§ 02 / The Asymmetry

Who has access to the methodology, and who has not.

An architecture is not a class-war instrument because its operators intend it as one. It is a class-war instrument because access to its operation is distributed unequally between classes whose material interests stand in long-running antagonism. The twelve cases each document such an asymmetry. The synthesis is that the asymmetry is consistent across the twelve.

ASYMMETRY 01 · CASE 01–02

Access to the methodology of policing's public-trust measurement

The University of Regina Justice Studies department is funded, in part, by the agencies whose perception surveys it methodologizes. The Indigenous and racialized respondents whose under-counting is the structural feature of those surveys are not funded to contest the methodology. The first group writes the questionnaire. The second group answers it.

→ Case 01 · Case 02

ASYMMETRY 02 · CASE 07–09

Access to the framing of oversight and inquest scope

The Military Police Complaints Commission, the provincial coroner's offices, and the operating institutions whose conduct is examined are staffed and funded by the same federal and provincial governments. The families and communities of the deceased are not. The first group selects the presiding officer. The second group is permitted to attend.

→ Case 07 · Case 08 · Case 09

ASYMMETRY 03 · CASE 10

Access to the methodology of the price index

The Boskin Commission was a five-economist panel appointed by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. Three of the five had affiliations with the Stanford / Hoover / NBER research cluster. No panellist represented a sector whose products would be hedonically up-adjusted. No panellist represented the renter, the pensioner, or the wage-earner whose indexed payments would be reduced by the recommendations. The first group writes the methodology. The second group is paid against it.

→ Case 10 · §05 Designers

ASYMMETRY 04 · CASE 11

Access to the monetary architecture of asset prices

The closure of the gold window in 1971 removed the external constraint on the U.S. money supply. The newly created money reached holders of financial assets first — through the credit system, the primary dealers, and the asset purchases of the Federal Reserve. The wage-earning population received the money last, if at all, through wage adjustments that the 1979 Volcker shock was deliberately structured to break. The Cantillon effect is not a metaphor for class war. It is its monetary mechanism.

→ Case 11 · §08 Reputation Laundering

ASYMMETRY 05 · CASE 12 · Episodes 01–02

Access to the medical-citation chain and the journals

R.J. Reynolds paid the Journal of the American Medical Association for advertising space and maintained a Medical Relations Division. Purdue Pharma funded the Continuing Medical Education system that propagated the Porter and Jick citation chain. The patients to whom the resulting prescriptions were issued — and whose children inherited the dependence — did not have a Medical Relations Division. The first group commissioned the literature. The second group was the literature's experimental population.

→ Case 12 · Episode 01 · Episode 02

ASYMMETRY 06 · CASE 12 · Episode 03

Access to the regulation of the medical licence

The provincial Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons are self-regulating. The licences they administer are administered by the same profession that holds them. The Indigenous patients harmed by the operational continuation of Canadian healthcare — coerced sterilization in Saskatchewan, ER neglect in Winnipeg, mockery in Joliette, forcible removal in Regina — have no equivalent self-regulating body. The first group writes the standard of care. The second group is the standard's case material.

→ Case 12 · Episode 03 · Case 09

ASYMMETRY 07 · CASE 12 · Episode 04

Access to the institutional voice during a pandemic

The Chief Medical Officers of Health, the provincial colleges, and the Canadian Medical Association together hold the institutional voice that determines whether universal masking is required in healthcare. The disabled and immunocompromised patient communities — who bear the largest share of the cost of nosocomial transmission — do not hold an equivalent institutional voice. The first group decides whether the protection is required. The second group is the protection's subject.

→ Case 12 · Episode 04

ASYMMETRY 08 · CASE 11 + CASE 10

Access to the deflator that determines the wage

The Consumer Price Index is the deflator. The wage is divided by the deflator to produce the real wage. If the deflator is revised downward, the real wage appears higher than it lived. The methodologists who revise the deflator have access to the consensus venues — BIS, OECD, IMF, NBER, Conference Board — in which the methodology is set. The workers whose real wages are computed against the deflator do not. The first group sets the divisor. The second group is what gets divided.

→ Case 10 + Case 11

The eight asymmetries above are not a complete enumeration. They are the asymmetries the twelve cases document with primary sources. Each is a difference of access. Each access difference is, on the public record, a class difference. The architecture does not require its operators to declare any of this. It requires only that the operators have access to one side of each asymmetry and the operators' subjects have access to the other.