“The greatest existential threat facing America lies with the rise of a new class order that leaves diminished prospects for the vast majority<\/em>“<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/h3>\n
The book jacket describes the New Class Conflict as a “call to arms and a unique piece of analysis about the possible evolution of our society into an increasingly quasi-feudal order<\/em>“. After reading the New Class Conflict, the image of Joel Kotkin as Martin Luther posting his famous 95 Theses came to my mind. A protest … perhaps. But it is much more an expression of outrage, and to many a heresy, concerning the consequences of our “rule” by a new class ensconced in power and determined to have its way with America.<\/p>\nUsing metaphors gleaned from the medieval world, Kotkin, the iconoclastic but extraordinarily insightful \u00a0master of Curmudgeons, describes a new ruling class which seems to dominate much of contemporary America. What has this got to do with economic development, you ask? Plenty! The New Class, according to Kotkin, follows its own definition of economic growth, and make no mistake, it ain’t your father’s definition of economic growth. Kotkin’s critique of this New Class and its devastating consequences to our society and economy delivers a powerful blow to several prominent economic development strategies. \u00a0Anyone in economic development can’t ignore this book–no more than the Pope could ignore the Protestant Reformation.<\/p>\n
By way of background, Luther, a Catholic priest, fed up with abuses and misrule by Catholic theocratic ruling elites, nailed a list of ninety-five abuses to the door of his church. This set in motion the Protestant Reformation. \u00a0In his famous “Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”<\/strong> (1517) Luther had attacked the pillars of the medieval society, economy and culture by\u00a0protesting key policies of the Catholic Church (nepotism, indulgences, simony and usury). The net effect of these key policies was that they supported the Catholic theocratic system which parasitically\u00a0lived \u00a0off the poor and the working\/middle class (Yeoman) Catholics.<\/p>\nKotkin embraces this medieval system as a metaphor for a new American ruling system which has come into power over the last decade or two. For Kotkin, the overriding abuse is that the economic development policies pursued by this New Ruling Class have hollowed out the American middle\/working class and our workforce. Who is the New Ruling Class? Composed of a technological elite drawn from \u00a0the huge technology companies and a “Clerisy” (academia, the media, and Hollywood celebrities), the New Ruling Class has connived with government bureaucrats and politicians to pursue a progressive ideology, he calls “Gentry Liberalism”.<\/p>\n
Gentry Liberalism has virtually destroyed our long-standing traditional American culture and replaced it with a new destructive culture suitable only to satisfy the needs, the profits, and the world view of the technological oligarchs\/Clerisy. \u00a0Because of this new culture, a slow to no-growth economy has caused a steroidal inequality in America, destroyed the American dream of social and economic mobility, and crushed the working and middle classes which are dependent on economic growth for their personal and economic success. Other than that, it’s all good!<\/p>\n
Our plan of attack is to explain (1)\u00a0who is in Kotkin’s New Ruling Class (technology oligarchs and Clerisy); (2) what do they believe (Gentry Liberalism and the Technology Religion); (3) the effects of Gentry Liberalism\/Technology Religion on his “embattled Yeoman class”; (4) and the geographical implications of\u00a0Gentry Liberalism\/Technology Religion. Sprinked, sorry saturated, throughout each section I will detail how all this affect current economic development strategies. In the end, of course, I’ll try to wrap it up and explain why I believe Kotkin’s New Ruling Class is a very significant addition to our literature–although, I suspect, most will see the book as a heresy. That is why the article uses Martin Luther as its metaphor.<\/p>\n
The 95 Theses: Kotkin’s New Class Order<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/800px-Wittenberg_Thesentuer_Schlosskirche-95-Theses1-224x300.jpg\")
<\/a>The church door at Wittenberg<\/p><\/div>\n
To understand the new order, one must first\u00a0explain the old one. For Kotkin the old order\/ruling class culture rested upon a capitalist society which valued hard work and\u00a0perseverance as the qualities which led to personal\u00a0achievement and economic\u00a0class mobility. This now out-of-favor Protestant ethic, made America the greatest nation on earth, the beacon of freedom–and for over two centuries produced a material economy and political stability which no other nation could match. In this old society inequality existed, but it was a problem that could be corrected through honest sustained work, resilience, personal character, and a can-do attitude. Sounds corny, no doubt, to many readers–but I confess, I’m a sucker–I believed, and I still do.<\/p>\n
For\u00a0Kotkin the old\u00a0values, while\u00a0not without their faults,\u00a0 exercised a commanding influence over\u00a0our culture until a couple of decades ago.\u00a0Our culture until then was aspirational and aspirations could be satisfied\u00a0through hard work, character and resilience and\u00a0attainable socio-economic mobility. Upward mobility which mitigated societal and economic inequality was “not only possible, but normative” (p .1). Socio-economic mobility ensured that inequality was kept in check, the economy grew, families\u00a0raised their children,\u00a0and we avoided a good deal of social unrest, anomie,\u00a0and revolution. Not so much anymore!<\/p>\n
We are losing those values as we have evolved into a new class order reflective of the world view of the New Ruling Class. The great majority of contemporary Americans, he feels, no longer believe they can personally be successful, and that their children will do more poorly than they. Yes, Virginia–there is no Santa Claus.\u00a0As a workers, we are less aspirational, less career-focused, and more inclined to believe the future, both personal and collective, is negative. \u00a0Why? The crushing reality, Kotkin asserts, is that inequality has increased over the last decades of the twentieth century making fatalism more credible.<\/p>\n
In ways not seen since the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class–what I call the progressive Clerisy–that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate (the Catholic Church) in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science. An alliance of upper-level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy for all their concerns about inequality have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street. As the modern Clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment. (Kotkin, Daily Beast: 11\/12\/2014)<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWages at best have stagnated, and for many declined so today our employed overall enjoy less purchasing power than their fathers, and probably grandfathers. Jobs and occupations disappear like there was a job-eating pac-man gorging itself on our economic system. Families break up, children live in one-parent households; young people cannot settle down, but live in a peter pan world instead. The system devised by the New Ruling Class has not delivered social and economic mobility–and now many believe we were sold out by a system that favored only a chosen few.<\/p>\n
![\"Max](\"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Max_Weber_18942-224x300.jpg\")
<\/a>Max Weber<\/p><\/div>\n
For those old enough to remember, Kotkin is following in the footsteps of sociologists such as Max Weber (<\/span>The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism<\/em><\/strong>) and \u00a0C. Wright Mills (<\/span>The Power Elite<\/em><\/strong>). Weber was focused on the role of culture and the economic system and Mills studied how the various elites came together to dominate society, culture and government. <\/span><\/p>\nThe people Kotkin calls Oligarchs are the elites who control\/operate the major institutions\/media\/key private companies and governments. The Oligarchs make the decisions which shape\u00a0the day to day affairs of our lives. \u00a0They offer excitement and hope for the future in the form of driverless cars, thin pink smart phones, and drones to deliver your medical marijuana. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFor Kotkin, the critical page-turning factors which allowed all this to happen \u00a0are technology, specifically the Internet, and the synergistic alliance of technology companies, with the media, celebrities and intellectuals who, having amassed such power and dominance over society and the economy have joined with government bureaucrats\/politicians to provide the financial and policy wherewithal to make the new culture work.. Without any conscious plan or conspiracy a new culture has been created over the last decade or two. That culture\u00a0is primarily responsible for\u00a0our stagnation of income, loss of job opportunities, destruction of our families, and the degradation of our personal resilience and capacity to achieve.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\nValley of the Oligarch and the New Clerisy<\/strong><\/p>\nKotkin begins by detailing the rise of a new type of private business elite, the post-industrial technology elites: such as Gates, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Brin & Page, \u00a0Bezos, Downey, and Jobs (CEOs\/Owners of Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, Google, Amazon-Washington Post, Twitter, and Apple). They are “big data”, “the social media” and “the cloud”. Together they dominate the Internet. \u00a0They are the tip of a technology industry iceberg which intersects banking\/finance, business logistics\/operation\/sales\/management, entertainment and social relationships, and political and policy information, and “get-out-the-vote electioneering”.<\/p>\n
These multi-billionaire technology business elites are not comparable with the old industrial\/service sector elites like Carnegie, Henry Ford, and the nameless CEOs who operated\/dominated American industry through the 1980’s or so (the ones that C. Wright Mills wrote about). The old-style CEOs led companies\u00a0composed of\u00a0literally hundreds of thousands of workers and managers. They had facilities in nearly every state and in many countries. They were the head of large bureaucracies and needed resources, logistics and raw materials from thousands of other firms which were beyond their control. Mostly their workers were unionized.<\/p>\n
Many of these corporations are still with us today; for example, Wal-Mart\u00a0with 1.4 MILLION U.S.\u00a0employees, General Motors over 2 Million, McDonald’s about 1.9 million. They are found in each\u00a0 and every city and most rural areas of the nation. These non-technology\u00a0workers are the core of America’s middle class, its middle management, franchise small business ownership, and the cream of its unionized\u00a0working\u00a0class.\u00a0However powerful, they were within their own organizations, these old-style corporate elites\u00a0were checked and constrained\u00a0by organizations and people whom the elites needed in order to make their products. They could\u00a0affect government, but they never came close to controlling it unlike the new oligarchs.<\/p>\n
Not so the present-day\u00a0technology Oligarchs.<\/strong><\/p>\nEverything today, at some point, and in some way, goes through the Internet. Dating, checking accounts, advertising, reading material and literature, clash of Clans, Candy Crush and music, watching films\/TV, getting a cab, getting driving directions, credit cards, paying bills, even porn, the electrical grid and national security. Through the Internet, the technology elites define your personal identity and can “track” a lot of what you do, and sell that data to someone who can sell stuff to you. Wal-Mart or General Motors never controlled these activities! But together the new technology oligarchs do! They control the Internet.\u00a0Kotkin\u00a0asserts “they (Oligarchs) depend on mass consumerism,<\/em> [they] base their fortunes primarily on the sale of essentially ephemeral goods: media, advertising and entertainment<\/em> (p. 7).<\/p>\nBut despite their immense power, these new companies are quite small, with a relatively small, homogeneous, non-unionized workforce concentrated in a few favored urban centers (see Enrico Moretti, the New Geography of Jobs<\/strong><\/a>). Google has about 50,000 employees, Amazon has about 110,000 each in a relative handful of locations–principally California, Pacific Northwest\u00a0and Silicon Valley.\u00a0 The technology companies build their stuff overseas using low-wage Asian workers\u00a0and their suppliers are silenced by contracts, patents,\u00a0and non-compete clauses more crushing than any Wal-Mart contract. They control their supply chains and they distribute their final product over the Web-bypassing transportation logistics.\u00a0They transport their elite workers from their home to work in\u00a0self-contained,\u00a0window-darkened buses.<\/p>\nThe technology companies interact, and according to Kotkin\u00a0are an “American Keiretsu” \u00a0(a combination of intertwined big corporation hierarchies) with access to their unique forms of capital (venture capital), powerful links to the media (p. 31), and a sharing of key employees. They buy each other’s companies with cash derived from their operations. They are largely insulated from our financial system. Kotkin says\u00a0this new technology business elite is “the apotheosis of economic centralization”. Their reach is global. If so, they make C. Wright Mill’s power elite’s look like amateurs.<\/p>\n
![\"120px-Keiretsu.svg\"](\"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/120px-Keiretsu.svg_.png\")
<\/a>Japanese symbol for Keiretsu<\/p><\/div>\n
Technology Oligarchs are only one element of Kotkin’s new ruling class. Most interestingly, Kotkin\u00a0describes a new “ascendant group”, composed of academic elites, media and the nonprofit sector which have joined with the technology Oligarchs. He calls them “the Clerisy<\/strong><\/em>” (don’t ask where he got the name–just go with it). “The power of the Clerisy stems primarily not from money or control of technology, but from persuading, instructing, and regulating the rest of society. <\/em><\/p>\nKotkin argues the Clerisy play an identical role to that the Catholic Church exercised in medieval society (that’s where he got the name; the linkage with religion\/Catholic Church is sure to drive secular elites nuts). Anyway, embracing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of Clerisy as “bearers of the highest ideals of society, charged in part with transmitting them to the less enlightened orders<\/em>“, maintaining the social order, advocating for a\u00a0noblesse oblige<\/em>\u00a0to “mitigate the worst impacts of the new economic order<\/em>”\u00a0often through philanthropic giving (pp. 45-46).\u00a0<\/em>The Clerisy include the “creative elite” <\/em>and constitute \u00a0today’s\u00a0“real college of cardinals<\/em>—the Academic State”<\/em>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nThis has particular impact given that the vast majority of the Clerisy are increasingly uniform in their worldview, especially in political matters, … environmental issues, and their social values<\/em>” (p. 8). “Educated along similar ideological lines at major universities, the Clerisy is concentrated in very ‘progressive’, albeit rich places<\/em>“. Citing \u00a0Walter Russell Mead to support his contention, Kotkin asserts the Clerisy live “within a cocoon, thoroughly absorbed and internalized … \u00a0[by]\u00a0<\/em>a set of beliefs and behavioral norms” that follow the standard upper-middle-class gentry American set of progressive ideas<\/em>” (p. 47).<\/p>\nAccordingly, the\u00a0Clerisy “distill for the masses today’s distinctly secular ‘truths’ \u00a0on a range of issues, including economics, justice, race, gender, and the environment<\/em>” (p. 47). The truths to be transmitted are discerned from science\/math, research methodologies and data-driven\u00a0analysis (“technocratic, data-driven solutions to complex social problems<\/em>“, p. 62). \u00a0The transmission of these secular truths is the responsibility of the media which on the whole have wholeheartedly embraced membership in the Clerisy. “(T)he traditional mainstream media like to proclaim their ‘objectivity’, but in practice they maintain the basic Clerical bias that follows a fairly predictable progressive line<\/em>” (p. 59).<\/em><\/p>\nThe Clerisy share with the technology elite a set of values and attitudes which unites the New Class.\u00a0Kotkin\u00a0labels this politically-correct\u00a0cultural paradigm, \u00a0the “Endgame–the Technological Religion<\/em>” (p. 63).\u00a0 The interpretation of this Technological Religion is provided to non-elites\u00a0by \u00a0“guru-type academics”, respected print-broadcast-blog media and network managers, \u00a0top scientists, famous “innovative entrepreneurs”, and, of course,\u00a0popular celebrities.\u00a0 These fine folk\u00a0assume the role of “supreme clerics<\/em>” in the New Class. Technological Religion, derived from science, technology and math, is “the domain of specialists, whose knowledge cannot be widely shared, and is difficult for laymen to challenge<\/em>“. the Technological Religion encourages ” …\u00a0particular lifestyles that are approved by Clerisy and sanctified as reflecting the values of science<\/em>” (p. 63).<\/p>\nTechnological sophistication, \u00a0advanced education, specialized skills, innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship and all the gadgets that go with them are the only serious sources of economic and personal growth in the modern economy. But for Kotkin, the obsession on technology serves other interests as well: “Technology essentially supplants divinity [i.e. God], community, and family as the driving force of history”–technology inevitably creates “a relentlessly improved society, powered and shaped by ever more intrusive technology … dominated by those who design or control them<\/em>” (p. 64).<\/p>\n![\"Highclere](\"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Highclere_Castle-aka-Downtown-Abbey-300x225.jpg\")
<\/a>Highclere Castle aka Downtown Abbey<\/p><\/div>\n
The rise of the Clerisy (and the informal cooperation of its member-elements) in the last twenty years or so has made them “a huge center of power and influence”. Together, these two separate sets of elites (technology Oligarchs and the Clerisy) have coalesced around a political\u00a0philosophy\/ideology which Kotkin calls “Gentry Liberalism<\/em>“. Gentry Liberalism in Kotkin’s mind is fairly similar to “progressive politics”–the Democratic Party’s left wing.<\/p>\nHe (Kotkin) argues that Gentry Liberalism, despite its middle class-populist rhetoric, reflects the values and career aspirations of upper middle class and the affluent. Above all, it is environmentally conscious and it has increasingly defined the\u00a0environment in terms of climate change and limited growth. This is where the overlap with economic development becomes especially noticeable.<\/p>\n
Gentry Liberalism overlaps with economic development practice \u00a0in two related ways: (1) the definition of economic growth, hitherto the principal goal of economic development, has been changed to “sustainable” growth (to be discussed later in the below “Proletarianism) and (2) innovation\/technology\/information\/education \u00a0and green\/alternative energy sectors as the only legitimate targets of economic development initiatives.<\/p>\n
Kotkin believes the common thread between the tech Oligarchs and the Clerisy are these shared conceptions of economic growth which rely upon \u00a0sustainability and technology and information\u00a0sectors, higher education, and environmentally green and alternative energy firms.\u00a0Kotkin labels the semi-exclusive focus on politically-correct sectors as the “Technology Religion”.\u00a0The Technology Religion \u00a0is the root, he believes, of much of our current economic woes: slow growth, structural employment and inequality. Gentry Liberalism, with its semi-exclusive focus on the Technology Religion “hurts most those ‘tangible’ industries, such as energy, manufacturing, logistics, and housing<\/em>“–the industries that “employ blue-collar workers<\/em>” (pp. 12-13). In essence, the Technology Religion achieve success through its destruction of the old economy in which most middle and working class work.<\/p>\nProletarianism of the Middle Class, The Embattled Yeomanry: Is Mass Serfdom the Future?<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Medieval](\"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Reeve_and_Serfs-300x172.jpg\")
<\/a>Medieval Serfs laboring to support their overlords<\/p><\/div>\n
Why are the old, non-technological\/non-green industries undesirable? The answer lies in the redefinition of economic growth made by Gentry Liberals. Tossing aside the beliefs of old-style Progressives to save capitalism by reforming it, new Gentry Liberals call for a new economy centered around protection of the environment to avoid climate change–which is best accomplished by restricting, if not reducing economic growth itself. We have move into an “era of limits” in which “protecting the environment was no longer a matter of improving technology or industrial methods to minimize physical impacts associated with growth; instead the very operation of the economy was the evil that must be restrained<\/em>” (p. 136). Or as Christopher Lasch wrote in 1991. “The discovery of the Earth’s ecology will no longer sustain an indefinite expansion of productive forces deals the final blow to the belief in progress<\/em>“.<\/p>\nThis translates into the Gentry Liberal belief “that economic growth constitutes more of a threat than a benefit to society. The traditional focus on enhancing social [and economic] mobility and opportunity as core progressive values has been supplanted by a stronger emphasis on limiting impacts on the environment, even at the expense of broad social uplift<\/em>” (pp. 136-137). Indeed, Kotkin cites John Holdren, President Obama’s Science Advisor who advocates “de-development<\/em>” rather than growth as the nation’s economic priority” (p. 137). “For many in the Clerisy … restrain[ing] consumption and production in the name of sustainability is an overwhelming ambition<\/em>” (p. 138). In essence the new definition of sustainable economic growth both reflects the world view of the technology elite, academics, the media, and adherents of the Technology Religion, but it also provides policy focus and profits to to the technology firms and their supporters.<\/p>\nGentry Liberal growth contrasts with Kotkin’s more traditional definition of economic growth. Kotkin asserts that traditional economic growth focused on creating many \u00a0jobs that allowed working\/middle class to achieve sufficient wealth over time so that they could achieve social and economic mobility. Home ownership was key to that socio-economic mobility. Gentry Liberal growth, instead, focuses on industries that usually create fewer jobs, but are “sustainable” and do not hurt the environment . That is why the sectors associated with Technology Religion have become the near-exclusive focus of Gentry Liberals.<\/p>\n
But\u00a0Gentry Liberalism’s redefinition of economic growth has devastated the Yeoman class, composed of the poor, minorities, the working class, private-sector unionized workers, franchise owners who are employees of the non-technology old-style industries. These former sectors, once the pillars, the foundation of the American economy are now in “secular retreat”–and their management and workers are being “proletarianized” [pushed into the working class]. The Yeomanry thus became the vortex of wage and income stagnation, and job insecurity.<\/p>\n
Crushed by the Financial Crisis, their capital frozen in place with illiquid homes, the Yeoman-now proletariat–are increasingly unwilling or unable to start new companies. New business formation is further penalized by environmental, health care, and living wage (minimum wage) legislation which are also key tenets of Gentry Liberalism. Instead, the Yeomen are being shunted off to job training and higher education for which they are, at best, ill-prepared, and for the most part uncomfortable, so they become qualified for “the correct” jobs and careers.<\/p>\n
The chronic inability of the Yeoman class to qualify and effectively compete for Technology Religion employment has resulted in structural unemployment, wage stagnation, inequality, and slow economic growth. From an economic developer perspective, this is a hurricane-force headwind against which our innovation, entrepreneurial, business formation strategies must struggle. To the extent, economic developers succeed in these strategies, they hollow out the economy, and crush the working\/middle class still more because they result in a few, elite jobs for the relatively highly educated. Kotkin, however, advocates for economic development that\u00a0“…\u00a0allows for the possibility of greater uplift for the middle and working class without the imposition of politically infeasible … and ineffective widespread redistribution policies. … It is not enough merely to place the blame on ‘the top one percent’ … Instead, we must look for ways to shift the benefits of growth away from the current [financial and technological hegemons] and toward those involved in broad array of productive enterprise”<\/em>\u00a0(p. 139).<\/p>\nIn past decades the centerpiece of Yeoman financial stability, home ownership, provided the avenue for personal\/family and economic mobility. But now home ownership is under attack and the Yeoman with a housing asset if often underwater or unable to sell. Indeed home ownership is attacked by Gentry Liberalism’s on a number of other fronts than financial. Gentry Liberalism’s unambiguous preference for Big City city living and for density has fostered an incredible increase in the price of housing–making it unaffordable to most. For those older Yeomen who own, steroidal housing values and paper profits combine with low millennial–first time buyer demand to drain the liquidity from the Yeoman’s property investment, thus freezing them in place in their retirement and inhibiting a natural tendency to downsize.<\/p>\n
Kotkin shudders at this. He questions the Gentry Liberal paradigm and believes it is chiefly responsible for our contemporary cultural and economic woes. In particular, he focuses on what others have described as “the hollowing out of our economy” and the Gentry Liberalism war with traditional American social and economic mobility- through new business formation and home ownership. Mobility and economic security, achieved in the past by home ownership, is now a practical impossibility. These are the factors fueling our growing inequality. He concludes with pessimism on “the prospect that more Americans should become renters, largely in apartments, represents nothing less than an attempt to reverse the class gains of the postwar (World War II) era and return us to a more stratified society<\/em>” (p. 109).<\/p>\nThe \u00a0home owning disaster is just the tip of the Yeoman-sinking iceberg. Sociological and demographic factors\u00a0 have destroyed the institutions of middle, and especially working class life–in a particular aside from a lack of social economic mobility, the Yeoman class has seen the bastion of its way of life, the family, burnt to ashes.\u00a0 The old culture relied on family; now the new culture’s stresses government subsidy and public sources of support. Yeoman families have broken under these pressures and fractured into single person households with high birthrates (illegitimacy) and low incomes. Marriage is less desirable or no longer <\/span>practicable<\/span>\u00a0in the\u00a0New Culture.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\nThe substitution of a government check for the family, important to Gentry Liberals, has not gone unquestioned. \u00a0Kotkin approvingly quotes Robert Samuelson who has noted that “<\/span>the safety net has rescued millions from the worst abject poverty, but has proved ‘a failure as an engine of self-improvement<\/em>‘” (p. 85). In other words, For Kotkin, Gentry Liberal government assistance, is a mixed blessing indeed–<\/span>“… <\/span>large swaths of what might have once been parts of the Yeoman class, both Anglo and minorities, may become more like the traditional poor, whether in the inner city or outside, living paycheck to paycheck. Their descendants may enjoy far fewer opportunities for property ownership, or any form of economic independence …. The devolution of society under a slow-growth regime–or growth that benefits essentially the most well-placed and affluent citizens suggests a further intensification of class divides. Unless broadly based economic growth is restored, large parts of the emergent middle class … are in danger of turning into something of a permanent class of low-wage proletarians, with some falling into the lumpen proletariat or underclass<\/em>” (p. 85).<\/span><\/p>\n
Using metaphors gleaned from the medieval world, Kotkin, the iconoclastic but extraordinarily insightful \u00a0master of Curmudgeons, describes a new ruling class which seems to dominate much of contemporary America. What has this got to do with economic development, you ask? Plenty! The New Class, according to Kotkin, follows its own definition of economic growth, and make no mistake, it ain’t your father’s definition of economic growth. Kotkin’s critique of this New Class and its devastating consequences to our society and economy delivers a powerful blow to several prominent economic development strategies. \u00a0Anyone in economic development can’t ignore this book–no more than the Pope could ignore the Protestant Reformation.<\/p>\n
By way of background, Luther, a Catholic priest, fed up with abuses and misrule by Catholic theocratic ruling elites, nailed a list of ninety-five abuses to the door of his church. This set in motion the Protestant Reformation. \u00a0In his famous “Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”<\/strong> (1517) Luther had attacked the pillars of the medieval society, economy and culture by\u00a0protesting key policies of the Catholic Church (nepotism, indulgences, simony and usury). The net effect of these key policies was that they supported the Catholic theocratic system which parasitically\u00a0lived \u00a0off the poor and the working\/middle class (Yeoman) Catholics.<\/p>\n Kotkin embraces this medieval system as a metaphor for a new American ruling system which has come into power over the last decade or two. For Kotkin, the overriding abuse is that the economic development policies pursued by this New Ruling Class have hollowed out the American middle\/working class and our workforce. Who is the New Ruling Class? Composed of a technological elite drawn from \u00a0the huge technology companies and a “Clerisy” (academia, the media, and Hollywood celebrities), the New Ruling Class has connived with government bureaucrats and politicians to pursue a progressive ideology, he calls “Gentry Liberalism”.<\/p>\n Gentry Liberalism has virtually destroyed our long-standing traditional American culture and replaced it with a new destructive culture suitable only to satisfy the needs, the profits, and the world view of the technological oligarchs\/Clerisy. \u00a0Because of this new culture, a slow to no-growth economy has caused a steroidal inequality in America, destroyed the American dream of social and economic mobility, and crushed the working and middle classes which are dependent on economic growth for their personal and economic success. Other than that, it’s all good!<\/p>\n Our plan of attack is to explain (1)\u00a0who is in Kotkin’s New Ruling Class (technology oligarchs and Clerisy); (2) what do they believe (Gentry Liberalism and the Technology Religion); (3) the effects of Gentry Liberalism\/Technology Religion on his “embattled Yeoman class”; (4) and the geographical implications of\u00a0Gentry Liberalism\/Technology Religion. Sprinked, sorry saturated, throughout each section I will detail how all this affect current economic development strategies. In the end, of course, I’ll try to wrap it up and explain why I believe Kotkin’s New Ruling Class is a very significant addition to our literature–although, I suspect, most will see the book as a heresy. That is why the article uses Martin Luther as its metaphor.<\/p>\n The 95 Theses: Kotkin’s New Class Order<\/strong><\/p>\n The church door at Wittenberg<\/p><\/div>\n To understand the new order, one must first\u00a0explain the old one. For Kotkin the old order\/ruling class culture rested upon a capitalist society which valued hard work and\u00a0perseverance as the qualities which led to personal\u00a0achievement and economic\u00a0class mobility. This now out-of-favor Protestant ethic, made America the greatest nation on earth, the beacon of freedom–and for over two centuries produced a material economy and political stability which no other nation could match. In this old society inequality existed, but it was a problem that could be corrected through honest sustained work, resilience, personal character, and a can-do attitude. Sounds corny, no doubt, to many readers–but I confess, I’m a sucker–I believed, and I still do.<\/p>\n For\u00a0Kotkin the old\u00a0values, while\u00a0not without their faults,\u00a0 exercised a commanding influence over\u00a0our culture until a couple of decades ago.\u00a0Our culture until then was aspirational and aspirations could be satisfied\u00a0through hard work, character and resilience and\u00a0attainable socio-economic mobility. Upward mobility which mitigated societal and economic inequality was “not only possible, but normative” (p .1). Socio-economic mobility ensured that inequality was kept in check, the economy grew, families\u00a0raised their children,\u00a0and we avoided a good deal of social unrest, anomie,\u00a0and revolution. Not so much anymore!<\/p>\n We are losing those values as we have evolved into a new class order reflective of the world view of the New Ruling Class. The great majority of contemporary Americans, he feels, no longer believe they can personally be successful, and that their children will do more poorly than they. Yes, Virginia–there is no Santa Claus.\u00a0As a workers, we are less aspirational, less career-focused, and more inclined to believe the future, both personal and collective, is negative. \u00a0Why? The crushing reality, Kotkin asserts, is that inequality has increased over the last decades of the twentieth century making fatalism more credible.<\/p>\n In ways not seen since the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class–what I call the progressive Clerisy–that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate (the Catholic Church) in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science. An alliance of upper-level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy for all their concerns about inequality have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street. As the modern Clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment. (Kotkin, Daily Beast: 11\/12\/2014)<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Wages at best have stagnated, and for many declined so today our employed overall enjoy less purchasing power than their fathers, and probably grandfathers. Jobs and occupations disappear like there was a job-eating pac-man gorging itself on our economic system. Families break up, children live in one-parent households; young people cannot settle down, but live in a peter pan world instead. The system devised by the New Ruling Class has not delivered social and economic mobility–and now many believe we were sold out by a system that favored only a chosen few.<\/p>\n Max Weber<\/p><\/div>\n For those old enough to remember, Kotkin is following in the footsteps of sociologists such as Max Weber (<\/span>The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism<\/em><\/strong>) and \u00a0C. Wright Mills (<\/span>The Power Elite<\/em><\/strong>). Weber was focused on the role of culture and the economic system and Mills studied how the various elites came together to dominate society, culture and government. <\/span><\/p>\n The people Kotkin calls Oligarchs are the elites who control\/operate the major institutions\/media\/key private companies and governments. The Oligarchs make the decisions which shape\u00a0the day to day affairs of our lives. \u00a0They offer excitement and hope for the future in the form of driverless cars, thin pink smart phones, and drones to deliver your medical marijuana. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For Kotkin, the critical page-turning factors which allowed all this to happen \u00a0are technology, specifically the Internet, and the synergistic alliance of technology companies, with the media, celebrities and intellectuals who, having amassed such power and dominance over society and the economy have joined with government bureaucrats\/politicians to provide the financial and policy wherewithal to make the new culture work.. Without any conscious plan or conspiracy a new culture has been created over the last decade or two. That culture\u00a0is primarily responsible for\u00a0our stagnation of income, loss of job opportunities, destruction of our families, and the degradation of our personal resilience and capacity to achieve.<\/span> Valley of the Oligarch and the New Clerisy<\/strong><\/p>\n Kotkin begins by detailing the rise of a new type of private business elite, the post-industrial technology elites: such as Gates, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Brin & Page, \u00a0Bezos, Downey, and Jobs (CEOs\/Owners of Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, Google, Amazon-Washington Post, Twitter, and Apple). They are “big data”, “the social media” and “the cloud”. Together they dominate the Internet. \u00a0They are the tip of a technology industry iceberg which intersects banking\/finance, business logistics\/operation\/sales\/management, entertainment and social relationships, and political and policy information, and “get-out-the-vote electioneering”.<\/p>\n These multi-billionaire technology business elites are not comparable with the old industrial\/service sector elites like Carnegie, Henry Ford, and the nameless CEOs who operated\/dominated American industry through the 1980’s or so (the ones that C. Wright Mills wrote about). The old-style CEOs led companies\u00a0composed of\u00a0literally hundreds of thousands of workers and managers. They had facilities in nearly every state and in many countries. They were the head of large bureaucracies and needed resources, logistics and raw materials from thousands of other firms which were beyond their control. Mostly their workers were unionized.<\/p>\n Many of these corporations are still with us today; for example, Wal-Mart\u00a0with 1.4 MILLION U.S.\u00a0employees, General Motors over 2 Million, McDonald’s about 1.9 million. They are found in each\u00a0 and every city and most rural areas of the nation. These non-technology\u00a0workers are the core of America’s middle class, its middle management, franchise small business ownership, and the cream of its unionized\u00a0working\u00a0class.\u00a0However powerful, they were within their own organizations, these old-style corporate elites\u00a0were checked and constrained\u00a0by organizations and people whom the elites needed in order to make their products. They could\u00a0affect government, but they never came close to controlling it unlike the new oligarchs.<\/p>\n Not so the present-day\u00a0technology Oligarchs.<\/strong><\/p>\n Everything today, at some point, and in some way, goes through the Internet. Dating, checking accounts, advertising, reading material and literature, clash of Clans, Candy Crush and music, watching films\/TV, getting a cab, getting driving directions, credit cards, paying bills, even porn, the electrical grid and national security. Through the Internet, the technology elites define your personal identity and can “track” a lot of what you do, and sell that data to someone who can sell stuff to you. Wal-Mart or General Motors never controlled these activities! But together the new technology oligarchs do! They control the Internet.\u00a0Kotkin\u00a0asserts “they (Oligarchs) depend on mass consumerism,<\/em> [they] base their fortunes primarily on the sale of essentially ephemeral goods: media, advertising and entertainment<\/em> (p. 7).<\/p>\n But despite their immense power, these new companies are quite small, with a relatively small, homogeneous, non-unionized workforce concentrated in a few favored urban centers (see Enrico Moretti, the New Geography of Jobs<\/strong><\/a>). Google has about 50,000 employees, Amazon has about 110,000 each in a relative handful of locations–principally California, Pacific Northwest\u00a0and Silicon Valley.\u00a0 The technology companies build their stuff overseas using low-wage Asian workers\u00a0and their suppliers are silenced by contracts, patents,\u00a0and non-compete clauses more crushing than any Wal-Mart contract. They control their supply chains and they distribute their final product over the Web-bypassing transportation logistics.\u00a0They transport their elite workers from their home to work in\u00a0self-contained,\u00a0window-darkened buses.<\/p>\n The technology companies interact, and according to Kotkin\u00a0are an “American Keiretsu” \u00a0(a combination of intertwined big corporation hierarchies) with access to their unique forms of capital (venture capital), powerful links to the media (p. 31), and a sharing of key employees. They buy each other’s companies with cash derived from their operations. They are largely insulated from our financial system. Kotkin says\u00a0this new technology business elite is “the apotheosis of economic centralization”. Their reach is global. If so, they make C. Wright Mill’s power elite’s look like amateurs.<\/p>\n Japanese symbol for Keiretsu<\/p><\/div>\n Technology Oligarchs are only one element of Kotkin’s new ruling class. Most interestingly, Kotkin\u00a0describes a new “ascendant group”, composed of academic elites, media and the nonprofit sector which have joined with the technology Oligarchs. He calls them “the Clerisy<\/strong><\/em>” (don’t ask where he got the name–just go with it). “The power of the Clerisy stems primarily not from money or control of technology, but from persuading, instructing, and regulating the rest of society. <\/em><\/p>\n Kotkin argues the Clerisy play an identical role to that the Catholic Church exercised in medieval society (that’s where he got the name; the linkage with religion\/Catholic Church is sure to drive secular elites nuts). Anyway, embracing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of Clerisy as “bearers of the highest ideals of society, charged in part with transmitting them to the less enlightened orders<\/em>“, maintaining the social order, advocating for a\u00a0noblesse oblige<\/em>\u00a0to “mitigate the worst impacts of the new economic order<\/em>”\u00a0often through philanthropic giving (pp. 45-46).\u00a0<\/em>The Clerisy include the “creative elite” <\/em>and constitute \u00a0today’s\u00a0“real college of cardinals<\/em>—the Academic State”<\/em>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n This has particular impact given that the vast majority of the Clerisy are increasingly uniform in their worldview, especially in political matters, … environmental issues, and their social values<\/em>” (p. 8). “Educated along similar ideological lines at major universities, the Clerisy is concentrated in very ‘progressive’, albeit rich places<\/em>“. Citing \u00a0Walter Russell Mead to support his contention, Kotkin asserts the Clerisy live “within a cocoon, thoroughly absorbed and internalized … \u00a0[by]\u00a0<\/em>a set of beliefs and behavioral norms” that follow the standard upper-middle-class gentry American set of progressive ideas<\/em>” (p. 47).<\/p>\n Accordingly, the\u00a0Clerisy “distill for the masses today’s distinctly secular ‘truths’ \u00a0on a range of issues, including economics, justice, race, gender, and the environment<\/em>” (p. 47). The truths to be transmitted are discerned from science\/math, research methodologies and data-driven\u00a0analysis (“technocratic, data-driven solutions to complex social problems<\/em>“, p. 62). \u00a0The transmission of these secular truths is the responsibility of the media which on the whole have wholeheartedly embraced membership in the Clerisy. “(T)he traditional mainstream media like to proclaim their ‘objectivity’, but in practice they maintain the basic Clerical bias that follows a fairly predictable progressive line<\/em>” (p. 59).<\/em><\/p>\n The Clerisy share with the technology elite a set of values and attitudes which unites the New Class.\u00a0Kotkin\u00a0labels this politically-correct\u00a0cultural paradigm, \u00a0the “Endgame–the Technological Religion<\/em>” (p. 63).\u00a0 The interpretation of this Technological Religion is provided to non-elites\u00a0by \u00a0“guru-type academics”, respected print-broadcast-blog media and network managers, \u00a0top scientists, famous “innovative entrepreneurs”, and, of course,\u00a0popular celebrities.\u00a0 These fine folk\u00a0assume the role of “supreme clerics<\/em>” in the New Class. Technological Religion, derived from science, technology and math, is “the domain of specialists, whose knowledge cannot be widely shared, and is difficult for laymen to challenge<\/em>“. the Technological Religion encourages ” …\u00a0particular lifestyles that are approved by Clerisy and sanctified as reflecting the values of science<\/em>” (p. 63).<\/p>\n Technological sophistication, \u00a0advanced education, specialized skills, innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship and all the gadgets that go with them are the only serious sources of economic and personal growth in the modern economy. But for Kotkin, the obsession on technology serves other interests as well: “Technology essentially supplants divinity [i.e. God], community, and family as the driving force of history”–technology inevitably creates “a relentlessly improved society, powered and shaped by ever more intrusive technology … dominated by those who design or control them<\/em>” (p. 64).<\/p>\n Highclere Castle aka Downtown Abbey<\/p><\/div>\n The rise of the Clerisy (and the informal cooperation of its member-elements) in the last twenty years or so has made them “a huge center of power and influence”. Together, these two separate sets of elites (technology Oligarchs and the Clerisy) have coalesced around a political\u00a0philosophy\/ideology which Kotkin calls “Gentry Liberalism<\/em>“. Gentry Liberalism in Kotkin’s mind is fairly similar to “progressive politics”–the Democratic Party’s left wing.<\/p>\n He (Kotkin) argues that Gentry Liberalism, despite its middle class-populist rhetoric, reflects the values and career aspirations of upper middle class and the affluent. Above all, it is environmentally conscious and it has increasingly defined the\u00a0environment in terms of climate change and limited growth. This is where the overlap with economic development becomes especially noticeable.<\/p>\n Gentry Liberalism overlaps with economic development practice \u00a0in two related ways: (1) the definition of economic growth, hitherto the principal goal of economic development, has been changed to “sustainable” growth (to be discussed later in the below “Proletarianism) and (2) innovation\/technology\/information\/education \u00a0and green\/alternative energy sectors as the only legitimate targets of economic development initiatives.<\/p>\n Kotkin believes the common thread between the tech Oligarchs and the Clerisy are these shared conceptions of economic growth which rely upon \u00a0sustainability and technology and information\u00a0sectors, higher education, and environmentally green and alternative energy firms.\u00a0Kotkin labels the semi-exclusive focus on politically-correct sectors as the “Technology Religion”.\u00a0The Technology Religion \u00a0is the root, he believes, of much of our current economic woes: slow growth, structural employment and inequality. Gentry Liberalism, with its semi-exclusive focus on the Technology Religion “hurts most those ‘tangible’ industries, such as energy, manufacturing, logistics, and housing<\/em>“–the industries that “employ blue-collar workers<\/em>” (pp. 12-13). In essence, the Technology Religion achieve success through its destruction of the old economy in which most middle and working class work.<\/p>\n Proletarianism of the Middle Class, The Embattled Yeomanry: Is Mass Serfdom the Future?<\/strong><\/p>\n Medieval Serfs laboring to support their overlords<\/p><\/div>\n Why are the old, non-technological\/non-green industries undesirable? The answer lies in the redefinition of economic growth made by Gentry Liberals. Tossing aside the beliefs of old-style Progressives to save capitalism by reforming it, new Gentry Liberals call for a new economy centered around protection of the environment to avoid climate change–which is best accomplished by restricting, if not reducing economic growth itself. We have move into an “era of limits” in which “protecting the environment was no longer a matter of improving technology or industrial methods to minimize physical impacts associated with growth; instead the very operation of the economy was the evil that must be restrained<\/em>” (p. 136). Or as Christopher Lasch wrote in 1991. “The discovery of the Earth’s ecology will no longer sustain an indefinite expansion of productive forces deals the final blow to the belief in progress<\/em>“.<\/p>\n This translates into the Gentry Liberal belief “that economic growth constitutes more of a threat than a benefit to society. The traditional focus on enhancing social [and economic] mobility and opportunity as core progressive values has been supplanted by a stronger emphasis on limiting impacts on the environment, even at the expense of broad social uplift<\/em>” (pp. 136-137). Indeed, Kotkin cites John Holdren, President Obama’s Science Advisor who advocates “de-development<\/em>” rather than growth as the nation’s economic priority” (p. 137). “For many in the Clerisy … restrain[ing] consumption and production in the name of sustainability is an overwhelming ambition<\/em>” (p. 138). In essence the new definition of sustainable economic growth both reflects the world view of the technology elite, academics, the media, and adherents of the Technology Religion, but it also provides policy focus and profits to to the technology firms and their supporters.<\/p>\n Gentry Liberal growth contrasts with Kotkin’s more traditional definition of economic growth. Kotkin asserts that traditional economic growth focused on creating many \u00a0jobs that allowed working\/middle class to achieve sufficient wealth over time so that they could achieve social and economic mobility. Home ownership was key to that socio-economic mobility. Gentry Liberal growth, instead, focuses on industries that usually create fewer jobs, but are “sustainable” and do not hurt the environment . That is why the sectors associated with Technology Religion have become the near-exclusive focus of Gentry Liberals.<\/p>\n But\u00a0Gentry Liberalism’s redefinition of economic growth has devastated the Yeoman class, composed of the poor, minorities, the working class, private-sector unionized workers, franchise owners who are employees of the non-technology old-style industries. These former sectors, once the pillars, the foundation of the American economy are now in “secular retreat”–and their management and workers are being “proletarianized” [pushed into the working class]. The Yeomanry thus became the vortex of wage and income stagnation, and job insecurity.<\/p>\n Crushed by the Financial Crisis, their capital frozen in place with illiquid homes, the Yeoman-now proletariat–are increasingly unwilling or unable to start new companies. New business formation is further penalized by environmental, health care, and living wage (minimum wage) legislation which are also key tenets of Gentry Liberalism. Instead, the Yeomen are being shunted off to job training and higher education for which they are, at best, ill-prepared, and for the most part uncomfortable, so they become qualified for “the correct” jobs and careers.<\/p>\n The chronic inability of the Yeoman class to qualify and effectively compete for Technology Religion employment has resulted in structural unemployment, wage stagnation, inequality, and slow economic growth. From an economic developer perspective, this is a hurricane-force headwind against which our innovation, entrepreneurial, business formation strategies must struggle. To the extent, economic developers succeed in these strategies, they hollow out the economy, and crush the working\/middle class still more because they result in a few, elite jobs for the relatively highly educated. Kotkin, however, advocates for economic development that\u00a0“…\u00a0allows for the possibility of greater uplift for the middle and working class without the imposition of politically infeasible … and ineffective widespread redistribution policies. … It is not enough merely to place the blame on ‘the top one percent’ … Instead, we must look for ways to shift the benefits of growth away from the current [financial and technological hegemons] and toward those involved in broad array of productive enterprise”<\/em>\u00a0(p. 139).<\/p>\n In past decades the centerpiece of Yeoman financial stability, home ownership, provided the avenue for personal\/family and economic mobility. But now home ownership is under attack and the Yeoman with a housing asset if often underwater or unable to sell. Indeed home ownership is attacked by Gentry Liberalism’s on a number of other fronts than financial. Gentry Liberalism’s unambiguous preference for Big City city living and for density has fostered an incredible increase in the price of housing–making it unaffordable to most. For those older Yeomen who own, steroidal housing values and paper profits combine with low millennial–first time buyer demand to drain the liquidity from the Yeoman’s property investment, thus freezing them in place in their retirement and inhibiting a natural tendency to downsize.<\/p>\n Kotkin shudders at this. He questions the Gentry Liberal paradigm and believes it is chiefly responsible for our contemporary cultural and economic woes. In particular, he focuses on what others have described as “the hollowing out of our economy” and the Gentry Liberalism war with traditional American social and economic mobility- through new business formation and home ownership. Mobility and economic security, achieved in the past by home ownership, is now a practical impossibility. These are the factors fueling our growing inequality. He concludes with pessimism on “the prospect that more Americans should become renters, largely in apartments, represents nothing less than an attempt to reverse the class gains of the postwar (World War II) era and return us to a more stratified society<\/em>” (p. 109).<\/p>\n The \u00a0home owning disaster is just the tip of the Yeoman-sinking iceberg. Sociological and demographic factors\u00a0 have destroyed the institutions of middle, and especially working class life–in a particular aside from a lack of social economic mobility, the Yeoman class has seen the bastion of its way of life, the family, burnt to ashes.\u00a0 The old culture relied on family; now the new culture’s stresses government subsidy and public sources of support. Yeoman families have broken under these pressures and fractured into single person households with high birthrates (illegitimacy) and low incomes. Marriage is less desirable or no longer <\/span>practicable<\/span>\u00a0in the\u00a0New Culture.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n The substitution of a government check for the family, important to Gentry Liberals, has not gone unquestioned. \u00a0Kotkin approvingly quotes Robert Samuelson who has noted that “<\/span>the safety net has rescued millions from the worst abject poverty, but has proved ‘a failure as an engine of self-improvement<\/em>‘” (p. 85). In other words, For Kotkin, Gentry Liberal government assistance, is a mixed blessing indeed–<\/span>“… <\/span>large swaths of what might have once been parts of the Yeoman class, both Anglo and minorities, may become more like the traditional poor, whether in the inner city or outside, living paycheck to paycheck. Their descendants may enjoy far fewer opportunities for property ownership, or any form of economic independence …. The devolution of society under a slow-growth regime–or growth that benefits essentially the most well-placed and affluent citizens suggests a further intensification of class divides. Unless broadly based economic growth is restored, large parts of the emergent middle class … are in danger of turning into something of a permanent class of low-wage proletarians, with some falling into the lumpen proletariat or underclass<\/em>” (p. 85).<\/span><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/800px-Wittenberg_Thesentuer_Schlosskirche-95-Theses11.jpg\")
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