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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1888 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 6, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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thesis of a possible effort-post. does this have legs?

Globalization didn’t have to break the working class, but blank slate liberalism did

A few decades ago you could show up with a 3rd grade education and still get a decent factory job that fed your family and gave your life... maybe not meaning, but some dignity. Today, those jobs are gone. Globalization took them, and now America has a surplus class of unemployable and underemployable mopes; people born too late for easy jobs but too early for gay-space communism to take care of them. They're stuck, adrift.

Was there any way to help them? Was the populist backlash unavoidable except for the choice of the form of our destroyer, Bernie Sanders’ classist rage or Trump's MAGA nationalist rage?

Is this a false choice? Yes, but the solution hinges on IQ realism. It hinges on slaying blank slate liberalism.

Countries like Germany faced the same global pressures but came out intact. They kept their working class employed, respected, and connected to dignity. How? By accepting a truth America refused: not everyone is wired for lambda calculus. Germany didn’t chase a fantasy of universal upskilling, or telling freshly unemployed coal miners to learn to code. Instead, they built protected, respected, cottage industries and stable vocational tracks with early sorting, precisely for the millions who weren't destined to debug beta reductions.

America, by contrast, swallowed a comforting lie: that we could escape globalization’s consequences without sacrifice. We embraced blank slate thinking, believing with enough TED talks and vocational bootcamps everyone could become high-skilled, high-status knowledge workers. We decided dignity wasn’t found in factories or plumbing, but in laptops and cubicles. Work that liberals secretly preferred.

But the bell curve didn’t care. IQ didn't budge. And so today, millions of Americans remain underemployed, abandoned, and pissed off.

Globalization didn't have to do this. Our denial of human cognitive differences, our stubborn insistence on the blank slate, did.

Germany got it right. America told itself comforting lies.

Alright, here's my take as someone who sees everything as downstream from culture, be that right or wrong.

Germany had a good formula for dealing with the post-war years, minus the bits where we got over a manpower shortage by importing totally-not-permanent-guest workers from abroad. It worked in a non-globalized world with fixed borders, in which Germans unquestioningly stuck to German ways of doing things and accepted German standards and expectations as practically god-given and naturally correct. Naturally you'd get a job - any job if you can't get the one you want - and work for a living and deliver high-quality work; what kind of asshole would do any less and leave others to pick up the slack?

Obviously this state of affairs has changed.

  • Germans have by all means adopted the axiom that anyone who doesn't go to Gymnasium (the top tier of our three-tier secondary school system) is a failure. Not universally and necessarily that one must go to university and study, though very many do subscribe to that view, but there is a very noticeable class divide between those who went for the Gymnasium white-collar track and everyone else. Blue-collar work is lumped in with the asocials and unemployed, with barely-integrated immigrants and with intolerably backwards troglodytes who do and say and think all the wrong things.
  • Several generations of unchecked immigration, large-scale failure to force immigrant assimilation, and the wilful destruction of the Leitkultur have turned the lower classes into a fucking mess. Half of them are effectively foreigners who are just here because it pays, and they work only as much as absolutely necessary and only to such standards as they cannot get away with ignoring, and if possible they will work not at all. Welfare makes it possible. And the other half is ethnic Germans who wish they were migrants because being German isn't cool anymore, and why work hard and try to sustain society when everyone is just looking out for themselves? It's a race to the bottom of who can be the biggest defect-bot. And the third half is basically balkanians who are ferried here in bulk to do work that Germans and immigrants alike think themselves too good for.
  • Meanwhile, the middle and upper class try their damndest to ignore what's becoming of the country while fantasizing about emigrating to doesn't-even-matter-where.

Germany got nothing right.

Depends on where you live to some extent though. Baden Württemberg and Bavaria are full of guys in their late 20s and 30s making €75,000 a year as machine operators in factories producing some kind of industrial equipment who live in places where rent is relatively low and they can spend their weekends (and their million sick days) growing and smoking weed and a month a year in winter in Thailand with their Serbian girlfriends. Certainly a much better material condition than the Italian or Greek or British working class.

It's not really like that, although yeah, it's certainly better than in Greece or Britain.

Some unskilled 55 year old I know has been pushing a button at Porsche for 15 years, makes 30 Euros/hour base pay. He‘s being offered free early retirement packages (which are insanely good in germany). He‘s also addicted to coke and in bankruptcy proceedings, but that‘s another story.

Yes, those specialists, hard workers who do useful work, exist, but they are relatively rare and their numbers are dwindling. Most earn less, and do less useful work, and do it worse. Our material conditions are good, overall, but at the cost of burning down the commons by taxing productive members of society and growing ourselves an ever-larger underclass or outright parasites. We're being kept afloat by hyper-industrious boomers and those few who follow their example, and by leftover wealth from better years, and we have absolutely no perspective on improving our competitive position, social cohesion or working culture.

Perspective in English doesn't share the meaning [2] zeitlich: Zukunftsaussicht, Entwicklungsmöglichkeit (Wiktionary) that Perspektive has in German, just by the way.

Thanks for pointing it out, though I was aware. I just allow myself some Germanisms from time to time.

Edit: Does this sound like a lame excuse? It does. It does.

You have quite a bit of work to do to claim that the stagnation of manufacturing wages is due to globalization rather than technology, and also to claim that this is a US-specific issue. Lines like "Work that liberals secretly preferred" are just not good.

Countries like Germany faced the same global pressures

Is this true? Germany spent most of that blue-collar period partitioned, demilitarized, and stripped of human capital. It’s probably the worst comparison in Western Europe.

and came out intact.

Is this true? I definitely recall some of our European users expressing their disgust with the absolute state of German politics. And industry. And entertainment, etc. etc… If you want to make the case, you should probably bring some receipts. My guess would be that Germany imported all the soundbites and “learn 2 code” dismissals of the American consensus when it imported all our fintech and communications advances.

Instead, they built protected, respected, cottage industries and stable vocational tracks with early sorting

Here’s the part with legs. I want to see more about the proposed alternative, because that’s where a lot of critiques of neoliberalism stumble. How does it get around the supply/demand curves? How well can it generalize to larger players in the market?

I have a lot more to say about this, which is a good sign for a top level.

German issues now are largely a product of the past few years of policy, not any long term failures.

They elected the Greens, who promptly exploded their nuclear power sources and left them entirely reliant on natural gas from Russia. Now they have the highest electricity prices on the continent and vast swathes of industry are completely unviable.

I'm pretty sure the American working class gets a better deal than the German one. American plumbers and factory workers probably both earn more and have a higher employment rate compared to their German equivalent.

Instead this is about a few left behind areas. This isn't an issue with blank slate liberalism; Western Pennsylvania didn't have blacks to compete for jobs anyways. It declined anyways. The rust belt is one of the whitest parts of the country.

I want to stop and ask- are German small towns doing that much better? It seems like everyone on earth has an issue with small towns pouring into the metropole due to lower wages. Literally. Gen. Franco couldn't stop it. Chairman Mao couldn't stop it. Donald Trump won't be able to stop it.

American plumbers and factory workers probably both earn more and have a higher employment rate compared to their German equivalent.

Don't you need to be at least a little smart to be an electrician or a plumber? Moreso if you are self-employed doing these things and making a nice amount of money?

I've done my own electrical work and plumbing at home and it requires a non-trivial amount of attention to detail and being able to do some basic computation. I probably couldn't do it stoned. Surely 100 IQ minimum needed to be employable.

Electricians have to pass trigonometry. Plumbers must be able to contort themseves into rather small, awkward spaces, which is more weight and age than IQ limited. Poster Plumber on DSL said there’s a standardized test to become an apprentice plumber in CA.

In CA, probably. In Texas if you’re a citizen you just find someone willing to hire you for a few years and then take the journeyman’s exam.

Electricians additionally need to have a record of a passing grade in algebra 2 from high school, or college algebra from community college, to be accepted for an apprenticeship. They also have to take a math for electricians class as part of it, but I don’t know what exactly is entailed(quite possibly trig).

In both cases the apprenticeship length is four years except classes and overtime can cut down on it somehow. The formulae are complicated but generally an associate’s degree cuts a year off. There’s a journeyman’s test afterwards. After a few more years you can get a master’s license to own your own company but most don’t bother.

For HVAC you get your EPA license(you can self study and just pay for a written test through HVAC suppliers) then register with the state and find someone to hire you. There’s a test to become a contractor after four years but most techs don’t bother. HVAC tends to have a much stronger commercial/residential distinction than the other two trades because it’s so easy to get into; most HVAC guys start out with residential(and usually residential installs, which is shittier work) and after some experience the smarter ones tend to switch to commercial.

Welders aren’t regulated by the state. Basically all welders go to school and get some kind of certificate, but you don’t technically need one.

In all three cases union apprenticeships have their own process which is different from the standard one but has an identical end result in the eyes of the government- the union apprenticeship is generally seen as higher quality, and union trained tradesmen tend to be paid more even if they aren’t part of the union. Trades unions themselves are basically guilds; tradesmen work for, and are paid by, the union itself and technically leased out to union shops in a temp agency like arrangement. In practice in DFW union members only switch companies when they want to.

An electrician? Yes- even low level electricians need to understand algebra to work unsupervised, making an effective IQ floor. A plumber? Depends on what you do within it. There's plenty of plumbers making a good living in, not really a sinecure because they actually work, but doing things your average handyman or construction worker would be able to do for much cheaper if it wasn't due to regulatory capture.

Moreover, I'm pretty sure that semi-skilled blue collar workers make more in America than anywhere in the EU; it's possible that genuinely low skilled workers make less, but I wouldn't count on it. The part of the American working class that's really struggling is mostly the residents of small towns in the former industrial heartland, and 'small towns in the former industrial heartland suck' isn't unique to the US.

Right, in my (anecdotal) understanding even people without these qualifications or strong brains made a decent living before globalization.

My own father and uncles came to the US in the 70s (illegally!) with a 3rd grade education and no local language skills or writing skills (in any language), got jobs as construction workers and masons and still were able to buy houses and provide for big families.

They're not dumb, as they have started small business since then and have become substantially wealthier, but the work they were doing did not require even electrician or plumber level brain power and certainly not any credentials.

It's a good start, but I'd like to see topics like stronger unions (and better aligned union and executive interests), governmental attitudes on industrial policy, subsidies and the like before this goes from interesting idea to something more.

"Unions good" is a profoundly alien idea to me. What do you have in mind?

I don't have a source but what I'm told is that German unionists were heavily influenced by British ones who wanted to avoid making the same mistakes. The main idea was to avoid getting into the directly antagonistic relationship you see today in Anglo countries.

I was told that German unions tend to be more attached to individual companies, giving them more of an incentive to preserve their hosts and make agreements that are sane, but a quick search doesn't show any evidence for this. Wikipedia does say that strikes are very rare, and that companies and unions strive for consensus (and apparently achieve it most of the time). I'm not sure how this is achieved.

Perhaps @Southkraut or others would know more.

I've never had a union job, so I don't really have any insight into how the sausage is made here.

What I can confirm is that our unions are generally not very confrontational. Compared to the French, they're docile doormats. It's mostly public transport that strikes, i.e. rails and bus drivers, and the strikes are announced in advance, short in duration, and then negotiations drag on for a few years before the union employees get a one or two percent raise and some other nominal benefit. Other unions don't really strike a lot; they mostly just protest for this or that.

I'd say our unions are fairly cooperative overall.

I don't think unions are always good or bad, even if I tend to agree that on the net, they're tending towards a negative in terms of productivity and competitiveness. Germany has a form of corporate governance where labor union reps sit on equal terms with management, but I'm no expert on the finer details. I just think it's a common talking point that is worth addressing, even if to say it's not relevant in the end.

If your goal is specifically to increase blue collar compensation as a percent of corporate revenue, there's not really another way to do it.

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