There’s a debate raging on X regarding economic opportunities. One side argues that they are fantastic while the other isn’t feeling upbeat about the economic prospects of the younger generations.
I’m observing the debate with sadness because we keep reinventing the wheel instead of using the existing knowledge to move ahead. The erosion of the middle class and the lumpenization of a large portion of what used to be the middle class is a fact of objective reality in every country that was developed enough to have a middle class. This has been studied to death. Moreover, this was predicted by the best thinkers of our era 30 years ago. We have the best Humanities and social sciences in the world, and yes, they often produce exuberant woke crap. But they also create extraordinary value. Let’s use that value.
It doesn’t matter whether there is an Assistant Manager job at Panda Express in Tulsa. Or that there is a type of fish that can change sex. These are blips that don’t change the reality of either sexual bimorphism or the evisceration of, first, the working class and now the white-collar class by the dominant economic and social / psychological trends. Many names have been given to this phenomenon. Uberization of daily life is one. Precarization is another. Post-Fordism. Neoliberalism is the name I use. So many names have been given to this phenomenon because it is very real. The fact that Chris Rufo won the post-Fordist lottery doesn’t negate the fact that a vanishingly small number of people can win it.
Let’s stop trying to diagnose a condition that was diagnosed exhaustively a long time ago and move to the stage of finding a treatment. The incapacity to rely on the knowledge that has already been found and the need to be a very special cookie who single-handedly achieves a victory over everything is part of the disease. And this symptom also was diagnosed and described years ago.
Clarissa's Blog 
There was recently an …. arguement? Discussion? on another blog about a week ago. The focus was about the navy, but what it centered on was the dockyards. Several points were being tossed back and forth, but essentially the gist of it was this.
It would be absolutely amazing to expand the dockyards, expand the workforce, and build new ships here. It would also be possible to open up mines here in the US for the materials, and reopen the factories to build the parts. All of this would bring in jobs, and keep the money granted to the navy inside the US. In addition it would provide new trained workers for a multitude of areas where the average age of the workers is closing in on the 50s.
The counter point was that this would absolutely without question be blocked. The wealthy would not be willing to give up their ocean-side houses for expanded dockyards. The politicians and CEOs who are making money hand over fist would not be willing to invest in American mines and factories when they can get stuff cheaper overseas.
The thing is both sides are essentially correct. In Clarissa’s opening post I mean. There is both great economic opportunities and no economic opportunities at the moment.
There are opportunities. There are plenty of people desperate for decent wages. Not wages you can barely live on, but decent wages. The manufacturing and mining sections of America were essentially gutted which means you would have very little in the way of internal competitors. Our merchant marine is essentially gone. Today nearly every ship coming or going to the US that is not a warship is built and or flagged by a foreign nation. Likewise our dockyards and shipyards are barely hanging on because there aren’t enough ships being produced in them. I could go on. The country has basically gone from a manufacturing and export based economy to a service industry and an import based economy.
Of course as I said, the opposite is also true. Due to our trade laws, companies were and are able to ship their production and manufacturing overseas. While this does allow for cheaper products, and more profit to the company and its shareholders. It also means that the younger generations no longer have those jobs available to them. Likewise it means that short of those laws being (fixed) those companies have no incentive to bring the jobs back. Similarly anyone with the capital to create large companies (in this case by large company I mean anything with 100+ employees) are likewise incentivized to go overseas. Even more so if they publicly trade their stocks, or are offered mergers. At the same time it is in any foreign government’s and our own politicians best interests to maintain this situation. Lobbying is currently legal, and money is definitely flowing to keep this state of affairs in place.
You can also tack on top of that the massive overreach of nearly every branch of the government which makes it even more difficult to do business in the US. Toss in how badly the education system is running and you get an absolutely horrendous mess.
So to summarize, there are plenty of areas that could help change things, but nearly all of them are blocked mostly from a federal governmental level. Until things change for the better there, I quite frankly can’t see us getting out of this particular mess.
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There were some recent news about how Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg are approaching 1 trillion USD in net worth.
Clarissa, have you been following any of the work by Yanis Varoufakis regarding this topic? It does seem like we are in a technofeudal age.
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The Russian bot Varoufakis? He’s not my cup of tea but yes, absolutely the state now serves the oligarchy. The social contract of the nation-state is broken. This is the post national reality.
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It has been kind of amazing to see all these billionaires, many of who openly hated Trump up until recently, pay a fealty fee in the form of a million dollar “donation” to his inauguration. The fact that it’s so out in the open is the part that I’m shocked about.
I figured you would not like Varoufakis, but he’s been putting forth a lot of interesting work on this topic. This small segment here in particular caught my attention:
https://youtu.be/I0kvjNh7czM?t=1950
The amount of control and behavior manipulation available to governments and politicians today is indeed a wet dream for authoritarian regimes.
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There’s a gender element to it too that cannot be overlooked. For some reason all this “pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Don’t go to college, just go in the trades, or work your way up at McDonalds” sage advice is only doled out to men.
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Because the same people who give this sage advice to men tell women to marry a nice man who pulled himself by the bootstraps. He will take care of her and she can become a stay at home mom.
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