What do you work with?

Do you work with symbols, things, or people? The answer determines how you were affected by the virus crisis.

If your value comes from working with symbols (words, computer code), then you are more likely now to work from home. Otherwise, your work was not heavily disrupted.

If your value comes from working with things, then if those things were “essential” you kept working. In fact, work to deliver things actually increased. If you made things that were not so essential, you may have experienced a short-term layoff.

If your value comes from working with people, then you have had to shut down or operate in a greatly altered environment. Think of a restaurant server, a hair stylist, a teacher, or the proprietor of a small shop.

The virus crisis is going to exacerbate some of the class differences that Joel Kotkin talks about. The class least adversely affected includes those who were already separating themselves as an upper crust. The class most adversely affected includes those who already were suffering declines in status and relative economic strength.

10 thoughts on “What do you work with?

  1. Fishtown vs. Belmont. I’ve been saying this for awhile now. But, I wasn’t able to predict that it would turn out like this. I always knew that the Fishtown extroverts could only withstand the lockdowns for so long. But, jeez, this is crazy. And, yes, quite a lot of this has nothing whatsoever to do with BLM.

  2. Toss in property zoning and the monthly extraction of rents from the employee class, and you have a toxic combination.

  3. Those who work with people are also broken down to two groups- those who worked in private services and those who work for government. The ax hasn’t dropped on the latter group just yet.

    I wrote it months ago, now- if government workers and those in the private sector working from home had had to file for unemployment in March, the lockdowns never would have happened.

  4. Clerisy, craftsmen, and personal “servants” (ad hoc).

    A lot of those angry white women out on the protests are Orwell’s “shabby genteel” from ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’. They’ve got a taste of the clerisy from their elite schools but their “careers” are more on the servant side.

    “In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole. Rent and clothes and school-bills are an unending nightmare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an unwarrantable extravagance. Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances. It is obvious that people of this kind are in an anomalous position, and one might ’be tempted to write them off as mere exceptions and therefore unimportant. Actually, however, they are or were fairly numerous. Most clergymen and schoolmasters, for instance, nearly all Anglo-Indian officials, a sprinkling of soldiers and sailors, and a fair number of professional men and artists, fall into this category. But the real im- portance of this class is that they are the shock-absorbers of the bourgeoisie. The real bourgeoisie, those in the £2000 a year class and over, have their money as a thick layer of padding between themselves and the class they plunder; in so far as they are aware of the Lower Orders at all they are aware of them as employees, servants, and tradesmen. But it is quite different for the poor devils lower down who are struggling to live genteel lives on what are virtually working-class in- comes. These last are forced into close and, in a sense, intimate contact with the working class, and I suspect it is from them that the traditional upper-class attitude towards ’common’ people is derived.”

  5. “The class most adversely affected includes those who already were suffering declines in status and relative economic strength.”

    It is also worth considering why there were previous ongoing declines in relative economic strength. And if we look at the upper crust’s vertical integration and anticompetitive behavior with respect to the delivery industry, we can condense the three classes into two, roughly corresponding to Robert A Dahl’s homo politicus and homo civicus (see chapter 19 of Who Governs?) the former with significant political resources with which to work and the latter without.

    Many have commented on how Bezos has profited mightily from social distancing and his newspaper has been at the forefront of efforts to further ruin small business prospects and burn down the kulaks’ small holdings . And big tech’s financing of the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and American Enterprise Institute, all of which have received sizable contributions from the Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and their ilk. The homo politicus upper crust has bought itself quite a few friends.

    Looked at from this perspective, Kotkin’s rather condescending notion that homo civicus just needs to wake up and exert itself seems unlikely to succeed. The resources available to the upper crust simply out power anything available to the homo civicus kulaks. Maybe it is not as delusional as my personal quixotic desire for a constitutional convention to adapt a Swiss style system of government which would more likely adopt growth oriented policies amenable to kulaks and small business creation. Nevertheless, I suspect that Dahl’s was an excellent and penetrating mind and his thought will be enduring as well as useful in rebuilding if the implosion of the USA can bring down the upper crust with it.

  6. The typical journalist works with symbols and often their interactions with people are via IT. These workers would be fine with permanent telework, if their publication employers weren’t getting crushed and going bankrupt because they can’t get companies to pay for ads when people can’t buy those things right now.

    A lot of those “free weekly” papers make most of the their cash advertising for entertainment one attends in person, but even mainstream papers like USAToday get a lot of money for that. That whole market has been nuked, and the neighboring badlands of the journalism sector are having the fallout drop down on them.

    All the technology and symbols in the world won’t help you when all your customers go broke. The key is “market proximity” and exposure to sectors that by their nature tend to spread contagious diseases around.

  7. “Those who work with people are also broken down to two groups- those who worked in private services and those who work for government. The ax hasn’t dropped on the latter group just yet.”

    Lots of government workers still working. Teachers, for example. But it’s true that attendance clerks, custodians, and the like got paid to do basically nothing.

  8. Sounds like just about everything in government from politics to teaching to soldiering.

  9. Think of a restaurant server, a hair stylist, a teacher, or the proprietor of a small shop.

    But also think of orthopedic surgeons, dentists, nurses, therapists, etc. There are a lot of well-paid occupations in the ‘works with people’ category.

  10. In discussing market economies with my kids, I was explaining how an economy grows and, in particular, that market economies are not zero-sum. Everybody can be better off after trades, after development, after economic growth.

    But “status” IS zero-sum . You can only get more status if others have less.
    If you’re not in the top 10%, to get up there somebody else has to come down.

    The class most adversely affected includes those who already were suffering declines in status and relative economic strength.

    I think a lot of rage comes from college grads whose status is not as high as they were expecting.

    There is far too much study on “happiness”, but not enough (being cited?) on status.

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