Agonizing over the Bell Jar is enough to absolve anyone for not noticing the effects of lead in the water supply, or sugar in the milk, or a million other insults to the intelligence of under-served communities, before we even get to the insult to everyone's intelligence that is the PMC twitter feed.
I think that any examination of the PMC must include a look through the lens of what David Graeber called, "Bullsh%$ Jobs," because so many of these positions and careers are essentially worthless.
While some of the posturing by elements of the PMC may be in attempt to divert scrutiny from the holders of capital, I think that some of this is also an artifact of the precarity of the PMC. In many cases, an objective review of their careers would reveal them to be about as useless as t^%s on a bull, and on some level they know it, so they must profess virtue to justify their positions.
There are some excellent observations here. However, one of the aspects of PMC commentators which I have noted is that they write and publish, without reading through what they have written, and making sure it is what they actually meant to say. To wit: 'Is it due to nature or nature?' You might wish to revisit that.
It's a fair point. And certainly Liu makes it clear she believes the personality type is strictly a function of their class role. Lukacs would hit me with the ole' reification theory. I used that "nature vs. nurture" concept to open it up to a general reader. I am personally inclined to think the personality type is mostly a result of being in a downwardly mobile class and being educated to think in managerial terms. So, put me down as nurture.
Sorry to be clogging or hogging your combox, yo, but it's not surprising that the PMC has a lock on virtue, since they are the ones defining what "virtue" means.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the word "virtue" as mediated by the PMC would turn out to mean "just like me!"
Something similar could be said about "meritocracy". "Merit" in PMC terms means "excelling, when judged on the PMC's own terms". Not surprisingly, such people also have a corner on merit.
Here's an equation I find useful: meritocracy = technocracy = professional class. The chief goal of the professional class parent is to get her kids into prestige school. Everything must be subordinated to this goal. The professional class reproduces itself, in the classic Ehrenreich scheme, through the transmission of social capital. Status in the professional class is an exponential function of school prestige. As Markovitz has shown, the prestige school-elite firm pipeline is at the center of professional class reproduction. (Here's an equation I find useful: meritocracy = technocracy = professional class. The chief goal of the professional class parent is to get her kids into prestige school. Everything must be subordinated to this goal. The professional class reproduces itself, in the classic Ehrenreich scheme, through the transmission of social capital. Status in the professional class is an exponential function of school prestige. As Markovitz has shown, the prestige school-elite firm pipeline is at the center of professional class reproduction (https://policytensor.com/2020/06/27/asymmetric-information-and-professional-class-reproduction/). The ideology of Boasian antiracism, of which woke is just a recent escalation, emerged from Columbia Anthropology (https://policytensor.com/2019/10/10/what-in-the-name-of-the-lord-is-boasian-antiracism/) and has as its epicenter the humanities department at prestige schools. Submission to the doctrine is now required even on the science side of the epistemological divide within Academia. The brighter kids want to study economics, law and computer science so they can run the technocracy. We can even pin point when the United States changed from being a democracy to being a technocracy — it was the moment in 1996 that Adam Curtis described as when it became clear to Clinton that 'the power had gone'. In that moment, when Carville spoke of wanting to being reborn as the bond market, the politicians relinquished their power over economic affairs to technocrats. The Volcker coup of 1979 when technocracy surfaced to tame the instability had by 1996 been consummated. It would be not until 2021, that Democratic politicians would reclaim the power that they had abandoned in 1996: https://policytensor.substack.com/p/the-making-of-the-mother-of-all-economic.
"Sorkin himself acknowledges his work is geared towards upper class liberals, and revealed in an Aspen Institute interview with David Brooks (because of course) that The West Wing pilot bombed in its first test screening in 1999, and was only saved by Warner Brothers convening another test screening made up of viewers who: came from households making over $75,000 a year, had at least one person in the household that was college educated, had a home subscription to The New York Times, and had home internet access (relatively rare in ‘99). And scene."
I did not know that, but that is smart marketing - market a product targeted at insecure people who have disposable cash and who use their consumption habits to prove a point.
By contrast, pro wrestling has a huge audience in terms of number of viewers, but pro wrestling is not particularly attractive to advertisers in spite of its size. This is because the pro wrestling audience typically doesn't have much money to spend and their purchasing choices are often informed by price alone.
An astute historian of social class -- the late Paul Fussell -- wrote that pro wrestling (or maybe it was roller derby?) was categorized by ad agencies as watched by something like "Low-Reach Undesirables." The name of this "class"-- of course, coined by a PMC person-- is in the same category of casual references to "deplorables," etc., that are the go-to tropes of the PMC.
"If you have ever dealt with members of the PMC, the first word that comes to mind is annoying. It might be part of a slightly larger summation of annoying and pretentious. But annoying is always going to make the cut because members of the PMC are not just managers by vocation, but also by personality. They love to regulate and micromanage: their subordinates, their children, and even themselves."
The two words I would have chosen to describe the PMC are "sanctimonious" and "censorious". An entire class of self-appointed hall monitors and teacher's pets.
As is common in most social commentary, it is usually prefigured in art. Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched is the PMC zeitgeist rendered in all of it’s destructive, hideous nature.
Thank you! Nice overview. Lambert Strether of nakedcapitalism.con has been saying these things about the pmc for nearly a decade, as has Thomas Frank.
I'll check it out. Thank you.
Agonizing over the Bell Jar is enough to absolve anyone for not noticing the effects of lead in the water supply, or sugar in the milk, or a million other insults to the intelligence of under-served communities, before we even get to the insult to everyone's intelligence that is the PMC twitter feed.
I think that any examination of the PMC must include a look through the lens of what David Graeber called, "Bullsh%$ Jobs," because so many of these positions and careers are essentially worthless.
While some of the posturing by elements of the PMC may be in attempt to divert scrutiny from the holders of capital, I think that some of this is also an artifact of the precarity of the PMC. In many cases, an objective review of their careers would reveal them to be about as useless as t^%s on a bull, and on some level they know it, so they must profess virtue to justify their positions.
There are some excellent observations here. However, one of the aspects of PMC commentators which I have noted is that they write and publish, without reading through what they have written, and making sure it is what they actually meant to say. To wit: 'Is it due to nature or nature?' You might wish to revisit that.
It's a fair point. And certainly Liu makes it clear she believes the personality type is strictly a function of their class role. Lukacs would hit me with the ole' reification theory. I used that "nature vs. nurture" concept to open it up to a general reader. I am personally inclined to think the personality type is mostly a result of being in a downwardly mobile class and being educated to think in managerial terms. So, put me down as nurture.
Sorry to be clogging or hogging your combox, yo, but it's not surprising that the PMC has a lock on virtue, since they are the ones defining what "virtue" means.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the word "virtue" as mediated by the PMC would turn out to mean "just like me!"
Something similar could be said about "meritocracy". "Merit" in PMC terms means "excelling, when judged on the PMC's own terms". Not surprisingly, such people also have a corner on merit.
Make the rules, then play the game.
Here's an equation I find useful: meritocracy = technocracy = professional class. The chief goal of the professional class parent is to get her kids into prestige school. Everything must be subordinated to this goal. The professional class reproduces itself, in the classic Ehrenreich scheme, through the transmission of social capital. Status in the professional class is an exponential function of school prestige. As Markovitz has shown, the prestige school-elite firm pipeline is at the center of professional class reproduction. (Here's an equation I find useful: meritocracy = technocracy = professional class. The chief goal of the professional class parent is to get her kids into prestige school. Everything must be subordinated to this goal. The professional class reproduces itself, in the classic Ehrenreich scheme, through the transmission of social capital. Status in the professional class is an exponential function of school prestige. As Markovitz has shown, the prestige school-elite firm pipeline is at the center of professional class reproduction (https://policytensor.com/2020/06/27/asymmetric-information-and-professional-class-reproduction/). The ideology of Boasian antiracism, of which woke is just a recent escalation, emerged from Columbia Anthropology (https://policytensor.com/2019/10/10/what-in-the-name-of-the-lord-is-boasian-antiracism/) and has as its epicenter the humanities department at prestige schools. Submission to the doctrine is now required even on the science side of the epistemological divide within Academia. The brighter kids want to study economics, law and computer science so they can run the technocracy. We can even pin point when the United States changed from being a democracy to being a technocracy — it was the moment in 1996 that Adam Curtis described as when it became clear to Clinton that 'the power had gone'. In that moment, when Carville spoke of wanting to being reborn as the bond market, the politicians relinquished their power over economic affairs to technocrats. The Volcker coup of 1979 when technocracy surfaced to tame the instability had by 1996 been consummated. It would be not until 2021, that Democratic politicians would reclaim the power that they had abandoned in 1996: https://policytensor.substack.com/p/the-making-of-the-mother-of-all-economic.
"Sorkin himself acknowledges his work is geared towards upper class liberals, and revealed in an Aspen Institute interview with David Brooks (because of course) that The West Wing pilot bombed in its first test screening in 1999, and was only saved by Warner Brothers convening another test screening made up of viewers who: came from households making over $75,000 a year, had at least one person in the household that was college educated, had a home subscription to The New York Times, and had home internet access (relatively rare in ‘99). And scene."
I did not know that, but that is smart marketing - market a product targeted at insecure people who have disposable cash and who use their consumption habits to prove a point.
By contrast, pro wrestling has a huge audience in terms of number of viewers, but pro wrestling is not particularly attractive to advertisers in spite of its size. This is because the pro wrestling audience typically doesn't have much money to spend and their purchasing choices are often informed by price alone.
An astute historian of social class -- the late Paul Fussell -- wrote that pro wrestling (or maybe it was roller derby?) was categorized by ad agencies as watched by something like "Low-Reach Undesirables." The name of this "class"-- of course, coined by a PMC person-- is in the same category of casual references to "deplorables," etc., that are the go-to tropes of the PMC.
I believe it was roller derby.
"If you have ever dealt with members of the PMC, the first word that comes to mind is annoying. It might be part of a slightly larger summation of annoying and pretentious. But annoying is always going to make the cut because members of the PMC are not just managers by vocation, but also by personality. They love to regulate and micromanage: their subordinates, their children, and even themselves."
The two words I would have chosen to describe the PMC are "sanctimonious" and "censorious". An entire class of self-appointed hall monitors and teacher's pets.
As is common in most social commentary, it is usually prefigured in art. Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched is the PMC zeitgeist rendered in all of it’s destructive, hideous nature.