On May 13, 2019, umber hague writes on Eudaimonia:
Why Economic Indicators Don’t Tell the Sad and Shocking Story of America’s Descent into Mass Poverty, Hunger, Misery, and Despair
Here’s a tiny fact. 40% of Americans struggle to afford food at this point. Wow. It’s the kind of statistic that’s somehow shocking and alarming — but not surprising. And yet just before reading that one, I read the New York Times saying something to the effect of: “a strong economy is the President’s greatest asset!” That’s a myth I read over and over again, every day, hear on CNN and MSNBC, recited by Ezra and Chris and Nate and the rest of the gang — “the economy’s booming!”
Wait. What the? How can the economy be “strong” when 40% of people are struggling to eat? Isn’t that a little bit like the Hunger Games actually coming to life? Is that where America is now? What on earth?
Think about the fact itself for a second, before we discuss it — 40% of people in the world’s richest country struggle to afford food. It’s a “Let Them Eat Cake” moment happening before our eyes. How much more Versailles can you get? There’s nothing — nothing — more basic than being able to afford food. When a society can’t provide food for its people, it’s one of the most severe and fundamental indicators that something’s badly, badly wrong. What happens when people can’t eat anymore? I’ll come back to that.
The truth is that the economy isn’t strong. It’s not even so-so. It’s so weak that it’s collapsing. Let me recite the now familiar litany of statistics that I so often do. 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The majority have no savings, hence 70% can’t even raise $1000 for an emergency. The middle class has collapsed, as incomes haven’t risen in decades, but inequality has. 50 million Americans live in technical poverty — more than the population of Canada, or most European countries. Longevity is plummeting by a year, every year. Suicide and depression are skyrocketing, as people give up on the future. The expectation is that life will only get worse for future generations.
Now add to all that the brutal, unreal, horrific fact that 40% of people can’t afford food. But that’s not all this latest research said. 40% struggle to afford healthcare. 50% struggle to find a decent job with good wages. 35% are falling behind on bills. 40% struggle to pay off their credit cards. Shocking, alarming — but not surprising, to anyone that’s a regular American, not living in a cloistered Beltway ivory tower. Let’s translate those statistics into plain English.
Americans now face endemic, systemic, chronic poverty, hunger, misery, illness, powerlessness, and a lack of basic safety. That’s not a joke. It’s not an overstatement. It’s a hard reality. Somewhere between 40 to 80% of them, which is a colossal number — hundreds of millions of people, larger than the populations of Canada and most European countries — face such lives every single day now. That is statistical reality. Nobody much discusses it. Why not? Isn’t that another failure? Have you ever wondered? Why public discourse doesn’t reflect your reality?
I often say that Americans are the weird, terrible paradox of being the world’s first poor rich people. These grim outcomes are hardcore, explosive, savage indicators of social collapse. They are like alarm signals tell us that society can’t provide even the most basics to people anymore. There’s nothing more basic than food and safety. Societies — at least modern ones, especially rich ones — cannot be more badly broken than leaving people hungry, broke, poor, miserable, ill, unsafe, and powerless.
Let me put that in context for you. How genuinely horrifying and dire are these statistics? We have seen such things precisely twice in the modern history of rich nations before. Once, during the Weimar Republic. Two, during the tail end of Soviet collapse. (Maybe three, during World War II…but obviously, we’re talking about peacetime). A society cannot have more worse indicators than these. It’s like all four engines of a 747 cutting out — at 30,000 feet.
So why this constant myth that the economy is “strong”? Why would anyone with eyes and a brain believe such an obviously foolish thing?
Well, the first thing to understand is that it is a myth. Not just a little one — but a gigantic one, one of the most fundamental ones. When suicide is skyrocketing, when people can’t afford to feed their families, when half a society says they can’t find a decent job…the economy isn’t doing well. But as long as you believe it is…then it’s your fault if you’re struggling. It’s not your fault. It can’t be your fault if you’re struggling when close to half a society is having trouble eating. That’s a social problem. It points to a terrible, epic, systemic failure, in the absence of a giant famine.
Let me make that even clearer. Hunger, poverty, misery, and inopportunity are not a strong economy. They are a weak one. In fact, they represent a collapsing one, if they are new things, like they are in America. It’s a bizarre fantasy to think so. If hunger, poverty, misery and inopportunity are a “strong economy”…what on earth could be a weak one? Aliens enslaving everyone? See my point? Nearly half of Americans are struggling to feed their kids.Chronic, systemic, endemic hunger, poverty, misery, powerlessness, and illness now characterize American life. But when the Hunger Games actually come to life…that’s not a strong economy, it’s a dystopia.
So where does this bizarre, astonishing, spectacular fantasy, that makes the rest of the world shake its head in horrified disbelief — “the economy’s strong!”, while 40% of people can’t afford to feed their families — come from? What does it tell us?
It comes from the fact that, as many of you know by now, Americans economic statistics don’t represent the economy anymore. By “the economy” we should mean “people’s welfare”, how well their lives are actually faring. But since American economists and thinkers are ideologically blind, because they only study one system, and they assume from the get-go that that system is the answer to every one of society’s problems, quite naturally, they developed a set of indicators that look at the health of…that system. Not people’s lives. But those are two different things. A system is never anybody’s life.
That system, of course, is capitalism. Now, I use “capitalism” in the European sense. My favorite baker in Paris, who makes these delicious pistachio buns, isn’t a capitalist — he’s just…a baker, an old French dude who takes great pride in his art. Capitalism? That’s Wall St, Bezos, the Waltons, Silicon Valley, etc. In the American sense, you might call it “corporatism”, if you like.
America’s thinking classes don’t know how to think about the economy anymore — economists, journalists, pundists, and so forth — because they imagine that as long as the indicators that exist are ticking up, then everything must be fine. In other words, they imagine that all the real problems have been solved — and all there is to do is apply the solution, which is always more capitalism, as in markets for healthcare, less public schools, smaller government, and so forth.
The indicators that American thinking relies on — the stock market, GDP, the unemployment rate — only really tell us about the health of capitalism. They don’t tell us anything whatsoever about how well people are doing. It’s perfectly feasible for GDP, which is the sum of profits — and the stock market, which is just tomorrow’s profits, counted today — to grow by, for example, destroying the planet, democracy, all the animals, and stealing your life savings, too. That’s exactly what is happening.
Hence, some economists — the few good ones left — like Kemal Dervis at the Brookings Institutions, or Joe Stiglitz, will say that economic indicators have “decoupled” from “welfare.” It’s a complicated way of saying that economic indicators don’t tell us about the reality of people’s lives anymore, they don’t contain much or nearly enough information. Even that’s only halfway to the truth, though — it’s not just that American economic indicators don’t tell us about people’s lives, it’s also that all they do tell us is about the health of capitalism (or corporatism, if you like.)
As a result, you get this incredibly bizarre, weird, and grotesque picture. The stock market’s booming! GDP’s growing! But 40% of Americans can’t afford to…eat. What the? Do you see shades of Versailles in that? Shades of Soviet collapse? You should. It’s predatory growth — American are growing hungry, poor, and ill precisely because their ultra rich are preying on them, or maybe deluding them into preying on each other, dangling little rewards before thm, just like so many time before in history.
The situation above is eminently Soviet. The Soviets, too, had a set of indicators that their elites and leaders used to assess the health of the economy. And as long as those were OK — everything was fine. Did we make enough tractors? Did we employ enough people at that factory in Gdansk? Everything’s fine! But everything wasn’t fine. People were growing hungry. Afraid. Angry. Bang! Collapse. When a society can’t feed its people…it’s on the way to collapsing, my friends. There is no surer sign.
But what really makes America Soviet these days is that just like the Soviet Union, it’s thinkers and leaders can’t see even that. They can’t see that hunger, poverty, powerlessness, misery, and illness are now endemic, chronic, systemic — things that exist at a mass level, on a social scale. That’s because they’re trapped in the fairy tales of ideology, which in this case is capitalism’s final triumph over the world. They can’t see how badly reality has diverged from the fantasy, the fairy tale.
The Soviets believed — or at least were made to believe — that communism was the answer to everything, that if there was a problem with it, it wasn’t “true communism” yet, that every issue in society was to be solved with more communism, life was always better than everywhere else, and no questioning or dissent of any of the above was to be allowed in the public sphere. Hence, you couldn’t open up a little dry cleaning shop until 1989.
But that’s America in 2019, too. Capitalism is the answer to everything. If there’s a problem, it’s because it’s not “true capitalism” — since every issue in society is be solved by capitalism to begin with. Life is always better than everywhere else. And no questioning or dissent from this ideology is to be allowed. (Just look at Pete Buttigieg — once a mild radical, within a few months…a good, obedient neoliberal. Look at how Elizabeth Warren is ignored for telling these simple truths.)
Can you think of any other rich country in the world where nearly half of the people in it struggle to feed their kids? I can’t. Do you know how many people eat one meal a day in Venezuela? 30%. That’s not a direct comparison — it’s just to give you a sense of how dire American collapse really is.
America is the new Soviet Union, my friends. It’s leaders and elites are so badly blinded by an absolutist ideology that they can’t even see it when their society has ended up starving, broke, poor, miserable, sick, and hopeless — en masse. Think about that for a second. Instead, looking at a set of indicators that have absolutely no connection to reality anymore, they simply keep on declaring that things are “great” or “strong.” They’ve never been better! The main job now, it seems, of America’s elites, is to defend, and reproduce, that ideology — to keep it powerful, ascendant, for it to monopolize discourse and truth. The only real difference is that in this case the ideology in question is totalist capitalism — capitalism as the answer to everything, the only set of indicators that matters — instead of totalist communism.
And until all that changes, my friends, the sad truth is that hunger, poverty, misery, powerlessness, and illness will only grow. Because they are the most profitable things of all, to a predator.
