The Virtue Industries

Back in the days of Occupy Wall Street, Kenneth Anderson wrote

OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits – the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.

Pointer from Glenn Reynolds. I recommend the entire essay, but especially like the term “virtue industries.”

24 thoughts on “The Virtue Industries

  1. white collar job in the Virtue Industries:

    This sounds like white collar workers dominated by women. And of course if you think about the Post-WW2 era, many of these tasks were performed by the higher income housewives. (We way underestimate how many working class women and mothers worked in the 1950s and 1960s.) And many of duties were performed without either no or below market wages.

  2. I think “virtue industries” is very good too. But he forgot to include higher-education and so missed some of the downwardly mobile members — PhDs who ultimately expected tenured university positions but instead find themselves working as insecure, non-tenured lecturers at very low wages and finding little demand of any kind for their degrees outside of academia. It’s interesting (and a bit depressing) to google “leaving a phd off your resume”. And note that these aren’t all Humanities degree holders — some of the people asking about this are people with degrees in Chemistry and Physics.

    • This is not really new. When I was looking at colleges in 1979, I knew I needed some science degree. After the late 1970s economy, Liberal Arts didn’t seem all that wise. But even in what is now STEM, the media and other advised care reporting on several with PhDs in Astrophysics washing dishes due to cutbacks in the Space Program making jobs scarce.

      I remember a line from the movie ’48hrs’ where Nick Nolte’s character is explaining why his girlfriend was upset, “Same as everyone, can’t find a job in her field”. Or a ‘Law and Order’ where the murder of a professor was linked to a desperate, poverty-stricten, out of work PhD, and I believe some plagiarism.

      • I find it a bit difficult to believe this is that common for STEM PhDs these days – STEM PhDs washing dishes, etc. – except among people who did rather poorly in grad school. I expect most STEM majors today know at least some programming, at least in statistical languages like R or MATLAB, and likely have some quantitative skills. Those alone give one a huge leg up, even if your research itself is inapplicable. Especially if you have a PhD in a more quantitative STEM field, there are a lot of unrelated industries that’ll be willing to hire you just because of the quantitative and programming knowledge. I can imagine this not being the case though a few years ago when fewer scientists knew how to code or do statistics.

        • As a STEM PhD (chemistry) with substantial math skills and significant skills in coding and statistics, my experience is that nobody was interested. There are plenty of math majors and coders available cheaply. I eventually retrained into accounting and got a job, where I worked with another PhD chemist who’d gone into accounting.

  3. I get the implied worthlessness of “virtue industries”, which seems to appeal to libertarians.

    Meanwhile, without virtue industries our civilization would be akin to a collection of Stepford Wives.

    Course, libertarians would probably like that.

    • The real irony is that those who purse the non-economic Liberal Arts degrees and “virtue industries” should be the most supportive of capitalism rather than the least. It is only through capitalism that most are afforded the opportunity to indulge in “extras”. I suspect most of them fancy they’d be indulged intellectuals of aristocrats who extract their wealth as food rent from the “lesser orders”. Historically, few enjoyed such sinecures. And when such were provided, the “intellectual freedom” was limited to pleasing the lord.

      “In the precapitalistic ages writing was an unremunerative art. Blacksmiths and shoemakers could make a living, but authors could not. Writing was a liberal art, a hobby, but not a profession. It was a noble pursuit of wealthy people, of kings, grandees and statesmen, of patricians and other gentlemen of independent means. It was practiced in spare time by bishops and monks, university teachers and soldiers. The penniless man whom an irresistible impulse prompted to write had first to secure some source of revenue other than authorship.”

      –Mises, Ludwig von (1956). The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality

    • …a collection of ‘Stepford Wives’? I don’t even know what that means or how it could be connected to libertarianism. Still half a point for creativity — the standard ‘libertarians suck and are evil’ canard is that they’d like to turn society into Somalia. ‘A collection of Stepford Wives’ really doesn’t make any sense, but at least it’s not a cliche.

      • Made sense to me. The point is that after reaching a certain level of wealth (studies indicate about $50K per year), the pursuit of additional wealth can seem pointless and unfulfilling. Many people feel the need for some collective endeavor to give their lives meaning (for many around here libertarianism is such a collective endeavor, oddly enough). The “virtue industries” offer such endeavors and attract the sort of people who would have been church ladies 70 years ago. It gives them something to do.

        • The point is that after reaching a certain level of wealth (studies indicate about $50K per year), the pursuit of additional wealth can seem pointless and unfulfilling.

          Those studies and the idea is debatable but, even so, it still has nothing to do with ‘Stepford Wives’. The Stepford Wives was a dystopian novel and film about suburban husbands who murder their spouses and replace them with perfectly turned out, perfectly compliant robotic doppelgangers. What on earth does that have to do with libertarianism? Even using ‘Stepford Wife’ as code for an upper-class ‘lady who lunches’ with a picture-perfect house and family, again, what is the connection to libertarianism?

          • I think he was using “Stepford wives” as a synecdoche for the experience of being affluent and bored in suburbia. Since economic liberty usually produces wealth but rarely produces meaning, libertarianism tends to move people in that direction. The robots and murders were, I assume, not an intended part of the reference.

        • Are they? How would we know (since they don’t exist). And the connection to libertarians and ‘virtue industries’ is what?

    • Um, what? I don’t even know what you’re trying to say. Bureaucrats and activist groups are what make life worth living?

  4. The apprentice electrician married to an underemployed Berkeley grad brought to mind a lot of examples of similar counter-narratives. The narrative being that going to college means that you will earn more and that not going to college means that you will never marry or have a decent job. I‘ve a stay at home niece with a masters in marine biology married to a high school graduate breadwinner gainfully employed in a factory and their family does well living in a low cost of living area. And I know several breadwinner auto mechanics who have underemployed wives with graduate degrees. It might be worthwhile to understand such counter narrative examples to understand the limits of macro-sociology narratives. Macro-sociology gives the impression of being about as useful as macroeconomics. That said, the Mormons pushing the flipped college model, that is to gain an occupation before college, do seem to be on to something that may be right for many young people.

  5. Maybe all true, but do not forget that the military apparatus of the United States, hyper mobilized and globalized, is usually defined by itself and proponents as a virtue industry.

    The social justice warriors and The Virtue Industries are annoying. But you never read about how annoying virtue signaling is when it comes from the military-VA-intelligence-foreign policy-free trade complex.

    I always say there is left-wing PC and right-wing PC and left-wing virtue signaling and right-wing virtue signaling.

    • And everyone, it seems, aspires to a cushy position somewhere along the wingnut welfare circuit. Virtue industries indeed. Paging Bill Bennett! Is he alive??

    • “the military-VA-intelligence-foreign policy-free trade complex.”

      That sort of made sense until you tacked ‘free trade’ onto the end. The military was historically considered one of the ‘noble professions’, along with the clerisy. Suitable for second sons of the aristocracy and opposed to the bourgeoisie who engaged in grubby commerce (and who — however much money they might have — were to be routed to the tradesman’s entrance). Free trade, on the other hand, is clearly on the bourgeois side of that divide.

      Boundaries have shifted some but even now in the UK, it was laudatory for princes William and Harry to do their stints in the military but would have been considered unacceptable and uncouth for them to spend years in, say, running a manufacturing firm or working in investment banking.

      (Oh, and, ‘virtue signalling’ and ‘virtue industries’ really aren’t the same at all — perhaps a reason not to be too ready to adopt the latter term).

      • Obviously a large topic, and I cannot address every issue in a comment. You made a lot of smart comments.

        But what we call “free trade” today… Well, just let me say the US military has become a global guard service for multinationals, and free trade has little to do with it.

        What is free about China? And Singapore has one of the most managed economies on Earth. Saudi Arabia is a krap-whole nation if there ever was one. How can any trade with Saudi Arabia be described as free?

        I guess I could even posit that salutes to free trade are more virtue signaling…

        By the way, look at the website of nearly any S&P 500 company. No one is in business anymore to make as much money as possible for shareholders, although that is a very worthy goal. Everyone is in business to do good for the world community.

    • Yes. Riffing on this, in my oft-bouts of unemployment (I’m a member of the so-called precariat), I come to know well something I’ve dubbed LinkedInspeak. It’s the kind of speak concerned with keeping up certain white collar appearances: non-cynical, chipper, pro-industry and pro-boss POV attitudes and rhetoric. In order to convey the right image to get back in the work force. This is a kind of PC – if fighting PC is defined as unmasking truths and calling out bullshit – that gets overlooked by the right.

      I find when I’m comfortably employed I go back to disliking more traditional PC and blue-haired cat ladies yadda yadda.

  6. Kenneth Anderson has a knack for coming up with these terms. “Aber jabber” is another one of his. I was talking to someone educated at Aberystwyth and, for a time, employed at Aberystwyth. She was not amused.

    But she’s pretty much the human embodiment of Aber jabber. Now a consummate Remainer. A real life stereotype. EU-funded for her entire adult life. Just not as lavishly as she might be.

    And of course two hundred years before Anderson there was Thackeray: “But the worst of all University Snobs are those unfortunates who go to rack and ruin from their desire to ape their betters. Smith becomes acquainted with great people at college, and is ashamed of his father the tradesman. Jones has fine acquaintances, and lives after their fashion like a gay free-hearted fellow as he is, and ruins his father, and robs his sister’s portion, and cripples his younger brother’s outset in life, for the pleasure of entertaining my lord, and riding by the side of Sir John.”

  7. “The university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google.”

    Hasn’t this long been true? Law school admissions essays have long had 50% imagining themselves doing “public interest law” – and 5% do it.

    I wonder if the data backs the anecdotes. Is teaching a virtue industry? Applications to teacher prep program are down.

Comments are closed.