Monthly Archives: August 2021

the new elite is like the old elite

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There is much writing–from a variety of ideological perspectives–about a new elite that is said to dominate culture, politics, and the economy. This group obviously bears a resemblance to previous elites (and disproportionately descends from parents who were wealthy and powerful), but perhaps it demonstrates some new features.

Among the novel characteristics could be: high education and technical skills (as opposed to deriving wealth from physical property), a meritocratic ideology, competitiveness and addiction to work, a tendency to cluster together in specific neighborhoods of selected cities and to marry only people of the same group, and a tilt toward center-left parties, which are said to be losing their working-class base in reaction to the dominance of meritocratic elites.

For instance, David Brooks writes:

The class structure of Western society has gotten scrambled over the past few decades. It used to be straightforward: You had the rich, who joined country clubs and voted Republican; the working class, who toiled in the factories and voted Democratic; and, in between, the mass suburban middle class. … But somehow when the class conflict came, in 2015 and 2016, it didn’t look anything like that. Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite. These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is.

I found this story perfectly plausible but wanted to examine it empirically. Therefore, I explored it using data from the General Social Survey (GSS). In brief, I do not see evidence that today’s elite have different ideological or partisan leanings from their predecessors nearly fifty years ago, nor have they diverged from non-elites in terms of work hours, religion, or geographical mobility. They are more educated and more racially diverse than elites were in the 1970s, but overall, they look very much like their predecessors. That means that we are not experiencing a scrambling or a situation that has “suddenly” developed. Rather, critiques of a liberal-leaning, highly educated elite have been pretty consistent since the days of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan.

Method: The GSS categorizes jobs by prestige, based on a survey of representative Americans. In 2012, respondents rated a street corner drug dealer and a panhandler lowest (at 1.9 and 2.1, respectively) and a college or university president and a physics professor highest (at 7.1 and 7.2). [Correction: physicians are highest, at 7.6] A lawyer was rated 6.4; a mechanical engineer, 6.6; and a board member of a large company, 6.8 (Smith & Son 2014).

I isolated people who either held jobs in the top tenth of the prestige scale or else were married to people in the top tenth. Although it matters whether one is the worker or the spouse, I was interested in high-status households and wanted to include partners, especially in the 1970s.

I could have defined the “elite” in different ways. Trying various definitions would be valuable. However, it is important not to select on the dependent variable. In this case, one could define the elite as people who are liberal, live in major metro areas, hold advanced degrees, and meet other criteria assumed by commentators like Brooks. But then the conclusion would be foreordained. With equal validity, one could identify survey respondents who are conservative, religious, and powerful and tell a story about them. To avoid this form of bias, I pre-selected a definition of “elite” and then examined this group empirically. To be honest, I was surprised by how little change I observed.

Here are some comparisons and contrasts between the most-prestigious households in the 1970s and the 2010s.

Education: Today’s elite (as defined above) is more educated. Seventy-two percent hold at least a bachelor’s degree, up from 58% in the 1970s. Less than one percent don’t have a high school diploma, down from 6% in the 1970s. The non-elite also have more education than they did in the 1970s; however, just 24% hold a bachelor’s degree or more.

At the same time, a graduate degree certainly does not guarantee admission to the elite. Sixty-four percent of people with graduate degrees are not in the top tenth by occupational prestige.

Demographics: The elite was 93% white in 1970, six points whiter than the non-elite at the time. Both groups are now more diverse, but the change has been faster among the elite (who started at a very white baseline). In the 2010s, 80% of the elite was white, 8% was African America, and 12% belonged to other racial groups.

Party and ideology: Elites have not moved toward the Democrats. Including independents who lean toward either party, the elite has gone from 47% Democrat and 39% Republican in the 1970s to 47% Democrat and 37% Republican in the 2010s. They already leaned Democratic in the days of Richard Nixon, and still do by an almost identical margin.

However, non-elites are considerably less Democratic, down from 56% to 45% between the 1970s and 2010s, with most of that change happening during the 1980s. This trend may reflect Southern realignment more than ideology. The graph below shows ideological trends for elites and non-elites. It is true that elites have become somewhat more liberal since 2000, but the changes are small. Overall, elites were more liberal than non-elites in the 1970s and still are today. (To be sure, what it means to be “liberal” has changed, but this is still a reason to doubt a story of ideological realignment.)

Work-week: The elite worked a mean of 41.5 hours in a typical week in the 2010s– essentially the same as the 41.2 hours their predecessors had worked in the 1970s. The non-elite are down about two hours/week to 37.4 hours.

Geography: The elite have not diverged from the non-elite in geographic mobility. Both groups have become about 3-4 percentage points less likely to live in the same city where they lived when they were 16 years old. In each decade, the elites have lived in places with larger average populations than the non-elites, but community size has shrunk for both groups–presumably, as a result of movement to the suburbs and exurbs.

Marriage: Most non-elite adults (72%) were married in the 1970s. That proportion fell to just over half (54%) by the 2010s. Most of this large shift was to the “never married” category. Elites were less likely than non-elites to be married in the 1970s, and even less so in the late 1900s, dropping to 35% married by the 1990s. However, the marriage rates among the elite has risen to 46% in the 2010s, approaching the rate of the non-elites. A consistent one in four elites reports never being married in each decade.

Religion: In each decade, elites have attended religious services a bit more often than non-elites (on average), but religious attendance has fallen for both groups.

Sources: General Social Survey; Tom W. Smith & Jaesok Son, “Measuring Occupational Prestige on the 2012 General Social Survey,” NORC at the University of Chicago GSS Methodological Report No. 122, 2014. See also: why the white working class must organize; the Left between Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Tim Jackson and the Quest for Post Growth

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Ecological economist Tim Jackson is one of the few serious scholars trying to imagine what a post-growth world might look like. Over the past thirty years, this specialty – largely ignored by mainstream economics – has become ever-more relevant to contemporary life. It is becoming clear that growth is not the panacea for what afflicts modern societies.

In the 1990s, Jackson pioneered the idea of “preventative environmental management,” showing how preventing pollution in the first place could improve profits and quality of life. But his journey into post-growth thinking surged forward when he was appointed Economics Commissioner for the UK Sustainable Development Commission in 2004. Improbably, UK politicians wanted a professional, an indepth assessment of the idea of a no-growth economy.

The result – a controversial 2009 report to the UK government – was published as the book Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. (A substantially revised and rewritten edition was published in 2017). This book, now translated into 17 languages, examines the problems of growth and consumerism and the prospects for a new “ecological macro-economics” and a redefinition of prosperity. More is not always better; we need to focus on what helps us flourish as human beings and helps us lead a satisfying “good life.”

More than a decade later, Jackson’s thinking about this topic has evolved in some new and unexpected ways. He has just published a new book, Post Growth: Life After Capitalism (Polity Press), which doesn’t offer economic charts and policy proposals. It is, instead, a philosophical, cultural, and personal exploration of how we might pursue a vision of post-growth.

It’s a brave and radical departure for a serious economist to step back from the number-crunching and plunge into the world of culture, philosophy, storytelling, and the human quest for meaning. Jackson doesn’t consider this a self-indulgent diversion, but a critical task for economics as a discipline.

He shares his thoughts about post-growth in my latest podcast episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #16), just released.

Jackson is Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), which he founded in 2016. He is also Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey in the UK. 

While Jackson obviously remains committed to the challenges of economic analysis and policy, he has come to believe that we need to open up some new conversations, especially about our social relationships, ethical beliefs, and spirituality. It no longer makes sense to talk about “the economy” without engaging with these topics.

Jackson surprised me with the observation that capitalism and Buddhism “both start at the same place” – how to deal with suffering. Of course, he quickly added, each offers “almost diametrically opposed routes away from that. Capitalism says, ‘You can’t get away from suffering, you can’t get away from struggle. So you better get good at that struggle by becoming as competitive and individualistic as possible.’”

“Buddhism, by contrast, says that the way out of suffering is compassion. It’s about understanding that my suffering is what connects me to other people. Neglecting that suffering and turning away from it, is actually a neglect of my responsibility as a human being.” The only real solution to suffering, according to Buddhism, “is to work to reduce the cravings for the things that create the struggle” in the first place.

Jackson believes that economics needs to expand its own field of vision. So in Post Growth he invokes the work of such people as biologist Lynn Margulis, philosopher Hannah Arendt, poet Emily Dickinson and spiritual teachers like Lao Tzu and Thich Nhat Hanh. 

Jackson tells a particularly powerful but little-known story about the emotional breakdown of political philosopher John Stuart Mill, the founder of rational utilitarianism that is the philosophical foundation of classical economics.

Rational utilitarianism is built around the idea that the highest good comes from individuals maximizing their personal utility – a central idea of economics to this day. The discipline has the conceit that rationality, when rigorously applied to every aspect of life, will lead to human perfection and happiness.

As a young man, however, Mill had a monstrous epiphany in the middle of the night. He realized that even if his system of rationality became widely adopted, it would not make him happier or more satisfied as a human being. He fell into a depressive angst for two years and only began to recover “when he read the Romantic poets,” said Jackson. Mill “realized that there is a world outside of rationality – that there is a world that appeals to the emotional and aspires to the spiritual. Eventually, that’s what drew him out of his own crisis.”

It’s a nice parable for the psychic traumas of our time. Locked into so many totalizing systems of hyper-rational control – economics, algorithms, artificial intelligence – modern societies are experiencing their own breakdowns for which standard economics as constituted has little to offer. The enduring answers must come from outside the field. 

You can listen to my conversation with Tim Jackson here. 

 

 

 

Tim Jackson and the Quest for Post Growth

Posted on by
Reply

Ecological economist Tim Jackson is one of the few serious scholars trying to imagine what a post-growth world might look like. Over the past thirty years, this specialty – largely ignored by mainstream economics – has become ever-more relevant to contemporary life. It is becoming clear that growth is not the panacea for what afflicts modern societies.

In the 1990s, Jackson pioneered the idea of “preventative environmental management,” showing how preventing pollution in the first place could improve profits and quality of life. But his journey into post-growth thinking surged forward when he was appointed Economics Commissioner for the UK Sustainable Development Commission in 2004. Improbably, UK politicians wanted a professional, an indepth assessment of the idea of a no-growth economy.

The result – a controversial 2009 report to the UK government – was published as the book Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. (A substantially revised and rewritten edition was published in 2017). This book, now translated into 17 languages, examines the problems of growth and consumerism and the prospects for a new “ecological macro-economics” and a redefinition of prosperity. More is not always better; we need to focus on what helps us flourish as human beings and helps us lead a satisfying “good life.”

More than a decade later, Jackson’s thinking about this topic has evolved in some new and unexpected ways. He has just published a new book, Post Growth: Life After Capitalism (Polity Press), which doesn’t offer economic charts and policy proposals. It is, instead, a philosophical, cultural, and personal exploration of how we might pursue a vision of post-growth.

It’s a brave and radical departure for a serious economist to step back from the number-crunching and plunge into the world of culture, philosophy, storytelling, and the human quest for meaning. Jackson doesn’t consider this a self-indulgent diversion, but a critical task for economics as a discipline.

He shares his thoughts about post-growth in my latest podcast episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #16), just released.

Jackson is Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), which he founded in 2016. He is also Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey in the UK. 

While Jackson obviously remains committed to the challenges of economic analysis and policy, he has come to believe that we need to open up some new conversations, especially about our social relationships, ethical beliefs, and spirituality. It no longer makes sense to talk about “the economy” without engaging with these topics.

Jackson surprised me with the observation that capitalism and Buddhism “both start at the same place” – how to deal with suffering. Of course, he quickly added, each offers “almost diametrically opposed routes away from that. Capitalism says, ‘You can’t get away from suffering, you can’t get away from struggle. So you better get good at that struggle by becoming as competitive and individualistic as possible.’”

“Buddhism, by contrast, says that the way out of suffering is compassion. It’s about understanding that my suffering is what connects me to other people. Neglecting that suffering and turning away from it, is actually a neglect of my responsibility as a human being.” The only real solution to suffering, according to Buddhism, “is to work to reduce the cravings for the things that create the struggle” in the first place.

Jackson believes that economics needs to expand its own field of vision. So in Post Growth he invokes the work of such people as biologist Lynn Margulis, philosopher Hannah Arendt, poet Emily Dickinson and spiritual teachers like Lao Tzu and Thich Nhat Hanh. 

Jackson tells a particularly powerful but little-known story about the emotional breakdown of political philosopher John Stuart Mill, the founder of rational utilitarianism that is the philosophical foundation of classical economics.

Rational utilitarianism is built around the idea that the highest good comes from individuals maximizing their personal utility – a central idea of economics to this day. The discipline has the conceit that rationality, when rigorously applied to every aspect of life, will lead to human perfection and happiness.

As a young man, however, Mill had a monstrous epiphany in the middle of the night. He realized that even if his system of rationality became widely adopted, it would not make him happier or more satisfied as a human being. He fell into a depressive angst for two years and only began to recover “when he read the Romantic poets,” said Jackson. Mill “realized that there is a world outside of rationality – that there is a world that appeals to the emotional and aspires to the spiritual. Eventually, that’s what drew him out of his own crisis.”

It’s a nice parable for the psychic traumas of our time. Locked into so many totalizing systems of hyper-rational control – economics, algorithms, artificial intelligence – modern societies are experiencing their own breakdowns for which standard economics as constituted has little to offer. The enduring answers must come from outside the field. 

You can listen to my conversation with Tim Jackson here.