Most white collar workers are executing a similar maneuver, except that instead of using force, they are corrupting the victim’s ability to make sense of the situation.
I think it’s actually a combination of this, and actual coordination to freeze out marginal gangs or things that aren’t gangs, from access to the system. Venture capitalists, for example, will tend to fund people who feel like members of the right gang, use the right signifiers in the right ways, went to the right schools, etc. Everyone I’ve talked with about their experience pitching startups has reported that making judgments on the merits is at best highly noncentral behavior.
If enough of the economy is cartelized, and the cartels are taxing noncartels indirectly via the state, then it doesn’t much matter whether the cartels apply force directly, though sometimes they still do.
So called “career capital” amounts to having more prestige, or otherwise be better at convincing people, and therefore being able to extort larger amounts.
It basically involves sending or learning how to send a costly signal of membership in a prestigious gang, including some mixture of job history, acculturation, and integrating socially into a network.
If I replaced the word “gang” here, with the word “ingroup” or “club” or “class”, does that seem just as good?
In these sentences in particular...
Venture capitalists, for example, will tend to fund people who feel like members of the right gang, use the right signifiers in the right ways, went to the right schools, etc.
and
It basically involves sending or learning how to send a costly signal of membership in a prestigious gang, including some mixture of job history, acculturation, and integrating socially into a network.
...I’m tempted to replace the word “gang” with the word “ingroup”.
My guess is that you would say, “An ingroup that coordinates to exclude / freeze out non-ingroup-members from a market is a gang. Let’s not mince words.”
Maybe more specifically an ingroup that takes over a potentially real, profitable social niche, squeezes out everyone else, and uses the niche’s leverage to maximize rent extraction, is a gang.
Overall your wording seems pretty close.
I think it’s actually a combination of this, and actual coordination to freeze out marginal gangs or things that aren’t gangs, from access to the system. Venture capitalists, for example, will tend to fund people who feel like members of the right gang, use the right signifiers in the right ways, went to the right schools, etc. Everyone I’ve talked with about their experience pitching startups has reported that making judgments on the merits is at best highly noncentral behavior.
If enough of the economy is cartelized, and the cartels are taxing noncartels indirectly via the state, then it doesn’t much matter whether the cartels apply force directly, though sometimes they still do.
It basically involves sending or learning how to send a costly signal of membership in a prestigious gang, including some mixture of job history, acculturation, and integrating socially into a network.
If I replaced the word “gang” here, with the word “ingroup” or “club” or “class”, does that seem just as good?
In these sentences in particular...
and
...I’m tempted to replace the word “gang” with the word “ingroup”.
My guess is that you would say, “An ingroup that coordinates to exclude / freeze out non-ingroup-members from a market is a gang. Let’s not mince words.”
Maybe more specifically an ingroup that takes over a potentially real, profitable social niche, squeezes out everyone else, and uses the niche’s leverage to maximize rent extraction, is a gang.