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"In the America where things are made, the recession has been a depression. According to a new Northeastern University study, one in every six blue-collar industrial jobs have disappeared since 2007, matching the drop in overall employment in the Great Depression. Last year, about 1.3 million factory jobs vanished."
"Indeed, last year's wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year. This year the World's Billionaires have an average net worth of $3.5 billion, up $500 million in 12 months. The world has 1,011 10-figure titans, up from 793 a year ago but still shy of the record 1,125 in 2008. Of those billionaires on last year's list, only 12% saw their fortunes decline."
If the Internets die, I will personally rise up against The Man. I have certain baseline needs, here.
Chris Bray -
3/15/2010
All very good points. It does seem to me that debt is now a much bigger problem -- both personal debt and the federal debt. The GDP said last week that they project federal debt to be 100 percent of GDP by 2020, and that's not comparable:
But more generally, you're right. There's a lot happening that isn't new at all.
David Silbey -
3/14/2010
Or, alternatively, we're in the Second Gilded Age:
Senate in stasis? Check.
Lots of anti-government rhetoric? Check.
Threat of societal violence? Check.
Getting involved in Asian wars through deception? Check.
Catastrophic economic crashes? Check.
And the U.S. came out of that with the world's largest economy.
Manan Ahmed -
3/14/2010
I bet if the internets died - operationally or procedurally - those masses would react.
More seriously, we are looking at a few more decades of stasis - the size of the population as well as internal resources can sustain a lot more inequities for a far greater time. Mughal India from 1700 onwards comes to mind. Hmm. Food for comparative thought, here.
Jonathan Dresner -
3/14/2010
You're right, too.
Chris Bray -
3/14/2010
Yes, but. The key fact is that we -- or "we" -- still buy that illusion, and our government is still populated by people who haven't noticed its limits. It's remarkable how casually our political class clings to the idea of itself as a group that bears the burden of leading the world. The gap between illusion and reality is the deadly part.
Jonathan Dresner -
3/14/2010
We can't stop illegal immigrants or jaywalkers, either. Even Singapore can't completely stamp out disorder, and lord knows they've given it a good try. Power has limits, both in reach and in depth. The illusion that we could do anything, kill anyone, walk free and easy through the world without fear was just an illusion. That we bought into it was silly, but it doesn't mean that we're in decline.
Chris Bray -
3/14/2010
I think we might be experiencing our Opium War. We are great! We are mighty! Britain!?!? Ha! A puny island of barbarians!
(Long pause)
Uh, whaddya mean, "they're shelling the coastline and we can't stop them?"
The U.S. spends $700 billion a year on its military, and another $50 billion on 16 intelligence agencies -- we can't find OBL or stop Somali pirates. We've found our limits. The Wizard of Oz is just some dude.
Jonathan Dresner -
3/14/2010
A few years ago we passed the point of no return, actually, when the number of private security forces in the US exceeded the number of police officers.
The tax code is another sign: the exemption of certain kinds of income from taxation -- and our tax code has thousands of exemptions -- creates pressure to raise taxes on the remaining base which, in turn, creates pressure for people to find ways out of the tax base which creates even more pressure to raise revenues on the remaining base.....
I agree, in other words: withdrawal weakens the body politic, and there's lots of withdrawal going on. Some of it's intellectual -- my friends in Texas who home-school -- and some of it's economic -- my friends in Minnesota who are "urban homesteading" -- and some of it's selfish (see tax exemptions, above) and some of it's ideological (90% of homeschoolers) and some of it's desparation and frustration (gated communities, territorial gangs).
Manufacturing was going to die. The problem is that tens of millions of us are not educationally or emotionally equipped for anything else.
Jonathan Dresner -
3/14/2010
We went through a round of "Rome is burning" a couple of years ago (my contribution, though I feel sure I wrote others that I can't find quickly), and the Bush as Hitler/Mussolini/Fonzie/etc debates. I'm not sure that I can muster up the energy for another one yet.
I'll have to think about the Qing thing, of course, but if we are, it's the Qing of the early 1800s, before the Opium War (if Mexico and Columbia invade to force us to stop enforcing our drug laws, I'll wash your car!) and the great internal disturbances, the Qing which is seeing its balance of payments reverse but a long way from realizing that the industrial revolution thing is going to pan out.
Chris Bray -
3/13/2010
Adding that I'm spending a lot of time with James Scott's "The Art of Not Being Governed," lately, and it suggests to me a second possibility: that people withdraw, hunch in, etc.
The American right had this discussion in amazingly silly terms, talking about "going Galt," but I think there's a less ridiculous way to discuss this sort of despairing withdrawal in less stupid terms.
I can see a hollowed-out country, with dying industry and a sunken middle class that hides and withdraws rather than fighting. Scott argues convincingly that technology has obliterated non-state space, and I don't argue with that. But the state can render a withdrawn population as legible as it wants without having much of an effect. You can harness a sick horse and climb up on its back, but it's not going to gallop for you.
This is an inflection point. Millions of vanished manufacturing jobs leave of millions of people whose lives have been crushed.
Chris Bray -
3/13/2010
Three things that are always front and center in all my thinking, these days:
First, the L.A. Times ran a story when the latest "World of Warcraft" version was released, and they interviewed people who lined up before dawn to get into stores and buy the disc the moment it became available. At a Best Buy store, the Times reporter talked to a grown-up who got into line in a sniper suit in order to express his passion for digital warfare.
Second, I was in the Bay Area a couple of months ago, and the BART stations had this great ad on the walls encouraging people to live intense and meaningful lives -- by playing some really hard-core video game. The graphic was a photo of a young couple sitting on a couch, looking orgasmically thrilled as they stared into their television set.
Third, UCLA undergraduates and their ability to engage with fact, narrative, text, etc. Do I need to say anything more about that?
I've have mixed feelings about Chris Hedges, but when he talks about the "Empire of Illusion," I think he's dead on. Americans have been very carefully taught to be passive and unseeing. You can't rouse people like this -- they're dead.
But when I look at the disparities I mention in the post, and the plainly systematic creation of these disparities, coupled with the apparent hollowness of state institutions, I see the stark likelihood of violence and decline. And I've thought of the United States as the Qing Dynasty for quite a few years, now.
State failure + a spectacularly passive population = beats me.
So I don't see pitchforks tomorrow, except for outliers like the guy who flew his plane into the IRS office and obvious crazies like the shooters at the Pentagon and the Holocaust Museum.
But the condition of the United States -- the social, political, cultural, and economic condition -- look to me like the conditions that have almost always led to violence against the state, whether that's Shay's Rebellion or the Taiping Rebellion. You can't throw millions of people into the dark without somebody getting shot.
We're currently papering over the holes with printing press money and government make-work programs -- in my city, federal stimulus money is paying to make the Sunset Strip cleaner and nicer, so people will have better pavement to vomit on -- but eventually that train collides with reality. California could be Greece in a very few years; the United States could follow in maybe another ten.
Violence is a 90 percent possibility; immediate violence, less so. But the decline began a while ago, and it has consequences.
This seems to me like something that historians would be urgently discussing. Change over time! Here it is! But I'm not seeing that discussion.
Jonathan Dresner -
3/13/2010
You can add a third data point to the plot, if you want to really stir things up.
My problem, though, is this: as stark as the data is, people have been predicting pitchforks for a while now, and I'm just not seeing it. While there are specific industries in which overpaying (I almost said 'overcompensating') executives is coming under fire, and there's starting to be a critique of corporations as political actors, there just isn't enough class consciousness (outside of the right wing, where it's class envy rather than class conflict) to sustain disorder, much less revolution.
