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Notes -
thesis of a possible effort-post. does this have legs?
Globalization didn’t have to break the working class, but blank slate liberalism did
A few decades ago you could show up with a 3rd grade education and still get a decent factory job that fed your family and gave your life... maybe not meaning, but some dignity. Today, those jobs are gone. Globalization took them, and now America has a surplus class of unemployable and underemployable mopes; people born too late for easy jobs but too early for gay-space communism to take care of them. They're stuck, adrift.
Was there any way to help them? Was the populist backlash unavoidable except for the choice of the form of our destroyer, Bernie Sanders’ classist rage or Trump's MAGA nationalist rage?
Is this a false choice? Yes, but the solution hinges on IQ realism. It hinges on slaying blank slate liberalism.
Countries like Germany faced the same global pressures but came out intact. They kept their working class employed, respected, and connected to dignity. How? By accepting a truth America refused: not everyone is wired for lambda calculus. Germany didn’t chase a fantasy of universal upskilling, or telling freshly unemployed coal miners to learn to code. Instead, they built protected, respected, cottage industries and stable vocational tracks with early sorting, precisely for the millions who weren't destined to debug beta reductions.
America, by contrast, swallowed a comforting lie: that we could escape globalization’s consequences without sacrifice. We embraced blank slate thinking, believing with enough TED talks and vocational bootcamps everyone could become high-skilled, high-status knowledge workers. We decided dignity wasn’t found in factories or plumbing, but in laptops and cubicles. Work that liberals secretly preferred.
But the bell curve didn’t care. IQ didn't budge. And so today, millions of Americans remain underemployed, abandoned, and pissed off.
Globalization didn't have to do this. Our denial of human cognitive differences, our stubborn insistence on the blank slate, did.
Germany got it right. America told itself comforting lies.
It's a good start, but I'd like to see topics like stronger unions (and better aligned union and executive interests), governmental attitudes on industrial policy, subsidies and the like before this goes from interesting idea to something more.
"Unions good" is a profoundly alien idea to me. What do you have in mind?
I don't have a source but what I'm told is that German unionists were heavily influenced by British ones who wanted to avoid making the same mistakes. The main idea was to avoid getting into the directly antagonistic relationship you see today in Anglo countries.
I was told that German unions tend to be more attached to individual companies, giving them more of an incentive to preserve their hosts and make agreements that are sane, but a quick search doesn't show any evidence for this. Wikipedia does say that strikes are very rare, and that companies and unions strive for consensus (and apparently achieve it most of the time). I'm not sure how this is achieved.
Perhaps @Southkraut or others would know more.
I've never had a union job, so I don't really have any insight into how the sausage is made here.
What I can confirm is that our unions are generally not very confrontational. Compared to the French, they're docile doormats. It's mostly public transport that strikes, i.e. rails and bus drivers, and the strikes are announced in advance, short in duration, and then negotiations drag on for a few years before the union employees get a one or two percent raise and some other nominal benefit. Other unions don't really strike a lot; they mostly just protest for this or that.
I'd say our unions are fairly cooperative overall.
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I don't think unions are always good or bad, even if I tend to agree that on the net, they're tending towards a negative in terms of productivity and competitiveness. Germany has a form of corporate governance where labor union reps sit on equal terms with management, but I'm no expert on the finer details. I just think it's a common talking point that is worth addressing, even if to say it's not relevant in the end.
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If your goal is specifically to increase blue collar compensation as a percent of corporate revenue, there's not really another way to do it.
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