![]() ![]() It so happens that my line of work is as subject to these same pressures as other productive jobs. I want to explore this same process in more detail by a somewhat roundabout route. If that process continues, there’s a real chance we may see the whole ramshackle mess start to come apart. ![]() As they do so, the system they abandoned is in trouble. Too many people have grasped that the system is rigged against them, and they are turning their backs on it and finding other ways to live their lives. All those are taking place, at least in part, because the immense ziggurat of corporate profit has been built so high that the ordinary people on whose labor and purchases it all depends are no longer getting enough return on their labor, and enough quality in the products they buy, to make it worth their while to participate. It’s no accident, in other words, that the labor shortage is happening at the same time as a boom in small business formation and a vertiginous drop in shipments of consumer trash across the Pacific to US ports. Decades of product debasement have come home to roost, and many former consumers have grasped the fact that if they provide goods and services for themselves, they get all the value of their own labor and can quite easily achieve the sort of quality that big corporate stores can’t even begin to match. ![]() That led no small number of them to realize just how miserably shoddy, absurdly overpriced, and generally useless most consumer goods are these days. One of the major unintended consequences of the Covid-19 shutdowns of 20 is that many people, given much more free time than they expected, decided to try things like baking their own bread and knitting their own hats. The same thing is happening on the consumer side of the scale. That their reaction comes as a surprise to anyone is a good measure of just how detached our society’s comfortable classes have become from the reality their preferred policies have created. What they’re not willing to do is waste their lives working in abusive and humiliating environments to make someone else rich, in exchange for rock-bottom wages, no prospect for advancement, and no benefits worth mentioning. Talk to the young people in question and you’ll find that quite a few of them are working very hard on projects of their own. You can catch a whisper of what else is going on if you listen to the frequent rants heard from the managerial class these days about how young people just don’t want to work any more. Quite a bit of that is a function of the wicked blend of inflation and recession that’s got the global economy in its grip, but again, that’s not all of it. At the same time, the consumer side of the equation is also collapsing, and stores are floundering as inventory builds up and sales slump. ![]() Part of that is a function of the soaring number of people who are struggling with bad health just now-no, we don’t have to get into why that’s happening-but not all of it. Intractable labor shortages are becoming the norm in today’s industrial societies. What we’re seeing now is that a growing number of people have lost interest in continuing to fill those particular roles. That’s the base from which the whole tottering mess rises. Most people in the industrial world participate in economic activities in two ways: selling their time and labor to businesses as employees, and buying goods and services from businesses as consumers. Venture below the towering abstractions of notional wealth that fill business websites, all the way to the base, and you’ll find that the whole gargantuan structure rests on certain relationships between individuals and the economy. I’m not sure how many of my readers have noticed the massive realignment going on right now at the foundations of the industrial economy. ![]()
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