The market is up, unemployment is down, sort of. Yet we all know the economy is not what it used to be — the great engine of upward mobility. Not only do a few at the top garner a larger and larger share of the wealth, the mass of men live lives of quiet or sometimes noisy, violent desperation.
The issue is jobs. Jobs for people who aren’t Merit Scholars with high SATs and programming skills, jobs for average people that can support a middle class lifestyle. In the 1950s a good factory job could do it and mom could stay home with the kids. If she didn’t and also joined the workforce, an even more adequate middle class existence was within reach. A little safety net savings account, a more spacious home, a few luxuries, a vacation without scrimping.
This was the great foundation on which the prosperity of the consumer economy was built. It was also an anomaly. Until very recent historical times, there were peasant or landed gentry with very few of what were called the middling sort in between. Slowly, the middling sort became the middle class and the source of not just prosperity but of political stability.
For the past 40 years that has been slipping away, one reason politics has become more polarized and angry. Rich have gotten richer, poor poorer and those with a footing in the middle class more insecure. Some blame goes to social and taxing policies that have tilted the playing field in favor of monied interests and have exacerbated underlying trends toward increasing inequality. But those real world trends loom largest.
American workers, particularly those who work with heir hands, now compete with people around the globe willing to work for less. Union wages that fueled mid-20th Century prosperity have been trumped by the cruel reality of globalization which demands low cost labor to remain competitive. If a company doesn’t screw its workers, the competitors will screw theirs.
Once the vast majority of workers were on the farm, in the mines or mills doing hard manual labor that required minimal education. Many of those jobs have been exported or transformed by technology. Fewer humans are need. Those that are needed increasingly do jobs that require higher educational attainment. Our education system has lagged and needs to be modernized. But even that won’t solve the problem.
We don’t like to admit it, but our own schooldays ought to remind us that not everyone is going to be able to complete high school, community college, college, graduate school. There were plenty of jobs for such people once upon a time. Most of the jobs, in fact. Essential jobs, growing things, making things, repairing things. What happens when they vanish and the people don’t?
Long ago, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Player Piano (1952) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), described the world that was coming into being and that we now occupy. He saw it being born as a flack for GE and understood it, having studied anthropology. He described technologists working for large corporations who make a nice living engineering a world with relatively few poorly paid workers and plentiful machines turning out endless consumer products. Soon the streets are filled with surplus people — unneeded, unwanted, useless to their society and themselves and stigmatized for changes beyond their control. Sound familiar? It should.
This fable is no longer a prophecy but has come true. Since more and more potential consumers are un- or underemployed, they are increasingly unable to afford the plenty modernity is able to create. Rather than breeding happy consumers we are producing an underclass filled with resentment, stress, and unsatisfied desires which can easily lead to substance abuse, psychological problems and violence.
Politicians, government and the academy have been slow to face the size and seriousness of this dilemma. It is too frightening, too large, too bleak. Its manifestations can be seen in Detroit and other Rust Belt cities, in stagnant Europe and in the festering Middle East. The result is despair at best, fury at worst.
Politicians offer band-aids. Democrats want to tax the rich and subsidize the unemployed, educate them better, reduce inequality and attempt to make every man competitive. Well-intentioned, but the means proposed are unlikely to address the size and complexity of the problem.
On the other side of the political spectrum, David Brooks wittily notes that “you can tell what kind of conservative somebody is by what year they want to go back to.” Note that none want to go forward. Quite a few want to go back before the New Deal or even the Progressive Era. They think deregulating everything and helping nobody will produce a country filled with striving Horatio Alger heroes. Lazy folks can be kicked to the curb or sent to the workhouse. Once they would have been sent to America or Australia.
Slightly more benign conservatives like Marco Rubio just want to go back to the era of Ike perhaps. He offers a plan to reform the tax system to bring back offshore jobs, to minimize the burden of student debt by extending the payments longer, to pay out the earned income tax credit monthly instead of once a year as a tax deduction. Okay so far as they go, but pretty small beer.
All such familiar recycled remedies ignore the lesson of the recent recession. Things have changed fundamentally. Not only did blue collar people get laid off, never to be recalled. So did white collar office workers. The world only need so many MBAs, doctors, lawyers, computer coders. It needs fewer and fewer middling people and with a great glut of applicants here and a vast peonage abroad, fewer Americans can look forward to a middling wage.
We are on the brink of inhabiting a science-fiction dystopia, a world that needs fewer workers and only smart ones, where the machines do more of the work. A world where many people are no longer economically useful but where more people are still being produced. Those thinking about the social ills all this causes write their prescriptions for the symptoms, but no one is seeking a cure for the underlying disease.