That DEI (women and brown people) are responsible is a constant right wing cry.
The competency crisis is a result of an economy where making money without making a product is easier than making something. We prioritized financial profits—multi generational rises in asset prices that were faster than inflation. Housing went up. Stocks went up. Private equity earned money buy buying companies, larding them up with debt, and running them into the ground. Profits were juiced by moving production offshore and engaging in regulatory and labor arbitrage.
The best profit came from playing financial games and rentierism. You didn’t have to make anything or delivery anything, you just had to find a way to squeeze money out of something by making it go up faster than inflation, or by destroying something which was already built, taking all the future value now and giving it to yourself. Even the (old) Middle Class got in on this, by buying houses when they were cheap, watching them appreciate faster than wages, then selling them when old and moving south to be have their bums wiped in cheaper southern states by brown immigrants.
Everyone wanted to make money without having to create to get it. Mostly they either wanted to get unearned money from appreciation, to destroy what others had built, or to capture a market in an oligopoly or monopoly so they could juice prices.
Meanwhile, the manufacturing floor moved to China and elsewhere. The people who knew how to make things retired, moved to other jobs, retired and eventually died.
We can’t build most things because we haven’t prioritized building things, or getting better at building things since the 70s. The eighties are where predatory capitalism took hold, and since then the whole game has been rentierism, unearned gains, predation and arbitrage.
DEI doesn’t much matter in comparison. The people running the economy for the last 45 years have been mostly white males, and that doesn’t matter either. Women or brown people would have done the same thing. Margaret Thatcher was a woman, and one of the founders of his mindset.
No one’s competent at actually doing things, except profit extraction, because our societies haven’t prioritized doing anything but extracting profit for over 45 years. Everyone who lived in a society that was about really delivering products and making things is dead or retired.
if you want a competent society again, make it so that no one can get wealthy, let alone rich, without really making something or improving people’s lives. And no, Facebook and Google and so on don’t count, because they were started as good, and made shitty to increase profits. That’s the opposite of what’s needed. (AI in the US will be the same.)
GlassHammer
Honest question, “Has the West always had an “anti-mastery/competency” tendency or does it just come and go with cultural & economic changes?”
Today we as a Western people are distrustful of “mastery” at every turn (just as likely to pick a fight with an experienced carpenter over their workmanship as we are an experienced doctor over theirs) and we seek to replace it with a subpar copy that we can automate, propagate, and monetize as soon as possible. (And the information technology of today has only made the subpar copies more abundant and more deficient.)
If I was going to dig a bit further I would say our hyper-individualism and freedom to act has birthed a massive inferiority complex among the populace who simply cannot conceive of having to shut up, listen, and do as told.
I say all this because how does one expect competency/mastery to emerge and sustain itself in a culture that really seems to attack it.
Ian Welsh
It comes and goes. The old Protestant ethic very much encouraged mastery. Work is worship, you should do it well.
Not a huge fan of Camille Paglia, but she is the last gasp of that ethic. She once wrote that scholarship as calling is spiritual gold. But that can be true of any type of work. You also see this in certain strains of Buddhism and Confucianism. Not really a part of Hinduism. For Judaism, usually only for scholarly work.
GlassHammer
Thank you Ian.
It’s difficult for me to find Western writings on mastery that aren’t of the “work = worship” variety and it forces me to explain the value of mastery in an Eastern framework to others. (Nothing wrong with an Eastern framework, its just harder for me since it’s not my culture and that creates barriers in language/context that I must navigate.)
By the way I avoid the “work = worship” framing when speaking with others because a.) I get accused of being a works salvationist if I do and b.) the culture is centered on speaking/thinking not doing/re-doing… a very anti-action malaise is just constantly present.