#managerial class

So I think by now we're used to the constant talk about class warfare in terms of the capital class vs the working class, but apparently some people are worried about a third class.

Apparently some billionaires have discovered a book from the early 1940s that talks about a managerial class that's secretly working to take control of their capital away from them (ignore the fact that the predictions of that book never came true or that the current situation doesn't remotely resemble the one the book describes).

Part of that transfer of power is taking shape in a straightforwardly geographical way.  The Trump administration is relocating large parts of the federal government away from Washington DC, and they’re not going elsewhere in the bicoastal bubble of privilege—they’re moving to flyover country.  Two of the main bureaus of the Department of Agriculture, for example, will soon be moving to the Kansas City area, while the Bureau of Land Management is heading for Grand Junction, Colorado.  That’s fiscally prudent—office space costs a lot less in Kansas City and Grand Junction than it does in Washington DC—and it also makes much more sense to put the Department of Agriculture in the middle of farm country and the Bureau of Land Management out west, where most federal lands are located. Yet the political implications are lost on no one inside the Beltway.  When the eager young people who show up for their first day of work at the Department of Agriculture come from farm-belt schools rather than the Ivy League, a tectonic shift in the landscape of American power will have been accomplished.

What is rather sad about this study is that it is deemed to be newsworthy at all, as J.K. Galbraith told us this tale of managerial misbehaviour some forty-five years ago in his masterpiece The New Industrial State. Exponents of neo-liberal economics were partially right that the advent of hostile takeovers in the early 1980s would provide a market mechanism to not only check, but substantially undermine, the power of the managerial class; but they failed to foresee the ease with which that class would successfully lobby to insulate its members against such takeover bids, thus fortifying their power.

The great strength of Galbraith's writings lay in his ability to interweave economics, sociology, and politics, in addition to the lessons drawn from his own wide-ranging professional experiences, to furnish lay readers with an understanding of how the market actually operated, rather than how it ought to operate according to one's preferred theory.

The Western democracies urgently need a J.K. Galbraith for our time to elucidate for the general public the terrible damage which fanciful neo-liberal theories have inflicted, and continue to inflict, upon our societies and economies.