If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

Buckminster Fuller

In our last post, we considered the possibility that economic issues are not the powerhouse electoral factors that we think they are. So while we’re on the nebulous e-word tip, let’s look at some current economic trends. While the picture might seem bleak for non-plutocrats, there could be a kernel of hope inside those economic trends, no matter how crummy they look on the surface.

Let’s start with some basics:

• Labor force participation is just 61.4% as of July. This is the lowest non-pandemic level in 50 years, since the 70s. This stat is actually a better stat to use than just the regular unemployment number. Technically, the official unemployment rate looks good, at only 4.1%. But that hides the number of people who have just dropped out and stopped looking for work. Those people are not captured in the unemployment rate, but they show up in the dismal overall participation rate. Another stat that is better than the regular unemployment rate (the U3 number) is the U6 rate, which includes discouraged workers and people who are looking for full-time but can only find part time. The U6 rate, as if July, is 7.9 – 8.3%, depending on seasonal adjustments.
• Male labor force participation has fallen consistently for the last 25 years.
• Middle and lower tier wages are stagnant over the last 50 years, with just a 5% increase for middle wage earners since 1979, and a 5% DECLINE for low wage workers in that same period. Higher wage workers in that same stretch are up 41%.
• The top 10% of the population owns two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 50% has just 2.5%.
• Household consumption makes up over two-thirds of US GDP. Of that household consumption, roughly 50% is now done by the richest 10% of earners, up sharply from 36% in the early 90s.
• The stock market is at all time highs recently. Great, right? Well, the top richest 10% of Americans own roughly 90% of all stock wealth. What’s more, the current market bubble is highly dependent on a handful of AI companies, who make a product that most people don’t like or at least don’t trust. And for those non-rich people collectively holding that 10% sliver of stock wealth to ensure their retirement, we’re kind of forced to cheerlead for the endless inflation of assets, the very thing that elsewhere makes life unaffordable for the young and the left-behind working poor.
• And one more for fun. Looking for that great new job? Trying to impress those HR departments with your experience and acumen? Well, almost 90% of American companies now use AI to screen applicants, so you better get on that AI tip to have your machine-generated resume impress other machines.

So how could any of this gloomy landscape hold out any rays of hope? Well, let’s start with young people, essentially Late-Millennial to Gen Z and younger. These younger folks are now very disillusioned with the classical markers of post-war, Goldilocks-era capitalism: home ownership, stable careerism, marriage, child-rearing, robust consumption of hard, durable goods. They have crossed off a lot of these simply because the opportunity is gone, and they don’t have enough cash and life security to opt in to these “normal” stages of the Good Life. Younger people are not turning to the radical promises of Democratic Socialism just for fun. They’re doing it because sheer scarcity has prevented them from being lured by the baubles of consumer capitalism with which earlier generations became obsessed. They thus have no illusions that the system is fundamentally good, because the evidence is not there in their lives. As we’ll see later, that’s actually a good place to be in, if we can make some basic pivots in our societal arrangements.

But what about collapsing labor force participation? Our major parties treat non-work as the greatest individual failing and social ill of them all. Conservatives and liberals don’t agree on much, but full employment and the crucial importance of work are absolute musts for both parties. Everyone wants more jobs, better jobs, better wages, more job retraining, more access to trade schools, more free college to allow people to get better jobs, higher minimum wages, etc. If there’s one universal positive in American political and cultural valences, it’s that work should be plentiful, dignified, and also the individual’s primary ticket to the good life. The only problem is, capitalism doesn’t agree. In the American format of plutocratic neoliberalism, the only duty of business and of the market in general is to maximize profit and shareholder return. As mentioned on this blog many times, capitalism doesn’t care about people’s lives, let alone their opportunity to find dignified, well-paid work. In fact, labor is a cost, and like all other costs, businesses do well when they cut those costs.

We spend a lot of money and political hot air trying to force businesses to pay their workers more. We loathe price controls in general, but we want to leverage the state to make businesses artificially inflate their labor costs. We even want to try to re-invigorate labor unions, to get those wages back up. This is just not smart. It only makes sense when you see paid labor as the only way we have in our society to access things we need to NOT DIE. Needless to say, this is just a backward, completely uncreative way to approach the general problem, which is how to make people’s live better. If our only answer to that is, “Let’s make businesses pay people more money, even when they don’t really need to,” then we’re in trouble.

Declining labor force participation is thus actually an opportunity, one part of an overall scheme to get rid of work as the only way we have to think about how to shape and arrange people lives. If millions of people are now just dropping out of the workforce, they may be partly on the way to saying, in the words of James Livingston’s great book, “Fuck Work.”

One significant part of this work dilemma is the manhood crisis, as work dries up, especially for men with just a high school level education. Even prime working age male labor force participation has been drifting down since the 1950s, so it’s not just an artifact of an aging population. Right now, a lot of these men, as part of the younger generational cohorts mentioned above, are dumping their lack of career and family opportunity into the toxic manosphere, where women are treated as adversaries or baby machines, often both. But if we were able to provide some concrete household alternatives to the current social arrangements, a la the Bigger Home Bases that I cover extensively in this blog (check the Categories Index), places that could leverage traditional male skills to actually build, maintain, and expand larger physical household structures, I believe that the energy that young men dump into the virtual manosphere would dry up quickly.

One more negative that could be turned into a positive. The rise of non-benefitted, part-time, contingent, and gig work is horrible for people when they are just trying to cobble together a facsimile of a good, stable job, especially in our current household format. But like reduced labor force participation, this is another thing that could help usher in the needed death of work as our primary life-organizer. People’s diverse skills from gig work could be incredibly useful when deployed inside a larger household format, providing real talent and proficiency at organizing in-house projects and small cottage businesses.

Even the housing crisis could be seen as a painful but necessary signal that our current economic arrangements just don’t work. Instead of constantly banging our heads against the lack of affordable housing and the ridiculously inflated real estate bubble, we should take it as another sign that the way we have laid out American geography through obsolete economic ideology is simply nonfunctional, and forever pushes out the day when we could actually turn the tide of plutocratic rule and make things work for regular people. That day is always deferred because the wealthy control the terms of the game, and they make out just fine raking in debt service for inflated assets in perpetuity.

In short, all the economic bleakness we are currently seeing is not just a cyclical downturn, or a soft recession, or even stagflation — rather, the writing is on the wall that the whole system is unsustainable, and is thus doing what unsustainable things do: collapse.

We just need the courage to acknowledge the truth about American-style capitalism, and stop believing that salvation is just around the corner, if we can just get more solar panels up, more e-cars on the road, more wind turbines spinning, and more green job re-training for the “careers of the future.”

Trumpists have already admitted to themselves that the whole system must be torn down, which is what gives MAGA the edge in passionate political commitment. But their loss of faith in the system has been captured and weaponized by feckless kleptocrats, fascists, and theocrats, in service to an adolescent fantasyland, where all the men are white and virile, all the women fertile and subservient, and all the brown, black, feminist, trans, atheist, and other weirdos are just disappeared from the American landscape, either reverse-raptured out to crummy countries with excess prison capacity, or just re-conditioned to love the Glorious Leader.

If all the non-MAGA people in the US want to combat this Trumpist dystopia, we had better stop telling ourselves fairy tales about rescuing the system by greening it up or applying more “social justice,” and get on board with our own full-spectrum rejection of our current socioeconomic arrangements. We need a radical but passionate vision for the future, or we’re toast.