This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.
But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china. I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys. I don't even really care who, and I don't care who does it. It could be Il Duce Trump, it could be General Secretary Mamdani, it could be some boring centrist whose name we don't know.
Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class would win my instant approval. This could just be because of my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO/ Artemis being a big fucking waste of time and money* / Boeing doing boeing stuff, it could be the long 2008 hangover, it could be a thousand things.
I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.
I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"
I really think that unless the uniparty plays it's cards right, the next realignment is not gonna be pretty for anyone. We need another FDR type to head that shit off like it's vanguardist communism in the 1930s, and at this point I don't think I care if they are left or right, they just need to be for the bottom and middle and even most of the top, and against the peak.
*Yes I know about pork. Pork can at least do something! highways can get build, parks are nice, and if we need to build bombs somewhere to it might as well be in bumfuck nowhere to give the nowhereians something to do other than meth.
I feel like you're confusing different categories of people here, which is a common failure mode when it comes to discussions on "billionaires". A lot of generic dislike for both capitalism and rich people (not necessarily billionaires) gets swept up with talk of Musk, Gates, et al., and it seems like it would be useful to break down what we're talking about. Even if you really do mean only billionaires, you're still talking about both the mega successful Musks with dozens of hundreds of billions, local oligarchs and royalty, your mostly unknown investors, and even apex celebrities and sports people.
And then you've got:
Billionaires are largely not the managerial class. Even within the managerial class, it's worth splitting up your C-level and CEOs with the PMC that are much more middle and upper middle class
So when it comes to your overall complaints, who do you actually dislike?
Billionaire 'founders': Musk, Bezos, Ellison, Gates, etc. The richest of billionaires, but with most of their wealth tied up in the businesses they created and still run. Typically very high profile.
Investors: Buffet, Larry Fink, Carl Icahn, etc. Those who largely made their income from hedge funds, PE, and other market moves. They can be further split between the activist investors like Fink and Icahn, and the passive like Jim Simons and John Bogle
Old money: Royalty, Rothschilds, etc. Now we're getting into a group which doesn't comprise that many billionaires anymore. I'm tempted to put in second and third generation families here as well like the Walton family, although most wouldn't use old money in that sense.
Oligarchs: I'm counting any of the third/second world mega-rich here, the people that essentially just stole their country's wealth. Your emirs and sultans, as well as more typical corruption.
Apex celebrities: Swift, Jay-z, Michael Jordan, Ronaldo, etc. The very top of the sports and art worlds, the vast majority of celebs are only multimillionaires and even the richest are <$5bn
-CEO billionaires: Tim Cook, Nadella, Pichai, etc. The very top of the greasy pole, the execs who didn't build anything but are at such large companies they've still reached the billion mark thanks to stock options.
Then there are the many who aren't billionaires at all:
And the "managerial classes"
C-level execs: All of the other business leaders, from enterprise down to SMEs.
The Professional managerial class: The millions of senior management roles that make the vast majority of day-to-day decisions in big business.
When most people complain about billionaires, I think they really mean the 'founder' category, the handful of tech founders with the highest profile. When pushed they'll probably complain about Joe Business who made 2Bn from his real estate company, but they never actually think about that kind of person.
When I read your complaint about the managing class, I feel like you mostly mean the PMCs and C-level people, many of whom won't even be millionaires. And perhaps some of the activist investors?
I think of them as a big blob with that 1800's political cartoon of the fat rich guy, to be honest.
I don't really care about the raw numbers, and in the context of this complaint not even the percentage very much. It's the immunity from consequence that gets me.
I lived in an aggressively poor country during my early life; the richest guy around was much richer relative to everyone else than anybody but elon theses days, but he was still tied in to the society. He experienced the friction of living in a place, with certain values and expectations, and he reaped the rewards by displaying noblesse oblige to us peasants, but he also risked the punishment of social approbation all the way down to a group of dudes showing up outside if his compound with the knowledge that they were the final arbiter of proper behavior.
A business I make use of in my business was acquired by private capital, saddled with a load of debt, gutted, had it's property sold out from under it and then leased back, and finally went out of business this year.
In a well functioning society, the people that do that shit would not be rewarded with power and money. They would be poor, possibly in prison, maybe tarred and feathered and run out of town, perchance fucking dead.
That's what I mean about consequences I guess; in china it's at least theoretically possible that if you damage production or distribution in a way that pisses lots of people off and materialy damages the economy but isn't illegal, the big hand of the state might come down out of the sky and slap your wrist, instead of what happens in the US which is a big shrug and a 'well, we only have absolute power over life and death and a popular mandate and all three branches of government, there's nothing we can do'
PE/VCs are yet another category we could make in our list of the super rich; I don't know but I'd assume the majority of PE founders are going to be the multi-millionaires, apart from the very successful few like Blackrock and KKR.
There's a whole 'nother load of misconceptions about PE that could form a topic on their own, but rest assured that the stories of leveraged buyouts leading to rapid bankruptcy are almost always disasters for the PE investors.
As for this, I have a few Chinese bridges to sell to you.
Back in the day one of my first Chinese employers was this sociopathic woman who somehow took an ironclad business and pissed away a ton of money and goodwill, seriously enraging all our customers and partners. And these were some wealthy and powerful people, but did it matter?
Of course not, because she was even more powerful. Her dad was a major player in Anhui's CCP, so she was essentially untouchable.
Some of other posts made essentially this point below. China does not remove billionaires/the elite from their system, they simply trade an untouchable business elite for an untouchable political elite
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link