Political prediction always exudes a whiff of astrology.

| Anton Jäger

…

Election day seems the perfect time for the quote above from Anton Jäger, the most recent source of the concept of hyperpolitics, here summarized by Nick French:

These episodes [Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and No Kings, for example], Jäger argues, are characteristic of the era of what he calls hyperpolitics. Everyday life in the United States and other Western democracies is increasingly politicized: our political ideologies, as curated on social media, have become central to our identities and have even increasingly come to structure our closest personal relationships. Yet this heightened politicization has not translated into meaningful policy change. Instead, the public’s dissatisfaction with traditional parties of both the Left and the Right continues to grow, while a panoply of new right-populist formations has managed to win over disaffected voters in ever larger numbers across the developed world. Meanwhile, the core elements of the neoliberal economic program — low taxes, public disinvestment, and corporate handouts — remain the order of the day.

How did we get here? For Jäger, the United States and European countries find themselves at the end of a process of evolution — or, more accurately, devolution — that started with the era of “mass politics” stretching from the late nineteenth century to roughly the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since then, these societies have stumbled through two unstable new orientations toward politics — post-politics and antipolitics — before landing in our current hyperpolitical era.

Today is Election Day in the US. Let’s see what tomorrow brings. It can only get better, right?

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HR Distortion Field

Laurel Kalser wrote early last year that employee engagement surveys don’t accurately reflect employees’ perspectives, with ‘6% rarely or never answer honestly’:

• HR teams may be relying on misleading employee engagement surveys to develop initiatives and make critical decisions about productivity and agility, according to a February report by people analytics firm Visier.

• Nearly half (47%) of 1,000 U.S.-based employees surveyed in October 2024 said they often or occasionally feel pressured to withhold feedback, and another 6% rarely or never answer honestly, the responses showed.

• Trust — or rather, a lack of it — in their organization’s data management system is the main culprit: 37% of employees said they don’t believe engagement surveys are ever really anonymous. They also said managers don’t get how they feel; 44% believe their manager would rate their emotional state differently than they would, while 21% said their manager would inflate it.

I haven’t checked, but I bet that these numbers haven’t improved, and I’d wager they’ve gotten worse.

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Trilemma

I read a great explanation of what a trilemma is, by Paul Morland, Philip Pilkington from Migration, Stagnation, or Procreation: Quantifying the Demographic Trilemma:

More interesting [than the dilemma] is the trilemma, where the choice is two out of three perceived goods. You can have any two, but you cannot have all three. An example of a trilemma was neatly formulated by the Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek. Living in a Communist country, you could be any two, but not all three, of honest, loyal, and intelligent. If you were honestly loyal to the regime, you were not intelligent (you might call it the “dense option”). If you were honest and intelligent, you could not be loyal (the “dissident option”). If you were loyal and intelligent, you could not be honest (the “dissembler option”). By being dense, a dissident, or a dissembler, you were choosing two and foregoing one of the virtues of honesty, intelligence, and loyalty.

This description recalls the corporate conundrum of exit, voice, and loyalty laid out by Albert O. Hirschman, and here explained1 by James O’Toole and Warren Bennis:

In the early 1970s, Albert O. Hirschman posited that employees who disagree with company policy have only three options: exit, voice, or loyalty. That is, they can offer a principled resignation (exit), try to change the policy (voice truth to power), or remain team players despite their opposition (loyalty). Most people choose option three, the path of least resistance. They swallow whatever objections they may have to questionable dictates from above, concluding that they lack the power to change things or, worse, will be punished if they try. Most executives expect their people to be good soldiers and not question company policy, but a great leader will welcome alternative viewpoints.

To use Žižek’s terms, employees face a trilemma. As the HR survey results above show, nearly half of workers are dissemblers (and 6% nearly always lie). Most dissenters exit, or are pushed out for raising their voices. And in this economy, a large proportion of workers might embrace loyalty, either honestly (or ‘dense’ly) or as dissemblers.

O’Toole and Bennis suggest that executives should seek to create a culture of candor to break this trilemma, but, honestly, executives generally aren’t wired for it.

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Ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?

| Wendell Berry

…

Berry was writing about political decisions and how we — as citizens and politicians — should judge proposed changes in society. And since we honor democracy so highly, we should approach business decisions in a more democratic way, instead of the one-sided, autocratic approach that plagues business culture. Business leaders should be compelled to answer such questions before irrevocable decisions are made.

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What Happened To Hybrid?

Two years ago Lauren Hirsch spoke1 with various knowledgeable observers of the hybrid work wave. Her bottom-line question?

So why do so many employers that say they’re data-driven seem to move counter to science?

Because they weren’t thinking scientifically, but emotionally, and in a dark way.

Almost five years since the start of the pandemic, many C.E.O.s are ready to move on from an experiment they never wanted to start. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” [Andy] Jassy wrote in a memo about ending remote work at Amazon.

[Adam] Grant says C.E.O.s may not always methodically control for whether an effect was caused by remote work, the pandemic or something else, as an academic researcher would.

They also may not want to find out that hybrid work is better.

“Leadership is a lot less fulfilling and a lot less fun when you’re doing it remotely,” [Laszlo] Bock [a former senior vice president for people operations at Google] said.

There’s the darkness: they are justifying their desire for personal fun with a nebulous productivity issue, or claiming their business is unique, when the data show small, measurable productivity increases from hybrid work, and the same pros and cons across all businesses grappling with hybrid work. They just don’t want to.

“There’s a premium on decisiveness in the business world,” [Adam Grant] said. But “if you’re making a highly consequential, irreversible decision, you are supposed to slow down as much as possible.”

Yes, remember Daniel Kahneman‘s recommendation to defer important decisions for as long as possible. See With Decision-Making, You Have to Go Slow to Go Fast, where I quoted him:

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.

But they jumped to conclusions.

The economy and corporate policies play against individuals who might want to work remotely, and business leaders hold all the cards

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A Tribute To Claudia Goldin

Three years ago, economist Paul Krugman wrote An Economics Nobel for Showing How Much Women Matter2, following Claudia Goldin’s receiving the Nobel for Economics. He summarized her work on the Pill and its impact on women’s employment, and ultimately, how women came to view work as central to their identity by the ‘70s, and — to some extent — everyone else did too. Krugman notes that the Nobel committee overlooked her work on the decline in inequality and the rise of the middle class starting in the postwar 1940s.

His highest praise?

Claudia Goldin’s pathbreaking research, deeply grounded in history yet hugely relevant to the present, is a model of what social science should be. This is truly a Nobel to celebrate.

Hear, hear.

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The Tragedy of No Commons

In 2023, Douglas Rushkoff wrote a scathing response3 to a David Leonhardt essay. Leonhardt seemed to accept the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ theory from ecologist Garrett Hardin, in a companion piece to an otherwise rigorous report on the state of groundwater in the US.

Rushkoff wrote:

In the piece, [Leonhardt] correctly explains how if every person and every business use all the water they want, there won’t be enough. But he goes on to call this phenomenon “The Tragedy of the Commons,” crediting ecologist Garrett Hardin — a nativist, anti-immigration eugenicist.

[…]

As for the commons, well, [Hardin] was not writing about the commons at all. He was writing about chaos and over-extraction. His concern was overpopulation, particularly by non-Europeans who would use up all of white people’s resources. So he argued that we should seal up borders, stop giving any aid to poor nations, and purge cultural diversity from the US. Otherwise we risked “passive genocide” of whites by people of color who used up all the stuff. (No, this is not the environmentalist you’re looking for.)

What [Hardin] realized, in a sort of Malthusian, Club-of-Rome-meets-Steve-Bannon way, is that if everyone takes whatever they want, there won’t be anything left. And he called this “The Tragedy of the Commons.” But this situation does not describe a commons at all. A commons is when a group of people make rules about a shared resource, and then enforce those rules together. It’s how grazing land was managed in late medieval Europe, so that farmers wouldn’t overgraze. It worked so equitably and profitably for the lower classes that aristocrats decided to “enclose” the commons for the exclusive use of private owners — meaning, themselves.4 A commons is the most appropriate and efficient way to share a common resource so that it is not extracted and depleted for the sake of the market.

Having cleaned up the errors Leonhardt made, Rushkoff widens his scorn to ‘free-market advocates’ — which is to say capitalists:

Free market advocates love the phrase Tragedy of the Commons, because the only alternative to a commons is a market! Put prices on things, so that the market can negotiate its scarcity. But there’s a difference between a commons and an unregulated free-for-all. A commons doesn’t mean everyone takes whatever they want until there’s nothing left. It’s precisely the opposite.

[…]

The commons is not the tragedy at all, but the solution to over-extraction of resources by those looking to grow markets. Calling the commons a tragedy is like calling cooperation a form of failure — not to mention sharing, mutual aid, or social contracts. Whenever you see the disinformational phrase “tragedy of the commons,” remember who came up with it, and what it was intended to do.

And who it serves, when accepted as true.

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In science, novelty emerges only with difficulty.

| Thomas Kuhn

…

Kuhn is the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to whom we owe the notion of paradigm shift. Via Wikipedia:

Kuhn contrasts paradigm shifts, which characterize a scientific revolution, to the activity of normal science, which he describes as scientific work done within a prevailing framework or paradigm. Paradigm shifts arise when the dominant paradigm under which normal science operates is rendered incompatible with new phenomena, facilitating the adoption of a new theory or paradigm.

Kuhn did not extend his thinking outside the natural sciences, but the premise of paradigm shifts carries over into other realms, like art, music, fashion, and, yes, even business.

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The Cycle of Management Models

Back in the pre-pandemic, I first came across a tantalizing analysis by well-regarded academics, Zlatko Bodrožić and Paul S. Adler, that laid out a historical analysis of the rise and replacement of management approaches over the past few hundred years. Entitled What explains the evolution of management models over the past two centuries?1, the quite short piece attempts a great deal, and falls short in some basic ways. But the core concept is worth understanding.

At the core, the authors assert that scientific management, human relations, and strategy-and-structure are ‘well-known management models in the history of business’ and then pose an implied question: ‘we still understand little about why a given model succeeds in competition with other models.’ They answer this question in the same introductory paragraph:

Our analysis of the historical record led us to conclude that management models succeed when they respond effectively to the organizational challenges and opportunities created by successive waves of technological revolution.

In a way, that top-level take is not too surprising. I find it strange that they don’t cite other work on these ideas, like Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership2 from the ‘90s, or David Ronfeldt's groundbreaking Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Social Evolution. Also odd that company size goes unmentioned; perhaps we can assume these trends impact the largest companies first and the rest follow?

Here’s the ‘tech revolution’ diagram at the heart of their model of models. (Forgive the small fonts; they are in the original.)

Along the bottom are a sequence of technological breakthroughs, arrayed temporally, but not on a precise scale. An arrow points up from each, impacting the organizational form of the time. For example, Railroads & Steam led to a transition from Traditionalistic Management to Professionally Managed Firms. In each cycle, there are two parts: first, the overthrow of the status que ante model of management — in this case, family-run firms — and the creation of a new model, as in the adoption of a Line and Staff model of organization. Second, there is a counter-revolution: an effort to address the new problems introduced by the transition to a new model. In this case, Industrial Betterment.

The authors explain:

This cycle also led to a degradation of working and living conditions for the workers who staffed the railroad operations and who were thus scattered far from their communities and families. This degradation exacerbated industrial conflicts, which in turn led to a secondary cycle that gave rise to the “Industrial Betterment” model. Industrial Betterment did not undo the Line-and-Staff model, but added a counter-balancing social function that was responsible for improving workers’ living and working conditions. Occupationally, we see the emergence of the welfare secretary role (which subsequently evolved into the personnel manager).

Left unsaid is a great deal of context. Just a few exxamples: the rise of suffrage for unpropertied working men (in the UK, the Second Reform Act of 1867; in the US, by 1860 just five states restricted suffrage to male taxpayers and only two required property), unionization efforts, and labor-oriented political parties also paralleled these management shifts, which on a societal level also involved strikes, riots, anarchy, and the dissemination of socialist thought. The chart and descriptions lack those societal inputs/outputs.

Also left unmentioned is the original sin of slavery. One commenter on the essay notes that in the 1861 census ‘the largest single occupational category of managers, identified as such, was on US plantations worked by enslaved human beings. Four million enslaved people were worked for profitable production, integrated into the US and the global capitalist economy, not least through the work of 38000 salaried managers.’ Yes, this was agricultural work, but it set the context for organizational models prior to and during the rise of railroads and steam. No discussion or acknowledgment by the authors.

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The next cycle?

The steel and electricity revolution of late 19th and early 20th century yielded the Scientific Management model based on workflow optimization and capitalizing on the acceleration of production afforded by the new technologies. This inaugurated a transition to a new organizational paradigm that we call the Factory, symbolizing a unitary, centralized organization. This model also led to high turnover and low morale of workers due to the close control over how and how fast tasks were performed. The resulting conflicts provoked a secondary cycle that yielded the Human Relations model, based on counselling and supervisory techniques that responded to the alienation induced by rationalized workstation operations. Human Relations did not undo Scientific Management but rebalanced the Factory paradigm.

Note that the concept of worker alienation is originally from Marx3: he asserted that under capitalism, workers are alienated from the products they make, the work they do, other workers, and their personal well-being. Again, a great deal of context is left out. Consider, for example, this4 from Nelson Lichtenstein:

Nor did wage labor mean truly free labor in the new factories. That was a nineteenth-century conceit designed to distinguish the proletarian labor of the industrial heartland from slave labor elsewhere. Whatever the difficulties of agricultural labor or proto-industrial home production, few workers, and certainly not adult males, were eager for employment in the new factories where close supervision and unrelenting work requirements created a prison-like environment. That was one reason that a huge proportion of those so employed were women and children. One landowner spoke of factory villages as a “convenient asylum” for those displaced from their farms when enclosures snuffed out their rural livelihood. Meanwhile, in the cities, vagrancy laws targeted the “idle and disorderly poor,” while Britain’s Master and Servant Act of 1823 made workers criminally liable if they left their employer before the contractual end of their service. In Prussia, workers who left work without permission could be punished with a fine or fortnight’s imprisonment.

Factory work of that day sounds like slavery by another name. I don’t think adopting Human Relations was really enough5.

Returning to Bodrožić and Adler, and more recent history:

The automobile and oil revolution of the mid-20th century yielded the Strategy-and-Structure model based on differentiating internal structure and business-unit strategies so as to support the production, marketing, and sales of differentiated products to different customer segments. This contributed to the establishment of an organizational paradigm that we call the Corporation, representing the multi-divisional mass-production firm with strategic integration but operating autonomy in the divisions.

The new model eventually led to poor quality and service, low worker involvement, lack of cooperation and political games among managers. These problems provoked a secondary cycle aimed at quality, organization culture, and organization learning. The Quality Management model that emerged in this cycle recommended a management system that involved personnel at all levels in continuously improving product and process quality. It did not undo the Strategy-and-Structure model but remedied its dysfunctions and stabilized the Corporation paradigm.

I won’t belabor the greater context of the late 20th Century, and all the social turmoil, because this is too long already, and I would like to focus on the last of their cycles:

Our analysis of the most recent wave is more tentative because that revolution is only now reaching the critical inflection point where computers and telecommunication begin to transform a wider range of industries and functions. As we see it, the first cycle of this revolution yielded the Business Process model, based on the redesign of business processes up and down the value chain, redrawing internal and external boundaries, and externalizing “non-core” activities.

Buried in this are workflow automation, reengineering, the email revolution, cell phones, instant messaging, social media, offshoring, and outsourcing, to name just a few of the novelties that have arisen in the past 30 years.

This model contributed to the establishment of a new organizational paradigm that we call the Network, where units within and across organizations are interlinked by rationalized processes supported by digital technologies. This cycle seems to have led to the neglect of the human element and thereby weakened the innovation-generating capacity of firms. These problems, in turn, have provoked a secondary cycle that has encouraged the emergence of a cluster of concepts that appears to be cohering around Knowledge Management and novel types of communities of practice.

How very 2019. Knowledge management? I buy into the Network notion, though, that work is increasingly atomized and our reliance on communication tools has led to increased alienation and disengagement from work.

This was penned pre-pandemic, so the authors wrote without the perspective of today’s hybrid, always-on, pervasively web conferenced, burned-out business. With today’s hindsight, it would be interesting to see what the rebalancing trend might have been; I doubt Knowledge Management would have been seen as a bandage for the wounds inflicted by aggressive corporatism. Just as one glaring instance: consider how large US corporations continue to fight against unionization drives, or other organizing by employees. Starbucks continues to drag its feet, and the writers’ strike in Hollywood are just two examples that come to mind. I won’t get into the perturbations that AI is introducing into this vortex of swirling forces, but that’s worthy of a separate, longer treatment, in the works.

The larger context for the Networked model is perhaps the general sense of brokenness around the work contract, as I have written about before. It’s an element of the greater societal perception of brokenness in our institutions, as Alana Newhouse writes in Brokenism:

The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.

[…]

At its base, brokenism revolves around the idea that institutions and even whole societies can and do decay—sometimes in ways that are obvious, often in ways that are not.

Consider me a brokenist, then.

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My ‘dream job’ is… not working. No work. I don’t dream about labor.

| @thetrudz (2019)

…

@thetrudz now limits her feed to known Xers, so you can’t access the tweet directly.

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In If You “Don’t Dream of Labor,” You Should Organize for Socialism1, written in April 2023 by Caitlyn Clark, we see a highlighting of the ‘I don’t dream of labor’ meme:

That’s the theme of a popular TikTok meme, which started off life as a viral tweet with a quite different meaning. The saying “I don’t dream of labor” has been everywhere on social media in recent years, most notably in a TikTok audio featuring the voice of user @mrhamilton stating in a mock mid-Atlantic accent, “Darling, I’ve told you several times before, I have no dream job — I do not dream of labor.” The audio has since been used in over 51,400 videos. The quote is often falsely attributed to the likes of James Baldwin; in fact, it seems to have originated with Twitter user @thetrudz, whose tweet “My ‘dream job’ is . . . not working. No work. I don’t dream about labor” went viral in 2019.

How different it all is now in 2026. Especially young college grads looking for their first job, but also people who feel stuck in their existing roles, blocked from promotion by the ‘slow fire, slow hire’ economy we are living in. Not to mention the threat of layoffs or the looming impact of AI replacement.

I first wrote about this meme in

One excerpt:

This vignette is another example of how a thought that holds up a critical mirror to our culture is merchandized into selling mirrors instead of reflecting on the original intent of the thought.

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What Leaders Do

In What Leaders Really Do2, from 2023, John Kotter carefully parses the facets of leadership, debunking some myths along the way:

Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having “charisma” or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it.

Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.

No surprise: since he has characterized the business environment as ‘complex and volatile’, that sets the stage for his split between leadership and management:

Management is about coping with complexity. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change.

Management, complexity (planning and budgeting). Leadership, volatility (setting direction).

[Leaders] don’t make plans; they don’t solve problems; they don’t even organize people. What leaders really do is prepare organizations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it.’

Leaders are gardening, not engineering. Kotter warns ‘Most discussions of vision have a tendency to degenerate into the mystical’. Which is not where they should reside:

One of the most frequent mistakes that overmanaged and underled corporations make is to embrace long-term planning as a panacea for their lack of direction and inability to adapt to an increasingly competitive and dynamic business environment. But such an approach misinterprets the nature of direction setting and can never work.

Long-term planning is always time-consuming. Whenever something unexpected happens, plans have to be redone. In a dynamic business environment, the unexpected often becomes the norm, and long-term planning can become an extraordinarily burdensome activity. That is why most successful corporations limit the time frame of their planning activities. Indeed, some even consider “long-term planning” a contradiction in terms.

Kotter should be closely read and integrated into our understanding of the yin-yang of leadership and management.

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The problem with business is that it is afraid of dealing with the business of people.

| W. Edward Deming

…

This Deming quote reminds me of the first meeting I attended with Google’s ‘collaboration tools’ group, after signing them as an advisory client.

They had a slide showing on the giant monitor in the meeting room: a quote from a post I had written, making a distinction between tools for people at work and tools for businesses to manage people.

They informed me that they had decided to rename the next release of Google’s collaboration suite as ‘Google for Work’ instead of the originally planned ‘Google Enterprise’.

It was a great start. However, a new SVP (who shall remain nameless) arrived quite soon after, and the suite was recast as a lowly, lowly element of the Google Cloud, and the emphasis on people was dropped. Instead, we saw the return of ‘Enterprise’ everywhere in their marketing and messaging.

Remember: names matter.

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Words are slippery; both in meaning and in time.

Some terms are likely to be used forever; others fade quickly.

Overemployment

A vestige of the post-pandemic hiring spree, the term ‘overemployment’ was directed to those who were ‘secretly working more than one full-time job’, as reported in 20221 by Fadeke Adegbuyi.

All of her points are informative, and some are very insightful:

For a time, Murphy [one of the overemployed] thought she had stumbled upon a novel way of working—something she alone was experimenting with. But it wasn’t long into her new work arrangement that she realized there were scores of knowledge workers doing the exact same thing and discussing it online. On TikTok, the tag #overemployed has over 4.3 million views. The subreddit r/overemployed has over 89,000 members, and the accompanying Discord community has more than 32,000 users; during active periods of the day, a new member joins every few minutes. Both the subreddit and Discord exist under the banner of the Overemployed website, a resource hub and the home of this emerging work movement. These internet communities and online spaces have become a lifeline for people experimenting with or considering this new mode of work.

The online mentions for the term have risen and fallen over the years — spiking in 2022 when Adegbuyi wrote about it — and are now at a relative low. Not surprising, given the employment picture in tech:

The overemployed have cynical views of the relationship to their employers [emphasis mine]:

• The overemployed are rarely seeking self-actualization and meaning-making at work.

• Antiwork and OE have an overlap. Antiwork talks about how the system is against the workers and we should tear that system down. OE thinks the system is against the workers and says ‘let’s exploit it.’

• Overemployment is more than just a style of work. It’s an ideology of individualism and self-reliance held by many who feel that corporations have turned their backs on workers.

They know work is broken.

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Greedflation

In 2022, Lydia DePillis summarized2 a growing perspective of progressives called ‘greedflation’. Namely, it wasn’t only impartial inflation of that post-pandemic era that was driving up prices but deliberate profiteering:

Increasingly dominant corporations are taking the opportunity to jack up prices more than they otherwise could, which is squeezing consumers and supercharging inflation. Or “greedflation,” as the hypothesis has come to be known.

Well-known economists — like Ben Bernanke and Oliver Blancard — attempted to reassert the historical ‘wage-price spiral’ as the source of this inflation, in essence putting the blaming on increases in pay, and that corporations were only of necessity raising prices.

A 2023 article3 by Emily Peck pointed out that the concept of greedflation was gaining ground:

Once dismissed as a fringe theory, the idea that corporate thirst for profits drives up inflation, aka “greedflation,” is now being taken more seriously by economists, policymakers and the business press.

Fewer commentators and policy-makers were fooled by the corporate smokescreen and directly challenging the conventional wisdom:

In a speech in January, then-Fed vice chair Lael Brainard said wages weren’t the main driver of inflation and pointed to a “ price-price spiral,” where companies mark up prices far higher than the increases in their input costs.

In March, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, published a note on “profit margin-led inflation,” describing how in late 2022 and into this year, companies — particularly retailers and consumer goods makers — convinced consumers that they needed to raise prices. (They didn’t really.)

As just one example of someone who had been considered a conspiracy theorist for advancing greedflation as a major factor in rising inflation, consider Isabella Weber:

By May [following Donovan’s note], the Wall Street Journal published a story on how corporate profits were keeping inflation high, citing the work of Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was derided for her work on the topic back in late 2021.

In a stunning comeback this month, The Times of London profiled Weber’s rise from a lone voice to star economist who’s drawn attention to the notion that companies and certain sectors can drive inflation — she calls it “sellers’ inflation,” not greedflation.

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman pulled an about-face after his criticism of her work:

Krugman deleted tweets attacking Weber’s article as “truly stupid” and made a public apology.

Even Jerome Powell pivoted in 2022 away from his more conventional views in 2021.

The term has stayed in use, but fallen from its peak in 2023.

I choose to interpret this as the widespread acceptance that inflation — at least to a significant extent — can be influenced by profiteering. So where people talk about inflation now, it’s shaded by that awareness: we know they are taking advantage of the exogenous rise in the cost of their inputs to gouge us on the price of their outputs.

Class Ceiling

A recent piece4 by Noam Scheiber introduced the term ‘class ceiling’ to me.

• Being female or a person of color has long been seen as a disadvantage in hiring and promotion. A new study of college professors shows that class may loom as large.

• According to a recent paper, such a background [first-generation scholar] can also hurt a scholar’s career. The paper, in the prestigious journal Econometrica, found that scholars whose parents did not graduate from college are less likely to land tenure-track jobs at major research universities and less likely to get tenure.

• The researchers, Anna Stansbury and Kyra Rodriguez, found that the disadvantage of being a first-generation college graduate could be even greater than the disadvantages associated with being female or nonwhite.

So, for example, a female, Black PhD with college-educated parents might be more successful than a male, white first-generation PhD.

This effect boils down to social capital, in several ways:

First-generation graduates appeared to have less social or cultural capital than people from more privileged backgrounds.’ Fewer relationships with those with higher social capital, who might be able to open doors, make introductions, or teach graduates how to play the game.

This extends beyond academia:

“In many other elite professional settings, the qualities on which you’re judged — on which you’re getting ahead, getting opportunities — are somewhat subjective,” said Dr. Stansbury, an economist at M.I.T. Lawyers, bankers, consultants and middle managers typically advance when higher-ups perceive them as crafting strong arguments or giving good presentations. But there’s no way to measure these skills precisely.

Instead, just as for aspiring professors, “networks, social capital, perceptions and bias of how you present yourself — cultural capital — are a big reason for how it plays out,” Dr. Stansbury said. And those criteria put the working class at a real disadvantage.

And the first-generation doctorates enter the workforce beyond academia the ceiling still plays:

First-generation college graduates with Ph.D.s earned less when they entered the private sector and were less likely to hold senior management jobs than Ph.D.s whose parents had a graduate degree.

This is a quite new term, and one that is already rapidly fading, but that doesn’t mean the effect is:

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What counts is not the things that happen, but what we do with them.

| Annie Ernaux

…

Back from a brief beach vacation, where I mostly read, and wrote only a little. Here’s some bits that resurfaced from 1964 and 2025.

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Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics1, is a timeless classic. He was strongly influenced by Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt, and Barry Goldwater’s efforts to paint the United Nations as a tool of ‘international communism’: [emphasis mine]:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Personally, my view is that 'paranoid style' may not go far enough. Hofstadter is detailing instances of mass psychopathology when large groups are infected by conspiracy theories about 'others' -- Catholics, Jews, anarchists, Communists, and immigrants who are purportedly attempting to secretly subvert politics and society, up to and including overthrowing the government. These are largely movements of White supremacist nativists calling out these 'enemies' as dangerous and 'un-American'.

Instead of his title, he might have used ‘The Paranoia of American Politics’.

A point of departure for me: I don’t believe that people who fall under the sway of paranoid mass movements are ‘more or less normal’. I think they are nuts, no matter how many of them there are.

I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

He tracks various historic conspiracy theories, from the 1800s to his era, the 1960s: the Bavarian Illuminati, the anti-Masonic movement, Goldwater and the anti-UN movement, McCarthy’s anti-Communist frenzy, and the anti-Catholic movement.

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

This sounds like Trump’s coterie, up to claims that the Dems are communists, attempting to destroy America. The ‘dispossessed’ argument hits home in 2026, as more Americans think everything is broken, and become increasingly antipolitical.

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.

By ‘free capitalism’ I interpret him to mean ‘free trade’ which is shorthand for ‘unfettered, pro-growth-at-all-costs globalist capitalism’.

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

‘The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.’

In sections entitled Emulating the Enemy, Renegades and Pedants, and The Double Sufferer, Hofstadter details the psychology of the ‘paranoid spokesman’, in a psychiatric style.

Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.

Everything is reduced to good versus evil, us against them, zero-sum absolutes.

A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop.

An inability to learn how things do and don’t work.

He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

This reminds me of Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing’s concept of the ‘self-contained’, who cannot be changed by experience, articulated in The Mushroom at the End of the World.

Hofstadter wraps up with his epigraph on the double suffering of the paranoid:

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

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Anne Helen Petersen on Death of the Corporate Job

In September of 2025, Anne Helen Petersen responded to Alex McCann’s blockbuster essay, Death of the Corporate Job. By blockbuster I mean it created a lot of chatter, but at its core, it seemed to me to be a rehash of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs script (repudiated by Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs | Magdalena Soffia, Alex J Wood, Brendan Burchell, which I explored in Nice Doggy).

Petersen starts by pulling a few quotes from McCann:

The corporate role isn’t dying in some dramatic collapse. It’s dying like religion died for many people—slowly, through diminishing belief rather than disappearing churches.

The structures remain. The offices still gleam. The meetings still happen. The emails still flow. But the faith that this activity means something, that it’s building towards something worthwhile, that it justifies the life hours it consumes—that faith is evaporating.

And finally:

I know developers who do their “official” job in the morning and build their own products in the afternoon. Marketers who run their agencies from their corporate desks. Consultants who’ve automated their actual deliverables and spend most of their time on side projects.

They’re not quitting. They’re using the corporate infrastructure—the steady salary, the laptop, the stability—as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn’t died; it’s become a funding mechanism for actual work.

One person I spoke to called it “corporate entrepreneurship”—not in the LinkedIn way where you’re an “intrapreneur” innovating within your company, but in the sense that you’re using your corporate presence to subsidise your real work.

This is particularly acute for people in their twenties. We entered the workforce just as the illusion was becoming impossible to maintain. We never had that period where we could believe our corporate roles were meaningful.

Then Petersen lets loose [emphasis mine]:

It’s all very Fight Club and Office Space meets Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, isn’t it? Maybe a little Graduate, a dash of Say Anything Lloyd Dobbler-ism, and certainly some David Graeber, who first published his essay on “Bullshit Jobs” in 2013 (and who Alex, to his credit, references directly).

I don’t mean to be paternalistic so much as highlight how every generation arrives at a similar point of disillusionment: most jobs involve bullshit. What you do with that information, once gleaned, is usually a pretty good barometer of character. But the realization that the corporate career can feel meaningless — that’s nothing new.

The highlighted sentences above motivated me to use the Annie Ernaux quote for this issue. We all run headfirst into the bullshitty, corporate, cringey parts of work, usually pretty soon after starting to work in the first place.

You can mistakenly take that collision as a personal shortcoming; that somehow you are failing at the corporate game. Or, perhaps with more time toiling in the mines, you might reach a realization: corporatism is not about helping workers to find purpose and meaning in their work. It is simply a machine designed to derive profits that can be — to the greatest extent possible — directed to the owners, and as little as possible to the workers. The solution to this is a different economy, where the returns on all the participants’ contributions — capital and labor — are shared more equally.

Petersen does not lean as far to the left as I do in her discussion, but she spends the rest of her analysis making the case for self-employment as a means to get out of the machine [emphasis mine]:

Self-employment has remained somewhat steady for the last decade at just over 10% of the working population. There was an uptick after Covid, and current numbers suggest that the demographics with the greatest job loss — see: Black women — are also the demographics with the biggest increases in self-employment. We have woven a rhetoric around the current job market to convince us that the problem isn’t the way we’ve organized the economy, or the ongoing erosion of the safety net, or the erosion of worker’s rights, but the jobs themselves. In that paradigm, the solution isn’t to vote to create a different economy, with different incentives and different allocation of profits, but to create your own job.

It’s rich, I know, that I’m writing all of this from the perch of a seemingly secure freelance job. But it’s also telling that even though this enterprise has been successful beyond my wildest dreams, I worry constantly: about my partner losing his full-time employment and, by extension, our access to good healthcare; about developing brain fog or a disability; about Substack’s viability as a platform; about my relevance as I age; about how much I need to set aside each month to ensure that when I can no longer write the way I do, I will be able to survive.

So here’s my contribution to this genre of job market writing. After years of navigating failing industries and labor exploitation, I finally have total control. I know exactly what I do, and who I do it for, and why I do it. I have almost entirely rid my workday of bullshit. But because nothing about the larger system itself has changed, I can have all that control — a seemingly perfect job! — and operate, every day, in total fear.

We need to change that ‘larger system’ to counter that fear. Now.

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Whereas personal nostalgia peoples the mind with real memories, political nostalgia often travels back to a time that is as unreal as time travel itself.

| Eula Biss, The Theft of the Commons

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From Ground Water To Enclosure

I undertook the newish Resurfaced section here on workfutures.io as a way to reconnect with my own reading and thinking from past years, a way to rethink and explore paths lying latent in earlier notes and writings.

The Eula Biss quote above resurfaced from a newfound approach to personal nostalgia.

First, on 2026-08-29, my Obsidian daily note search offered up an article by David Leonhardt from 2023-08-29, entitled Uncharted Waters1, an evocative name for a prosaic topic. The subtitle is less poetic: The threat to groundwater is a classic tragedy of the commons.

Leonhardt gets the thrust of ‘the tragedy’ of the commons wrong. He cites the infamous Garrett Hardin who said the tragedy was inevitable. It isn’t, as Elinor Ostrom proved, but she goes unmentioned, about which more later.

But Leonhardt’s stats -- from Mira Rojanasakul and Christopher Flavelle -- are terrifying:

• ‘Over the past 40 years, groundwater levels at most of the sites have declined. At 11 percent of the sites, levels last year fell to their lowest level on record.’ Another cornerstone of our economic system based on resource extraction, like energy from fossil fuels. Except now we are talking about eating and drinking.’

I searched but couldn’t find recent data on nationwide ground water stats, but the localized ones — like the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer which supports much of the agriculture in the midwest — are continuing to decline, and rapidly.

Leonhardt continues:

• ‘The U.S., in other words, is taking water out of the ground more quickly than nature is replenishing it.’

He makes the implicit claim that this is a proof of Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. But Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom disproved his theory through her work with many different groups in many different places, where bottom-up agreements among those sharing a common resource—like grazing land for cattle in the Alps—avoided overuse of the commons, in some cases for hundreds or thousands of years. (A good analysis of her contributions can be found in A Review of Vlad Tarko’s Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography by David D’Amato2.)

I had made a link in the Leonhardt note I made in 2023 to an article by Eula Biss, The Theft of the Commons3, from which I pulled the opening quote. Among the many things she tied together in that essay was the tale of Laxton, the last village in England that has not been enclosed. Enclosure means the displacement of ‘commoners’ from the ‘commons’ from which they could gather wood, graze sheep and cows, and fish. In Laxton, they have been communally farming for over 700 years.

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But her debunking of Hardin’s thesis is compelling [emphasis mine]:

The idea that shared resources are inevitably ruined by people who exploit them is sometimes called the tragedy of the commons. This is not just an attitude that passes for common sense but an economic theory: “The Tragedy of the Commons” was the title of a 1968 essay by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. His essay has been cited so often that it has kept the word commons in use among people who know nothing about the commons. “The tragedy of the commons develops in this way,” Hardin wrote. “Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.”

Hardin was a white nationalist who subscribed to what is now called “replacement theory.” He believed that the United States needed to restrict nonwhite immigration, because, as he put it, “a multiethnic society is insanity.” In 1974, he published an essay titled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” in which he warned of the dangers of creating a world food bank: “The less provident and less able will multiply at the expense of the abler and more provident,” he wrote, “bringing eventual ruin upon all who share in the commons.”

Hardin was writing long after the commons had been lost to enclosure, and his commons was purely hypothetical. Actual, historical commons weren’t the free-for-all he imagined. In Laxton, villagers who held rights to Westwood Common could keep twenty sheep there, or the equivalent in cows. No one was allowed to keep more animals on the commons in summer than they could support in winter. Common rights were continuously revisited and revised in the course of centuries, as demand rose and fell. In 1662, the court fined a Laxton man “for not felling his part of thistles in the Town Moor.” As E. P. Thompson observed, “Commoners themselves were not without commonsense.”

What Hardin considers the “inherent logic of the commons” is actually the logic of capitalism, the dominant logic of our time. That logic dictates expansion, no matter the consequences, and it has brought our world, as Hardin warned it would, near ruin. “Ruin,” he wrote, “is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.” Freedom, in this context, is what we might call free enterprise, freedom having been redefined, in our age, as access to profit.

So, the tragedy of the commons lies in taking the commons away, appropriating what smallholders might have conserved, and instead placing the common resource — like the groundwater beneath the Midwest — into the gears of capitalist markets.

That’s fossil water, that was deposited there thousands or millions of years ago, and its recharge rate is less than an inch a year, while we’ve see the water level drop more than 200 feet in many locales.

The water being sucked from the ground at enormous rates is not principally being used by small farms, but by massive agricultural and industrial corporations, which are sucking the land dry. Like they enclosed the commons across England at the start of the Industrial Revolution, displacing the commoners who streamed to the cities to become factory workers, and ‘improving the land’ for industrial-scale farming.

In the US today, we are seeing the end result of industrial-scale farming: the last drops of groundwater are pumped out so alfalfa, soy, and corn can be sold and transported far away, along with the water still in the crops.

And when the farms fail, where will the farmers go? What factories will hire them, when all the water is gone? Have we lost our commonsense?

…

(By the way, the Eula Biss essay is a wonderful piece of writing, linking romantic poetry, her trip to Laxton, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism in glorious prose. Read it. You’ll thank me.)

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In some sense capitalism is already behind us. We live here in its fevered midst, to be sure, but a recognition is emerging, especially among younger generations: It isn’t sustainable. The devastation of the natural world; the mindless consumerism; above all, the human misery that corporations trawl the world to extract,…

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[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.

| Suzanne Langer

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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 compr…

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