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Peter Turchin says elite overproduction leads to an increase in inequality, and then a decrease in societal cooperation:

How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects a direct, causal connection. High inequality is corrosive of social cooperation and willingness to compromise, and waning cooperation means more discord and political infighting. Perhaps more important, economic inequality is also a symptom of deeper social changes, which have gone largely unnoticed.

Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.

| Peter Turchin, Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays (2013, but in my notes from 2023-08-12)

Given time, these surplus elites can become a counter elite, fighting the system. Look at the polarization against establishment politicians in 2026 elections.

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I recently rejiggered my workflow in Obsidian so that files I created one, two, and three years ago are shown in each day’s daily note. This is to prompt me to scan them and to decide if I should retire them or reconsider their subjects.

It occurred to me that I should pick notes surfaced by this mechanism that are worth sharing, and post them.

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2023-08-12

Samuel Moyn’s ‘Liberalism Against Itself’ | Becca Rothfeld

‘The central thesis of Samuel Moyn‘s daring new book, “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times,” is that Cold War liberals and their contemporary heirs do not champion a stirring vision so much as they adopt a self-protective crouch.’

She reminds us of the adage, often attributed to Robert Frost, ‘A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel’.

Rothfeld thinks Moyn is too dismissive of Isaiah Berlin, whose words she elevates:

A liberal sermon which recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realise its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats.

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The Hidden Value of Time | Esau McCaulley

A very family-centric polemic against time poverty, and McCaulley argues that the poor have the worst time poverty of all. He then contrasts the challenges his impoverished mother faced and his own, but as a well-off public intellectual.

McCaulley makes an oblique argument for basic income, and comes up with a great one-liner: ‘A living wage should be one in which there is space for something beyond work’. Kind of a weak ending for what should be either a direct call to action or a stronger condemnation of the status quo.

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2024-08-12

How San Francisco Longshoremen Made Their Union a Powerhouse | Benjamin Fong

San Francisco was a strong union town. San Francisco dockworkers went on strike in 1919, as in many other American workplaces, cities, and industries after World War I. That union was racially exclusive, like other unions before it in San Francisco. And not surprisingly, employers used African Americans and black West Indians as strikebreakers in 1919. That was one of the reasons that that strike failed. And then that ushered in an anti-union era in San Francisco, which was and would be the biggest and most important port on the West Coast for decades.

Employers had used divide-and-conquer tactics very effectively. And many white workers were hung up on racism. And, of course, California was the heart of the anti-Chinese xenophobia of the nineteenth century. That also played into the anti-Black racism that persisted. And so employers cleverly, cynically but brilliantly, played race in San Francisco on the waterfront. And as a result, San Francisco dock workers suffered the consequences. They lost their union. Their wages went down. The shape-up persisted. All the bad things that happen when workers are weak occurred on the San Francisco waterfront in the interwar era.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has been a strong player—although a small one—in the integration of American unions, despite efforts of all arrayed against them.

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2025-08-12

AT&T CEO’s Memo Just Made It Official: Workplace Loyalty Is Dead | Aki Ito

John Stankey says the quiet part out loud, and says the unwritten compact between workers and company have been rewritten:

‘It’s not every day that a CEO’s 2,500-word response to an employee engagement survey goes viral. But that’s exactly what happened last weekend, after AT&T CEO John Stankey sent a memo to his managers that my colleagues Dominick Reuter and Katherine Li published for the entire internet to see. Upon first reading it, I laughed at just how blunt Stankey was in his admonishment of his staff who apparently complained in the company’s survey. Here goes another executive lashing out at frustrated employees, I thought.

But the more times I read it, the more I saw something deeper: perhaps the clearest attempt yet by a major CEO to rewrite the terms of the workplace in contemporary corporate America. Last year, in an essay about the changing relationship between employers and employees, I argued that decades of layoffs, slashed benefits, and hardline management killed off our long-held norms around workplace loyalty. But I had never heard the head of a large corporation actually admit that. Now, here was Stankey — the CEO of a 140-year-old company that once epitomized corporate loyalty — declaring the death of loyalty himself. “Some of you may have started your tour with this company expecting an ‘employment deal’ rooted in loyalty,” he wrote. “We have consciously shifted away from some of these elements.”

He’s laying his cards on the table, say, this is no bluff. Take down all the inspirational posters in the cafeteria. The deal is now nakedly transactional. Late-stage capitalism sheds all posturing and mushy mumbo-jumbo about the intangibles of the relationship between the organization and the people that comprise it. The implicit mutual regard between management and the managed is erased, and all that is left are the steely jaws of the machine.

‘That “employment deal” Stankey references is known by another name in organizational psychology: the psychological contract. As I wrote last year, it’s the set of things that employers and employees believe they owe each other and are owed in return. Usually, these beliefs go unsaid — they’re more inferred by the totality of a company’s culture. What’s unusual about Stankey’s note is that he goes on at length making the implicit explicit, telling employees what they’re right to expect from the company and what they aren’t. Stankey says his workers deserve a transparent career path, a functional office, and the proper tools to do their jobs. But he says they’re wrong to expect promotions based on tenure, the flexibility to work from home, and something about “conformance” that I can’t decipher for the life of me. Most of all, he says, don’t expect loyalty.’

We don’t, Mr. Stinky.