I find this analysis spot on and, alas, probably twice as long as it needs to be, in order to gain a really wide-spread audience. What to do? Boil the critique down to a much shorter introductory piece and then expand it in a couple of mid-sized follow-up pieces. Reading long-form essays on one's computer screen -- much less on cell-phone screens, which Substack's annoying app coercion is always pushing -- are a tough sell for readers who are used to scattershot memes or short hot takes. Lorenzo, you write some very valuable observations. Give yourself the best possible presentation to attract the most readers.
Oh, and one other thing: I never quite got the "paid to show up" description's meaning for woke activists or bureaucrats. Perhaps it was spelled out in one of the links, but central phrases like that need to be clear in the basic text of the piece. Just a suggestion.
I have been doing computer security for over 30 years now. In one job I had, I was responsible for triaging security issues. On one occasion I identified several issues that struck me as particularily dangerous and scheduled them for expedited fixing. A higher up team decided that they were not as serious as I claimed and they could be fixed on a slower schedule. I appealed for two of the issues, citing specific factors that made them more dangerous - and requesting that the standards be changed to accomodate the risk enhancing factor that I had cited.
I lost.
A month or two later one of those issues was used in an attack against the company.
The big shots came down on me for allowing the vulnerability to ship.
I copied them the ruling against me, my appeal for why the issues needed to be fixed, my request for an amendment to the rule, and the ruling against my appeal and request.
That was the last I heard about the incident - but I would have been held responsible if I had not fulfilled my duties - and documented it. I did hear that they eventually changed the standard along the lines I suggested.
I was a safety officer about 50 years ago in a chemical research establishment as well as about 40 years ago at an electronic research facility. If we made mistakes a lot of people could get hurt and a lot of damage could be done. We were careful and people were told not to do some things because the risk was too high. We knew that if an event occured we would be asked why we had not prevented it.
My youngest daughter is a structural engineer with a professional engineering license. She is accountable - and knows it. My son also does security work and knows that if the shit hits the fan management will come looking for victims to blame - even though they are probably the more responsible party for emphasizing features and ease of use over security and integrity.
I'm currently writing about our ruling class/intelligentsia right now as well. It seems more and more obvious that the political goals of the left have always just been sleights of hand, distractions and manipulations formulated to gain this class more power and protect the privileges and wealth they already have.
My question to concerned progressives is always: what have YOU done to help the marginalized? Not opinions, not social media posts, not likes or protests. What have you DONE?
When the rubber meets the road the things that really care about are their homes, their incomes, their kids' schools, and (above all) their status. Every policy and cultural value they profess are avenues to collectively improve and augment these things - at the expense of poor and working-class Americans.
Teasing out the absurdities of woke is pointless. Ideas do not require logical coherence or an evidentiary foundation to have social force.
Woke is invaluable for regimes presiding over economies in managed decline that are seeking to partner with the Global South.
A while back Ben Rhodes, Obama's speechwriter, claimed that the Civil Rights movement did more to win the Cold War than the Vietnam War.
This is the view right at the top. Woke is a radicalised, quasi-Maoist, development of civil rights. It is supported because it enables Western elites to engineer conditions for a fully integrated global economy, conditions where resources can be re-allocated away from once core constituencies. The expectations of these once core constituencies cannot be met. Woke consolidates the social order that emerged under post-Cold War neoliberalism.
Woke is downstream from the passing of mass society. It is about managing expectations for a demobilised workforce taking orders from an ultra-diverse managerial class, recruited in significant measure from the Global South.
It is also a cheap way of purchasing loyalty from the apparat. Woke offers opportunities to bully and humiliate others. These are valued by those whose identities are affirmed by the regime. The moral economy is now Sadean.
First. The Rob Henderson's link to "We Were Never Woke". I thought it might be a worthwhile read/listen, especially since I had six Audible credits and no idea what to pick next. After 55 minutes of the author’s self-aggrandizing before even approaching the main discourse, it became clear he represents a different kind of “woke”—black woke, resentful of White woke—even though Rob borrowed some ideas from the book to support his thesis. Thankfully, Audible allowed a refund; I didn’t feel like giving a penny to this guy.
Second. Regarding school starting in kindergarten and holding boys back: I keep repeating this—back in the USSR, we started school after turning seven. Government-run kindergartens didn’t offer any schooling, and that was for the better. As far as I can tell, there is no benefit to educating immature brains. Kids under seven benefit far more from free socializing and unsupervised play. Many studies show that early teaching interventions fade out over time. Starting ABCs too early serves no real purpose—it’s misguided and another facet of utopian blank-slatism.
Additionally, by age seven, both boys’ and girls’ brains are developmentally ready to learn. We had only ten grades, so people typically graduated at 17—which was also for the better. The modern Western notion of calling 18- and 19-year-olds “teenagers”—when they are, in fact, adults still stuck in school—is a travesty.
Right, browsed through the link. I think listening to the introduction to his book reveals his true views more clearly, which then color much of his writing. I find his term "symbolic capitalists" completely off the mark. While I mostly agree with his evaluation of values and activities, "symbolic capitalists"? Any persuasive and internally consistent narrative can be constructed by a skilled writer—or an AI, for that matter—but if it's built on misunderstood terms or flawed analogies, I have no time grading his work.
Besides, the first few minutes of the book preview enticed me to buy the audiobook, as I regularly observe the behaviors he described. While his observations weren’t particularly new to me, I was curious about his conclusions. However, at times he seemed to go unquestioningly in defense of his group’s evolutionary strategy—something I also witness frequently. After four years of wokery and DEI, I understand it well and have little patience to dissect it further.
So why I dislike al-Gharbi so much after reading so little of his work? Because he feels like yet another culture of (biased) critique of surface behavioral phenomena with scant (if any) evolutionary grounding, and without a positive program.
Am further into We Have Never Been Woke. The empirical data is very useful. Quantitative sociology can be very good at spotting patterns.
What is increasingly obvious is Sociology is crap at mechanisms. Musa al-Gharbi goes on about legitimation, which is mostly a non-problem, when what he is really examining is the patterns of networks and status plays. Legitimation is generally an issue only if you are making non-consensual demands on resources.
Right, this is what I am complaining about. There are so numerous "theories" like sociology and other "studies" (and numerous theories within sociology with their terms and lingo), all of which are mountains that continuously are getting taller, built on the molehills of truth (as you aptly quip).
Same goes for redneck theory of black underclass. Why am I not buying it?
(Redacted excessive personal info here.)
Thus, my point is that there are too many Talmudic "theories" on human individual and group behavior, but unless they are based on solid understanding what humans are and what ticks them (evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, etc.), all of them are internally consistent and fundamentally bogus (though very appealing to the colleagues and followers).
In my last post in this series, I show that primatologist Richard Wrangham’s proactive/reactive aggression analysis slips really easily in Jens Ludwig’s analysis, and such cross-disciplinary consilience (especially from biology) is a very good sign. I also make some very unPC analysis of different levels of selection for or against reactive aggression in human populations and an obvious physical indicator of the same.
This is the best post of the four, and it contains many valuable insights. However, I regret to say that it still doesn't present the crux of the picture as it applies to the US of these last 10 years.
I would suggest that the section titled "Beliefs as (disastrous) moral assets" is the core of the explanation. The other facts can be addressed, and the proposed solutions have already been attempted - successfully - on a number of occasions. It was always clear that good policing is the key!
Yet, I was present during the 1990s and 2000s. People tend to forget now - or the progressives gladly memory-holed it - but black racial relations saw their greatest improvement by the time of Obama’s election (for whom I also voted - with all "hope and change" and belief in the end of racism inaugurated with his election). Yet during his presidency, BLM and race-blaming and race-baiting and oh-so-righteous "mostly peaceful 'protests'" were stirred up. This is because Democrats rely on the black vote to win elections, and if there was close to no racism remaining, it needed to be fabricated. or else.
Although the facets of Wokery were already growing before the 2016 election, the left became rabid during Trump-45 presidency and consolidated further under Biden. Biden & Co. declared early on that White supremacy was the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, invoking Jim Crow-Crow-Crow repeatedly. Then came 2020, with defund the police, statue toppling, sanctuary cities, ever higher leniency on crime, and the rest.
So yes, there were older historical events as you described from multiple sources, but their memory was reified and weaponized by the left.
A just solution would be for progressives to abandon woke ideology with all that race baiting - then things could gradually improve over the coming decades. But since that’s their only political weapon, it’s not going to happen. I agree with the consilience as you described, it has its place, but the last 15 years were driven more by the left's political expedience.
Lorenzo, I deeply value your analysis. However, I don’t believe this series of posts is timely or relevant or conclusive in late 2025, even though I recognize it was much needed in 2019. And I am sure a good number of people found it educational now too, so all is good!
The “redkneck” theory is more plausible if you don’t know anything about patterns outside the US. Even in the US, that Scots-Irish homicide rates differ by past insitutional coverage goes, as you say, to patterns assembling and dis-assembling.
Am continuing to work through We Have Never Been Woke. The empirical data is useful.
Bourdieu, being quasi-Marxian, is way too hung up on social position, and not nearly enough on social function. Human capital can be directed towards physical things or social/human things. It can be practical/detailed or abstract/general. There is no need to reify it, or to conflate status with capital.
A lot of what Musa al-Gharbi theorises is better covered by other distinctions: Goodhart’s Anywhere/Somewheres, for instance.
It's great that you're digging deeper - thank you for the follow-up. I also like the Anywhere/Somewhere distinction (with appropriate classification); it's far more insightful, which cannot be said for conflating status with capital. But then again, it follows the Bourdieu other discourse on cultural capital (if he used 'advantage' it would make much more sense, but it wouldn't be as much of a critique as he wished, and would be so trivial there would be nothing to write about!) Here is another dump borrowing from Bourdieuon on Whiteness as capital: https://www.socialsciencejournal.in/assets/archives/2020/vol6issue5/6-5-32-995.pdf No surprise such base appealed to al-Gharbi.
Hanania also veered into a long and unproductive tangent about elite human capital. It felt like he wanted to publish another book on something profound, but nothing truly compelling came to his mind. I don't see it adding anything to what’s already known, and actually showing his confusion as of late.
Also, both of these mates are focused on surface-level behavioral phenomena, which are meaningless without a true evolutionary understanding what causes humans to behave in such a way—and that's where you shine.
Thank you. Bourdieu is hung up on the silly Marxian definition of capital as property, rather than the produced means of production.
Our conversation has led me to think about why I am comfortable with the idea of human capital and social capital but not the Bourdieu spin-offs. I have considered whether the concept of social capital had pushed people away from considering the problems of social order back into interchangeable widgets utilitarianism (which is the morality of interchangeable widgets) transactional economics.
I have concluded that the concept of social capital is fine, the systematic under-rating of connection has deeper reasons. Contracts, for example, are about managing connections. This is especially true of employment contracts. This explains why family business—where folk are embedded in deep, pre-existing connections—operate differently from firms where the employment relationship IS the connection to be managed.
I was comfortable too, but seeing the above outrageous example made me think whether the term is meaningful, or was it sneaked in by Marxians and became a habit, while a better term would likely be more explanatory.
Like in my example with 'cultural capital' where 'advantage' is really meant. And my example of how such abstract vagueness (really an allegory) makes an opening for the follow-up more and more deranged allegories. Same for calling skill or knowledge 'capital'. They really aren't, they are skill and knowledge, their applications is part of capital, but if they are idle or unproductive or counterproductive, they are not (hence Hanania's 'elite human capital' non sequitur).
But this is my perception, please tell me if I misunderstand.
It is also possible that the Social Physics delusion encourages under-rating the importance of time. (P.s. I am pleased that Joel Mokyr go the Nobel memorial: I am always pleased when an economic historian gets honoured, particularly a very good one.)
I am not fond of his term ‘symbolic capitalists’ either. He takes too much from Pierre Bourdieu, including labelling things ‘capital’ that should not be so labelled.
The connection to the shift of power beyond accountability to ordinary people via the ballot box is worth exploring in more richness in future essays.
To that end, let me offer a couple of thoughts:
One may think of this as Charles attempting to wrest power back from Parliament or as an attempt to create a new House of Lords, limited to those of the highest status but with status determined not by land and family but by one's rank among the woke.
One may also think of this as a reactionary response to the broad / universal franchise in a world in which the idea of narrowing the franchise is verboten wrong think.
The Liberal Principles protect the weak from the strong, the powerless from the powerful.
Wokery is just a shorthand name for the revolution to eliminate the constraint places upon the powerful by Liberal Principles.
Now there is a fascinating notion - the Golden Age - regardless of it being rooted in the past or the future. In either case it isn't a real thing, just imagination - the real question is why is that so seductive?
Here´s some diverse opinion from the right: OPPRESSION IS A VERY REAL THING. And it can be described as a constant anxiety about not having enough money to pay your bills and pay off your debt. That, by the way, now describes the condition of about 70 percent of Brazilian households currently - and it´s a wildly diverse bunch, rich, poor, black, white. Left-wing, right-wing. You can find yourself living "anxiety free" in a 700 square meter house in a gated community with the rest of your peer group, but some of them are BROKE DICK - and only if you are really paying attention will you notice the facade is starting to crack.
Yes! But at the risk of sounding like one of those people who change the meaning of words in order to sound intelligent (an argumenter, or argue mentor), I´d say that labour bondage is very much on the way out, along with labour itself. Soon all that will be left is a kind of identity bondage, or self-oppression. In other words, people will stack themselves on the pyramid of social value without realizing that they are stacking themselves, and not being stacked. That´s why I like the word SUBSTACK. And that´s why I think AI does not stand for artificial intelligence, but for ASSIGNED IDENTITY. It´s all in the algorithm. The almighty algorithm.
I find this analysis spot on and, alas, probably twice as long as it needs to be, in order to gain a really wide-spread audience. What to do? Boil the critique down to a much shorter introductory piece and then expand it in a couple of mid-sized follow-up pieces. Reading long-form essays on one's computer screen -- much less on cell-phone screens, which Substack's annoying app coercion is always pushing -- are a tough sell for readers who are used to scattershot memes or short hot takes. Lorenzo, you write some very valuable observations. Give yourself the best possible presentation to attract the most readers.
Oh, and one other thing: I never quite got the "paid to show up" description's meaning for woke activists or bureaucrats. Perhaps it was spelled out in one of the links, but central phrases like that need to be clear in the basic text of the piece. Just a suggestion.
Useful feedback, ta. I am a little over writing about wokery. But a pithy series is a good idea.
On the other hand, it's nice Mr. Warby left some work for the rest of us, eh?
Oh, also, while I'm here, the link to Williams' rationalization paper is broken, there's some garble text in front of the address.
Fixed, ta.
I get so fed up with these self inflated idiots.
I have been doing computer security for over 30 years now. In one job I had, I was responsible for triaging security issues. On one occasion I identified several issues that struck me as particularily dangerous and scheduled them for expedited fixing. A higher up team decided that they were not as serious as I claimed and they could be fixed on a slower schedule. I appealed for two of the issues, citing specific factors that made them more dangerous - and requesting that the standards be changed to accomodate the risk enhancing factor that I had cited.
I lost.
A month or two later one of those issues was used in an attack against the company.
The big shots came down on me for allowing the vulnerability to ship.
I copied them the ruling against me, my appeal for why the issues needed to be fixed, my request for an amendment to the rule, and the ruling against my appeal and request.
That was the last I heard about the incident - but I would have been held responsible if I had not fulfilled my duties - and documented it. I did hear that they eventually changed the standard along the lines I suggested.
I was a safety officer about 50 years ago in a chemical research establishment as well as about 40 years ago at an electronic research facility. If we made mistakes a lot of people could get hurt and a lot of damage could be done. We were careful and people were told not to do some things because the risk was too high. We knew that if an event occured we would be asked why we had not prevented it.
My youngest daughter is a structural engineer with a professional engineering license. She is accountable - and knows it. My son also does security work and knows that if the shit hits the fan management will come looking for victims to blame - even though they are probably the more responsible party for emphasizing features and ease of use over security and integrity.
I'm currently writing about our ruling class/intelligentsia right now as well. It seems more and more obvious that the political goals of the left have always just been sleights of hand, distractions and manipulations formulated to gain this class more power and protect the privileges and wealth they already have.
My question to concerned progressives is always: what have YOU done to help the marginalized? Not opinions, not social media posts, not likes or protests. What have you DONE?
When the rubber meets the road the things that really care about are their homes, their incomes, their kids' schools, and (above all) their status. Every policy and cultural value they profess are avenues to collectively improve and augment these things - at the expense of poor and working-class Americans.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/oppressors
This! A million times this. Patronizing lectures from hypothetical nepo babies.
Teasing out the absurdities of woke is pointless. Ideas do not require logical coherence or an evidentiary foundation to have social force.
Woke is invaluable for regimes presiding over economies in managed decline that are seeking to partner with the Global South.
A while back Ben Rhodes, Obama's speechwriter, claimed that the Civil Rights movement did more to win the Cold War than the Vietnam War.
This is the view right at the top. Woke is a radicalised, quasi-Maoist, development of civil rights. It is supported because it enables Western elites to engineer conditions for a fully integrated global economy, conditions where resources can be re-allocated away from once core constituencies. The expectations of these once core constituencies cannot be met. Woke consolidates the social order that emerged under post-Cold War neoliberalism.
Woke is downstream from the passing of mass society. It is about managing expectations for a demobilised workforce taking orders from an ultra-diverse managerial class, recruited in significant measure from the Global South.
It is also a cheap way of purchasing loyalty from the apparat. Woke offers opportunities to bully and humiliate others. These are valued by those whose identities are affirmed by the regime. The moral economy is now Sadean.
A reason why I write about the social dynamics so much.
Great post, Lorenzo!
I'm commenting as I read on the things you cite.
First. The Rob Henderson's link to "We Were Never Woke". I thought it might be a worthwhile read/listen, especially since I had six Audible credits and no idea what to pick next. After 55 minutes of the author’s self-aggrandizing before even approaching the main discourse, it became clear he represents a different kind of “woke”—black woke, resentful of White woke—even though Rob borrowed some ideas from the book to support his thesis. Thankfully, Audible allowed a refund; I didn’t feel like giving a penny to this guy.
Second. Regarding school starting in kindergarten and holding boys back: I keep repeating this—back in the USSR, we started school after turning seven. Government-run kindergartens didn’t offer any schooling, and that was for the better. As far as I can tell, there is no benefit to educating immature brains. Kids under seven benefit far more from free socializing and unsupervised play. Many studies show that early teaching interventions fade out over time. Starting ABCs too early serves no real purpose—it’s misguided and another facet of utopian blank-slatism.
Additionally, by age seven, both boys’ and girls’ brains are developmentally ready to learn. We had only ten grades, so people typically graduated at 17—which was also for the better. The modern Western notion of calling 18- and 19-year-olds “teenagers”—when they are, in fact, adults still stuck in school—is a travesty.
In full agreement with your conclusions/summary.
Ta and good points.
Musa al-Gharbi has some very informative Substack posts. For instance, this one.
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/inserting-culture-into-the-culture
Right, browsed through the link. I think listening to the introduction to his book reveals his true views more clearly, which then color much of his writing. I find his term "symbolic capitalists" completely off the mark. While I mostly agree with his evaluation of values and activities, "symbolic capitalists"? Any persuasive and internally consistent narrative can be constructed by a skilled writer—or an AI, for that matter—but if it's built on misunderstood terms or flawed analogies, I have no time grading his work.
Besides, the first few minutes of the book preview enticed me to buy the audiobook, as I regularly observe the behaviors he described. While his observations weren’t particularly new to me, I was curious about his conclusions. However, at times he seemed to go unquestioningly in defense of his group’s evolutionary strategy—something I also witness frequently. After four years of wokery and DEI, I understand it well and have little patience to dissect it further.
So why I dislike al-Gharbi so much after reading so little of his work? Because he feels like yet another culture of (biased) critique of surface behavioral phenomena with scant (if any) evolutionary grounding, and without a positive program.
Am further into We Have Never Been Woke. The empirical data is very useful. Quantitative sociology can be very good at spotting patterns.
What is increasingly obvious is Sociology is crap at mechanisms. Musa al-Gharbi goes on about legitimation, which is mostly a non-problem, when what he is really examining is the patterns of networks and status plays. Legitimation is generally an issue only if you are making non-consensual demands on resources.
Right, this is what I am complaining about. There are so numerous "theories" like sociology and other "studies" (and numerous theories within sociology with their terms and lingo), all of which are mountains that continuously are getting taller, built on the molehills of truth (as you aptly quip).
Same goes for redneck theory of black underclass. Why am I not buying it?
(Redacted excessive personal info here.)
Thus, my point is that there are too many Talmudic "theories" on human individual and group behavior, but unless they are based on solid understanding what humans are and what ticks them (evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, etc.), all of them are internally consistent and fundamentally bogus (though very appealing to the colleagues and followers).
In my last post in this series, I show that primatologist Richard Wrangham’s proactive/reactive aggression analysis slips really easily in Jens Ludwig’s analysis, and such cross-disciplinary consilience (especially from biology) is a very good sign. I also make some very unPC analysis of different levels of selection for or against reactive aggression in human populations and an obvious physical indicator of the same.
This is the best post of the four, and it contains many valuable insights. However, I regret to say that it still doesn't present the crux of the picture as it applies to the US of these last 10 years.
I would suggest that the section titled "Beliefs as (disastrous) moral assets" is the core of the explanation. The other facts can be addressed, and the proposed solutions have already been attempted - successfully - on a number of occasions. It was always clear that good policing is the key!
Yet, I was present during the 1990s and 2000s. People tend to forget now - or the progressives gladly memory-holed it - but black racial relations saw their greatest improvement by the time of Obama’s election (for whom I also voted - with all "hope and change" and belief in the end of racism inaugurated with his election). Yet during his presidency, BLM and race-blaming and race-baiting and oh-so-righteous "mostly peaceful 'protests'" were stirred up. This is because Democrats rely on the black vote to win elections, and if there was close to no racism remaining, it needed to be fabricated. or else.
Although the facets of Wokery were already growing before the 2016 election, the left became rabid during Trump-45 presidency and consolidated further under Biden. Biden & Co. declared early on that White supremacy was the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, invoking Jim Crow-Crow-Crow repeatedly. Then came 2020, with defund the police, statue toppling, sanctuary cities, ever higher leniency on crime, and the rest.
So yes, there were older historical events as you described from multiple sources, but their memory was reified and weaponized by the left.
A just solution would be for progressives to abandon woke ideology with all that race baiting - then things could gradually improve over the coming decades. But since that’s their only political weapon, it’s not going to happen. I agree with the consilience as you described, it has its place, but the last 15 years were driven more by the left's political expedience.
Lorenzo, I deeply value your analysis. However, I don’t believe this series of posts is timely or relevant or conclusive in late 2025, even though I recognize it was much needed in 2019. And I am sure a good number of people found it educational now too, so all is good!
Your links reminded me of tattoos as signals.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/the-economics-of-neck-tattoos/486581/
Yes, this one ended as a very costly commitment signal.
The “redkneck” theory is more plausible if you don’t know anything about patterns outside the US. Even in the US, that Scots-Irish homicide rates differ by past insitutional coverage goes, as you say, to patterns assembling and dis-assembling.
I think what I was saying here was trivially true. (Redacted.)
Am continuing to work through We Have Never Been Woke. The empirical data is useful.
Bourdieu, being quasi-Marxian, is way too hung up on social position, and not nearly enough on social function. Human capital can be directed towards physical things or social/human things. It can be practical/detailed or abstract/general. There is no need to reify it, or to conflate status with capital.
A lot of what Musa al-Gharbi theorises is better covered by other distinctions: Goodhart’s Anywhere/Somewheres, for instance.
It's great that you're digging deeper - thank you for the follow-up. I also like the Anywhere/Somewhere distinction (with appropriate classification); it's far more insightful, which cannot be said for conflating status with capital. But then again, it follows the Bourdieu other discourse on cultural capital (if he used 'advantage' it would make much more sense, but it wouldn't be as much of a critique as he wished, and would be so trivial there would be nothing to write about!) Here is another dump borrowing from Bourdieuon on Whiteness as capital: https://www.socialsciencejournal.in/assets/archives/2020/vol6issue5/6-5-32-995.pdf No surprise such base appealed to al-Gharbi.
Hanania also veered into a long and unproductive tangent about elite human capital. It felt like he wanted to publish another book on something profound, but nothing truly compelling came to his mind. I don't see it adding anything to what’s already known, and actually showing his confusion as of late.
Also, both of these mates are focused on surface-level behavioral phenomena, which are meaningless without a true evolutionary understanding what causes humans to behave in such a way—and that's where you shine.
Thank you. Bourdieu is hung up on the silly Marxian definition of capital as property, rather than the produced means of production.
Our conversation has led me to think about why I am comfortable with the idea of human capital and social capital but not the Bourdieu spin-offs. I have considered whether the concept of social capital had pushed people away from considering the problems of social order back into interchangeable widgets utilitarianism (which is the morality of interchangeable widgets) transactional economics.
I have concluded that the concept of social capital is fine, the systematic under-rating of connection has deeper reasons. Contracts, for example, are about managing connections. This is especially true of employment contracts. This explains why family business—where folk are embedded in deep, pre-existing connections—operate differently from firms where the employment relationship IS the connection to be managed.
I was comfortable too, but seeing the above outrageous example made me think whether the term is meaningful, or was it sneaked in by Marxians and became a habit, while a better term would likely be more explanatory.
Like in my example with 'cultural capital' where 'advantage' is really meant. And my example of how such abstract vagueness (really an allegory) makes an opening for the follow-up more and more deranged allegories. Same for calling skill or knowledge 'capital'. They really aren't, they are skill and knowledge, their applications is part of capital, but if they are idle or unproductive or counterproductive, they are not (hence Hanania's 'elite human capital' non sequitur).
But this is my perception, please tell me if I misunderstand.
It is also possible that the Social Physics delusion encourages under-rating the importance of time. (P.s. I am pleased that Joel Mokyr go the Nobel memorial: I am always pleased when an economic historian gets honoured, particularly a very good one.)
I am not fond of his term ‘symbolic capitalists’ either. He takes too much from Pierre Bourdieu, including labelling things ‘capital’ that should not be so labelled.
Brilliant!
The connection to the shift of power beyond accountability to ordinary people via the ballot box is worth exploring in more richness in future essays.
To that end, let me offer a couple of thoughts:
One may think of this as Charles attempting to wrest power back from Parliament or as an attempt to create a new House of Lords, limited to those of the highest status but with status determined not by land and family but by one's rank among the woke.
One may also think of this as a reactionary response to the broad / universal franchise in a world in which the idea of narrowing the franchise is verboten wrong think.
The Liberal Principles protect the weak from the strong, the powerless from the powerful.
Wokery is just a shorthand name for the revolution to eliminate the constraint places upon the powerful by Liberal Principles.
Now there is a fascinating notion - the Golden Age - regardless of it being rooted in the past or the future. In either case it isn't a real thing, just imagination - the real question is why is that so seductive?
Really excellent piece. Thank you.
Portand’s not Hell, the Pinot Noir is too good
Pinot Noir is Belgian for small pee pee.
Here´s some diverse opinion from the right: OPPRESSION IS A VERY REAL THING. And it can be described as a constant anxiety about not having enough money to pay your bills and pay off your debt. That, by the way, now describes the condition of about 70 percent of Brazilian households currently - and it´s a wildly diverse bunch, rich, poor, black, white. Left-wing, right-wing. You can find yourself living "anxiety free" in a 700 square meter house in a gated community with the rest of your peer group, but some of them are BROKE DICK - and only if you are really paying attention will you notice the facade is starting to crack.
Speaking as a medievalist with a longstanding interest in systems of labour bondage, that strikes me as not oppression, thought it may be oppressive.
Yes! But at the risk of sounding like one of those people who change the meaning of words in order to sound intelligent (an argumenter, or argue mentor), I´d say that labour bondage is very much on the way out, along with labour itself. Soon all that will be left is a kind of identity bondage, or self-oppression. In other words, people will stack themselves on the pyramid of social value without realizing that they are stacking themselves, and not being stacked. That´s why I like the word SUBSTACK. And that´s why I think AI does not stand for artificial intelligence, but for ASSIGNED IDENTITY. It´s all in the algorithm. The almighty algorithm.