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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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The generation of elites currently in charge and screwing up (Boomers and early Xs, except in Silicon Valley where success comes younger) were teenagers in the 1980s when it was expected that young PMC members worked menial jobs. (I am younger than that I didn't because I wrangled an engineering summer job - and even that involved shop-floor work - but the majority of my contemporaries at one of the top private schools in the UK did). This is still the generation where more CEOs have worked for McDonalds than any other company.

The Silicon Valley elites who being touted as more competent than other elites were more likely to have been hacking on their startups (or ideas that didn't pan out before they started their startup) at the age when the parents would have been waiting tables. So I don't think "elites didn't wait tables in university any more" is the problem.

The thing that has changed is that elite careers are increasingly unlikely to involve leading non-elites. My grandfather was an officer in WW2, and his father had been an officer in WW1. (Even my working-class maternal grandfather had been an NCO in India). My father's first graduate job was as a shift manager in a factory. The only people I have had to manage are younger versions of myself, and when I was on the graduate job market there was a major ugh filed attached to jobs like manufacturing industry or commercial banking where you would have to be a hands on manager of line workers (with the military seen as an exception, but almost nobody from Cambridge went into the military). You can go through 6-9 months on the burger line (split across three summer jobs) while only developing a superficial relationship with co-workers who are unlike you and you both know it. You can't command a platoon and only develop a superficial relationship with your troops.