"There is no plan about how the cuts in bureaucrat numbers will work"

"As far as can be judged, there is no plan about how the cuts [in bureaucrat numbers] will work. ... The government mumbled about ‘artificial intelligence,’ ... but I have seen no study which would suggest that it is possible to get a 14 percent increase in productivity across such a diverse range of activities in three years. ...

"To add to the confusion, the government is going to merge a wide number of public agencies and centralise some backroom activities. With the possible exception of politicians, everyone knows that such re-disorganisations reduce productivity for a period of three and more years. ...

"Typically, these bigger organisations have more layers of management – I bet there will not be a proportional reduction in generic managers – and the top is even more isolated from the front line. ... In any case they will have increasingly to deal with the job reductions plus the re-disorganisation. There will be an increase in badly supervised consultancies.

"I regret to say that to this independent observer, the proposed reduction seems to be a panic measure. I shall not be surprised if it all turns to custard when the new government arrives after the election. (It may still be a Luxon-Willis Government.) Another source of custard is if the Treasury assumption of the strait of Hormuz opening up soon and smoothly proves optimistic. ...

"Expect some brutal measures after the election."

~ Brian Easton fro his post 'Is New Zealand’s Economy in Dire Straits?'

"Chris Bishop’s primary responsibility is reforming the RMA. ... The bureaucratic class has magnificently undermined his agenda."

"[Chris] Bishop’s primary responsibility, other than completing Steven Joyce’s highway from Warkworth to Whangarei, is reforming the RMA. ... [G]iven how central the reform of the Resource Management Act has been to this government, it defies comprehension that National didn't arrive with a draft ready to go. ...

"The excellent folk at the NZ Initiative have done an analysis of the two proposed [replacement] laws [which eventually emerged]: the Natural Environment and the Planning Bills. Nick Clark, the researcher, concluded, '...in the translation from principles to legislative text, something has gone wrong. Key elements have been weakened, complexity has crept back in, and an extraordinary amount of the systems' substance has been deferred to secondary instruments that do not yet exist.' ...

"The desire to place property rights at the heart of the legislation has been superseded by placing mana whenua into their customary central role in managing the land. ...

"[Also, i]f passed, these bills will not be the final word. That will be left to ‘secondary legislation’, or regulation; binding rules made by the minister of the day that determine how the law is to be applied. The proposal is for parliament to delegate its authority to the executive with minimal oversight. This time next year, Minister Swarbrick could use this secondary legislation to mandate her own vision into reality.

"Did we vote for that? ...

"[T]he bureaucratic class ... has magnificently undermined his agenda. This should have been self-evident thirty months ago ... "

~ Damien Grant from his post 'Chris Bishop has emerged as the main pretender to a shaky crown. How shall we assess his performance?'

"The pandemic pulled back the curtain for a moment. When everyone worked from home, it became obvious who was actually doing things and who was just... there."

"Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. 'I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams,' she said. Then laughed. 'I genuinely don’t know what that means anymore.'

"She’s not alone. I keep meeting people who describe their jobs using words they’d never use in normal conversation. They attend meetings about meetings. They create PowerPoints that no one reads, which get shared in emails no one opens, which generate tasks that don’t need doing.

"The strangest part: everyone knows. When you get people alone, after work, maybe after they’ve had time to decompress, they’ll admit it. Their job is basically elaborate performance art. They’re professional email forwards. They’re human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other. ...

"The pandemic pulled back the curtain for a moment. When everyone worked from home, it became obvious who was actually doing things and who was just... there. Some people’s entire roles evaporated when they couldn’t physically attend meetings. Others discovered they could do their 'full-time' job in about three hours a day.

"Now we’re back in offices, and everyone’s pretending again. But something’s shifted. The pretense feels different. More conscious. More exhausting.

"The economist David Graeber called these 'bullshit jobs'—roles that even the people doing them suspect are pointless. But I think it’s evolved beyond that. We’ve built entire ecosystems of mutual nonsense. ...

"What’s emerging [however] isn’t the collapse of corporate work—it’s something more interesting. People are building parallel systems of actual value while maintaining their corporate personae. ...

"They’re not quitting. They’re using the corporate infrastructure—the steady salary, the laptop, the stability—as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn’t died; it’s become a funding mechanism for actual work.

"One person I spoke to called it 'corporate entrepreneurship'—not in the LinkedIn way where you’re an 'intrapreneur' innovating within your company, but in the sense that you’re using your corporate presence to subsidise your real work."

~ 'Alex' from his post 'The Pandemic of Fake Jobs'

"It’s not really about te reo, tikanga, or even Māori. It’s about power."

 

"It’s not really about the words.

"That so many Kiwis care about [the wording on a passport] shows this is a symptom of a much bigger problem. ... a microcosm of the slow-burning cultural tension that has been building in New Zealand for years. ...

"What began as a well-meaning effort to honour Māori language and culture has, in the hands of our cultural elites, become a tool for ideological conformity and social stratification.

"It’s not really about te reo, tikanga, or even Māori. It’s about power. ... They get to be the priest class. They can sneer at the plumber in Palmerston North who doesn’t want his kids doing karakia at school, and tell themselves they’re not just smarter, but better. ... 

"Today, we’re swimming in a sea of te ao Māori frameworks, mandatory karakia in secular spaces, and public servants scrambling to prove their cultural credentials rather than deliver basic services. The line between recognising Māori as tangata whenua and enforcing a cultural ideology across every aspect of national life has become increasingly blurry and people have noticed.

"I am wound up that we’ve arrived at a place where people can’t distinguish between cultural recognition and cultural imposition. Where using Māori names is no longer about embracing heritage, it’s about enforcing allegiance."

~ Ani O'Brien from her post 'It's just a passport cover... except it's not'

"The emergence of Ngāti Pākehā has become a feature of modern Aotearoa."

"The emergence of Ngāti Pākehā – that tribe of pale Kiwi with their pounamu lanyards and pained expressions – has become a feature of modern Aotearoa.
    "It is a harmless pantomime, as they cloak themselves in the culturally appropriated korowai of perpetual grievance and benefit from the Kiwi reluctance to cause unnecessary offence....
    "If half of the world’s plumbers were lost in the Rapture, we’d notice. If ninety percent of sociologists vanished who would report them missing? To which, these recent graduates find themselves competing with their equally educated peers for jobs that, a decade past, a Labrador with a good attitude could have secured.
    "This, for the entitled offspring of the muddling classes, is a shocking realisation. They are not important. They are not special. They are not, in truth, entitled to anything more than their inheritance which, thanks to their parents’ regimen of yoga and boiled legumes, is slowly receding along with their own hairlines."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'What being ‘woke’ may really mean'

"Strangely, an entire social class has managed to go almost completely unnoticed. It is nothing less than the ruling class. And it is the most formidable and zealous enemy of free-market capitalism and individual freedom."

"Strangely, an entire social class has managed to go almost completely unnoticed. It is not to be found in history books or in newspaper articles. It is missing from academic and public discourse. Even the Marxists, who see the world entirely through the lens of class, have failed to spot it.

"It is odder still that this particular social class should be anonymous and invisible, because it is large, loud, unashamed, and bossy. It is the most powerful class in society. It is the class that constitutes the Establishment. It is nothing less than the ruling class. And it is the most formidable and zealous enemy of free-market capitalism and individual freedom.

"The problem of this missing class first occurred to me in the late 1990s, when I visited an anti-capitalist ‘climate’ rally in London. ... According to the Socialists, it is ‘the working-class’ who have most to gain by the overthrow of capitalism. ... But where, I wondered, at this anti-capitalist ‘climate’ jamboree, were the heroic, muscle-bound, lantern-jawed proletarians? ...

"The protesters cannot simply be labelled 'middle class' because ... the commercial middle class had failed to send a single delegate. ... These practical grafters I guessed were too busy doing capitalism. ... quite out of sympathy with these high-minded, anti-capitalist radicals. So what social class are we left with?

"There is, in fact, a name for the group assembled at the Climate rally, though it is rarely used. The protesters were members, or on their way to becoming members, of the New Class. ... not easily defined but may be vaguely described. It consists of a goodly proportion of those college-educated people whose skills and vocations proliferate in a 'post-industrial society' ... We are talking about scientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their career in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of larger foundations, the upper levels of government bureaucracy and so on. It is by now, a quite numerous class …a disproportionately powerful class, it is also an ambitious and frustrated class. ...

"Members of this class are remarkably conscious of their affinity with other members, they strongly identify with one another politically, culturally and intellectually, and they act, as a class, in a co-ordinated and determined way to pursue their goals. They consider themselves separate from and opposed to other classes. The ideology and worldview of this group, taken as a whole, is consistent, predictable and intractable. And those of us who value individual freedom and property rights, whether we know it or not, are at war with this class. ...

"Th[is] New Class ... has a ‘voracious and insatiable’ hunger for power. ... No other class in history has been as cohesive and single-minded in defending itself and controlling that which it holds. And this includes control of speech and thought. ...
"
As government spending has grown so has the number and size of groups relying directly and indirectly on State funding. These groups, which comprise the core of the New Class, naturally tend to look favourably on their own activities, would like to see their powers increased and their responsibilities extended over greater areas. ...

"The New Class maintains that society needs expert analysis, expert advice, direction, guidance and regulation, and they are the people who will do it. ... They demand more public spending, regulation and planning as naturally as a stream flows down a mountain, because public spending pays their wages and they are the regulators and planners.
"
Members of this class encounter one another, in the workplace and socially, and their views become honed and hammered out. ... and over time they become a coherent, distinct, moral view of the world. ...

"Members of this New Class will always call for something to be done, to solve a perceived problem, in the form of another enquiry or review or committee or institute or ministry, for more research into this or that area, for more laws and statutes and official guidance or the funding of more support groups. If there is no problem to justify an extension of their activities, a problem, or threat, or risk must be found. The problem can never be Big Government (this would be to blame themselves), it must always stem from unregulated activity, and the solution must be more State spending and control.

"To this planning class, freedom itself is an affront. ...

"But grumbling resentment and vague animosity towards the New Class is not enough. The nature of the battle must be spelled out. The need to fight must be underlined, the reasons for waging war explained, and distilled into memorable slogans.

"Most of all, the enemy needs to be clearly identified. Our failure to do so has allowed the New Class to grow and grow, and to escape responsibility for the chaos and misery it has caused. The first step must be to pronounce and advertise, loudly and repeatedly, that the New Class exists. The immense power of the New Class, as we have seen, lies in its anonymity - in the fiction that its members are neutral and disinterested experts, well-meaning ‘concerned’ scientists, high-minded intellectuals, impartial planners and regulators, rationally ordering us and our world, in our best interests. This sham neutrality must be exposed, the selfish motives called out. This invisible class must made visible. This anonymous class must be given a name."

~ Martin Durkin, from the first chapter to his forthcoming book on The New Class

"Though it's tempting to [always] blame the government for getting in the way of business, there's a lot about Kiwi business that is about getting in the way of itself."

"[T]hough it's tempting to [always] blame the government for getting in the way of business, there's a lot about Kiwi business that is about getting in the way of itself. ... The Mood of the Boardroom Survey & recent remarks by some of this nation's CEOs reflect on the (dubious) quality of New Zealand's boardrooms more than anything else. Namely that most are woke & weak. ...
    "NZ's Big Corporate CEOs will not themselves push productivity-enhancing reforms in their own firms ... They'd prefer, instead, to be Mr Nice Person. Look at the qualifications of many of them - the typical one being in Accounting. Other than that, its law. Lawyers often get on Boards because Kiwi firms want someone to help with compliance - not a person with imagination about where the future of the company should be. ...
    "Before the Productivity Commission was de-commissioned, it identified lack of 'managerial capability' as a contributor to our low productivity. ... Many of our CEOs & Boardrooms are not capable. ... The staff can't make up for a boss who is the wrong boss. ... "

~ Robert McCulloch from his post '"The Mood" of NZ's (Weak and Inbred) Boardrooms reflects on their own ineffectiveness, which has cut productivity, not on our MPs' quality'

"...capitalism would destroy itself by breeding a 'new class...' "

"Joseph Epstein’s [article] 'Socialists Don’t Know History' ... on the abysmal historical knowledge of young people brings to mind the prophesy of the keenest of economists, Joseph Schumpeter, in 1942 when he said that capitalism would destroy itself by breeding a 'new class: bureaucrats, intellectuals, professors, lawyers, journalists, all of them beneficiaries and, in fact, parasitical on them and yet, all of them opposed to the ethos of wealth production, of saving and of allocating resources to economic productivity.' The 77 years since then has proven Schumpeter a major prophet."

~ Larry W. White, from his 2019 letter to the Wall Street Journal. Hat tip The Dangerous Economist, who reposts a more similar yet more detailed 1992 article by Robert Samuelson 'Schumpeter: The Prophet'

"Much of the mess we are in can be blamed, in my view, on lawyers ... "

"In [New Zealand], much of the mess we are in can be blamed, in my view, on lawyers (and judges). ...
    "It was Geoffrey Palmer, a lawyer, who designed the original Resource Management Act, and it is David Parker, a lawyer, who's currently drawing up plans to implement wealth and capital taxes as part of the Labour Party's platform for the 2026 election. The current Chair of Kiwi Rail is a lawyer. His Deputy Chair is a lawyer. Most of NZ's big firms have boards dominated by lawyers (and accountants) who have no shop-floor experience in the industry in which "their" company is working. How have they got their jobs? From what I have learned, mostly by networking & schmoozing. Is this a world-wide phenomena? No. Who do companies like Tesla have on their boards? To give you a flavor, folks like Mr. Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, and Mr. Straubel, founder of Redwood Materials, a firm working to drive down the costs and environmental footprint of lithium-ion batteries by offering sources of anode & cathode materials from recycled batteries. ...
    "What has been the objective of those sitting in the Auckland law firms quietly earning incomes of way over $1 million a year? To maximise their fee income, of course. The legal & regulatory structures that have promoted monopoly power in NZ, the frameworks that govern race-relations, and the mountains of red-tape we all must navigate, have been made deliberately divisive, deliberately ineffective, and deliberately onerous by Kiwi lawyers, all to generate more disputes & work for law firms and their partners. The profession that has ground NZ's economy to a halt has been our legal profession — all in the name of its ... quest for higher incomes."

~ Robert MacCulloch from his post 'God Save New Zealand from Lawyers'

"Yes, Labour has won a landslide, but it’s not quite Starmer-geddon."

Britain's 'leaders' mourn the death of the Uniparty

"Yes, [UK] Labour has won a landslide [in the British election overnight], but it’s not quite Starmer-geddon. According to the exit poll, his landslide, predicted to be the largest since 1832 in one eve-of-election poll, is in fact smaller than Tony Blair’s in 1997, although not by much (170 v 179). 

    "More encouraging, if the exit poll is to be believed, is that Labour only managed a vote share of 36%, significantly lower than in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn (40%). 

    "By contrast, the Tories and Reform won a combined share of 43%. [Labour leader] Keir Starmer has won a landslide but not a mandate – his own majority is down by 16,000 – although I doubt he’ll be constrained by that.
    "The Left of the Labour Party will point to the fact that Starmer polled fewer votes than Corbyn – we don’t know that for sure yet, but it looks likely – and dispute that Labour only won this election by tacking to the centre, just as the Right of the Conservative Party will argue the Party didn’t lose by abandoning the centre ground (which is the prevailing orthodoxy among ‘One Nation’ Tories, believe it or not). And they’d both be right, in my view. In spite of Starmer’s victory, technocratic managerialism – or 'stakeholder capitalism,' as Klaus Schwab calls it – hasn’t exactly triumphed in this election. 

    "The Uniparty – that is, the Conservative Party under Sunak and the Labour Party under Starmer – got a bloody nose in the sense that the two main parties received an even lower share of the vote – 62% – than they did in 2010 (66%). That’s a lower share than in 1983 at the height of the SDP‘s popularity (70%) and worse than in either of the 1974 elections. Indeed, lower than in 1923, when the two main parties won 68.7%. You have to go all the way back to 1918, when the Liberal Party hadn’t yet collapsed, to find find Labour and the Conservatives collectively polling a lower vote share (59.2%).

"The superficial take on the result is that the U.K. is bucking the anti-technocratic trend sweeping the rest of the globe, particularly France where we may be witnessing the death throes of the Fifth Republic. But look beyond Labour’s landslide and the real story of the last six weeks is the rise of Reform and the lack of enthusiasm for the two centrist parties. 

    "Indeed, if we had PR in the U.K., as they do in the EU, we might now be looking at a Right-of-centre coalition with a populist leader at the helm and a move away from the Uniparty’s position on immigration and Net Zero, as well as its uncritical embrace of sectarian identity politics. We may have to wait another five years before that happens, but it seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that Starmer’s premiership will breathe new life into this calcified ideology. Much more likely is that a succession of policy failures, leading to a financial crisis, civil unrest and rolling black-outs, will be the death knell of technocratic managerialism. 

    "In 2029, the British electoral may finally vote for real change."

~ Toby Young from his post 'End of the Uniparty'

"...'A Lister' management types who have no in-depth knowledge of the technical, engineering workings of their industries?"

 

"The Board Chair of Kiwi Rail, David McLean, is a lawyer. He did a Bachelor of Law degree at Victoria University. The CEO of Kiwi Rail, Peter Reidy, has a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Accounting from Auckland University, where I work. 

    "Both were asked about what caused the Inter Island Ferry to crash. I assure you - nothing about how trains or ferries work is covered in law or commerce degrees. 

    "Why is productivity low in NZ? Could it be so many of the Boards & CEO positions in NZ are made up of 'A Lister' management types who have no in-depth knowledge of the technical, engineering workings of their industries? ... 

"Was Google started by accountants & lawyers? Was SpaceX started by lawyers & accountants? Was RocketLab started by lawyers & accountants?"

~ Robert MacCulloch, from his post 'Who does NZ call when its Ferries, Planes and Electricity Supplies are Broken? Lawyers and Accountants (!?)'

"Wellington's consultancy-industrial complex is in a funk." Good.

"[Wellington's] consultancy-industrial complex [is] in a funk, because philosophically and culturally, the change in government has shown up the gulf between them and the government. It has also demonstrated two major issues: The dearth of strategic and intellectual grunt in much of the public sector; and the ideological chasm between many of the ... public servants [sic], and the Government ...
    "[Ten years ago] there was a significant cohort of senior and leadership talent in parts of the public service [sic] that were formidable in their intellectual capability, commitment to ideological neutrality, and interest in an evidence-based approached to public policy.... [along with] a deep understanding of what they did and did not know, and what they could not know. ... They all knew that, by and large, they had no idea how much of the economy worked in any detail. ...
    "The beginning of change in that culture happened under the Clark Government, which was much more pro-active and wanted to 'do more.' ... the Ardern/Hipkins Government put it into overdrive, and the Luxon Government will be seeing the signs of it. ...
    "The elections of [Tory Whanu as mayor], Tamatha Paul as MP of Wellington Central and Julie Anne Genter as MP for Rongotai provides a sign of what has happened to the Wellington public service [sic] over that time. ... The Wellington public service [sic] grew enormously in the past six years, drawing upon enthusiastic graduates, predominantly coming with ... left-wing enthusiasm for state intervention, regulation, spending and taxation, with suspicion around ... the views of significant portions of the public, including those of more senior civil servants, because of identity factors (e.g. race, sex, gender &c.) ...
    "None of that would matter one iota if they could put that to one side and be highly-competent public-policy analysts, but that competence is wanting ... lacking historical knowledge and being weak on analytical capability.
    "As a result the mood today in many government departments ... is one of fear and depression, as a workforce of relatively young public servants [sic], most of whom did not vote for this government, struggle to cope with being asked to implement policies they don’t agree with. ...
    "[T]here is significant scope to scale down the numbers of people doing policy in government in Wellington ... because there is a distinct lack of talented, capable and clever people, who put aside their personal political biases in favour of evidence-based policy advice. Most importantly, there are few who will admit to Ministers 'we don’t really know how to do that' or 'we don’t know how that part of the economy works' or 'we don’t have the knowledge or experience on that issue ... '
    "[T]he government appears willing to lean down on the state sector (albeit not enough), which should provide ample opportunities to send blinkered ideologues with mediocre intellectual grunt to a new life not serving a government they hate."

~ Liberty Scott, from his post 'Wellington is in a funk'

The FAILURES of the Anointed

"[I]n the vision of the anointed, there is obviously a very expansive role for government and for the anointed in prescribing what government should do. ... Characteristic patterns have developed among the the anointed for dealing with the repeated failures of policies based on their vision. ... 

    "This pattern typically has four stages:

"STAGE 1. THE 'CRISIS': Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterised as a 'crisis' [climate, racism, hate speech, child poverty, children's lunches, smoking rates, microplastics &c.] even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described as a 'crisis' has in fact already been getting better for years.
"STAGE 2. THE 'SOLUTION': Policies to end the 'crisis' are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and 'simplistic,' if not dishonest. 

"STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z. 

"STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as 'simplistic' for ignoring the 'complexities' involved, as 'many factors' went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programmes that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors. Examples of this pattern are all too abundant."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

"We defeated the divine right of kings, now we have to do the same to the divine right of bureaucrats."

"I would like to think that the cozy post war socialist consensus is coming to a long overdue end. We defeated the divine right of kings, now we have to do the same to the divine right of bureaucrats."

~ Roué le Jour, from their comment on the 'Scorpion State'

"This was the election in which our political leaders declared, very loudly, that they weren’t here to fix the nation’s deep and evident problems."

"[T]his was the election in which our political leaders declared, very loudly, that they weren’t here to fix the nation’s deep and evident problems. They were here to ensure that things remained broken and they were prepared to go against the nominal values of their own parties to do so. ...
    "My contention is that this government was simultaneously too centrist and not centrist enough and I predict the next government will be the same. Instead of an economy that is built around either an interventionist state or free markets we have a hybrid of private and public sector solutions that never seem to solve anything; they deliver little value to the public, vast profits to private sector providers and high salaries to the senior public servants provisioning them, who seem to be completely unaccountable – no matter how dire their performance....

    "New Zealand is a liberal-democratic-free market-social welfare state – Francis Fukuyama’s 'End of History' model. But – as Fukuyama pointed out – all of the institutions that make the model work are vulnerable to oligarchic capture. Over time the people who manage them reorient them towards their own self-interest."

~ Danyl McLauchlan, from his post 'Notes towards an alt-centrist manifesto'

"Wokesters' loyalties are clearly not with the working poor."

"[Wokesters'] loyalties ... are clearly not with the working poor.... [T]his anti-enlightenment movement, popular chiefly among rich whites [is] a movement closer to the far-Right in its dismissal of universalism, militant identitarianism, and fervent support of censorship...
    "[The Woke write] newspaper columns celebrating price-hikes for inner-city car parks, without even a nod as to how crushing they would be for working parents, many of whom are forced to duck out of employment to manage their children at school’s end....
    "[The Woke enjoy] a good chuckle with fellow bourgeois commentator (of which we have no shortage) Moana Maniapoto about the plight of poor white men, oblivious to the deeply conservative subtext of ‘white privilege’ (another gift bestowed upon us by the woke). According to this charmer of a doctrine, if you are white and poor there really is no excuse, because you’re white, and so shouldn’t expect sympathy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and just stop being bloody poor and unhappy, will you?! Like so many wokisms, this is reheated conservativism.
    "Their open contempt for the poor is crystal in the central drive of this political project: to concentrate cultural, and all other power within their [professional-managerial] class.... [I]t’s well past time that the obnoxious, rich kids currently boring us all to death were told to pipe down, and the working poor were finally given a chance to speak up."

~ Dane Giraud, from his post 'Attacking woke politics is the most Left-wing thing you can do'

ESG creates a new rent-seeking class

“How many environmental justice majors does it take to calculate the CO2 emissions of a light bulb? This isn’t a joke. Businesses now employ scads of college grads to do this. For years America’s political class has lamented that too many college grads are working in low-paying jobs that don’t require post-secondary degrees. The diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental, social and governance industries—DEI and ESG, respectively—are solving for this problem while creating many others. In the modern progressive era, young graduates are finding remunerative employment as sustainability coordinators, DEI officers and 'people partners.' Instead of serving up pumpkin soy lattes, they’re quantifying corporate greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring employers don’t transgress progressive cultural orthodoxies.”

~ Allysia Finley, from her article 'Bidenomics and the Boom in DEI and ESG Jobs' [hat tip Samizdata]

"The professional class ..."

"The professional class that supports policies like housing regulation and occupational licensing to inflate their home values and salaries has had a worse impact on opportunities for the poor than the 1%, although the latter gets a lot more attention from the left."

~ Chris Freiman