I was thinking that Brooks as far as Scott represents him in this review doesn’t address potential cultural causes of the change in Ivy admissions. Space race and the Cold War seem very plausible!
It stands for Professional Managerial Class, as I recall.
That is, the class of people whose jobs fall into the general category of "administrative overhead". Middle managers, HR, PR, DIE, and so on. People who do not do object-level work or own the business (the latter are true capitalists, or in the case of government agencies politicians), but who give orders to the former and take orders from the latter and get paid for this.
The term "PMC" gets used a lot by people who don't like the Blue Tribe, because the power of the Blue Tribe comes in large part from the fact that these people lean *heavily* Blue and are *very*-well co-ordinated. If you try to oppose them from underneath, you get fired. If you try to oppose them from above, you *theoretically* can fire them, but there are several problems with that:
1) You get your information about what is going on *from* them, which means you'll see only what they want you to see (and their work is much harder to objectively check than that of people doing things "on the line")
2) If you don't have tight control of HR, the replacements will be just as bad
3) These are people who know everything about your operations, are well-coordinated, and are well-aligned ideologically with mainstream journalists, so you'll get a steady stream of leaks and horror stories hitting the press.
I wouldn't count that particular chicken until it's hatched. Also, note how hard Elon is having to work at it and that he's got a lot more room than usual to risk blowing up his own company as collateral damage due to literally being the richest private citizen in the world (he bought Twitter apparently-purely as a social project). But I did grant that it's *theoretically* possible.
A DevOps engineer is most definitely NOT PMC. You are conflating values (the "twitter engineer" vs the "engineer") with production and class role. I don't think your argument can stand.
Meh. I've met plenty who are. Their status depends more on their membership in the class than on their actual competence as programmers. Your argument has merit I think only if you have crossed your fingers behind your back and privately added "the highly competent ones, that is" as a footnote to the phrase "DevOps engineer."
Engineers are mostly underpaid relative to the value they bring. It can’t really be any other way on average because the owners won’t bother unless they can extract value from labor. The capitalist ideal is where everyone involved is still doing better than they would apart even though capital wins the most. But the alternative is worker-owners where not only is everyone better off together but also compensation is fairer and the marginal utility of that compensation is higher.
This isn’t actually the definition of professional managerial class. The PMC is basically just the same thing as what’s now known as more commonly as a “knowledge worker”. The original essay explicitly describes engineers, journalists, and teachers as members of the PMC. The idea as I understand it is that the PMC *should* be allied with the working class since they’re workers too but they are in fact mentally / spiritually / socially aligned with capitalists. There’s obviously a large overlap between the PMC and Brooks’s Bobos.
The essay itself is so steeped in 1970s cultural contexts and Marxist ideological frameworks that it's not incredibly easy to understand for a 30something layperson like me. For this reason, I also found this New Yorker interview with one of the authors helpful for understanding the context behind the piece and why she wrote it:
I find it really amusing how people keep rediscovering the same concepts. Any marxist worth its salt could have told you in 1922 about the petite bourgeoisie, the salaried white collar workers who embrace the ideals and esthetics of the bourgeoisie, without being part of it. It is actually interesting that after the higher paid parts of it merged with the liberal professions (doctors, lawyers, etc...), the latter were pushed one step down the ladder and pauperized.
One of the wonderful things about Marxism is that when two classes are wanted, there are only two classes, (bourgeois and proletarians) but when you want more, there are as many as you want.
They are similar, but I think the idea is that the petite bourgeoise are chiefly self-employed / small business owners, whereas the PMC are chiefly a professionalized class of employees.
Correct. The PMC is corporate and government employees generally who despise small business owners and the rural poor, (can never connect with the truly disadvantaged) and pull in the urban poor for attack or defense - bodies between them and their enemies - for better or worse.
I think there's some merit in what you say, but it wasn't the space race per se, if we mean Project Apollo and such, it was nuclear weapons and the V-2, because those happened in 1945 and the Space Race got started later (and for that matter, a significant motivation in the Space Race was the fear of The Best And The Brightest that Soviet missile technology would surpass the USAF as a strategic threat multiplier).
It's no coincidence this was signed the year after Sputnik, but the fear of Sputnik wasn't fear that the Soviets would win civilian gold medals in space, plant the red flag on the Moon first, it was fear of Soviet missiles -- if they could put a dog into orbitt they could certainly land a 1Mt nuke on Miami -- and indeed the notorious "missile gap" helped JFK defeat Eisenhower's VP two years later.
The space race was valuable for academic science, but I think a larger, slightly earlier, and extremely similar event was also involved: the Baby Boom hitting college. My father was born just before the Depression's baby bust, and became a professor around 1957, and my reflections on his career showed the power of timing. Colleges were hit, first, with the GI Bill students, followed by the Baby Boomers. There were financed by the government, a booming economy, and a new trendiness of college education.
But the supply of new professors was very limited; you're not going to make a baby and turn it into a professor in much less than 26 years, so anyone who was a professor from 1946 to about 1975 was doing great. And given academia's tenure system, once you got established as a professor, you were generally protected from competition with newcomers.
All of this reversed in the 1980s, when the Baby Bust generation went to college and the Baby Boomers were trying to get professorial jobs. As one university said, "We don't lower wages any more out of humanitarian considerations." But the rise of part-time adjunct professors disconnected them from those considerations.
I was thinking that Brooks as far as Scott represents him in this review doesn’t address potential cultural causes of the change in Ivy admissions. Space race and the Cold War seem very plausible!
"and I'd argue, the PMC."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMC
I'm going to assume this is referring to the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge.
It stands for Professional Managerial Class, as I recall.
That is, the class of people whose jobs fall into the general category of "administrative overhead". Middle managers, HR, PR, DIE, and so on. People who do not do object-level work or own the business (the latter are true capitalists, or in the case of government agencies politicians), but who give orders to the former and take orders from the latter and get paid for this.
The term "PMC" gets used a lot by people who don't like the Blue Tribe, because the power of the Blue Tribe comes in large part from the fact that these people lean *heavily* Blue and are *very*-well co-ordinated. If you try to oppose them from underneath, you get fired. If you try to oppose them from above, you *theoretically* can fire them, but there are several problems with that:
1) You get your information about what is going on *from* them, which means you'll see only what they want you to see (and their work is much harder to objectively check than that of people doing things "on the line")
2) If you don't have tight control of HR, the replacements will be just as bad
3) These are people who know everything about your operations, are well-coordinated, and are well-aligned ideologically with mainstream journalists, so you'll get a steady stream of leaks and horror stories hitting the press.
I wouldn't count that particular chicken until it's hatched. Also, note how hard Elon is having to work at it and that he's got a lot more room than usual to risk blowing up his own company as collateral damage due to literally being the richest private citizen in the world (he bought Twitter apparently-purely as a social project). But I did grant that it's *theoretically* possible.
What exactly did I say that makes you think I'm looking on too short a timeline?
Is it though? Link to the prediction market where you make a big investment on Elon's success?
Counting chickens is a valid point.
BUT it’s the “Twitter will collapse in two weeks” crowd that, so far, have been proven wrong (and yet have done nothing to update their priors).
A DevOps engineer is most definitely NOT PMC. You are conflating values (the "twitter engineer" vs the "engineer") with production and class role. I don't think your argument can stand.
Meh. I've met plenty who are. Their status depends more on their membership in the class than on their actual competence as programmers. Your argument has merit I think only if you have crossed your fingers behind your back and privately added "the highly competent ones, that is" as a footnote to the phrase "DevOps engineer."
Have you ever actually worked in corporate America?
Bret has explicitly stated that he never served.
Engineers are mostly underpaid relative to the value they bring. It can’t really be any other way on average because the owners won’t bother unless they can extract value from labor. The capitalist ideal is where everyone involved is still doing better than they would apart even though capital wins the most. But the alternative is worker-owners where not only is everyone better off together but also compensation is fairer and the marginal utility of that compensation is higher.
This isn’t actually the definition of professional managerial class. The PMC is basically just the same thing as what’s now known as more commonly as a “knowledge worker”. The original essay explicitly describes engineers, journalists, and teachers as members of the PMC. The idea as I understand it is that the PMC *should* be allied with the working class since they’re workers too but they are in fact mentally / spiritually / socially aligned with capitalists. There’s obviously a large overlap between the PMC and Brooks’s Bobos.
Interesting.
Could you link said essay?
Absolutely! It starts on page 7 of this PDF: https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1125403552886481.pdf
The essay itself is so steeped in 1970s cultural contexts and Marxist ideological frameworks that it's not incredibly easy to understand for a 30something layperson like me. For this reason, I also found this New Yorker interview with one of the authors helpful for understanding the context behind the piece and why she wrote it:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/barbara-ehrenreich-is-not-an-optimist-but-she-has-hope-for-the-future
I find it really amusing how people keep rediscovering the same concepts. Any marxist worth its salt could have told you in 1922 about the petite bourgeoisie, the salaried white collar workers who embrace the ideals and esthetics of the bourgeoisie, without being part of it. It is actually interesting that after the higher paid parts of it merged with the liberal professions (doctors, lawyers, etc...), the latter were pushed one step down the ladder and pauperized.
One of the wonderful things about Marxism is that when two classes are wanted, there are only two classes, (bourgeois and proletarians) but when you want more, there are as many as you want.
They are similar, but I think the idea is that the petite bourgeoise are chiefly self-employed / small business owners, whereas the PMC are chiefly a professionalized class of employees.
Correct. The PMC is corporate and government employees generally who despise small business owners and the rural poor, (can never connect with the truly disadvantaged) and pull in the urban poor for attack or defense - bodies between them and their enemies - for better or worse.
I think there's some merit in what you say, but it wasn't the space race per se, if we mean Project Apollo and such, it was nuclear weapons and the V-2, because those happened in 1945 and the Space Race got started later (and for that matter, a significant motivation in the Space Race was the fear of The Best And The Brightest that Soviet missile technology would surpass the USAF as a strategic threat multiplier).
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act
It's no coincidence this was signed the year after Sputnik, but the fear of Sputnik wasn't fear that the Soviets would win civilian gold medals in space, plant the red flag on the Moon first, it was fear of Soviet missiles -- if they could put a dog into orbitt they could certainly land a 1Mt nuke on Miami -- and indeed the notorious "missile gap" helped JFK defeat Eisenhower's VP two years later.
The space race was valuable for academic science, but I think a larger, slightly earlier, and extremely similar event was also involved: the Baby Boom hitting college. My father was born just before the Depression's baby bust, and became a professor around 1957, and my reflections on his career showed the power of timing. Colleges were hit, first, with the GI Bill students, followed by the Baby Boomers. There were financed by the government, a booming economy, and a new trendiness of college education.
But the supply of new professors was very limited; you're not going to make a baby and turn it into a professor in much less than 26 years, so anyone who was a professor from 1946 to about 1975 was doing great. And given academia's tenure system, once you got established as a professor, you were generally protected from competition with newcomers.
All of this reversed in the 1980s, when the Baby Bust generation went to college and the Baby Boomers were trying to get professorial jobs. As one university said, "We don't lower wages any more out of humanitarian considerations." But the rise of part-time adjunct professors disconnected them from those considerations.