I've been thinking a lot about the whole Blackrock as Chest concept, and what AA says here. (I note also that Yarvin has just challenged this on his substack, though what follows are my thoughts.)
From AA: "When Larry Fink sends his quarterly ‘Letter to the CEOs’, it is practically like a set of orders from a Soviet commissar. Thus, the compliance culture of corporations is downstream from the institutional pressure that massive asset management firms like Blackrock can push on them. It is not coming from woke Harvard graduates who are simply the product of this power structure, it is coming from the top."
Now, without giving too much away, I work and have worked at large financial corporations and investment banks. I've been on the receiving ends of these compliance culture orders, I've been at committees where ESG matters are discussed, I've worked with the people that directly write the policies. I've even changed areas because I didn't want to be part of it all. I once attended a talk where a regulator lesbian lectured on D&I and her amazing journey and the Head of the Investment Bank then heaped praise and talked about everything he was doing to bring equality to his team. Based on all this, my thoughts are these:
-At least at the level I have seen, these senior managers don't have their own ideas or plans. They are completely absorbing willingly their views from somewhere and they are all immediately singing from the same hymn sheet. In order to get to MD level you must become one of these clones. Now maybe the people at the very very top of the structure do have the ideas and plans, but as they are the same type of people I find it very hard to visualise. I think the senior managers get these ideas and their orders from certain key people that the firm brings in, such as a new head of diversity, from the state paid regulator in the case of the talk I went to, from training sessions written by certain people who will have copied from various industry presentations so the same language is used. I've also done an unconscious bias course that was run by a US company that I expect has trained tens of thousands of city workers. The people running it were ex corporate managers who had worked with academia to develop the course. In terms of direction, I was also struck by how the content of the course was all the critical theory stuff I had learnt at uni 20 years earlier. Clearly, what had been just one largely literary theory back then had grown legs and made it to the corporate world in that time. What I don't see is any evidence of all this coming from the very top from the firms I worked in, or from Blackrock or central banks (I did see from a regulator as mentioned). I can see how Blackrock might remind corporations of the importance of all this, such that the Board and CEO continue to see it as a priority and don't rock the boat. But I see it as like a mini industry within the finance industry that seems to have primarily been influenced by itself, academia, regulators, and the media and then continues to translate all this into a sanitised corporate version which it is running with and also feeding back into the culture.
So in summary, I see limitations with both AA's and Curtis' model based on the messy practical way I have seen the corporate part of this play out over the last 10 years. I do think that the idea that big finance is the ultimate captain of the ship is difficult to reconcile to what you can see, although it could well be the ultimate discipliner.
So in a sense Moldbug's cathedral is still valid. In simple terms Cathedral is Academia and Press which enables government bureaucracy. But as the nature of power is to centralize the chest which is bureaucracy controlling finance has successfully pwned other parts of bureaucracy.
Bravo, AA. This sort of "think tank" like research takes a lot of time and it is much appreciated.
Your talk at the event was great. Nice to see it published here.
The road to Fresh Prince is paved with good intentions. A sledgehammer of a write here AA.
I've been thinking a lot about the whole Blackrock as Chest concept, and what AA says here. (I note also that Yarvin has just challenged this on his substack, though what follows are my thoughts.)
From AA: "When Larry Fink sends his quarterly ‘Letter to the CEOs’, it is practically like a set of orders from a Soviet commissar. Thus, the compliance culture of corporations is downstream from the institutional pressure that massive asset management firms like Blackrock can push on them. It is not coming from woke Harvard graduates who are simply the product of this power structure, it is coming from the top."
Now, without giving too much away, I work and have worked at large financial corporations and investment banks. I've been on the receiving ends of these compliance culture orders, I've been at committees where ESG matters are discussed, I've worked with the people that directly write the policies. I've even changed areas because I didn't want to be part of it all. I once attended a talk where a regulator lesbian lectured on D&I and her amazing journey and the Head of the Investment Bank then heaped praise and talked about everything he was doing to bring equality to his team. Based on all this, my thoughts are these:
-At least at the level I have seen, these senior managers don't have their own ideas or plans. They are completely absorbing willingly their views from somewhere and they are all immediately singing from the same hymn sheet. In order to get to MD level you must become one of these clones. Now maybe the people at the very very top of the structure do have the ideas and plans, but as they are the same type of people I find it very hard to visualise. I think the senior managers get these ideas and their orders from certain key people that the firm brings in, such as a new head of diversity, from the state paid regulator in the case of the talk I went to, from training sessions written by certain people who will have copied from various industry presentations so the same language is used. I've also done an unconscious bias course that was run by a US company that I expect has trained tens of thousands of city workers. The people running it were ex corporate managers who had worked with academia to develop the course. In terms of direction, I was also struck by how the content of the course was all the critical theory stuff I had learnt at uni 20 years earlier. Clearly, what had been just one largely literary theory back then had grown legs and made it to the corporate world in that time. What I don't see is any evidence of all this coming from the very top from the firms I worked in, or from Blackrock or central banks (I did see from a regulator as mentioned). I can see how Blackrock might remind corporations of the importance of all this, such that the Board and CEO continue to see it as a priority and don't rock the boat. But I see it as like a mini industry within the finance industry that seems to have primarily been influenced by itself, academia, regulators, and the media and then continues to translate all this into a sanitised corporate version which it is running with and also feeding back into the culture.
So in summary, I see limitations with both AA's and Curtis' model based on the messy practical way I have seen the corporate part of this play out over the last 10 years. I do think that the idea that big finance is the ultimate captain of the ship is difficult to reconcile to what you can see, although it could well be the ultimate discipliner.
Finance permits buy-in from the technical-bureacratic class by allowing the fiction that there's a 'free market'.
Good stuff. It seems a bit like the Power Rangers combining their powers to produce this single machine.
So in a sense Moldbug's cathedral is still valid. In simple terms Cathedral is Academia and Press which enables government bureaucracy. But as the nature of power is to centralize the chest which is bureaucracy controlling finance has successfully pwned other parts of bureaucracy.