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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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because if e.g. people living below the poverty line all suddenly stopped having kids child poverty would hit 0% very quickly.

I think your overall thesis is wrong because I don't think that preventing the lower strata from reproducing will actually improve the wellbeing of the next generation.

There has been much talk of "elite overproduction" previously: the proposition that much of the political malaise of the West lately (and, indeed, Ancient China before any of its periodic civil wars) comes from an oversupply of big-brain literati and an undersupply of prestige jobs to keep them from formenting revolution. Put another way: the economy needs Dalits; there must always be sewage janitors working on minimum wage. If the economy doesn't get it's Dalits through Dalit reproduction, it'll get 'em through cramming Brahmins into jobs that they feel are beneath them, which is WORSE for stability and prosperity than just letting the Dalits keep reproducing more Dalits.

We live in Omelas already. We need those miserable children. They cannot be excised from the makeup of society. Improving the objective quality of the lower strata will do nothing to improve their actual life-satisfaction and may even be counterproductive, because it'll not improve their relative economic condition but it WILL make them more resentful about it, and better at throwing pipe bombs at the higher strata.

If anything our best course of action is to Brave New World epsilon semi-moron them to be WORSE.

Put another way: the economy needs Dalits; there must always be sewage janitors working on minimum wage.

I would argue that this has become less true throughout the industrial revolution.

In ancient times, almost all of the population had to engage in backbreaking agricultural labor, with most of the surplus going to military aristocrats. Today, even minimum wage jobs typically require literacy and are a lot less back-breaking than working the fields.

You can argue that instead of exploiting our own poor, our wealth is built on exploiting the poor of other countries, but I do not think this is substantially correct either. Of course having countries where labor is cheap which produce electronics or textiles increases the wealth of the Western world, but fundamentally there is more to the success of Western countries than just exploiting the Global South.

The job market for shit jobs has some supply elasticity. If unskilled labor costs next to nothing, automation is often not worth it. On the other hand, if unskilled labor is scarce, then using automation is a great way forward. A wagon driver can probably replace ten porters, and a truck driver can replace plenty of wagon drivers.

In medieval cities, you needed to employ a lot of people to shovel all the shit. You need vastly fewer people to run a modern sewer system. OTOH, the job of sanitation janitor is much more complex than simply shoveling shit. Depending on the supply of labor, I would not be surprised if they made actually more than minimum wage in richer countries.

I’m not 100% sure what ‘sanitation janitor’ means, but CNA’s and hazmat guys both make only a mild wage premium over general unskilled labor. These aren’t careers you brag about- they’re crappy working class jobs. Garbagemen, likewise. Janitors, still not making bank.

Plumbers do, but plumbers are skilled professionals whose jobs are not mostly cleaning.

If the economy doesn't get it's Dalits through Dalit reproduction, it'll get 'em through cramming Brahmins into jobs that they feel are beneath them, which is WORSE for stability and prosperity

"Homemaker" being a central example of such a job (even among the Dalits, humorously). Which is why the Western way to deal with this is through massive amounts of immigration (doesn't hurt that it's also intended to solidify political control in the countries that participate in this, of course, but because the party that doesn't benefit from being the "gibs" party never stops immigration when they are in power, it's obvious there's something else going on).

Of course, for the Brahmins that don't believe that occupation to be beneath them, is that because most of the divide between Dalit and Brahmin is fake (education is a bar so low anyone can pass provided they show up), today's Dalits can reasonably be tomorrow's Brahmins, which will compete with the children of today's Brahmins if nothing else changes. And even for the Brahmins that are smart enough to pass the merit-based education (which cannot be passed simply by showing up), there's no guarantee their children will be similarly inclined/talented, thus making them less likely to pick up the homemaking occupation (parents that care tend to want their kids to have better lives, and they have fewer guarantees than they used to).

And the problem is that, really, there are no good solutions to this problem at present (nor in the past; recall this was Plato's big deal). And even if you do come up with one, any one of the Four Horsemen (or a bad reaction to their shadows) can and will send it spiraling out of control.

You could farm that job out; doing this in a lab intentionally can give you exact control over who ends up in what caste- as a bonus, you can damage the lower castes in such a way that they never figure out that they've been damaged, perhaps through intentionally causing fetal alcohol syndrome as in Brave New World.

Making caste genetic (like India functionally did) solves that problem but creates some others (specifically, moral hazard in the Brahmins; negative effects from X-ism/X-supremacy are mostly caused by that lack of accountability/responsibility) that we don't want to go back to.

Making caste class-based (like Britain has) solves that problem but creates similar moral hazard if not managed properly (it never is, that's a law of nature).

Making caste sex-based (like in Afghanistan) is stable but suboptimal in terms of economic productivity (to the point where having any natural resources around that isn't goats and opium makes this untenable). This is also only stable when women are on the bottom, because (like in Afghanistan pre-US-withdrawl) the enemy can just promise the men better terms and conquer the society without a single shot fired.

Making caste age-based (like in the Western world) only works on the ages that aren't yet capable of realizing it's happening or organizing against it; that usually happens around 18-20, but can vary based on economic opportunity and other factors.

You could manage your economy well by using manufacturing jobs- not as unpleasant and a better utilization of people who are detail-oriented enough, just not driven to actually do something more useful- as a brake on social mobility. But if you do that, you have to be very careful about external factors; if you all of a sudden have a massive wave of migration (horseman: war) you're too incompetent to control (which... is also kind of inherent to being middle class) this finely tuned system will get thrown out of whack, as it has been in Germany (and other European countries, to a point).

Real Communism(tm) was promised as a panacea, but unless you have a leader that's literally goodness itself it's impossible to sustain it [not helped by the means in which it is achieved] (which, interestingly, is exactly what the Christian afterlife promises).

And so on and so forth. Some of this stuff you can fix through Tower of Babel high enough technology, but I have it on good word that the poor we will always have with us.

there must always be sewage janitors working on minimum wage

Or there could be sewage janitors making extremely good wages, sufficiently socially respected for their sacrifice to assuage the struggle of the work.

This has literally never happened. Plumbers, earning good wages to work with their hands, don’t get a lot of social respect- you think the janitors working with their hands at half the skill level are going to be respected and paid well?

The problem is also the solution, in this case: if anyone can do your job in a society where some subsection of people are known to be trash, nobody will give you the time of day. But if everyone is excellent, then even the lowest are worthy of everyone's respect.

I'm not talking about any communist bologna, more like how the medieval meritocracy of denmark has transitioned so that the gal taking your order at McDonalds is beautiful and friendly

Edit for PS: I went to Alaska once for a few days many moons ago and the hotel maid was like a Danish McDonald's worker, blew my mind

An interesting result of an economy where everyone is equally talented is that the least enjoyable jobs pay the best. People actually have to choose to do those jobs rather than being stuck with them because they're not smart enough to be engineers or whatever.

Even within engineering, the "enjoyable" jobs are known for lower pay and worse work-life balance: most game development houses and places like SpaceX are notoriously bad for this.

They don't want you to know this, but the guy working for a defense contractor filling out TPS reports (or programming in COBOL or whatever) is getting paid a lot, and gets to go home at 5:00 every day.