Source: Facebook

In technology here in Ukraine we have a lot of ‘labor’ but not a lot of ‘professionals’. In America we have even professional ‘labor’. Just as we have nearly every living soul capable of entrepreneurship.

A professional means a member of the middle class. What does the middle class mean? It means organizing production. What does a professional do? Organize his production and the production of others. And cooperate with peers on using empirical evidence and scientific reasoning to organize voluntarily.

Still the post-soviet thing everywhere: limited empirical experience, limited theoretical understanding, the need for direct supervision, the inabilty to resolve problems scientifically rather than authoritarively and intuitionistically.

I have problems with staff here that you only have at the very worst organizations in america – where people are overemployed above their abilities (which is very common in the states). But professionalism often compensates for lack of personal ability.

What we see here is the opposite, self reliance, or reliance on instruction rather than teamwork.

It’s one reason why they’re poor.

When contemporary economists label a middle class they mean “the ability to possess discretionary income”. Well, in the western past, the middle class could possess discretionary income. But that is not what defined the middle class: it was organizing production.

So while in theory economic, social, genetic, middle class should be synonyms, it’s quite possible to be a member of a genetic middle class, and socially and economically impoverished.

Conversely, it’s also possible to be a member of an economic middle class but socially and genetically impoverished (most of our artistic classes, and sportsman classes).

Most of ukraine seems to be populated by genetic middle classes with surprisingly few defects caused by long periods of urbanization. But they are artificially impoverished socially and therefore artificially impoverished economically.

I love them. But it frustrates me no end.