The 40 Year Recession
If anyone wants to know what is really going on in this country’s economy they should look very far away from the stock market and very close to their friends. A friend of mine hates her job but she soldiers on every day because she can’t find another one. Another friend lost her job unexpectedly and now doesn’t know what she and her family will do. They were getting by as a dual income and now can’t afford to be a single income even though her husband is a professional.
I left a company of mostly unhappy people that feel stuck in their jobs.
There’s a bright note if you say we are living through a dismantling of the glitter and gold dust world we’ve been believing in over the last few decades, and that has pointed people back to basics, into thinking about what matters, into mattering. But there’s the dark part which is the fact that a way of life most of us grew up believing and aspiring to – the middle class – is fading away into oblivion.
And this didn’t start yesterday, this has been going on over a very long period of time:
Between 1971 and 2007, real hourly wages in the U.S. rose by only 4%. (That’s not 4% a year, but 4% over 36 years!) During those same decades, productivity essentially doubled, increasing by 99%. In other words, the average worker’s productivity rose 25 times more than his or her pay.
This was, of course, a bonanza for corporations and for the richest Americans. In 1976, the top 1% of U.S. families held 19% of the country’s wealth. By 2000, they held 40% of it. In those same years, 58% of every dollar of income growth went to the top 1%.
Another friend lost her job a year ago and having never found another to replace it, decided to start her own company. This is what I’ve and others are doing to reinvent ourselves in this brave new world, but in doing this you have to give up a lot of what had become familiar, comfortable, the “norm” and brace yourself for uncertainty, different forms of currency, and a reimagining of what you know.
April 13th, 2013 at 9:08 am
Christ on a stick, I wish I’d read this yesterday instead of Saturday morning, but so damn true. It’s been obvious to me that two people couldn’t have the lifestyle of their middle class parents without two people working for a long time. And think of the things they had we no longer have: affordable health care, defined benefit pensions. The folks at the top have been boiling the frog so slowly most people haven’t figured out they are for dinner yet. There is an ugly political reckoning not to far down the road but I’m focusing on simplicity: a bottle of wine or Belgian ale tastes just as good sitting on the banks of the bayou or the back yard as it does sitting at Swirl or the Avenue Pub. I can roll my own cigarettes (as I seem determined to die of the damn things) and take the same pleasure in the process as men once took in smoking a pipe, and smoke less for the effort involved as well. And what is a necessity? Game of Thrones? No. Ten bucks a week for Tai Chi? Yes. What the top hat and cigar crowd don’t understand is that they have undermined the sands on which they stand, by forcing us into simpler lifestyle choices because we can’t afford or chose not to buy what they want to sell.
April 14th, 2013 at 12:02 pm
Mark – so true – the reason that retail corps are failing all around us is that the 1% have taken away the safety net of the 99% and what happened along the way and is we stopped giving a damn about that stuff and started focusing on things that matter to us – the company of a friend, a walk, and a good book. What never ceases to amaze me is how I, someone who had thought myself a bohemian and above the bourgeoisie came to buy into it lock stock and barrel. I drank the koolaid that I used to mock and it took a lot of unwinding to release the tethers of the bind. But as has been said before – free at last, free at last.