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 this 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.
Mark Pontin
Glass Hammer: ‘Honest question, “Has the West always had an “anti-mastery/competency” tendency or does it just come and go with cultural & economic changes?”’
No. It comes and goes, obviously. In our case, as Ian suggests, it’s the ascendancy of the neoliberal Ponzi over the last 40-50 years and the fact that neoliberalism is just a fancy word for looting.
I’m living in London now and, for instance, every other day go for a walk in Kensington Park past the Albert Memorial and the Victoria and Albert Hall. The first time I saw the Memorial (again, after a half-century, because I lived here as a kid) I felt like H.G. Wells’s Time Traveler seeing the strange, immense statue of the Sphinx in the far future and wondering what unimaginably strange kind of people had created this structure. Because it sure wasn’t people like us.
And the answer in the Albert Memorial’s case is, it was: Victorians.
Here’s what Victorian **sewage pumping stations** look like–
https://secretldn.com/crossness-pumping-station/
And I use the present tense of ‘look’ because while those sewage pumping stations aren’t used for that any more, there are still the workmen around to maintain them and, more relevantly, the tens of thousands of Victorian, Georgian, and Edwardian buildings in London which many millions of people do inhabit and use everyday.
It isn’t just old buildings, either. Here’s the new Elizabeth line (scroll down) —
https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/elizabeth-line-a-step-21st-century-london-underground-grimshaw
While these aren’t the Moscow and St. Petersberg underground metro stations, which famously look like this —
https://www.rbth.com/arts/328682-moscow-metro-most-beautiful-stations
— but they’re not too shabby.
To be sure, this is just London, which is a city-state that’s the ForEx and Eurodollar financial center of the world (and now the biggest renminbi trading center outside China). Get out in the rest of England and there are many towns that have become essentially Third World, though in a genteel way, as where they used to have factories and the accompanying employment back in the UK’s industrial era, they’re lucky if they now have an Amazon or Lidl distribution center as the biggest employer.
Mary Bennet
Would someone please explain:
1. What is a “works salvationist”? And why would that be anything to be
ashamed of?
2. What do charitable giving and kindness, the sort of things which were generally
thought to be “good works” have to do with mastery of craft? One of my great
grandmothers was a superb needlewoman and was also renowned for her
malignant bad temper. In fact, my experience has been that excellent
craftspeople are generally not known for having outgoing personalities.
3. The accusation itself sounds to me like a manipulation founded in envy, because the
accuser knows that he or she is functionally incompetent.
4. In the USA, I think maybe in Canada as well, but IDK for sure, there has been an
under the radar of revival of craft. The resentment and envy provoked by this
revival was one of the social pathologies which united to elect Reagan in 1980 and
you know who this year.
Speaking of brown people wiping privileged behinds, I do wonder if one MTG
has ever picked up after herself.
Jan Wiklund
Except that Thatcher wasn’t a founder of this mindset, she was just a marketer of it. The founder was a process by which the old industrial capitalism was so effective in producing things that it couldn’t find buyers of all the things it could produce.
And rather than help increasing the purchase power of poor folk it turned to the rentiers to borrow enough to weather the over-production crisis.
At least that is what Alfred D Chandler says in Scale and scope, The Book on industrial capitalism in the Western world, written in the early 90s.
And since they turned to the rentiers for help, the rentiers got the power. They weren’t interested inproducing (it was too labour-demanding), they just wanted their money back as soon as possible. And the industrial CEOs had to yield or retire. They happily yielded and were handsomely rewarded for that.
Soredemos
‘AI’ everywhere started as and will remain dumb bullshit. Playing around with it I’ve been struck how monumentally unimpressive it is in almost every use case. It’s shaping up to be a giant bubble. A few years of infatuation where they try to shove it into everything followed by its lingering in the small number of areas where it isn’t completely worthless. There’s already a growing field of basically ‘AI’ proofreading where humans have to review automated algorithm work, at which point why bother.
Duncan Kinder
DEI did not create the competency crisis, but it did and does provide a fig leaf for the financialization which you describe.
Nate Wilcox
excellent work, Ian.
marku52
You forgot the other way to wealth in the US. Get in the middle of a money stream and hold you hand out for doing nothing of value.
I give you the health insurance industry.
Oakchair
50 years ago 0.01% of children had autism, today 4% do and it is ever increasing.
That is the far side of the harm on the bell curve.
Why is socializing becoming more difficult, competency falling, depression/anxiety/ADHD et al. increasing, and overall functioning decreasing? Well what would you expect if everyone was being poisoned, and their brains being damaged to some degree over and over and over?
Estimates of the cost of autism today are 370 billion dollars. This is estimated to reach 5.5 trillion dollars by 2060 (table 3) due to continued increasing rates.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9114071/
There is a silver lining though. We wont be able to wage endless wars because the country will be to disabled, sick and poor from caring for the disabled and sick to go off invading and bombing.
Can’t bomb anyone when the planes plummet into the earth in a halo of fire and dust after take off.
GrimJim
We’ve always been the “United States of Snake Oil Salesmen,” but it was only in the last 45 years that everyone has been able to get in on the act.
From the get go, anyone who could make a buck off the labor of others did.
That’s what chattel slavery was all about. Hell, read the works of Mark Twain whenever they feature slaves and slave masters. The slave masters could barely manage to do anything for themselves, they all thought they were the kings of France, and had their slaves do every last jot and tittle of labor that they could.
In the North, it was all Wage Slaves. And then in the south, post ACW, it was all Chain Gangs; what’s old is new.
Things changed for some after WWII, when there was so much profit that if they didn’t let the mudsills have some of it they would definitely rebel.
Now they are clawing it all back. And they created an entire culture around not being the sucker who does all the work, so even the Poors think they can get in on it and have no problem with it.
Of course, it won’t be the elite who end up holding the bag when the game ends.
The last act of every government before the fall is to loot the country for every last penny they can get.
That’s what the tariffs are all about — a final looting of the Poors and the remaining Middle Class. A Final Immiseration before the Collapse.
They are already starting to experience discontinuities in food distribution. Imagine how bad that will get when they start rounding up all the “illegals” and slap tariffs on everything coming into the country?
You won’t be able to get half the food you used to, and what you will be able to get will cost double or more what it does now.
That sends millions who currently live hand-to-mouth into starvation level territory.
Will the food riots be televised?
Failed Scholar
Yes, I think you are right that the competency crisis is far more because of structural issues that you identified. Ultimately, competence in doing ‘the things’ requires practice in actually doing ‘the things’. Reminds me about an article I read a number of years ago about how Toyota makes a point even to this day to keep a small number of artisans and craftsman around making parts “the old fashioned way” so that the competencies wouldn’t be lost, and so that there are people that still know the process that automated machines are doing to make parts (so they can keep improving the machines or to spot problems with the processes). I thought this was very intriguing.
W.R.T. ‘DEI’, that is mostly a scam, like most other things one gets from ‘Democrats’. In lieu of concrete material benefits, we instead bring you legal discrimination against (basically) hiring white men. And people defend this? LMAO. I shouldn’t be surprised given some people still defend the miserable Biden ‘presidency’ – Genocide, But with Pronouns.
mago
The competency crisis is a cultural crisis, another symptom of the kaliyuga or degenerate age in which we live.
All the confusion and obfuscation is both deliberate and random.
And so we suffer in ignorance.
That’s my short sermon without elaboration.
Ian already did the heavy lifting.
GlassHammer
Mary Bennet
A works salvationist is “someone who believes their good deeds will get them into heaven”, its used as an insult by Protestants when you ask them to do something selfless/charitable when they don’t want to do it.
Those that use it as an insult will in the same breath affirm that the fruit of their belief is “good action”, actions they will never actually take because then they would be a “works salvationist”.
Its hard to convey how much of modern American Proestantism is “think good things” not “do good things”. It’s a real mess of bad doctrine and bad preachers now.
Joan
I think the Millennial generation, some of us, will return to craftsmanship. I’ve already seen it pop up in strange places. I reconnected with a friend and found out that there’s a bookbinding revival among fanfiction readers. Who would have thought! But it makes sense: since fanfiction can’t be sold, there’s no way to own a paperback or hardback of your favorite stories unless you do it yourself.
GrimJim
Sola fide is one of the many terrible heresies to come out of Protestantism.
It is the only theological basis for most Anglo-American denominations… there is literally nothing else there. Merely a hollow, empty “declaration of faith.”
It is the major cause for the fall of moral and ethical behavior among American Christians and was the core element of American “Christianity” that enabled the snake-oil salesmen who invented the “Prosperity Gospel.”
That they can believe this, when among the very last words Christ spoke to his Apostles were,
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
Sola fide is a sure road to Hell and Damnation.
If you believe in that sort of thing.
Purple Library Guy
But they DON’T think good things. Far as I can tell, evangelicals think pretty horrible things. I don’t think any doctrine will get you anywhere if you’re not doing EITHER.
GlassHammer
Purple Library Guy
Yes, many don’t “think good things” either but since “thinking” is often the pinnacle of what is done I was being nice and saying “Well at least some have good thoughts.”
It’s been said before but most Protestants have “belief in belief”, an extra layer of removal (which is really an extra layer of insulation) from the “living belief”.
Its running from reality into faith but not coming back to interact with reality again like the Bible commands you to do. (Chris Hedges does an excellent job at elaborating this layer of removal and its connection to past trauma a trauma where reality nearly killed them.)
somecomputerguy
The crisis of competency was best described but far from adequately explained by Chris Hayes in Twilight of the Elites.
It affects almost every sector of society, from the military to scientific research.
People are questioning masters, because those so-called masters have run everything from businesses to the conduct of war into the ground.
One possible reason is specialization. Real experts, when tested by being asked to make predictions based on their knowledge, are almost always wrong. Generalists, with wide ranges of expertise, are much better at predicting events.
Certainly, a giant contributor is absence of elite accountability. When will there be consequences for non-repeatable results in science, losing wars to cave-men, and what should they be?
There is an elite norm that societies institutions, and elite status itself, only exist to deliver a sweet paycheck.
I keep coming back to college, and credentialism. People with journalism degrees protect their fellow PMCers.
bruce wilder
I have never understood the “overproduction” thesis. I understand capitalists instinctively wanting to underpay and oppress workers. I understand “monopoly” though as fundamentally seeking to profit from artificial scarcity and limiting access to means of production. Financial capitalism, I understand as variations on the theme of usury. Driving up asset prices and then pretending that falling asset prices would be the equivalent of the sky falling and threaten the collapse of civilization is tried and true political stratagem.
You cannot have “markets in everything” without completely corrupting the polity. Not in a society which relies on institutional hierarchy. Ian has repeatedly drawn attention to the reduction in marginal rates of income tax in the 1970s and 1980s. As soon as it was possible to keep a big portion of a large nominal income, academics were rationalizing why top corporate executives should receive big salaries, bonuses and stock options. Power can always find ways to generate and concentrate the funds and top executives were in positions of great power. They are rarely nice ways.
Corruption and executive or leadership competency are not compatible. Why would this be controversial? Other than some latent hypocrisy and denial from the willfully blind?
Soredemos
@GrimJim
>heresy
It’s no less made up than whatever the Catholics or Orthodox are gibbering about on any given day. It’s all equally untrue.
bruce wilder
I disagree with the headline thesis. Not because I am sympathetic to inherently racist / sexist notions of “white guy meritocracy”, but because DEI really is a brandname for bureaucratic rot that substitutes for performance and accountability.
DEI is one branding of an ultimately nihilist, brain-dead political culture of ritualized virtue painted over a stultified social hierarchy of qualifications and credentials substituting for doing. I suppose it is a reaction to the industrial revolutions culminating in a political economy of abstract superfluousness.
GrimJim
@Soredemos
>It’s no less made up than whatever the Catholics or Orthodox are gibbering about on any given day. It’s all equally untrue.
Oh, indeed, I did say “If you believe in such things.”
The pint being the amazing cognitive dissonance to claim to believe in the word of Christ and then literally invert or ignore that word.
I can understand the snake-oil salesmen priests doing this; I can all too well appreciate the mass of illiterate followers following along.
I can’t understand, though, how anyone who has actually read what Christ supposedly said and understood it with even a basic understanding can fall for the heretical inversion and nullification that is Sola Fide.
It is like looking at a white circle. Knowing it is a white circle. Understanding it is a white circle.
And then grokking that it is a black square.
Orwell’s Doublethink’s got nothing on this.
Heady stuff, this opiate of the masses.
Altandmain
The economist Phillip Pilkington noted this last year as well.
https://x.com/philippilk/status/1781375147900850378
Ultimately, the problem is that the Western elite are just too greedy. The problem is that they want more wealth for themselves. They don’t care about the well being of people in other nations nor the well being of even their own countrymen.
All that the West has done, class warfare at home, and wars abroad, have been done to make the rich richer. The post-WW2 social democracy is gone and pretty naked class warfare is happening now. Finance has become a vehicle to transfer wealth upwards and I would argue so has DEI – it’s also a distraction.
It’s going to take a new elite in order to get changes. The business elite and rich would have to be changed – actually they might have to lose most of their wealth in order to get changes. That may not be far off – as many Russians have observed, the West is looking increasingly like the late USSR.