Or: How the pre‑1970 generation built a single ladder, pulled it up, and then blamed the young for not climbing it
Last time, we argued that baseline liberalism – adults are adults, let them fail, let them love whom they choose – is the path of least resistance. But we left a question hanging: what about the economy? What about the rigid financial, employment and status markets that turn adulthood into a zero‑sum death match?
This post answers that question. The core problem is not just cultural grievance; it is structural inflexibility. The solution is not to tear down the old pyramids, but to build many new ones – and to decouple your private life from your public scorecard.
The Single Pyramid Trap
For most of the post‑war era, there was essentially one social pyramid: you go to college, get a permanent job, marry, buy a house, have 2.1 children, retire with a gold watch. That worked – for a while. The economy grew. Housing was affordable. A single income could support a family.
Those conditions are gone. The pyramid is still there, but now it’s crowded, slippery, and guarded by people who climbed it decades ago and then pulled up the ladder. The result? Everyone under 40 is fighting for the same shrinking peak – while being told that if they fail, it’s their fault.
This is the single‑pyramid trap. It fuels the culture war because it makes every success feel like someone else’s loss. It fuels nativism because it turns immigrants into scapegoats for a shortage of good jobs. It fuels woke resentment because it reduces every person to their demographic scorecard – the only categories that seem to matter when there’s only one game in town.
The answer is not to fight harder on the same pyramid. The answer is to build more pyramids.
Multiple Pyramids: Let a Thousand Elites Bloom
Imagine a society where you can be a master electrician and be respected as much as a junior lawyer. Where a successful local baker is as celebrated as a mid‑level bureaucrat. Where an immigrant who starts a small restaurant, a skilled carpenter, a gifted teacher, an innovative software freelancer, a dedicated hospice nurse – each has their own pyramid, their own peak, their own status markers.
This is not utopia. It is already happening in the cracks. The maker movement, the open‑source community, the gig economy, the rise of portfolio careers – these are all attempts to escape the single pyramid. What they lack is legitimacy. A freelance programmer is not “a real job” in the eyes of the generation that still measures success by corner offices and company pensions.
The project of baseline liberalism is to confer that legitimacy. Not by taxing the rich into oblivion (though that might help), but by changing the cultural conversation: there is more than one way to be successful. You are not a failure if you don’t climb the corporate ladder. You are not a loser if you choose a path that doesn’t maximise income.
This reduces zero‑sum competition. It also undermines nativism, because when there are many pyramids, the immigrant who opens a corner shop is not a threat; he’s just another pyramid with its own peak.
Decouple: Your Job Is Not Your Life
The pre‑1970 generation conflated personal and professional life because the system rewarded that conflation. The “company man” was a hero. The stay‑at‑home mother was a paragon. The immigrant who kept his native customs was an outsider to be assimilated.
Decoupling means: your employer does not need to know your private arrangements. The state does not need to approve your family structure. Your neighbour does not need to agree with your cultural background. Private life is private. Public life is about contribution, not conformity.
This is already happening. Remote work decouples home from office. The gig economy decouples tasks from lifelong employment. New living arrangements decouple commitment from traditional scripts. Baseline liberalism says: let these trends accelerate, and stop moralising about how people organise their private lives.
Decoupling reduces the stakes of the culture war. When your identity is not fused with your job title or your private choices, you are less likely to see the other side as an existential threat.
The Luck Pipeline: Why Imposter Syndrome Is a Tell
The elite heir can study cooking, work in a restaurant that later gets a Michelin star, switch to theatre, win a scholarship abroad, and return to a comfortable life – all while feeling like an impostor. That imposter syndrome is not a psychological flaw; it is a tell. It signals that the system let them fail upward, change careers, take risks, because family wealth and social capital provided a safety net.
The non‑elite who tries the same would face debt, rejection, and no second act. Their imposter syndrome, if they succeed, is different: the fear of being found out despite genuine merit.
Reducing elite pipelining means making the safety net universal. It means need‑blind admissions, public registries of internships, caps on legacy preferences, and – ultimately – a social safety net that allows anyone to take a risk, fail, and try something else without falling into destitution.
This is not socialism. It is opportunity insurance. It is the logical extension of baseline liberalism: if adults are adults, they should have the freedom to fail without being punished for a lifetime.
Flexibility as the Antidote to Grievance
The grievances of Gen Z, Millennials, and even late Gen X in post‑Soviet Europe are all the same: markets that are too rigid, pyramids that are too few, private lives that are too public. The answer is not to turn back the clock to the 1950s (the nativist solution) or to police every interaction for micro‑aggressions (the woke solution). The answer is to make everything more flexible.
- More liquidity in financial markets (so young entrepreneurs can access capital).
- More channels in employment markets (so gig work, self‑employment, and portfolio careers are respected).
- More pyramids in status markets (so there are many ways to be elite).
- More decoupling of personal from public life (so your private choices don’t determine your public standing).
This is not a radical agenda. It is the quiet, boring, resilient work of institutional design. It will not make headlines. It will not go viral. But it will outlast the culture war, because it addresses the material and structural causes of grievance, not just the symptoms.
The old generation built a single ladder, climbed it, and then pulled it up. Our task is not to tear down the ladder – it’s to build a scaffolding, a network of ramps, a city of pyramids where everyone can find a peak that fits. That is the path of least resistance. And it is the only path that leads to the stars.