Fear of falling
An analysis of the professional middle class from the liberal elite of the 1960s to the yuppies of the 1980s and the amount of power and influence they wield over the American culture.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
3people
2013–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Middle class people can't distinguish their work from their identity. They seek a perfect harmony of purpose and output, in order to be the perfect servant. They need to sustain this for a lifetime, so their pleasure must come from the work (or they can supplement this with a hobby that is extremely job-shaped.)
If they fail at this, they will be ejected from the middle class, and their children will not be properly educated, therefore never beginning the middle class journey. If you're born poor, it's easy to stay poor all your life; if you're born rich, it's easy to stay rich all your life; the middle class is the class that has to reproduce itself every generation and sustain itself by constant service and sublimation of their desires and dreams. That's why they're simultaneously overpaid and overtaxed - just to keep them caged and desperate, a layoff away from a family annihilation. Loyal to death.
Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich is a good book about this.
This essay is pompous. Just say: I'm afraid my job is going to leave me, and it makes me feel insecure. Maybe sympathize a little when all of the storefronts on Main Street in some small town are empty after the dog food plant got obsoleted by Chinese imports, instead of telling them they should learn to code like you and to move to where the jobs are.
- Yes, the Democratic party is not left wing on either a global scale, as you say, or even on a historical scale. The Democrats used to support the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps to put people to work. Massive government projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration were instituted.
More recently the Democrats have been about "ending welfare as we know it" as "the era of big government is over". Words said by a Democratic president, not a Republican. Obama has been the same, and the examples of this are too numerous to mention completely - support of school privatization and charters while attacking teacher's unions, or the more recent nomination of Penny Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce.
This essay has some Orwellian doublespeak sentences which are real howlers - 'The movement towards these more egalitarian corporate structures goes by many names: stakeholder or partner or even conscious capitalism.' Barf! Fantastic, I'll be real glad to be part of a stakeholder corporate structure - YOU own the shares, but I get to be a "stakeholder". Terrific. "Egalitarian corporate structure". There's a contradiction. A corporate structure means one thing - control by the majority shareholders, with the purpose to maximize profit to them. Period. This fact is written into the legal code and court decisions ad nauseum.
If anyone is buying into this idea that today's college educated professional in the US is better off than the college educated professional of the 1950s and 1960s, I suggest you read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Fear of Falling" where she shows a mountain of evidence of why this is not the case.
If these startups are so great for everyone, where are the older people? Where do they go, since they don't seem to be around, other than a small percentage, at anywhere from a small startup to somewhere like Google. Did professionals have to work as many hours as they do nowadays? Oncall all the time, e-mails and phone calls at home? And so on.
The system doesn't even work for us, the educated elite doing the wealth and creating the wealth. It works even less for the rest of the world.
- https://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/titles/barbara-ehrenreich/...
Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_Falling -> "Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, a book by Barbara Ehrenreich" (sheesh, nowadays books come under the heading "Other", while music and video get their own headers?)
Thanks for the ref, and nice handle btw - these days very few people are allowed to understand that a monarch may be a better deal for them than a senate ...
