The more the middle-class is punished by the elites, the more the elites are going to be hurting by the consequences of their actions. From Glen Reynolds at the New York Post:
Elites suddenly realize they need blue-collar workers they derided
“The problem with living under postmodernism,” Dean Hunter Baker commented, “is that everyone is constantly tending the narrative instead of doing something useful.”
It does seem that way, especially if you run in my circles.
But of course, plenty of people are doing something useful. The world is full of those whose diligent and largely unsung work makes the lights stay on, the grocery shelves fill with food, the toilets flush and even the Internet run. They have been ignored, denigrated and even subjected to a species of economic warfare for the last several decades, but suddenly people are starting to notice that they matter.
It’s what Joel Kotkin calls “the revenge of the material economy.”
The material economy stopped being cool sometime in the 1990s. Blue-collar workers were being laid off, but economic pundits like Clinton Commerce Secretary (now Berkeley professor) Robert Reich were describing them as obsolete. Instead, the future was going to belong to “knowledge workers” — Reich called them “symbolic analysts” — who dealt in abstract concepts, not in concrete doings.
This idea seemed very satisfying to people who sat in front of computers for a living, manipulating symbols, like most journalists, academics and bureaucrats. It wasn’t so great for other people.
As manufacturing shifted offshore or to automation, the breezy advice given to the displaced blue-collar workers was “Learn to code.” That is, forget about the grubby real-world stuff you do for a living, and be more like us, the winners!
Heh - and another bubble runs its course and pops. Leaving a large population who thought that it was the last and final great idea. That all other ideas were now obsolete. Sucks to be you...
Great time to Go Galt
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