There are strange patterns in the economy right now, which have experts scratching their head. It's a topic that Marketplace (an NPR program on finance) has touched on repeatedly this past year. For instance, unemployment is lower than economists thought it could go without triggering inflation. Honestly, this is not stuff I understand, but I get the gist, which is that the usual predictions and indicators of the health of the economy simply aren't working as expected any more. Everyone is in new territory now.
On a purely anecdotal level, my company -- which makes its money consulting for big business -- is doing very well. So well that extremely generous raises were handed out at the end of the year (as much as one can tell, given that no one talks about compensation to fellow co-workers). So yes, the top of the economy appears to be thriving.
Yes, definitely. My guess is that the old assumptions are working for about 10% - 25%, more or less, or the fraction of workers who still have real jobs, and can own a home or otherwise build wealth.
About half of the population no longer make a “living wage.” They are not unemployed, but they are often unable to acquire one or more basics such as housing, healthcare or transportation. The old assumptions included the idea that if you worked full-time, you’d be okay. In the service and temp/gig economy, that’s no longer true.
If the voters understood this, we’d see more pressure for single payer healthcare and subsidized housing, among other things, in an effort to use redistribution to make up for goods people can’t afford in the market.
The inability of wages to keep up with the actual cost of living must be deflationary. I would guess that automation is making up the productivity difference as low wages would tend to make workers less productive after a point.
The system is still generating make work, but all that can be automated. Eventually, it will shed people at a noticeable rate. They won’t be counted as unemployed once they go too long without being able to find work. Since we don’t have a proper safety net, they’ll show up as homeless once their numbers swell past what informal community and family help can support.
The working poor are being encouraged to blame the disabled and homeless who are getting any help, and immigrants working under the table, instead of a system they can’t understand or afford. They are encouraged to blame themselves when they can’t survive on service job wages. I believe this is a driver of suicide in rural middle aged men. They can’t survive and can’t understand why.
I know it sounds arrogant to say a large fraction of the population is unable to understand what is happening to them, and unable to cope at what educated people generally consider an adult level. But if they truly can’t understand, someone has to intervene for them before they start lashing out. That’s not going to happen, because the enemies of this country control it.
Three or four years ago, I predicted the hard Right was engineering a coup. They believe they can submerge the population in poverty and still either maintain order or shelter themselves. This is impossible, disorder and economic rot don’t care who you are. All this madness is driven by a misunderstanding of the problem, the belief we’re still in the economic past, and a misunderstanding of what that past was.
But I am convinced we can’t explain it to people, either. Most of the people cognitively able to understand already do, and as arrogant as it may sound, I believe the rest really cannot. So TV fills the gap. And they still vote.
www.theguardian.com
