There is no obviously appropriate way to measure this, even in theory.
It’s hard to discuss these things without getting into all sorts of overly controversial topics, but I definitely disagree that there are no obviously appropriate ways to establish whether this, so to say, skew of the status distribution is increasing.
Admittedly, these are fuzzy observations where it’s easy to fall prey to all kinds of biases, but there is still useful information all over the place. You can observe the level of contempt (either overt or more underhanded) that people express for those below their class, the amount of effort they invest just to make sure they’re insulated from the lower classes, the fear and disgust of mere proximity to anyone below a certain class, the media portrayals of people doing jobs at various percentiles of the income distribution, the reduction and uniformization of the status criteria and the disappearance of various sources of status available to those scoring low in wealth, fame, and bureaucratic rank, and so on. Of course, my observations and interpretations of all these trends may well be biased and inaccurate, but it’s certainly incorrect to claim that no conclusions could be drawn from them even in principle.
I basically agree with you—The U.S. has certainly been headed in the direction of a winner-take-all society over the last few decades.
I think some of this is measurable. The Gini coefficient certainly captures some of the economic aspects,
and it has gotten higher over time
“the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history” seem too strong. History includes slavery, including practices such as “seasoning”
History includes slavery, including practices such as “seasoning”
I agree that was probably a too hyperbolic statement. History certainly records much more extreme instances of domineering and oppression. However, “dehumanized” was not a very good choice of term for the exact attitudes I had in mind, which I think indeed have little historical precedent and, and which don’t really correspond to the traditional patterns of exercising crude power by higher-status groups and individuals, being a rather peculiar aspect of the present situation. But yes, in any case, I agree I exaggerated with the rhetoric on that point.
However, “dehumanized” was not a very good choice of term for the exact attitudes I had in mind, which I think indeed have little historical precedent and, and which don’t really correspond to the traditional patterns of exercising crude power by higher-status groups and individuals, being a rather peculiar aspect of the present situation.
Dear Vladimir, must as I hesitate to offer you any assistance in your presumably shady-looking intellectual enterprise (as frankly I’ve grown to dislike you quite a bit, period).… the term you might’ve been looking for is “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopower”. Foucault, Arendt and Agamben have all pondered its significance in the 20th century.
it’s certainly incorrect to claim that no conclusions could be drawn from them even in principle.
I wouldn’t claim that, my claim is that there can’t be one formula specifying what you want to measure, so for reasonably similar societies like this one and that of fifty years ago, you can’t draw conclusions like that. If one looks at all the equally (in)appropriate ways to measure what you’re making claims about, the modern USA outperforms 18th century Russia in enough ways that we can draw conclusions. I’ll elaborate a bit on your examples.
fuzzy observations
The observations are the least fuzzy part.
the fear and disgust of mere proximity to anyone below a certain class
With something like this, you could perhaps quantify fear disgust of millions of people if in proximity to other people. You might find that in one society, 50% are extremely disgusted by the bottom 5%, and nonplussed by the others, and the top 10% of that is disgusted by the whole bottom 50%, while in another society, the top 20% is moderately disgusted by the bottom 80%, and the top 40% absolutely repulsed by the bottom 1%...etc.
What exactly, or even approximately, are your criteria, and how much do you think others on this site share them?
What our society has is an unprecedented tabooing of many overt scorning behaviors and thoughts. Perhaps you totally discount that? It has also tamed superstition enough that there is no system of ritual purity. People at least believe they believe in meritocracy. There is a rare disregard of bloodlines and heredity, compared to other times and places, including modern Japan.
the media portrayals of people doing jobs at various percentiles of the income distribution
What that brings to mind for me is the honest labor memes from the Puritans, and how so many were ready to identify with the common man, Joe the plumber, etc. One might say that this was primarily or only because he is white, and I think we all discount its value because of that to some extent, and if you idiosyncratically discount it more than others, you should be upfront about that by being more specific, and not make implicit claims that according to your readers’ values, what you say is true.
Were I trying to call out a certain statement as being sexist, I might quote the statement and tell people that the statement is sexist. That’s totally legitimate if I think that, would they reflect rationally and calmly, they would come to the same conclusion, according to their values. But if the reason I think that the statement is sexist is because it’s written in English, which has a long history of being used by sexists, it would be totally illegitimate for me to simply say to normal human beings that the statement is sexist, because the reason I think it sexist is its mere expression in English.
If you believe that your claims resonate with normal conceptions of fairness upon reflection by people, it’s fine for you to just make them. But this particular claim of yours is so, let’s say counter-intuitive, that I suspect you have very idiosyncratic values in which the worth of a great many things is reduced to zero where other people would think it worth something, perhaps a great deal. If so, please clarify that when you say “The better-off classes view those beneath them with frightful scorn and contempt, and the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history,” you just don’t mean “contempt” and “dehumanized” the way your readers do.
I think there may be some “rosy retrospection” going on here.
It seems like we have some essential misunderstandings on these points:
What our society has is an unprecedented tabooing of many overt scorning behaviors and thoughts. Perhaps you totally discount that? It has also tamed superstition enough that there is no system of ritual purity. People at least believe they believe in meritocracy. There is a rare disregard of bloodlines and heredity, compared to other times and places, including modern Japan.
The “status skew” I have in mind has nothing to do with the issues of fairness and meritocracy. In this discussion, I am not concerned about the way people obtain their status, only what its distribution looks like. (In fact, in my above comment, I already emphasized that the present society is indeed meritocratic to a very large degree, in contrast to the historical societies of prevailing hereditary privilege.)
What I’m interested in is the contrast between the sort of society where the great majority of people enjoy a moderate status and the elites a greater one, and the sort of society where those who fall outside an elite minority are consigned to the status of despised losers. This is a relevant distinction, insofar as it determines whether average people will feel like they live a modest but dignified and respectable life, or they’ll feel like low-status losers, with the resulting unhappiness and all sorts of social pathology (the latter mostly resulting from the lack of status incentives to engage in orderly and productive life).
My thesis is simply that many Western countries, and especially the U.S., have been moving towards the greater skew of the status distribution, i.e. a situation where despite all the increase in absolute wealth, an increasingly large percentage of the population feel like their prospects in life offer them unsatisfactory low status, and the higher classes confirm this by their scornful attitudes. (Of course, all sorts of partial exceptions can be pointed out, but the general trend seems clear.)
In fact, one provocative but certainly not implausible hypothesis is that meritocracy may even be exacerbating this situation. Elites who believe themselves to be meritocratic rather than hereditary or just lucky may well be even more arrogant and contemptuous because of that, even if they’re correct in this belief.
I think there may be some “rosy retrospection” going on here.
Well, I’m not that old, and I honestly can’t complain at all about how I’ve been treated by the present system—on the contrary. Of course, I allow for the possibility that I have formed a skewed perspective here, but the reasons for this would be more complex than just straightforward “rosy retrospection.”
It’s hard to discuss these things without getting into all sorts of overly controversial topics, but I definitely disagree that there are no obviously appropriate ways to establish whether this, so to say, skew of the status distribution is increasing.
Admittedly, these are fuzzy observations where it’s easy to fall prey to all kinds of biases, but there is still useful information all over the place. You can observe the level of contempt (either overt or more underhanded) that people express for those below their class, the amount of effort they invest just to make sure they’re insulated from the lower classes, the fear and disgust of mere proximity to anyone below a certain class, the media portrayals of people doing jobs at various percentiles of the income distribution, the reduction and uniformization of the status criteria and the disappearance of various sources of status available to those scoring low in wealth, fame, and bureaucratic rank, and so on. Of course, my observations and interpretations of all these trends may well be biased and inaccurate, but it’s certainly incorrect to claim that no conclusions could be drawn from them even in principle.
I basically agree with you—The U.S. has certainly been headed in the direction of a winner-take-all society over the last few decades.
I think some of this is measurable. The Gini coefficient certainly captures some of the economic aspects, and it has gotten higher over time
“the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history” seem too strong. History includes slavery, including practices such as “seasoning”
I agree that was probably a too hyperbolic statement. History certainly records much more extreme instances of domineering and oppression. However, “dehumanized” was not a very good choice of term for the exact attitudes I had in mind, which I think indeed have little historical precedent and, and which don’t really correspond to the traditional patterns of exercising crude power by higher-status groups and individuals, being a rather peculiar aspect of the present situation. But yes, in any case, I agree I exaggerated with the rhetoric on that point.
Dear Vladimir, must as I hesitate to offer you any assistance in your presumably shady-looking intellectual enterprise (as frankly I’ve grown to dislike you quite a bit, period).… the term you might’ve been looking for is “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopower”. Foucault, Arendt and Agamben have all pondered its significance in the 20th century.
I wouldn’t claim that, my claim is that there can’t be one formula specifying what you want to measure, so for reasonably similar societies like this one and that of fifty years ago, you can’t draw conclusions like that. If one looks at all the equally (in)appropriate ways to measure what you’re making claims about, the modern USA outperforms 18th century Russia in enough ways that we can draw conclusions. I’ll elaborate a bit on your examples.
The observations are the least fuzzy part.
With something like this, you could perhaps quantify fear disgust of millions of people if in proximity to other people. You might find that in one society, 50% are extremely disgusted by the bottom 5%, and nonplussed by the others, and the top 10% of that is disgusted by the whole bottom 50%, while in another society, the top 20% is moderately disgusted by the bottom 80%, and the top 40% absolutely repulsed by the bottom 1%...etc.
What exactly, or even approximately, are your criteria, and how much do you think others on this site share them?
What our society has is an unprecedented tabooing of many overt scorning behaviors and thoughts. Perhaps you totally discount that? It has also tamed superstition enough that there is no system of ritual purity. People at least believe they believe in meritocracy. There is a rare disregard of bloodlines and heredity, compared to other times and places, including modern Japan.
What that brings to mind for me is the honest labor memes from the Puritans, and how so many were ready to identify with the common man, Joe the plumber, etc. One might say that this was primarily or only because he is white, and I think we all discount its value because of that to some extent, and if you idiosyncratically discount it more than others, you should be upfront about that by being more specific, and not make implicit claims that according to your readers’ values, what you say is true.
Were I trying to call out a certain statement as being sexist, I might quote the statement and tell people that the statement is sexist. That’s totally legitimate if I think that, would they reflect rationally and calmly, they would come to the same conclusion, according to their values. But if the reason I think that the statement is sexist is because it’s written in English, which has a long history of being used by sexists, it would be totally illegitimate for me to simply say to normal human beings that the statement is sexist, because the reason I think it sexist is its mere expression in English.
If you believe that your claims resonate with normal conceptions of fairness upon reflection by people, it’s fine for you to just make them. But this particular claim of yours is so, let’s say counter-intuitive, that I suspect you have very idiosyncratic values in which the worth of a great many things is reduced to zero where other people would think it worth something, perhaps a great deal. If so, please clarify that when you say “The better-off classes view those beneath them with frightful scorn and contempt, and the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history,” you just don’t mean “contempt” and “dehumanized” the way your readers do.
I think there may be some “rosy retrospection” going on here.
It seems like we have some essential misunderstandings on these points:
The “status skew” I have in mind has nothing to do with the issues of fairness and meritocracy. In this discussion, I am not concerned about the way people obtain their status, only what its distribution looks like. (In fact, in my above comment, I already emphasized that the present society is indeed meritocratic to a very large degree, in contrast to the historical societies of prevailing hereditary privilege.)
What I’m interested in is the contrast between the sort of society where the great majority of people enjoy a moderate status and the elites a greater one, and the sort of society where those who fall outside an elite minority are consigned to the status of despised losers. This is a relevant distinction, insofar as it determines whether average people will feel like they live a modest but dignified and respectable life, or they’ll feel like low-status losers, with the resulting unhappiness and all sorts of social pathology (the latter mostly resulting from the lack of status incentives to engage in orderly and productive life).
My thesis is simply that many Western countries, and especially the U.S., have been moving towards the greater skew of the status distribution, i.e. a situation where despite all the increase in absolute wealth, an increasingly large percentage of the population feel like their prospects in life offer them unsatisfactory low status, and the higher classes confirm this by their scornful attitudes. (Of course, all sorts of partial exceptions can be pointed out, but the general trend seems clear.)
In fact, one provocative but certainly not implausible hypothesis is that meritocracy may even be exacerbating this situation. Elites who believe themselves to be meritocratic rather than hereditary or just lucky may well be even more arrogant and contemptuous because of that, even if they’re correct in this belief.
Well, I’m not that old, and I honestly can’t complain at all about how I’ve been treated by the present system—on the contrary. Of course, I allow for the possibility that I have formed a skewed perspective here, but the reasons for this would be more complex than just straightforward “rosy retrospection.”