Chapter 2 Muddle-Headed Egalitarianism and Misunderstandings about Class

This post is chapter 2 in a larger book project, The Information Class. The linked page has a general introduction, chapter titles, and the publication schedule. At the time of posting, the Trump regime— I don’t say the United States, because Trump has already violated the Constitution in ways that make it a mistake to regard the Trump regime’s actions as representing or authorized by the American people— has just suspended military aid to Ukraine, in deference to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and imposed 25% tariffs against our former allies— but I don’t think we really have allies anymore, this version of “America First” precludes any real international friendship— Canada and Mexico. It won’t be obvious from this post, but this book is my desperate attempt at resistance, by bringing together the educated class in a conspiracy of virtue that can carry the torch of liberal civilization through the new dark age, and inherit the mantle of leadership when the Trump regime falls.

The polite fiction of equality causes a lot of problems.

The mainstream American assumption, again, is that there should be no class stratification. That, we think, is the bad old ways, and we are better than that, and better than most societies in history, because we've gotten past it. We're an egalitarian, classless society, with equality of opportunity.

And when social scientists and pundits look at the data and realize that we do have class stratification again, the knee-jerk reaction is often to wax eloquent in favor of the old classless egalitarianism. It seems like a way for writers reporting unwelcome new facts to beg readers not to kill the messenger. But it's an unrealistic and unserious take. The response to rising inequality needs to be more hard-headed than that.

The new American class stratification began to be widely recognized in the 2010s, with a key role played by landmark books such as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids. But good social science kept getting mixed up with sentimental, nostalgic egalitarianism in ways that led to naïve policy prescriptions and moral advice, wishful thinking and unpersuasive exhortation. Coming Apart, for example, is a masterpiece of social analysis, yet its singularly naïve takeaway is that elites should preach what they practice, as if all social ills would vanish and a prosperous national solidarity would be restored if only professors and corporate vice presidents would take a break from curing malaria and sitting on foundation boards, in order to descend into the man-caves of non-working deadbeat dads, swill beer for camaraderie’s sake, and then lecture them about bourgeois virtue.

It’s more practical to accept class stratification, to celebrate guardedly the thriving of an educated elite, and then to think how to use the new class configuration for the general good. I think there’s much to admire in the classless society of mid-20^th century America, though it had its costs, a topic to which I’ll return. But it was an aberration that’s unlikely to recur. There are bad reasons, but also good reasons, why we left that behind. The emerging class stratification is more historically normal. And as I'll show below, it's very compatible with freedom, human dignity, and moral and material progress. Maudlin despair is unhelpful and inapt. We can build on this.

America's aversion to class stratification used to be a fairly innocuous national idiosyncracy, but it never reflected a mature reading of human history. It's past time for us to recognize that there's a good reason why history's most brilliant, inventive, just and merciful societies have generally had class stratification at the heart of the social order. It was always likely that it would happen to us, as a natural and integral part of our maturation as a society and a civilization.

The first big job of my argument is to help everyone understand why.

A couple of red herrings need to be got out of the way. Before we figure out what class is, let's settle a couple of things that it isn't.

First, class stratification is not the same as income inequality. If it were, the defense of class stratification would be very easy. Income inequality is inevitable, but class stratification is not.

There's an embarrassment of riches of reasons why income inequality is inevitable.

First, some people are more talented than others, and/or work harder.

Second, there are “compensating differentials,” as economists say. Some jobs pay more because they’re unpleasant, dangerous, or low in prestige.

Third, there are life cycle effects. In most careers, earnings rise over time as people get more experienced and well known.

Fourth, high productivity usually requires division of labor in specialist teams within and across organizations, and coordinating these specialized teams requires hierarchy and leadership. The leaders, if competent, have disproportionately high marginal product because of their position, and for them to capture some of the value they create is natural, and often necessary to incentivize them to perform.

Fifth, innovation is inherently risky and creates inequality between successful and unsuccessful innovators.

More could be said, but it probably isn’t needed.

This defense of income inequality does not imply that government can or should do nothing about it. Government can often reduce inequality through taxes and transfers, as well as other means, though there are hidden adverse costs to that, of varying severity depending on how the remedies for income inequality are designed. But policy can never eliminate inequality altogether, or reduce it to a level that won't seem offensive to people of highly egalitarian convictions.

Of course, high income inequality is related to class stratification. Causation runs both ways, from income inequality to class stratification and vice versa. Class stratification can increase income inequality by facilitating cooperation among the privileged and making them more productive, and/or by giving them the lion’s share of the best opportunities. Income inequality, in turn, contributes to class stratification as successful people try to use their wealth to pass on their elite status. That said, a thriving class must have more of a purpose than just trying to replicate high income.

Income inequality doesn't suffice to constitute class stratification, because class needs to be part of the identity of individuals and families, and income per se is too accidental and superficial a trait. It's usually normal for people to have friends across income strata, and maybe not even know it because they talk about things other than money. It's normal to marry across income strata, to move among income strata oneself over the lifecycle, and to be in a different income stratum from one's children or parents without feeling strain or shame. It follows that income stratum can't have the place in people's identities, public image and habits that class has. A society can have a lot of income inequality but still be classless if the income inequality doesn't systematically impact people's identity, social connections or family formation much.

Because income inequality is not the same as class stratification, policies that reduce income inequality may not reduce class stratification, and could even increase it. If the government seeks to reduce after-tax income inequality through redistribution, the handouts might fund still more vice and idleness, and college-educated professionals would segregate themselves even more in an effort to insulate their kids from the bad influences.

I also need, before proceeding, to get Karl Marx out of the way, so that people don’t keep looking him up in their mental index as the argument proceeds.

The most famous thinker on class, unfortunately, is Karl Marx. Karl Marx borrowed his ideas of class from economist David Ricardo, who excelled in thinking abstractly about factors of production like land, capital, and labor. Marx personified the factors of production as classes. Labor became (redemptive) workers, capital turned into (evil) capitalists, and land turned into (fading) feudal aristocrats. Marx then chose to view history as a series of class struggles, e.g., guilds vs. journeymen or bourgeoisie vs. aristocrats.

This is not an insightful view.

For one thing, people usually own multiple factors of production, e.g., a typical middle-class family disposes of labor but also owns a home with land and has some retirement savings invested in stocks and bonds. Also, what you own varies over the life cycle and isn’t always all that important to who you are. Strictly speaking, every typical middle-class American who saves for retirement goes from “working class,” needing to earn a living, to a “capitalist” who can afford to live on savings and investments, without knowing the moment of transition. That's a silly way to classify people.

Marx also erred greatly in regarding struggle as the typical economic relation of different classes. In fact, classes are generally complementary, performing different functions but needing each other. As a case in point, Marx thought capitalists “exploited” workers, doing them an injury, when really the relationship of capitalists and workers is one of mutually beneficial exchange, and workers need the jobs as much as owners of capital need the labor. Marx’s worldview pointed to the desirability of a classless society, but for completely fallacious reasons, because he wrongly thought capitalists and managers were parasites.

By far the most important factor of production in shaping class identity is human capital. That’s a concept Marx lacked. Different classes have different human capital endowments and contribute to the economy and society in different ways. Some classes need more of an ownership stake in the means of production to fulfill their potential than others do. But any healthy class is non-parasitic and contributes through who they are and what they do, not just what they own. Indeed, the term “working class,” though it is so well established that it probably can't be uprooted now, is the semantic expression of Marxian fallacy. All classes work. They work in different ways, and may not recognize one another’s work as forms of work. But it's not too hard for them to understand that, if they don't have propagandists blinding them to the fact.

Marx is a thinker with nothing to teach, except as a cautionary tale. But unfortunately, his atheist religion attracted so many blind adherents in past generations of the intelligentsia that echoes of his nonsense are all over the place and have become embedded. His power over the concept of class is so great that thinkers have hesitated to try to dethrone him, and as a result, wherever the concept of class is found to be useful, people tend to let Marx in the door as one of the authorized guides. If this book helps put to rest the baneful habit of taking Marx seriously, I will have accomplished something.

I feel petty resenting Marx merely for poisoning the wells of thinking about class. Some have much more to blame him for: whole nations raped by insane revolutionaries, millions killed, countless man-years of misery in the gulags, reams and reams of lies, churches burned, the lucky ones driven into exile. But it's also unfortunate that he made everyone stupider on the topic of class.

Let the reader keep in mind that when I refer to “class,” I am in no way alluding to a Marxian concept. My argument owes nothing to Marx.