![]() ![]() ![]() That pulls up wages in productivity-“adjacent” sectors. The huge increase in productivity at the most productive end of the economy generates a high-wage, high-productivity sector.Īt the margin, less productive sectors compete with the high-wage, high-productivity sector for workers. The Baumol effect (sometimes known as the Baumol cost disease ) is why a haircut in 2022 costs far more than a haircut in 1960, despite being the same service. As is all the easier to do when such costs are denied, missed, or lied about. With a fair dash of arrogant, even self-righteous, condescension directed at those genuinely disadvantaged by various changes. The “rate of change” guff is just another version of the fable of progressive innocence : nothing is ever the fault of progressives. Trump becoming the Republican Presidential nominee by some years. These patterns continue no matter which side of politics is in office. More recently, we have seen the rewriting of basic understandings of sex and gender through a trans agenda where dissent is widely treated as morally illegitimate, as well as a re-racialising of policy discourse. It is in the interests of Anywheres to suppress working-class wages, break up their communities (thereby breaking up social capital, ie their ability to organise in their own interests) and to de-legitimise any dissent from Anywhere convenience. One reason that Brexit is failing (apart from the decay in state capacity due to a civil service that is simply less capable thanks to 40 years in the EU) is that the Anywhere institutional and political establishment continues to fail to deliver border control. Anywheres overwhelmingly benefit from migration, Somewheres overwhelmingly don’t. Somewheres have reasons for their concerns. Mass migration suppresses wages by suppressing the Baumol effect *, breaks up working-class communities, and degrades working-class social capital. If Somewhere voters are deprived of the ability to use their ballot to shape migration policy (typically through some form of Anywhere political cartel), then they will begin to break for non-conventional political figures and parties. ![]() In many developed democracies - until recently - the most destabilising politics of institutional capture has been immigration. This is particularly so given the rising importance of divisions between Somewheres (those who are born, live, marry, raise children and die in a particular locality and whose connections are locality-based) and Anywheres (more mobile and educated people whose connections are not locality-based). Post-1991, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have become less and less useful, obscuring at least as much as they reveal. Put simply, institutional capture makes traditional electoral bargaining less effective. Instead, the de-stabilising of conventional centre-right politics increases the more thoroughly the politics of “non-electoral institutional capture” (to use writer Wesley Yang’s phrasing) has proceeded. Revolutionary movements in the explicit Marxian mode are a thing of the past in contemporary Western politics. ![]()
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