Class as a Mating Pool Halfway Up the Specialization Tree

Chapter 10 of The Information Class

This is chapter 10 of a longer book project entitled The Information Class, which among other things defends class stratification. It’s more relevant to current events than it seems, partly because the story of MAGA and the current administration is in large part about the overthrow of expertise by nihilistic “populism,” the disastrous consequences of which are unfolding daily. My diagnosis of the problem is that college-educated people who work with their minds using computers— “the information class”— have lost the trust of the broad public due to the waywardness of their moral thinking, which in turn results from old errors in moral philosophy that Alasdair MacIntyre traces back to the Enlightenment. The information class has a lot of good habits, but its moral reasoning is a muddle. We need to rediscover the tradition of the virtues so that we can resume our natural leadership and get Western civilization back on track.

Incidentally, I’ve have a couple of interesting conversations in the past year or two with men who told me they want to be “serfs.” Literally, that’s what they said: I want to be a serf. They’re a bit eccentric and contrarian— but still. I’m not advocating serfdom, but I am advocating a recognition that equality of opportunity is a false ideal, and that Western society needs to recognize that it’s fine and normal for lots of people not to have a realistic chance at fame or leadership, if they have a pretty decent assurance of regular workaday happiness. Class stratification isn’t quite inevitable, but it’s pretty normal and natural, and fighting it shouldn’t always be a priority. The Information Class should help people adapt to that reality.

Feedback is welcome!

Let's circle back to our definition of class. We said it was ethos plus endogamy: a class is a set of people who share a moral outlook with respect to education, work and career, and occupational choice, and who tend to marry and reproduce with each other and raise their children to be members of the same class.

It's fun at this stage to add a new definition, which sounds quite different, though it turns out to fit nicely with the first. A class is a mating pool halfway up the specialization tree, which produces children who have a headstart in life.

Unpacking that, any class-based society will have developed educational pathways to many different occupations, which travel some way together, with common learnings and experiences, but which later branch out into the more specialized occupations needed for high productivity.

Some of the specialization journeys are longer than others. Specialization isn't irreversible: people can go back up the tree and take another branch. That tends to be costly, however, sometimes slightly so and sometimes exorbitantly.

Sometimes different branches in the tree fuse together (here the “tree” metaphor comes up short) and there are occupations, such as ethnobotanist, biomedical engineer, and wildlife conservationist, which require the skills and experiences of two other occupations. To this, we'll return.

Some specialization journeys are more demanding in skills, others in moral development and adaptation. And a key to class is that many specialization journeys are so long that they are best begun in childhood, while others are next to impossible unless begun in childhood. All these specialization journeys gradually divide the population into smaller and smaller occupational categories and subcategories, but some are fellow travelers along much of the road, able to make friends and learn from each other, and to fall in love and marry with greater ease, on the basis of their commonalities.

The children of these couplings that occur halfway up the specialization tree have a peculiar headstart in life. If they are raised responsibly at all, they can hardly help acquiring in childhood much of the knowledge and virtue that their parents learned during education. They can be endowed with some of the knowledge, but especially, with much of the morality, ethos and professionalism while still very young, when they hardly even know what's happening. They may have a disadvantage in traveling down branches of the specialization tree remote from their parents, either for want of other skills and moral habits, or simply because they've been taught to aspire to their parents’ class and would feel discontented and lonely elsewhere. Maybe a professor’s son makes a bad carpenter. But within their class, they have an advantage that contributes not only to their own flourishing but to the health of the whole tree, which could not grow as tall without the richly elaborated specialization journeys that class makes possible.

In short, a healthy class is dedicated to the intergenerational pursuit of excellence, and increases the degree and variety of excellence that a society can achieve.

It's at the stages of incomplete specialization that classes should be looked for. Branching career paths create pools of similar people, in whom a good deal of useful human capital investment has been accomplished, but which is still large and diverse enough to form a good mating pool. The people in these pools still have some branching and sorting to do as they find their niche, but meanwhile they have much in common to connect about, and they can mate and make nests where children can acquire some of the skills and morals needed for success in the family of occupations that their parents engaged in.

With respect to competition versus cooperation, the two biological analogies that I've used– species in the wild and cells in the body– lie at extremes of a spectrum of which economic specialization lies somewhere in the middle. Different species in living nature are occasionally symbiotic but overwhelmingly competitive. Cells in the human body, in complete contrast, are entirely cooperative. Occupational specialists and classes in the economy are a lot more cooperative and complementary than organisms of different species in living nature. Above all, they are mutually non-violent, able to live in civil peace one with another, and trade among them is presumptively mutually beneficial. But there's also a lot of competition, and each person has a distinct self-interest.

There is a long-running debate here in the economics of education between a “human capital” explanation of the empirically observed college wage premium, and a “signaling” explanation. To me, that's like arguing about which blade in a pair of scissors does the cutting. Of course, human capital alone may be useless: someone needs to be able to see it in order to recruit you for a suitable job. The “signal” of a beautiful degree and a line in a resume is critical to success. But what the degree is signaling is human capital. The signal may sometimes be wrong. Some who never set foot on a college campus have more critical thinking than some with PhDs. But as a rough average, a college degree is a useful indicator that someone is likely to have what it takes for an information class job, and that's enough to motivate sorting on education in labor markets and to some extent social relationships.

Now at this point we should note a troublesome side of occupational specialization. We don't consider the welfare of the individual cells in the human body important. They have no individual telos or peculiar flourishing. Their telos is to do their part in the flourishing of the body as a whole. And yet if we were to measure their welfare in some way, say in size or longevity, then some cells would be much better off than others. Some cells grow much bigger than others. Some cells live a few months, while others endure for a whole human life. Among human occupations, too, some seem to be less conducive to flourishing than others, and we do care about that, for unlike in the case of the human body, in human societies it's the individuals rather than the collective whose welfare matters.

Some jobs are difficult and boring, some fun and interesting, some physically easy and mentally fascinating, etc. It seems unfair. But what can we do about that? The jobs need to get done. Occupational differentiation tends to lead to inequality in the degree of flourishing that people attain, and the resistance to class stratification is in part a crude, confused attempt to fight against that inequality. But the basic source of this inequality is occupational differentiation, which can't be avoided.

Class stratification can potentially mitigate the burdens of occupational specialization. Suppose society needs coal miners, and it's just inescapably a dark, dirty, dangerous job that no one likes. Hopefully they get the compensating differential of being paid well. But it would also be nice if everything else in their lives was adapted to providing as much happiness as the job allows. That end seems unlikely to be served if all those who end up as coal miners had better opportunities, and tried hard to chase them, but weren't quite as smart as others and so were left behind digging coal. It might be better if there's a traditional coal miner way of life, with its community and customs and its complement of happiness and security.

If we need coal miners, it's best to start by thinking of how a human life can be happy in which the principal economic contribution is digging coal, and then try to arrange things so that such lives can be happy. Macroeconomic scarcity may prevent us from making coal miners as happy as we should like. Just “leaving it to the market,” the somewhat too lazy panacea that certain elements of the information class like to jump to, might do a lot of the work, with market competition driving “compensating differentials” in coal miner pay to levels that enable comfortable early retirement for coal miners with ample savings. In that case, coal miners might have a time profile of happiness that's oddly backloaded, but not ungenerous overall. But we shouldn't take for granted that “leaving it to the market” will be good enough. People are often irrational and myopic. They may need to be embedded in a wise culture to make good decisions.

Society shouldn't only “leave it to the market,” but should be at least a little more intentional about giving people of all occupations a good chance to be happy. And that will need to start from a clear-eyed recognition that people start life with quite different opportunity sets, that the process of preparing for and getting sorted into jobs can consume a good deal of a person's life, and that much suffering can result from getting a very different life than one anticipated and prepared for.

A happy life will typically have some coherence and continuity about it, and a fulfillment in maturity of many of the hopes that animated childhood. Equality of opportunity tends to work against that. If everyone starts out the same and ends up very different, it follows almost inevitably that each life's earlier and later chapters have little in common. If some occupations inherently tend to be happier than others, as seems to be the case, those who end up in the worse occupations will almost certainly, under equality of opportunity, have hoped in childhood for something better, and gone some way down a path of preparation for something better, and then been disappointed. It's hard to see how a society of equal opportunity can avoid this source of unhappiness over and above the occupational unpleasantness itself.

Meanwhile, at the higher end, class stratification provides more opportunity to inculcate a propensity for noblesse oblige. If you know who will be upper class, you can start to teach them young to recognize larger responsibilities. And they'll know they didn't “deserve” it and were born rather lucky.

A class is a mating pool halfway up the specialization tree, which gives children a headstart in life. Some children, then, will know early in life that they are being raised with certain advantages. They can be taught to “give back,” to think of the less fortunate, and to dedicate their lives to the happiness of others.

Meanwhile, you mostly don't want to teach coal miners to dedicate their lives to the happiness of unrelated others. They're doing enough of that already by digging coal. Let them enjoy themselves as best they can when they're off the clock. You do want to teach them to dedicate much of their lives to the happiness of they own children, which will also be one of the greatest sources of joy and fulfillment for themselves. But they can do that best if they know something about what their children's lives will be like. A real equal opportunity society would largely turn their gotten into strangers, who can and will try to leave behind everything about their unfortunate childhoods and will usually succeed. That doesn't mean parents can't love children and help them, but it greatly limits the practical help they can give or the lifelong intimacy they can maintain.