Blogging is a peculiar activity.
Being something quite personal, and undertaken by a variety of reasons I guess
there are as many ways to go about it as there are bloggers. The way I
personally “go about it” is choosing a topic I want to clarify, mulling about
it for a few days (I tend to concentrate on issues when I go for a walk at
lunchtime, something I’ve taken a liking for of late) and then forcing myself
to put it down on paper (although there is no physical paper involved, as I normally
write directly on the computer) and see how it evolves when words have actually
to be chosen, and sentences crafted to express the ideas I have vaguely shaped
previously. Once I’m done (or, frequently, when the word count has reached an
inordinate amount) I typically find that many ideas have been left out, that
some sentences that I had already thought almost word for word never made it to
the page and that a lot of verbiage and sometimes of unnecessary chaff ended up
there instead (but it is damn difficult to separate the chaff from the wheat in
what one has written, as even the more unrelated circumlocutions may have a
certain tone, a whiff or heartfelt expressiveness, of oratorical persuasiveness
that makes it awfully difficult to just erase them in order to clean up the
argument…) Sigh, it is my hope that by practicing, and then practicing some
more I end up being better at it, but my regular readers may legitimately
wonder if there has been some noticeable progress, or my prose keeps as mangled
and baroque and circuitous as ever.
The reason of such tortured
reflection is that when re-reading the post I published yesterday, that was
originally to be about how the social structures we take for granted (from the
well-stocked supermarket to the commitment of the police to the rule of law and
judiciary review) may dissolve and disappear, and how to plan for it, ended up
being a rant about the failures of current capitalism to maintain a rate of
growth comparable to the one prevalent in the last two hundred years, and how
in the West we have mainly squandered four decades already. As that argument is one I’ve already made a
number of times, and am sufficiently convinced of it as to not need further
proof and clarification, I’d like to come back to the original argument and
explore the different possible paths of societal decay we can expect to unfold
in the next decades, be it gradual or sudden.
Back to the slowly boiling frog
OK, so in my previous post I (in so
many words) settled that gradual decline looks like our everyday life, because
it has been happening since the 70’s, even when we went through a stupendous
(apparent) period of unparalleled growth in the 90’s that was then mostly
erased by the dot com bust in the early aughts and then by the Great Recession
that settled in after 2008. That’s how long decline periods look like: there
are temporary bumps and upward turns, which are relentlessly followed by deeper
troughs and reversions to the overarching downward trajectory. I’m not saying
that the world will never, ever see an economic expansion again (we may be
seeing one right now, feeble as it looks like for the majority of the squeezed
middle class), only that they will be, on average, briefer than the recessions
they will be sandwiched in between, and that their benefits will be, as has
been the case so far, enjoyed only by the dominant minority. Because that was
the other half of my screed: the little growth that could be showed has been
very unequally distributed, so for the majority it amounts to nothing.
I also hinted at the fact that we
may have reached a tipping point, as people is widely beginning to realize that
the promise of ever increasing riches in exchange for ever increasing toil will
not be honored. Both salaried workers and independent professionals (unless
they belong to the best paid 1%) in their mid-forties and fifties should have
realized by now that their standard of living is pretty much similar to that of
their parents, minus the kids. That is, after reaching an age in which there is
not much more dazzling professional advancement to be expected, they have to
accept that they are making give or take very much like what their parents
made. Nominally it is surely sounds like much more, but once you start setting
apart a retirement fund -a must, given how shaky Social Security looks all the
world over-, you factor in the increased cost of health care and the
diminishing support to be expected from the state and take into account
inflation (much above the measured CPI in some significant sectors like the
aforementioned health care and in most countries’ real state: it is not
uncommon to find successful professionals wondering how their parents could
afford to buy and hold on to several houses while they can barely afford one,
typically smaller) they should realize they are by no means wealthier than
their pops were, and as they expected to be (a rational expectation, given that
their parents did become significantly wealthier than their own parents, and
that they grew up hearing stories of how their future would be even brighter,
surrounded by nanny robots and flying cars). But the real situation is even
direr, as not only they have not been able to amass more wealth than their
parents, but they should see that their parents managed to produce the same
amount of wealth while at the same time leaving more descendants (that could
personally take care of them in their old age and impersonally pay for their
needs with taxes to fund Social Security). In the West’s dwindling populations,
most people have more siblings than sons and daughters, so they should realize
that the generation that came before not only managed to produce in their
lifetime almost as much wealth as themselves, but could do so while also successfully
replenishing the work force in a way they have not been able to emulate (they
can think “geez, I only recently finished paying the mortgage of our house
-either smaller or farther from the city center and requiring a longer commute
than my parents’-, and still have much of the college expenses and skyrocketing
tuition of my single kid in front of me, can’t even start to fathom how I would
make ends meet if I had three or four of ‘em as mom and pop had!!!”).
Funnily enough, it is not the middle
aged, well-adjusted people in high-paying jobs the ones who are realizing to
what extent they have been swindled (but swindled by who? As a swindle needs a
willing swindler, and the nefarious deed has been in this case performed by an
impersonal dominant reason, by society being organized in a way that nobody
consciously designed but in whose design everybody unwillingly acquiesced). It
is the kids. The ones we burden with derisive labels (“Gen X’ers”,
“Millennials”), and which we scold if they are not career-driven enough, if
they don’t seem eager enough to jump in the rat race, to pursue the highest
grades, to constantly improve their SAT scores, to strive to get in the best
(and most expensive!) universities; if they choose to stay in their parents’
basement playing videogames until they are thirty and find out they are
unemployable and “unmarriable” (but seem to be happy enough just hangin’ out
with their buddies -physical or virtual). And their “dropping out” (a
tragically outdated expression if there ever was one, that got worn out before
its heyday came) suits the minority in power just fine, as they were going to
be replaced by robots and AI all the same, so better if it can be done while
they stay busy and contented lest they start questioning the dominant order and
the justice and fairness of a social arrangement that has no use for them (not
as producers, and, soon, not even as consumers) and no interest in giving them
a public voice or responsibilities of any kind.
But it is between them where the
first cracks will appear. The weakest link of any civilizational level
transmission mechanism is its reliance on enlisting the newer cohorts in the
implicit project of keeping the system alive, which has to be aimed precisely
to the the young. If a social order fails at instilling its value hierarchy,
its conception of what a good life consists in and its definition of socially
sanctioned desires (that is, its whole dominant reason) in the newer
generations it will fade away and disappear, as ours is exactly doing. How can
we notice if that is the case, and the whole society is indeed failing in this critical
task of transmitting the dominant reason on which it relies? Well, if it were
indeed the case we could expect to see a growing number of kids a) not working
b) not reproducing and at some point c) not acquiescing to the minority between
them that insist in keeping the whole charade going. I think that b) is
uncontroversial, and is what originally called to my attention that may be our
super system/ best of all possible worlds/ we never had it so good so shut up
and carry on may not be all that it was cranked up to be (if our social compact,
value set and life circumstances were so wonderful, so efficient, so conducing
to the maximum happiness to the maximum number, why would so many people vote
with their gonads against its continuation?). What about a)? not long ago Tyler
Cowen pointed in his excellent “Marginal Revolution” blog to a very interesting
article by Justin Fox in Bloomberg (out of prison, out of work)
that presented the following graph:
What we see is that instead of the
declining participation rate of men in the workforce being a uniquely North
American phenomenon, it is a widely extended one, affecting all advanced
economies. The only “exceptional” thing about the American case is how they
made it extra hard (and much less voluntary) to an unusually large number by
the implementation of a demented prison policy that condemned almost three
million citizens, a figure in which minorities were heavily overrepresented, to
a status of permanent underclass with no job prospects (but as it also robbed
them of the franchise they had no way to express and seek redress to their
grievances through the normal political process, being perpetually “out of
sight & out of mind”). We will extract a few interesting consequences of
the American experience in a moment, but first I’d like to dwell for a minute
in the implications of such trend. I think it can only be understood as another
defining sign of the exhaustion of our civilizational model and the growing
chasm between the dominant elites (who still preach the gospel of desiderative
reason: “produce as much as you can, because the more you produce the more you
will be able to consume, your position in the social hierarchy will be dictated
exclusively by how much you can consume, and the improvement of such position
is the only desire you are allowed to harbor”) and the masses that have stopped
believing in it, for different reasons (they see the system as rigged, they see
it doesn’t matter how hard they work, they never seem to enjoy the same status
as the undeserving heirs of the elites, the expectation of perpetual struggle
and perpetual reinvention seems just too much effort for such a meager reward…)
I can still remember reading with
horror a report from my old employer about “the future of work” which blankly
stated that the stable structure of the job market was leading towards the
following stratification:
·
A
third of the workforce would be permanently unemployed
·
A
third of the workforce would be occasionally employed, without any security,
for short periods and no stability whatsoever
·
A
third of the workforce would be stably employed, with full protections and
benefits
Not so off-the-mark, huh? And that
was published in the roaring 90’s of the past century, in the middle of the
longest economic expansion in USA history and with the labor market offering
something as close to full employment as in any other moment of the Republic’s life!
I hesitated to believe it back then, but now have to confess that we are almost
there (the USA has more NILFs and less unemployment, the more welfarist
European states have less NILFs and more unemployment… in both we have similar
total numbers of prime working age people not working, be it by choice or not).
And an interesting point is that automation and technological advance have
nothing to do with it. Apple developing a pair of wireless earbuds or Google’s
self-driving cars reaching 2 million miles (or rather, repeating the same
trajectory of twenty miles one hundred thousand times, which is quite
different) are responsible for exactly zero of that 30% of the potential labor
force that is out of work, regardless of them being counted on the official
unemployment statistics or not. As I’ve already noted a gazillion times, there
is not much technological innovation truly going on (as opposed to “going on in
the press releases of the tech companies that expect to benefit from gullible
people, including clever analysts with high stakes in the game, believing the
opposite”), so it is not innovation or creative destruction or excess
regulation causing the dwindling fortunes of the salaried employees, but the
sheer forces of demography and social model exhaustion.
The other interesting point is how
the people who still manage to work, be it in a high-powered job or doing
menial tasks occasionally, deal with the stark contrast between their life and
that of the growing number that is apparently not working and not much the
worse for it (thanks to a family support structure -the traditional moving back
to their parents’ basement- that although fraying at the edges still manages to
insulate many youngsters from the worst consequences of a social order that has
no need for them). Their reaction is similar to what we have seen in civilizational
crises during most of history’s “times of troubles”: tribalism and homogenization
of the ingroup values by contrasting them with a demonized “other”. When you identify
with a value set (or with a dominant reason, which is but another way of saying
the same thing, as the former is part of the latter), a set from whose
dominance you derive important benefits in terms of social prestige and
appropriation of an outsized fraction of the total social product, and you see
that set decomposing and being questioned from within, your first impulse is to
“circle your wagons” and try to defend it accusing “people from outside” from
its weakening. Brexit, anyone? Ascendant white nationalism (aka Trumpism) in
the USA? Increasing popular support for right-wing extremist parties in France
and Germany? Rejection of the peace deal between the Colombian government and
the FARC? All of them are manifestations of a threatened elite pulling the
strings to extend its own survival by stoking nationalist (to the point of
chauvinism), classist and reactionary sentiments between the unenlightened
masses.
And this is why the USA case is
doubly exemplary. What we saw there in the 70s was how the ruling (white)
majority imposed almost martial law on the more easily identifiable part of
their internal proletariat (blacks and, increasingly, latinos) by
disproportionally prosecuting their less socially oriented behavior (so the possession
and consumption of drugs seen as mainly used by blacks, like crack, were much
more heavily penalized than that of those associated with the white population,
like cocaine and cannabis), reducing the “social safety net” seen as
disproportionately favoring that internal proletariat (through Clinton’s
welfare reform, aimed at what was seen by whites as mostly black beneficiaries:
“welfare queens” and the like) and at the same time favoring their more
consumption-oriented behavior by easing their access to credit (a preliminary
step towards the reinstitution of debt peonage), although that last step was
probably taken too far, as the increased risk of that additional credit, redistributed
between all classes, almost brings the whole system (elites included) to their
knees in the subprime crisis of 2008 (which, however, most elites escaped
unscathed while the average -proletarian- taxpayer ended up paying the final
bill).
So this is what we can expect in the
rest of the world: more inequality, a growing fraction of the media devoting
more time to the construction of an imagined common identity that only admits
of a segment of the population (the one that monopolizes Toynbee’s “dominant
minority”: whites in Europe, Canada, New Zealand & Australia, ethnic
Japanese in Japan, Han in China, etc.) and the demonization of all the rest
(ethnic minorities, immigrants, or anybody claiming to propose an “alternative”
to Dominant Reason). Such demonization is an absolute requirement for the
formation of a widely accepted narrative of endangerment and threat that will
serve to keep on extracting every ounce of effort and commitment from those who
buy it. You thought that politics were becoming polarized and demagogic? You ain’t
seen nuthin’ yet…
Of course, such polarization and
demagoguery will in the end fail to revitalize a moribund social system. It has
never worked and it will not work now. It may stem the “tide of history” for a
while, but only for a while. In the end a dying, exhausted system, incapable of
any creative response to its external challenges (and man, do we have external
challenges we do not seem able to rationally address: from Climate Change and
antibiotic resistance to cheap fossil fuel exhaustion and loss of biodiversity),
may choose the pace and speed of its demise, but not the fact that in the end
it will be displaced by suppler, more successful competitors. A growingly
repressive, growingly intransigent, growingly exclusionary majority may slow
the speed at which its value system is consigned to the proverbial dustbin of
history, but such efforts will not suddenly make it creative and attractive again.
It will pointedly not make its kids want to reproduce happily again, as if the
last forty years were just a bad dream. It will not call back to the labor
force the excluded 30% (which are from the mostly excluded, demonized groups),
or motivate the 30% in the “gig economy” (the new name of the “precariat”) to
suddenly go back to college, obtain an advanced degree in a STEM discipline and
start contributing to the “knowledge economy” and earning a six figure salary.
Unfortunately, a dying system in
which a majority clings to power by increasingly oppressing one or many
excluded minorities is by nature pretty unstable. Even more so in an
international scenario where multiple sovereign polities face the same dilemmas,
trying to benefit from a zero sum game, in which the oppressed minority of one
nation is the dominant (and oppressing) majority of its neighbor. So beyond a
certain point the “slow decline” scenario becomes more and more difficult to
maintain, and we move in a “sudden crisis” scenario where some player (with or
without a state power structure backing him) does something incredibly stupid (but
unfortunately such stupidity is only apparent in retrospect) that sends the
whole edifice tumbling down, typically causing unimaginable amounts of pain and
suffering in the process. But that is already an alternative perspective that
will need to be explored in a subsequent post.
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