Virginia Postrel on culture

She writes,

In both markets and culture, the blue-collar values of loyalty, solidarity, security, and physical production, have largely given way to the creative-class values of creativity, self-expression, risk-taking, and brains. It’s the revenge of the nerds. The winners are symbolic analysts. The losers are guys good with their hands. For those who adhere to the old values, the shift can be infuriating. Many people suddenly feel not merely economically insecure but culturally disrespected.

Near the end, she poses some questions.

What can a liberal analysis tell us about cultural change? Do institutions of experimentation and feedback work to correct errors in cultural systems as they do in economics? Are there significant differences that might affect outcomes? Are the time scales similar or different? Are there institutions that might limit the collateral damage—a worthwhile question in the case of economic dynamism as well?

Culture is too important to be left to the sociologists.

16 thoughts on “Virginia Postrel on culture

  1. The creative classes had their blue collar types, too – printers, movie crews, construction engineers. They also had Hemingway.

      • Heh, one couldn’t miss the sarcasm in that comment, especially if one has been following the libertarian conversation about immigration policy for the past decade or so.

        With “funny ’cause it’s true’ jokes, it’s often useful to follow-up with analysis that takes the truth part seriously.

        On the other hand, most of the GDP impact estimates coming from the prominent advocates in that milieu are too lacking in rigor to be taken seriously.

  2. I found these arguments confusing and how much of the dynamic changes in economics interacted in changing culture in the long run. Also, I am still seeing the same economic libertarian desire to to return to religion and social conservativism but they don’t have any economic incentives for this. Can a very structured social system thrive under a very dynamic economic system? In the long run I don’t think so because the values of each aren’t the same. How can people believe in social conservatism if it does necessarily benefit them economically. (Also the writer seems to lament the loss of past societies without noting Tyler Cowen well put “Average Is Over’ thesis of global capitalism.)

    1) Look at the dynamics of marriage and divorce across all developed nations. After the post war boom, divorce laws starting ~1960 were changed to give people more freedom to live as they choose and the divorce rate went up to almost 50%. And there has been three primary changes since 1979 on marriage: 1) Divorce is down to below 40% 2) Single motherhood has gone up 3) Late marriage is new reality. So I believe the long run society is become more like a Far East Asian Tiger nation with slow marriage, lower divorce, and low fertility. (I recommend Sociology call the Sanger Solution.)

    2) Just look at the past two Republican President nominees? Both were rich billionaires that have some sense how to thrive in dynamic economy. And Romney really does represents the arch-type of a successful conservative. He is very religious, married, kids and promised a more dynamic economy while Trump was not religious, three times married, and promised the return to our image of the 1965/1985 economy.

    Guess which one won the Presidency? (OK I know hot takes Romney got more votes against a better candidate.)

  3. I yugely admire Virginia Postrel and have bought and read each of her books in the year they came out. Nevertheless, this piece evinces an us versus them attitude. The “winners” you see “value creativity, risk-taking, and brains.” The dumb guys stuck in the past who are good with their hands get infuriated by change. She just doesn’t get it and bigotry is what comes out.

    Roger Scruton doesn’t make these kinds of mistakes. He has respect for normal people, gets at the overarching issues, and is able to do more than merely lionize desk work. Scruton’s conservatism has a seriousness to it that is lacking amongst the libertarians.

    Postrel is guilty of oikophobia in this piece exactly in the sense that Scruton coined the term. He writes that “The disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home.”

    Normal people are not infuriated by whatever changes the so-called winners need to assure themselves of their moral superiority. Normal people simply don’t bother to turn on The Oscars when pretentious idiots hijack them. Normal people simply don’t bother to go to the art museums when beauty is tossed out the window and self-indulgent propaganda goes up on the walls. There are other options and normal people can find what they appreciate without the assistance of the smug overlords of culture.

    The so-called winners, unfortunately, are unwilling to be ignored. They take control of the education and licensure and impose requirements of fealty to the new creeds. Safely ensconced in tax-exempt and tax-subsidized industries, they find ever more authoritarian moralities to inflict on the normal people. To maintain relevance and gain notice they assume ever more puritanical powers: Ban cars, pets, single-family homes, meat…That will show them! Impose confiscatory taxes on people who try to exit the country. There will be not exit.

    In the end though, Postrel is correct. The libertarians have a lot to learn about culture. I just think they could learn a lot more from Roger Scruton that just about anyone else.

    • What constitutes “normal people”? Why are people that work with their hands supposed to be “normal” , while tech people with desk jobs not?

      • I think by normal people he just means…the people you know in your real life. When I consider the people I hang out with, very few are interested in politics, culture, or anything that might be written about in these blogs. They may occasionally (quite rarely) express this opinions (usually online, rarely in person), but you get the impression they are willing to abandon (if intensity if not always belief) their various positions at the drop of a hat.

        This doesn’t mean they wouldn’t vote for some bad stuff (mostly out of ignorance or apathy), but its certainly not central to their identity or passions. If they have an opinion on XYZ, they mostly just want to be left alone to live out that opinion, not chase down everyone who won’t affirm their opinions.

        Most of the people I discuss in this context are white collar college grads, though none are what I would call members of the elite or their direct UMC servants. I think that’s what we mean by “normal people”. There is a sense that the less dependent on the system you are (and people who work with their hands are less dependent than white collar professionals) the more free you are to ignore the party line (like a normal person would).

      • No, of course not. I reject Postrel’s losers versus winners dichotomy. Turning to Scruton, I would say that normal people are those that recognize “All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.” And Postrel’s article. and some other libertarians, and the left in general, reject the notion of any kind of unifying heritage. And that is not normal.

    • Charles Murray: “A subset of Belmont consists of those who have risen to the top of American society. They run the country, meaning that they are responsible for the films and television shows you watch, the news you see and read, the fortunes of the nation’s corporations and financial institutions, and the jurisprudence, legislation and regulations produced by government. They are the new upper class, even more detached from the lives of the great majority of Americans than the people of Belmont—not just socially but spatially as well. The members of this elite have increasingly sorted themselves into hyper-wealthy and hyper-elite ZIP Codes that I call the SuperZIPs.”

      Matthew Crawford: “Because our status is always in flux, or potentially so, we look around and compare ourselves to our contemporaries; bourgeois society is fundamentally competitive. One has to perform one’s social value anew each day. (That’s what social media is for. And to maintain a high-performance personality, it helps to have the right mix of mood- or attention-enhancing pharmaceuticals.)”

      John Stuart Mill: “In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”

      Add those three together and what do you get? Maybe our conformist, utterly un-eccentric, self-censoring, censorious Oscar hosts? Along with every other aspiring media star who would like to join them on stage on Oscar night, or at the Black and White Ball, or the Tonight Show, the New Yorker, the Supreme Court. A tiny subset of the population, media-ready and always on, always practicing PR, permanently in performance mode, not expressing themselves except in precisely those expressions that can be guaranteed to win the approval of the bigots and authoritarians who appointed themselves the police of society. Enforcers of conformity. Stamping out creativity. Stomping on self-expression.

  4. I could see this as an acceptable critique of culture, but I’m having a hard time accepting this as a problem in markets. Markets still care about value more than values.

  5. Postrel is bemoaning the lack of analysis about cultural change.
    ” Are there institutions that might limit the collateral damage—a worthwhile question in the case of economic dynamism as well?”

    The biggest recent cultural change is how secret discrimination against Reps and pro-life folk by the elites has now become accepted by the Dem dominated cultural gatekeepers: the MSM media, the Deep State gov’t, and especially the tax-exempt Universities.

    The Universities are the institution that should be changed first, by Reps and freedom lovers, so that it becomes more clearly illegal to discriminate against Reps (I think it is “formally” illegal, no discrimination based on “creed”, but it’s an open secret that it’s happening.)

    Reps have been losing the culture wars since accepting being excluded from the Universities.

  6. The cultural shift seems stronger than the market shift. There are lot of ‘guys who are good with their hands’ (electricians, plumbers, welders, oil-rig workers, etc) making as much more than ‘creative class’ members. ‘Lecturer’ may have higher cultural status than ‘electrician’, but the electrician makes 2 or 3 times as much as the adjunct faculty member (and with much better job security).

    Also, I question the differences in risk-taking. The bastions of the new economy are just not filled with risk-takers. Quite the opposite. The vast majority of these workers are happy enough to burrow into large, bureaucratic organizations (universities, medical centers, large tech companies) and never look back. You’re far more likely to find people starting their own businesses among guys who work in the trades.

    And I question whether or not our culture has anything like a uniform opinion on what kinds of jobs are high status. There are places where a title of ‘chief diversity officer’ would impress people and places where it would have quite the opposite effect.

  7. Watch Top Chef. Butcher, bbq pitmaster, brewmaster, cheese maker, kobe beef rancher, etc etc.

    Perhaps Rapid Oil Change part-time worker is not highly valued. Was it ever?? My grandma washed dishes in a cafeteria. I do not recall she ever had status.

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