The 1960s, Mass College Education, and the Rise of the Information Class
Chapter 19 of The Information Class
This is chapter 19 of a book that I’m publishing serially, entitled The Information Class. To get up to speed, read the intro, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, chapter 8, chapter 9, chapter 10, chapter 11, chapter 12, chapter 13, chapter 14, chapter 15, chapter 16, chapter 17, and chapter 18. Sign up to get future chapters in your inbox:
By the way— this is a hobby for me, not a job, yet I believe in “splitting the difference” in life’s transactions, so I have to admit that, in theory, I think it would be right for you to pay me, if you value this, half of what it’s worth to you— if you have disposable income. But I value comments more than money. Beat me up if you can, I’m not thin-skinned. Let me know if I’m inspiring you to higher things.
With all of this general understanding of class under our belts, we're ready to meet and assess the information class.
It is populated in part by refugees from the Sexual Revolution, by people who went to college to rise above the new dysfunctional underclass, with its broken homes, crime and welfare dependency, and to become stable, self-reliant, and productive. But its roots go much deeper than that. Like the medieval knights, who were sons of Norse pagan warriors and of the Church, the information class has dual paternity. It is born of the commercial bourgeoisie, and of the universities.
A typical information class professional might be the son or grandson of a shopkeeper or other small business owner. Or they might be the son or grandson of a bookkeeper or manager at a larger business. Less typical, but no doubt common enough, is descent from factory workers. The factory worker's son who goes to college and becomes an information class professional is a kind of exception that proves the rule, since he's probably conscious of having crossed a class frontier by going to college, and of not building on his father's work, but rather, leaving it behind. Also, factory workers are among the more bourgeois elements of the working class in that they're at least accustomed to regular hours and reliably putting in the time. But sons of shopkeepers or corporate officers who are the first in their family to go to college, though they may not continue their fathers’ work in any straightforward way, do have reason to think that the cognitive development college will provide would be useful in the lines of work their fathers pursued. There is both upward social mobility and substantial continuity with family tradition. They can be faithful to the values learned in a bourgeois family home, while building on them. And the bourgeois tradition of town dwelling and trading goes back for centuries, deep into the Middle Ages, although few know or care to trace their genealogies to see if their families’ bourgeois pedigrees go back that far.
By attending university, the information class professional entered and participated in another centuries-old tradition, still infused with scholastic values and adorned with medieval rituals. Universities were born in the Middle Ages. Long ago, to be a university student was almost to be a clergyman in training. But in another way, the tradition goes back even further than that, to Plato and Socrates, and all that has been meant down the ages by the word “philosophy.” I have described the characteristic virtues of the philosopher already, in chapter 7. It is the business of the college student to acquire them.
Since I have described the information class repeatedly as an elite and as a ruling class, I had better clarify that the information class are not generally billionaires, or famous. There is another set of people above them, not exactly a class in the sense developed here since it's too small for practical endogamy or to have its own culture, but a set with certain shared characteristics nonetheless. That's the billionaires and the celebrities, the people who enjoy all the privileges, and have to put up with all the perils and inconveniences, of fame and limitless money, who are isolated into a weird bubble by their wealth, and who need to make the people around them sign NDAs if they don't want their every word reported in the newspapers. The information class is not like that. If they wield power, it is through their jobs and/or their mental influence over powerful people, not through fame or money that they wield in their own right. They generally have higher living standards than the average, but they are working class in Marx's sense of the term, meaning that they need to work in order to live. Or to be more precise, the living standard to which they are accustomed is only affordable with the help of their earnings. They are collectively powerful because they are needed by the powerful. They are the necessary instruments by which power is wielded, and the power of the celebrities and billionaires and CEOs and elected politicians is both made possible and constrained by the modus operandi of the information class, and what they're willing and able to do.
The information class, in short, is an elite service class. In this respect, they resemble the medieval knights. Medieval knights were generally not the decision makers and shot callers. Others ruled and started wars. But who won the wars, and who ended up ruling, and how, depended on the knights, who could largely decide whom to serve and how well. In England, to simplify somewhat, the knights demanded a say in the governance of the country, so Parliament was born. The Crusades began because knights chose to answer the call of the pope. With a lag, the kings followed suit and crusaded, too. The crusades were a knightly cause before they were a royal cause; knights were the trendsetters. Likewise, in our time, the Trump I regime didn't matter very much, and with luck, the Trump II regime will also be a weird, meaningless interlude that doesn’t change history’s basic trends. That’s because only the information class knows how to run big operations, and the information class is loyal to the rule of law and not at all drawn to fascist-adjacent cults of personality. With luck, the ugly MAGA aberration will collapse, and the system will spring back to normal.
Great men, leaders and rulers matter in history. It's too quixotic to argue, as Tolstoy did in War and Peace, that they don't influence events but are mere pawns of deeper forces. And yet Tolstoy was partly right. Great men operate within constraints that they don't see or understand, and they are both empowered and constrained by the motivations, virtues, and scruples of those who serve them. In the heyday of chivalry, all kings had to behave more or less chivalrously, because that is what was expected of them and how they were obeyed. Likewise, in our times, liberalism is infused in the rules and personnel of all our institutions, and illiberal orders tend to push on a string. That's being tested at the time of writing, alas, and a kind of national version of the Milgrom experiment has been underway for the past few months. And yet it still seems likelier than not to be just the biggest wave to hit the beach, washing away sand and breaking a rock or two at most, but building nothing and then going away. Liberalism is the beach. The information class, if all goes well, will prove to be the rocks.
While the information class works for a living, it would be a mistake to lump their labor together with that of what is traditionally called the working class, and to call it all “labor” as a generic factor of production. What they do is different.
An old distinction between those who work with their hands and those who work with their minds, between “manual workers” and what we might call “mental workers,” is somewhat useful here, with information class professionals, of course, being overwhelmingly mental workers, while most other workers are primarily manual. But really, all workers actually use both their hands and their minds. Still, there is a difference between those who can daydream and still be working because their jobs keep their hands busy while leaving their minds underutilized, and those who, on the contrary, may be at their most productive when they're just sitting still and thinking, and are probably off track and wasting time if they ever get stuck doing a repetitive task that demands little thought. For the former, the mental work is easy, and the manual work is the scarce resource. The latter are the mental workers.
Another helpful distinction is between those who produce stuff, and those who produce ideas and designs. Of course, ideas often have physical embodiments, but they're replicable, and specific physical embodiments can be destroyed without the value of the ideas created being lost. Here again, it's characteristic of information class professionals to produce ideas and designs, not stuff. It's also helpful to think of the information class as supplying the factor of production that economists traditionally call “entrepreneurship,” the organizing intelligence that allocates and mobilizes the other factors of production. The term could mislead if it suggests that information class professionals have a particular propensity for self-employment. As far as I know, they don't, although the founders of transformative companies lately seem always to be information class and are some of its chief paragons and role models. But in our times, the exercise of entrepreneurial intelligence to mobilize land, labor, and capital is not primarily a function of self-employed individuals, but of managerial elites within large organizations, and the information class does dominate those jobs.
The information class, in short, is the brain of liberal democratic capitalism.
Class, as we have seen, is a path-dependent equilibrium. So let me try to describe the character of the information class, in light of its history as the offspring of the bourgeoisie and the universities, of commerce and philosophy. Character is constituted, above all, by virtue, so to describe a class’s character is, above all, to describe its virtues.
The courage of the information class consists in the work ethic inherited from the bourgeoisie, and its propensity for entrepreneurial risk-taking, overlaid with the philosopher's audacity in doubting received wisdom and framing ambitious theories. Philosopherly doubt and theoretical ambition are useful in business because they feed innovation.
The justice of the information class consists in the non-violence and respect for property rights inherited from the bourgeoisie, overlaid with the philosopher's greater persistence, subtlety, and integrity in discerning truth. Philosopherly discernment is useful in business because companies make more profit in the long run when they are animated by true beliefs.
The temperance of the information class consists in the traditional self-control of the bourgeoisie in avoiding substance abuse and overspending in the interests of commercial prudence, overlaid with the philosopher's preference for the higher pleasures of the mind over the lower pleasures of the body, which is useful in business because these pleasures are skill enhancing, conducive to integrity, and often cheap.
The prudence, or wisdom, of the information class consists in the propensity for commercial planning and saving inherited from the bourgeoisie, overlaid with the philosopher's love of wisdom and hunger to grasp the grand design of things. The philosopher's perspective is useful in business because it supplies a larger context for a business to understand its situation and social value, and may give it a more inspirational mission and loftier heights of ambition to reach for.
The faith of the information class consists in the bourgeois propensity to maintain a stable lifestyle and honor contracts, overlaid by the philosopher's drive to develop and build upon a worldview founded on rational principles. That feeds into professional integrity, which enhances the trust needed in business.
The hope of the information class consists in the bourgeois hope of successfully completing tasks, seeing work bear fruit, and achieving upward social mobility, overlaid with the philosopher's hope of understanding the grand scheme of things and finding a higher meaning in life. This higher understanding and investment of life with meaning can make business more inspiring and fulfilling, and mobilize it with higher purpose.
The love of the information class, aside from basic love of family, consists in the bourgeois zeal for customer service and other affections and loyalties needed as the glue of commerce, overlaid with the philosopher's love of truth, and a propensity for grand, imaginative, far-reaching altruism that grows out of that. That love of truth is less naturally rivalrous than love of wealth is helpful in fostering business collaboration, and altruistic ambitions are a key driver of the formation and growth of the new kind of businesses.
Before I go on, I'd better fight a rearguard skirmish against objections to my writing about information class professionals as if they were all philosophers. Let me explain.
By attending university, and by submitting to class schedules and exams and writing assignments, by reading the great thinkers of history or at least reading about them, the information class has entered into the great tradition of philosophy, which reaches back through the medieval universities to the lyceum of Aristotle and the academy of Plato and the conversations of Socrates. Philosophy is a ramifying tree, of which nearly all the university disciplines are branches. College, rooted in philosophy, is a formative experience for information class youth. Such is the waywardness of contemporary universities that not only many of the students but even some of the professors may hardly be aware of this majestic backstory, though plenty of other professors, and the best of the students in the best of the universities, are well aware of it, proud of it, and loyal to it. But customs don't need to be self-aware in order to be effective. Those who attend college spend part of their lives under the tutelage of philosophy, and their minds will more or less bear that mark as long as they live.
The idea that every college graduate is a philosopher, and that the great history and ethos of philosophy down the ages is in any sense the key to his character, might strike many professors as absurd. The students seem so lazy-minded and ignorant! And it's true that the knowledge and powers of rationality and critical thinking possessed by the median college graduate are very inferior to the academic masters, both of the past and of today. Nonetheless, only compare the median college graduate to the illiterate peasant or nomadic hunter-gatherer of past ages, or equally to the semi-literate factory worker, landscaper or farm laborer of today, and he probably will seem like a philosopher, more willing and able to think clearly about more subjects, to discern what's plausible, to regard hearsay with skepticism, to accept a challenge to debate, and when confronted with a novel, urgent question, to avoid jumping to conclusions, but to craft sensible approaches to finding out the answer.
In a word, the information class is epistemically superior to other people, on topics other than ethics. That means much more than simply that they know more facts. It's a difference in the whole quality of their thoughts, and how they form beliefs. By comparison with the information class, uneducated people may hardly be able to know anything beyond the objects of their immediate experience, because they've enjoyed no cultivation of their faculties for abstraction and generalization. Possessing this philosophical cast of mind is of course by no means correlated exactly with the possession of a college degree. In some college students, the teaching doesn't take, or in a fit of academic malpractice is scarcely provided at all. Some who never went to college, or more likely, went but never finished, nonetheless have a natural bent for inquiry, and may have picked up some philosophy through loose currents in the culture or independent reading. And causation runs both ways: people with a bit of the spirit of philosophy are more likely to succeed in college. Still, the upshot is that people with college degrees usually have a dash, or more, of philosophical habits of mind, while people with no college pretty reliably don't.
People often think of philosophers as impractical people. Some choose to be, but naturally philosophy, in the broadest sense, flows naturally into a cornucopia of applications. The overlay of philosophical habits of mind on a basis of bourgeois commercial habits and work ethic is a ticket to great usefulness in the 21st-century knowledge economy. For it is the information class that built the Information Age, and that runs the commanding heights of the knowledge economy as well as its outposts in every company that keeps up with the new digitally empowered capitalism.
Class isn't a function of technology. Technology is not a necessary nor sufficient to make a class. The essence of class is moral. Nonetheless, classes can be particularly well adapted to certain technological conditions. The virtues of the medieval knights were specially suited to an age when horse breeding and metallurgy rendered the mounted warrior a specially potent battlefield asset. In the same way, the information class is well adapted to be the power users of computers, software, mobile telephony, the internet, and in general, all the transformative technologies that define the Information Age.
Once we studied for exams, now we learn new softwares. Once we took notes during lectures, and went back to our computers to write papers. Now we take notes in meetings, and go back to our computers to make documents and spreadsheets. The ease of replication and distribution that computers and the internet have brought amplify the value of our faculties of ideation and logical reasoning.
In the post-Cold War decades, there was little war and no need to settle new frontiers. The battles were against obsolescence and inefficiency, and the new frontiers were those of the mind. There we led, and made history, and made fortunes, while the old ways were decimated by disruption and creative destruction, even as the broad masses were compensated by a flood of optionality and convenience. They found much to like in the new world, but didn't understand it. They became the left-behind. We didn't understand it either, no one does, but we had glimmerings, and we felt at home in it, as at home as we do anywhere. We didn't want to go back. We wanted to win through to something, though we didn't exactly know what, but we wanted it to fulfill a lot of aspirations to integrity and usefulness and challenge that were inculcated through childhood and education.
It was a hard road at times, full of uncertainty. But we kept finding that we were able to meet expectations and eclipse others. It wasn't so much skills, for specific skills were constantly becoming obsolete as technology continued to evolve, as a kind of meta-skill that we didn't understand but that endowed us with a vague but persistent superiority. It was, in fact, the legacy virtues that we derived from the bourgeoisie and the universities. Eventually, most of us wandered into some sort of success, whether it be the get-rich-quick success of a successful startup or, more often, the staid success of a salaried role in a large organization.
In the Covid-19 pandemic, the information class was dramatically proved as the Atlas of 21st-century capitalism. In the face of a disease that temporarily pulled down the curtain on so much that had seemed to constitute the American way of life, the information class hardly missed a beat. Their old bastion, the office, suddenly shut its doors, but they took their computers home and kept the organizational Leviathan of liberal democratic capitalism on track and driving forward, undaunted, in some ways even strengthened. Saving civilization was so easy. There was no sacrifice. On the contrary, things became more comfortable and convenient– for us. Lo and behold, the suit-and-commute routine had been needless all those years. Hopefully the corporate bosses wouldn't be stupid enough to bring it back, and in fact, the dumb-as-a-post return-to-office movement has tapered off. The stock market surged. So did home prices.
Meanwhile, for the non-information class, the manual workers, the less educated, the left behind, times were somewhat hard, but above all, very strange. Initially, there was a huge bifurcation between “essential workers,” who had to stay on the job, with worse working conditions and facing new risks, and those who found themselves laid off, sidelined, unneeded. There wasn't a lot of material want, thanks to a flood of government largesse. But it can be demoralizing to find one's labor isn't needed and to have to live on handouts. There was also, suddenly, a crazy disconnect within the manual labor class between “essential workers” who had to make sacrifices for no gain in pay, and the lockdown unemployed who were suddenly getting $600/week for nothing. Then later, there was a disconnect between the random unearned enrichment of many who happened to be homeowners, and others who find rising rents even as soaring house prices put dreams of future homeownership out of reach.
As the information class calmly shifted into a higher gear, everyone else was thrown for a loop, even if some came out ahead. The weirdness of a crisis in which the American economy and way of life seemed to be abandoned without a fight in the face of such a seemingly minor threat, which many either never saw first-hand at all, or else experienced as something trivial, on the order of a mild cold, also drove a wedge between the information class, which largely trusts science and experts and was also more able to reason out the new situation, and manual labor, populism-prone classes that fell easily into conspiracy theories and blame games. The information class also tended to be Covid conscientious. Whether from fear (of infection) or altruism (don't infect others) is hard to say. It was probably good citizenship more than anything else. But to cynics, or to the envious, could look like cowardice, laziness, and virtue signaling rolled into one.
We of the information class have been leading a lot of useful, happy lives. But our seemingly easy success causes envy. Meanwhile, we have so much more potential, so much more to give. We're being held back by something. And part of it is our own warped moral imaginations. We don't know what the good is. We're very confused about that.