Provocation 59. Elites = professionals

Who are the “elites”? We tend to think they are they, not us. But lets take for the moment the idea that the elites are the owners of big capital and the supporting professional staffs of lawyers, accountants, pr firms, spouses and children, and all the people who have used licensing or selection, such as college admissions, to get a place in society. Residue of the old craft guilds.

The reality is that the game is quite fixed with prepared paths to neighborhood, school, college, and first “jobs” that follow from parental influence, outright interventions, and values. Some are supported by regulations that allow quasi monopolization of their small business such that the owner of a hardware store, a chain restaurant, can have an annual income in the neighborhood of a million. Other regulations create preferred paths to colleges and graduate degree, all protected by thousands of “procedures”, like the GRE, the grade system, grants and licensing that define and protect the professionals, making them part of the one percent, and being a target of the Trump voters. This would be tolerated if the income of the top 10% were reduced by 10%, the top one percent by half, the top .1% by 90%

The point is that the nexus of relationships is seriously hard to modify. This means, among other things that climate warming will proceed till the under 30 generation pulls governance apart, and inequality will continue to generate multiple social pathologies. We need to take responsibility that it was us, not the Trump supports who benefitted by and helped legitimate, if not create, the dysfunction we currently live in.

Our current mess highlights that the chief output of an economy is not the society of the spectacle as Guy DeBord brilliantly has it, but the society of power. We need to take seriously the idea that the power established is an economic outcome of the economy we have and participate in, as earners and spenders. Change must break habits. In order for economics to play a role in such changes we have to break out of the cocoon of economic formalism into the messy reality of the humanities and social sciences. From archeology through political thought to post modern novels.
PS.

Is this mere coincidence?

The first-move advantage in chess is the inherent advantage of the player (White) who makes the first move in chess. Chess players and theorists generally agree that White begins the game with some advantage.
First-move advantage in chess – Wikipedia
Wikipedia › wiki › First-move_advantag…

The white first rule seems to have been established in the 1860-1880 period.