In the current issue of Newsweek, author Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, posits the emergence of 3 global social classes: Global Symbolic Analyst, National Symbolic Analyst and the rest of us. I.e., the super-rich, the merely-rich and the poor.
Reich documents the demise of the U.S. middle class, and its concomitant bifurcation into the lower tier (mostly) and the upper tier (partly). That squeeze is thanks to the efficiencies of higher productivity, as well as the demands from the fast-growing scale and complexity of global commerce.
Reich defines a Symbolic Analyst as one who manipulates information in order to solve problems … examples are research scientists, design engineers, software engineers, civil engineers, biotechnology engineers, PR executives, investment bankers, lawyers, and real estate developers.
If your job description appears above, and you’re able to ramp your skills up to a global level, think outside the box and see opportunities where none exist, then you too can be a Global Symbolic Analyst, and will likely have a bright future … at least according to Reich.
The New Rich-Rich Gap – Newsweek, Issues 2006
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I think this was a prescient article. The middle class seems only to have shrunk since ’05.
Farewell, middle class. You definitely had a good run.
I don’t appreciate how the two other classes get cool names and my class is called “the rest.”