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Also to some degree there is anti-elitist backlash after being told you need to have a bachelor's, which is very expensive at these universities, but also it's basically impossible to get an entry-level white collar job without one these days; and for a while the economy bifurcated with different outcomes for white-collar knowledge vs. blue-collar workers.

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tmpz22 a day ago | parent | next [-]

And this anti elitist backlash will lead to… greater wealth inequality as the middle class is forced to cash out their equity and investments in a down market to be gobbled up by the top 1% like Elon Musk.

	▲	bobthepanda a day ago \| parent [-]
		While I know this, I will say there is a communication issue in which sneering and lecturing is not really an effective way to persuade others.

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jart a day ago | parent | prev [-]

60% of the US workforce these days is white collar, and it's one of the great illusions of our time. Most of these jobs only exist to keep busy the 60% of the US workforce that has a degree. In the 1940's about 30% of the US workforce was white collar and only 5% had degrees. What caused this change? It's probably because blue collar workers made so much money and had so much leverage that businesses shipped all their jobs overseas. Blue collar people actually make real things and perform useful toil for society, whereas now they're working fake jobs for less money which they're told has higher social status. It's genius the way the system works. The way it takes from people (student loans, less pay) while persuading them they got a better deal. But how can you have a society where the majority of workers are administrators? Well you needn't look any further than America to find your answer. One day the music is going to stop and other nations, like China, whose workers held no such delusions of grandeur, will have the advantage. Their illusion is that the government is a dictatorship of proles, which makes people think it's high status to be a prole. Plus when your government is officially one big labor union, you can effectively ban unions from interfering with production.

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eszed 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"White collar" labor, in a service / knowledge economy doesn't mean "not making real things". Most (?) people on this board do something software or science or product related. Software is real, even if it's intangible. Research is real, even if it's inscrutable. Heck, Design is real, even if it's ineffable.

(Yes, yes, there's vapor-ware, and useless products, and certainly "fake jobs". Those existed in the '40s, too, and in any other time period or economy you care to look at.)

In my view, the problem is that white collar workers stopped thinking of themselves as Workers. Any of us who rely on a company for a paycheck (and, perniciously, in the US for health insurance) aren't Capital, even if we make high salaries. Maybe we're aspiring to join that class - we'll hit the startup lottery, or FIRE, or our IRA portfolio will go up forever - but we ain't yet. (That's fine, by the way: I'm using Marxist terms, but I'm not a Marxist. Pursuing financial independence, and the real - even if remote - possibility of attaining it is what's made the US such a dynamic economy.)

However, allowing our aspirations for wealth, or the relative comfort of white-collar jobs, to lead us to identify with the political goals of Capital - or worse, to adopt an elitist attitude towards people who work in what you call the "real economy" - is what's got the US into the mess we're currently in. That's the "genius" you identify in the present system, and the origin of the cruelty within it.

In reality, we're all Working Class (well, 99% of us are - although that proportion is way out of whack on this board, of all places!), and we need to (politically) act like it.

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xracy 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

great illusions of our time, like there's not data to back it up?

	▲	lurk2 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		He's saying that the economic viability of the model is illusory.