanders, however, has insisted on characterizing his movement as a populist protest, rather than an insurgency driven by certain disaffected segments of the elite." < 🎯
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"In contrast, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign more explicitly appeals to the professional class, both in form and content....yet her rise is still likely to strain a Democratic machine heavily reliant on billionaire funders."
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"modern conservatism has opposed the professional managerial class that came to dominate business and government in the mid-twentieth century. Despite often shrill rhetoric ...conservatives could never reduce its size or importance in the modern economy."
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"At the same time, conservatives sought to build their own new class by setting up parallel institutions in academia, media, law, policy planning, and so on...But institutions built on ideological conformity inevitably tend to ossify.
Replying to
"The conservative institutions became as detached and self-referential as the “postmodern” academy they criticize, and they long ago ceased to have any significant influence on broader elite discourse." 🎯
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"Today, their main offering to new recruits is the chance to someday apply for affirmative action for conservatives." <-- especially pronounced and effective in law given scotus control and resulting effect on supply chain.
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"As working-class jobs have become more precarious and demeaning, professional jobs have become more meaningless and depressing... Anthropologist David Graeber has defined an entire category of “bullshit jobs”
Join the gig economy bullshitjobbers!
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"The purposelessness of many professional careers in the capital accumulation economy starkly contrasts with the growing number of unaddressed needs in the public sector."
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"Conservative donor gatherings are somehow even more pathetic. Most of the attendees are there only because they are not smart enough to recognize that the Democratic Party offers a far more effective reputation laundering service." 😂
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"What is remarkable about today’s oligarchy is not its ruthlessness but its pettiness and purposelessness. An all-consuming megalomania might at least produce some great art as a side-effect. But this collection of mediocrities cannot even do that."
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"future historians of American collapse will find something truly exceptional: capitalism without competence and feudalism without nobility."
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fin
this was a good read. As close as I've seen anyone come to clearly stating the core problem of the Great Weirding.
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The most important insight I got out of this was how Warren and Sanders each solve one half of the problem but make the other half intractable. In predictive terms the paradox results in: Sanders could win the election, but probably not the nomination. Warren other way around
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I think the tldr is: the laboring class is politically still potent but economically a deadweight loss and everybody (including they themselves) knows it and has acknowledged it. The professional class still thinks it has a shot at resurrection.
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So on the narrow question of winning POTUS, the right candidate would be a mix of Obama and Trump: promise hope to the elites and the chance to bloody a few noses to the laboring class. The paradox being they want to bloody the noses of the class looking for hope.
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One solution: run for POTUS on campaign promise of a Purge, but where elites get free guns, and if they survive, they get UBI and climate action. The masses get to mount the heads of any elites they take down on spikes. 0.1% capital winners will be parked in orbit during Purge
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