On class separation

The Times obituary of Lord Carrington says:

More commonly, he found himself sleeping in a hole beneath his tank with his four crew who came from poor backgrounds and had suffered hardship during the pre-war years. The experience shaped his politics, he said later. “You could not have got a finer or better lot than they were. They deserved something better in the aftermath of the war.

This was a common sentiment. In exposing posh men to the working class, military service increased their sympathy for the poor – and as Adam Smith said, sympathy is the basis of our sense of justice. For this reason (among many others discussed by Walter Scheidel in The Great Leveler) the war led to big fall in inequality.

Herein, though, lies perhaps an under-appreciated social change in recent decades – an increased separation of the classes. I don’t just mean geographic separation, though this is important. I mean separation in the workplace. Years ago, the classes would meet at work. In offices, posh men would meet less educated women in the typing pool: think of the Mad Men office. In manufacturing, middle class managers would rub shoulders with workers. And even in investment banks, there really were “barrow-boy”-type traders alongside old school tie-types. 

This now is now longer so much the case. Many of us are in occupations where we only meet folk of similar class. And thanks to a lack of social mobility, posh people are unlikely too meet many from a different class origin. The only working class person a journalist might meet at work is the cleaner. For all the talk of diversity, many posh people now work in homogenous offices. As Daniel Cohen writes:

Only recently, workers, foremen, engineers and owners were connected by relationships that, though sometimes antagonistic, allowed each group to evaluate where it belonged in a shared industrial world. Now, engineers are in consulting firms, maintenance workers are in service companies, and industrial jobs are subcontracted, mechanized or relocated. (The Infinite Desire for Growth, p148)

I suspect this has contributed to increased inequality.

One obvious route is via increased assortative mating; middle-class men now marry other middle-class women rather than their (working-class) secretaries. That has increased inequality (pdf).

Another mechanism is the “out of sight, out of mind effect”. If the poor never see the rich, they’ll never appreciate just how great inequality is. For example, Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael Norton have shown (pdf) that in 16 countries, the ratio of CEO to workers’ pay is massively greater than people estimate it to be.

By the same token, if the rich are out of sight, envy and resentment will be directed instead at the people who are in sight, such as benefit claimants.

But there’s also the reverse Carrington effect: greater class separation means less sympathy and so less taste for redistribution among the rich.

One aspect of this consists of the othering of workers. Because posh people have so little direct knowledge of working people, they impute all sorts of bad habits to them, such as lack of aspiration, poor diet and racism – even though the latter especially is also found in posher people.

Such imputation also serves a reactionary function, as the belief that workers have “legitimate concerns” helps to popularize anti-immigration policy and to displace more radical agendas. There’s just one problem with this. It’s not true. Attitude to immigration have softened markedly in recent years (table 6 of this pdf). And in new research Matthijs Rooduijn concludes (pdf):

There is no consistent proof that the voter bases of populist parties consist of individuals who are more likely to be unemployed, have lower incomes, come from lower classes, or hold a lower education.

Ignorance of workers, then, might well contribute to both inequality and a misreading of politics.

All this said, things aren't so clear. Mere proximity to workers doesn’t necessarily give you great knowledge of them: David Astor, the mega-rich editor of the Observer in the 50s, for example was shocked to discover that his staff had mortgages. Nor does it always generate sympathy. Perhaps the opposite. One reason for Thatcher’s popularity among much of the middle class in the 1970s was that managers knew workers well and saw them to be lazy, bolshy and greedy.

All I’m suggesting is a possibility – that there has been increased separation of the classes since (say) the 1970s; that this might have political and social effects; and that all this is under-appreciated.

Comments

[Scratch]

"Perhaps the opposite. One reason for Thatcher’s popularity among much of the middle class in the 1970s was that managers knew workers well and saw them to be lazy, bolshy and greedy."

I imagine the bourgeois and their little helpers would regard anything other than uncomplaining total immiseration as evidence of laziness, bolshiness and greed.

Its one of the many telling concordances between the "progressive" and golf club currents of contemporary class privilege.

[Alan Brisling]

You've been on fire recently. Lots of nails getting hit on heads.

[Daniel]

"By the same token, if the rich are out of sight, envy and resentment will be directed instead at the people who are in sight, such as benefit claimants."

Something like this manifests in my mum's dislike of the broad left. She hates snobby middle class socialists more than toffs like Rees Mog, she would rather be lorded over by a lord than recieve any kind of wealth redistributionfrom Fabian types who take a paternalistic and technocratic approach to socialism. She never had to encounter those who own large amounts of land and live in mansions. She does however have direct contact with the moralising middle class.

She also voted Leave and I think this failure of the left has contributed to Brexit.

[Jim]

You could replace 'posh' throughout in this piece with 'progressive Left' and it would be just as accurate. The Left used to be about helping the working man and woman, now its about identity politics and how many transexuals can dance on the head of a pin. The modern Left despise the working classes nowadays, they have this horrible tendency towards national pride and hetero-normality.

[Nick Reid]

Did "middle class men in offices marry working class women from the typing pool" ?

Wasn't it the case that middle class women, denied an academic education, went into jobs like secretarial work where they would meet middle class husband material.

As an aside, the clever secretaries who didn't marry and continued working, moving up to positions of responsibility in back & middle office office jobs, explains why (arguably) institutions were better run in the old days. These days such women would go to university and enter the professions themselves.

[Miguel Madeira]

I doubt that in the old days there was really much marriages between middle class man and working class woman.

Simple math - if there was many middle class man / working class woman marriages, there shouf be also at least one of the two: many middle class woman / working class man marriages; or b) many middle class woman and working class man remaining single for lack of acceptable partners.

We know that a) was almost taboo even some decades ago; and I doubt that b) was also much common (because I think that some decades ago the share of not-married people was much lower than today).

Like Nick Reid, I suspect that many of this apparent many middle class man / working class woman marriages were indeed with middle class woman doing apparently working-class jobs.

An additional observation - in the stories of Agatha Christie, set largely in the period from 1920 to 1970, it was common to find the daughters and nieces of lords and investment bankers doing jobs like secretary and nurse; I imagine that this was the reality for many not-yet-married upper and middle class women of the time.

[Dave Timoney]

It's worth remembering that Carrington's respect for the working class never extended to putting himself forward for democratic election. His long political career was entirely the result of aristocratic patronage.

[Anon]

Yes, it was often posh girls working as secretaries etc.

Also, as an aside, barristers' clerks are still often working class today.

[Blissex]

«anything other than uncomplaining total immiseration as evidence of laziness, bolshiness and greed»

But from a left/working class point of view a lot of the "class struggle" in the 60-70s was driven by a substantial degree of “laziness, bolshiness and greed”: because a number of important *trade* unions were in effect thinly disguised nearly hereditary guilds whose members were or aspired to be worker- rentiers, and screw everybody else, including the real working class, never mind the underclass.

These "elites" not really of the working class then became thatcherite to an excess as soon as thatcherism gave them a bit of property and some profits from self-employment as tradesmen.

Put another way, the supreme tory and whig value is incumbency, and some "trade" unions were dominated by reactionary incumbents who used left-wing language and appearances to defend their incumbency and make it as profitable as possible, in this not different from lords of the manor or City executives.

[Maurits Pino]

Nice post. Two questions/observations.

In the US south, slave owners, especially ones owning a small number, and their slaves would live in very close proximity day in day out. The sympathy and justice argument line didn't work very well there.

On work place separation, I guess you're right. And with respect to the cleaner, this is often an outsourced job who disappears in the course of the morning and won't join the office party.

But I have the impression that my grammar school (early '80s) was a lot more heterogenuous that my father's ('50s) and our universities as well.