[marginalium]
The Managerial Class Has No Future
21 Mar 2025
The Managerial Class Has No Future:
The professional-managerial class (PMC) comprises highly educated professionals who work in fields like law, medicine, finance, and corporate management. Unlike traditional elites who can pass down family businesses, land, or powerful social networks, the PMC’s only transferable asset is often their earning potential–which must be painstakingly re-earned by their children through similarly grueling educational and professional hurdles.
…
There is an absurdity to the results – parents queueing up for private kindergartens so their children may fingerpaint in prestigious company, high school kids earnestly talking up the fashionable nonprofit they founded with parental funding, eight year olds diligently practicing dressage so that they may study at the best institutions. But zoom out and the picture is a grim one. The professional-managerial class has no reliable means of reproducing itself without being taxed by these institutions, and however high the toll, they must pay.
…
The result is a class that, despite its high incomes and social prestige, is fundamentally unsustainable. Without the ability to directly pass down their status, and with institutions continuously raising the price of admission, the professional-managerial class finds itself locked in a cycle where each generation must start from scratch – until, inevitably, the system consumes more than the class can produce.
But the result isn’t that they get priced out and a meritocracy emerges. It’s that everyone gets priced out. They have ideas about what to do, but obviously people will do nothing. Interesting thought experiment to think about what would happen by default.
Anthologies: Betterment, Wealth Architecture, Collective Architecture, On Being Fruitful, On Politics and Power, Accidental Civilisation