Joel Kotkin’s “The New Class Conflict”

It has been several days since I have read this book. With a title such as this book’s you might expect a report of a conflict and not a rally for one side, but that is a scarcely realistic hope and it is not met here. I can no longer read Kotkin except as a proponent of some other sort of world than what we have. See my text at “L 1143” below. His criticism is solely in terms of what he sees in this world, accompanied with ample quotations of others. There is no contemplation of what might replace it or whether those he champions would be better off.

If you were learning about the American political landscape from this book you would assume that the Republicans were for the poor and the Democrats were for the rich.

Kotkin would appear from his book to be solely concerned with the gap between the poor and rich, not the welfare of the poor. He often sounds as if times were better in 1950 because the gap was smaller, even if the poor were much worse off.

It seems not to occur to Kotkin that the welfare of the poor depends greatly on the very technology that he seems to wish away. There is the curious isolated exception at “L 276”; see below. Perhaps a better characterization is that he wants all the benefit without all those obnoxious people who seem uniquely able to produce it.

I see no suggestions on how to improve things in the book.

I suspect that Kotkin does not not like Donald Trump, but he channels Trump’s supporters.

As I read

L 113: Kotkin quotes Associated Press: “By 2013 a majority of Americans expected life to get worse by 2050 …”. I expect that wealth gap to increase and the lives of the poor to get much better. Is that worse? Perhaps you can see a chip on my shoulder. Even so I may agree with Kotkin that there is a problem.

L 164: By this point I grant that Kotkin’s rhetoric while dour is scarcely as acid as Mencken’s.

L 190: Kotkin dourly recounts the rise of the “tech Oligarchs” as if it were something that someone should have foreseen and prevented. I suspect that Kotkin, along with most economists, fails to count any value from Silicon Valley that is not seen in GDP.

L 196: Kotkin quotes a ‘venture capitalist’: “It’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in LA. It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area”. I would go farther and say that Silicon Valley produces $2 of value for every dollar they charge and not even their outrageous cash flows measure the value that they create. That’s why it is growing so fast. Has this anything to do with Washington policy or politics?

Silicon Valley has until recently has seen Washington DC as a distant storm.

I should note that so far Kotkin blames no one explicitly, not even politics. He proceeds descriptively, but dourly.

L 216: Here Kotkin describes what I have mentioned elsewhere: “The rich don’t need the masses as much as they used to.”.

Put another way, Google at the end of 2013 had a market cap six times that of General Motors while having one-fifth as many American workers.

L 237: I learn here that I belong to the Clerisy. I am aligned with the new Oligarchs; I like Obama more than any of the 2016 primary candidates, but not a lot. I think I have been identified as the enemy — a good reason to read the book.

In the first chapter he describes the ‘Clersy’ in a way that describes a leaning that I adopt: I am with the enemy. In the third chapter he lists several attributes of the bad guys, that do not include me. They include few of my friends in Silicon Valley. I think that Kotkin is not in touch with my friends.

I think Kotkin is a sort of intellectual you don’t find in Silicon Valley.

L 276: Kotkin paints ‘gentry liberalism’ as young wealthy households that support mostly democrats.

In 2012, for example, President Obama won eight of the country’s ten wealthiest counties, sometimes by margins of two-to-one or better.

Every society needs its oligarchs, those who are able to take leadership and invest in the future; they are also necessary as creators and investors in new economic potential.

The great nineteenth-century robber barons, although often exceedingly unpleasant as individuals, left an enormous legacy in the form of industries, such as steel, utilities, and the railroads, that underpinned the industrial era. Only later, due to reforms and the further expansion of the economy, did that legacy translate into mass affluence.

L 348: Kotkin says that Tyler Cowen says that “average” intelligence and skills no longer suffice for social advance. That relates to my ‘competent’ comment above.

L 387: I like Kotkin’s broad view.

L 418: Kotkin praises here the possibilities, thru technology, of decentralization of the production of wealth—a highly individualistic notion. He seems to be speaking of the information economy. I agree.

L 457: Chapter 2: Valley of the Oligarchs
Kotkin does not like Silicon Valley. But in this chapter he describes what I mostly like about it.

L 534:

As a result, like their far less admired counterparts on Wall Street, America’s elite tech firms— and their owners— have become fantastically cash rich.

L 563:

Unlike the grandees of Wall Street or the energy industry, the tech Oligarchs have so far experienced relatively little of the criticism commonly directed at Wall Street or energy executives for their huge compensation levels.

L 587:

Many Americans, noted historian David Nye, believed that new technology would eliminate toil and allow Americans to settle in a pastoral utopia.

L 674:

The economic fortunes of specific companies may ebb and flow, but the benefits, and the highest profits, have accrued to the same basic array of financiers, serial entrepreneurs, lawyers, and other specialists. Ultimately, any company could fail— a Facebook, a Twitter, or even a Google— but the essential tech power structure will remain in place, with built-in advantages to start newer ventures and companies, most notably due to their vast fortunes.

I worry with Kotkin about surveillance.

L 704:

in part by refusing to license technology or through the acquisition of potential competitors.

L 717:

But what these firms have that others don’t is almost unlimited capital resources, and credibility, to enter new, often risky markets; and they frequently do so through the acquisition of companies, and talent, that lack such financial or technological resources.

L 1024:

Unlike aristocrats and bishops of the Middle Ages, or even the pastier nineteenth-century version of Coleridge’s “clerisy,” today’s version obtains the right to rule not so much from God or King but from their assumed superior command of science and information.

L 1143: As Kotkin expands on his notion of the clerisy I often feel excluded. There is little libertarian or old liberal slant to his later category. I am anti-PC at least in its current fervor. I am against most bureaucrats. I am usually anti-union. I am pro-market and anti-business. I would like a Carbon tax and the elimination of hundreds of regulations presumably motivated by the CO₂ problem. Many of my anti-clerisy attributes are broadly shared in Silicon Valley. I don’t feel estranged from Hollywood but I find it opaque.

L 1252: I feel that Kotkin is oblivious to the libertarian component of belief.

L 1343:

Author Chrystia Freeland sees the emergence over time of “the Silicon Valley school” of philanthropy, which stresses technocratic, data-driven solutions to complex social problems, even though it may not appeal very much to a majority that may be suspicious of help that “arrive[ s] in a wrapper of remote benevolence.” Coming from atop an ever sharper pyramid, their solutions may help in incremental ways but, as essentially beneficiaries of the new class order, they are unlikely to challenge the fundamental chasm now dividing society.

L 1385:

Increasingly, notes one Yale computer scientist [Gelernter], the new vision of humanity is wrapped up with computer intelligence as determinative. In contrast, the importance of subjective notions tied to emotions and sentiments fades with the embrace of the idea that “we are machines.” Following this logic, all questions of human behavior have objective answers—except perhaps those that violate the belief systems of the Clerics.

Kasparov writes on collaboration of man and machine to play chess.

L 1849: The last few pages are little more than descriptive words with no logic.

They increasingly constitute, as journalist Simon Kuper puts it, “the vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.”

L 1907: I don’t think that Kotkin understands how one avoids poverty, (short of theft or inheritance), you have to have something that is valuable to others. Labor has become less valuable. I have seen no clue in this book about any such insight. I have ceased to expect an answer in this book.

L 2058: I think the majority of this book could be summed up in Sophie Tucker’s comment: “I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich; rich is better.”.