The Future Is Not Bright

Tyler's Cowen's THE GREAT STAGNATION is a nifty little kindle read. His basic premise: we've tapped all the long hanging fruit that made us prosperous for the last 300 years and now we're in for a period of low or no economic growth. What does this mean? We will make less money than our parents. Our relative status and power vis-a-vis the rest of the world will shrink. Our politics will get increasingly nasty and disingenuous. Employment will be high.

Nice, huh?

Here's the dirty secret - we aren't needed. We are well on our way to a society that can run on 20% of the people working and the rest searching the internet. This is a scary prospect as many Americans - culturally and biologically - define themselves or at the very least, take pride in their work and labor. What happens when you take this away?

Sure, we will always use and need pizza delivery boys, cooks, plumbers, landlords, government officials, lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, filmmakers, basketball players, etc, etc...and the jockying and lobbying for these jobs and protection of these jobs will increase and become more competitive and less lucrative than ever before.

Okay. We all agree. This'll suck. It already sucks. So what can we do? Tyler Cowen suggests investing in science. Ummm...okay. The internet and green technology won't save us. Let me say that again - the internet and green technology WON'T save us. Twitter only employs 300 people. These industries are not employment heavy. They cannot feed entire cities like GM did with Detroit once upon a time. Green technology is a joke. Here's a test - how many people can you name who work in the industry? Just casually. Here's a guess: zero. I know one person who is studying to be a green engineer. One person. No, this does not sound like the future economic juggernaut lefties hope for.

I don't have the answers. But I say we admit the issues and problems in a straight forward manner rather than stick to lame-ass political platitudes about cutting taxes or adding benefits as if either of those address the real issue. Protecting unions and benefits and entitlements WILL NOT save us. It will only hasten the decline as it basically amounts to transferring wealth not CREATING any wealth. Liberals and Conservatives are both making the same mistake - they think we are rich. We are not. We are living on dividends of past generations. And they are shrinking every day unless we figure out how to make some new shit that the rest of the world will buy. And hopefully that shit will take a lot of people to build and only Americans are qualified to do the building. Otherwise, the Chinese will build it cheaper and better.

And one last thing - what we are talking about here is the collapse of the American Dream. What happens then? What motivates people to excel once this thing we've all bought into goes away? What happens when we have 30-40% of young, college educated people unable to find any sort of meaningful work?