The Rage of the Almost Elites

McArdle has some good insights at times. Almost I can imagine persuading her to be a conservative.

This article nails it for me. It uses the Kubler-Ross stages of coping with loss to explain the #ows movement. (they’re at “anger”)

The old economic order is dying and some people haven’t gotten used to that quite yet:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2011/10/17/kubler-ross-and-occupywallstreet/

That guy is at the ‘worship Cthulhu’ stage of grief. Holy cow, that’s dark.

To me it seems that the new economic order is dying and something older is reasserting itself, the new, dying order being the one where the middle of the middle class is a fine place to be and those with at least average ability who want to strive for wealth or status of some degree are free to do so. The older order is the one where only life as an aristocrat, even if only a very minor one, seems worth living, and the rest of peasant humanity is so much livestock.

There was a great line in one of the Jack Aubrey books about a gentleman aboard ship for a diplomatic mission. A couple of the officers he could relate to as fellow humans because of their families. The rest of the ship he treated like dogs, as treated by a man who loves dogs.

Here’s the Economist making pretty much the same point but in a less “dark” manner.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence