DREAD

The older I get, the less long term planning I do.
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Since the early Aughts, when it became apparent that the nation was heading down an unsustainable economic path, I've given up on saving for retirement and other sensible things that I used to take very seriously. This has accelerated since the economic collapse of 2008 and my foray into the post-Ph.D. job market. My employment pays just enough to keep me living in lower-middle class comfort (which is oxymoronic, given that the defining feature of this class stratum is uncertainty) and is both literally and figuratively a year-to-year arrangement.

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In the back of my head I still understand that retirement savings and personal financial planning are necessary, but every time I try to wrap my head around the future I'm filled with something much more powerful than uncertainty: cold dread. With this economic downturn and our political leaders' pathetic response, I feel like the potential exists for really, really bad times ahead. Krugman has started talking about a Depression and it's a healthy sign that we are in deep trouble when one reads such an opinion and thinks, "Yep, that makes perfect sense." How can I talk myself into retirement saving when the return on traditionally safe investments (MMAs, CDs, bonds, etc) are in the 1% range? And how can I roll all of my money into the stock market when there exists a very real possibility of it collapsing when all of the short-term profit maximizing tricks have been exhausted?

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Our problem is very simple, as this shockingly insightful but thin-on-solutions article from Intel big shot Andy Grove explains: we are not creating jobs. And the only political solution we are willing to accept since the canonization of St. Ronnie is to cut taxes, as if there is some magical tax break that will offset the fact that Chinese workers make a buck per day. There is already nothing made in the U.S. that can't be made more cheaply in Asia. Soon there will be nothing done in the U.S. – including the professions that the 1980s zeitgeist assured us were American for all time like accounting, engineering, and business – for which the same cannot be said. We will become an economy that consumes everything and produces nothing. What remains of this house of cards will collapse.

It is conceivable that The Worst is Yet to Come because we have absolutely no industrial policy, no economic policy, and no political solutions other than to keep cutting taxes.

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This is not to say that we have a bad economic policy; we simply do not have one. We have one of the most stunningly effective propaganda machines in the history of the mass media convincing the same people getting ground up in the gears of Progress that there is no solution but to double down on the policies that brought us here. We are, in short, fucked. The idea that if only our taxes were a little lower or if only our schools produced smarter graduates we would suddenly be able to compete with Chinese and Indian wages is ludicrous. We pushed the boulder of free trade and globalization down the hill in the 1980s and now there is no stopping it.

I am not thrilled to count myself among the Sky Is Falling crowd, but the disturbing speed with which elected leaders from around the world clasped hands and agreed that Austerity is their new god among economic buzzwords has drained me of any kind of hope for the future.
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At best we are about to enjoy a protracted ten or twenty year Japan-style deflation / recession combo. At worst we're going to re-live the 1930s. It is not that the time for decisive action has passed. It is just completely obvious that the only remedies any of our elected leaders will consider are the worst possible ones, guided by an ideology that needs no actual results to sustain itself.

34 thoughts on “DREAD”

  • Wow, I started following this blog because it was giving conservative morons a well-deserved kick in the ass. But I seem to have arrived just in time for Ed's personal existential meltdown.

  • duck-billed placelot says:

    We're really screwed, aren't we? In some ways, it's pretty freeing, to realize that no matter what, I'm probably going to be tenuously-comfortable, at best. No reason to scramble after stability that doesn't exist. Might as well be a starving artist instead of a starving corporate lackey. (Yet, amazingly, I don't feel very free. How can that be?!)

    So what's your long-term plan? Cat food? Marry a Canadian? Sell coffee mugs for great profit? (Seriously, can you get the coffee mugs already? I need something to put my whiskey in that allays suspicion through misdirection. [Ha! No! Of course I don't have gin in this coffee mug!])

  • Hey, Ed, look on the bright side! With our economy in shambles, we'll finally achieve those CO2 emissions cuts that we've been wanting.

  • Fuck you Ed, I was in a good mood and now I feel like shouting Fuck.

    Now I have to watch some Fawlty Towers to get me into a good mood again.

  • Let me tell you a true story. It may or may not make you feel better.

    When I visited Germany in the mid-80's, I met some men who were in their 70's at the time. These guys came of age with hyperinflation and a nationwide depression. Then they voted for a leader who seemed to have all the answers, so they followed the rules of the society and thought that things were going to work out fine for them. These weren't guys who went to "Juden raus" rallies, they were just blue collar workers who had families to support and were glad to have stable factory jobs.

    But as it turned out, "conquer your neighbors and steal their resources" turned out to be pretty much the ultimate unsustainable policy, and there they were at the end of the war, in what was supposed to be their prime earning years. Not only their money and social support, but a good part of their country's physical infrastructure, had been destroyed.

    You want to talk about fucked? Nobody in modern history was more fucked than the Germans at the end of WWII, and nobody was more deserving of having the rest of the world say, "Serves you right, ya sonsabitches, you brought this on yourselves."

    But a funny thing happened over the next 40 years: the country got better, rebuilt itself, and turned prosperous again. Those guys who thought that their lives had no hope left at age 35 had turned out pretty comfortable and happy after all by age 75.

    Good times don't stay good forever, and bad times don't stay bad forever. I don't doubt that there will be some hard times ahead, and they may even turn the United States into an international pariah. But there's nothing, nothing at all, that can't be recovered from as long as you're alive.

  • HoosierPoli says:

    I have to agree with Jim. There's a kind of pessimist idealism that's really in vogue now, everything sucks and it's all downhill from here and there will never be a recovery, etc.

    You really can't let yourself get wrapped up in that crap, though. The future will be different, mainly energy will probably start costing what it does in the rest of the industrialized world. But there's not going to be any Mad Max shit going on.

  • I heard about this new political movement called "Tea party" that has a lot of people energized with new ideas and fresh thinking. Things like hmm, oh yeah, major tax cuts and dismantling public services… All we need to do now is to elect these people who hate governments into governing positions.

  • Jimcat has it.
    (also, you seem to think the two evils are: deflation, and sharper deflation. Fed chairmen and Presidents seem to agree, which is why they've already stated a plan to inflate and devalue our way out of this. Will it lead to hyperinflation, which breeds totalitarianism and scapegoating? Or will it simply be a period of inflation and the collapse of the USA? I don't, honestly, know.)

    Yes, we'll be able to staff all jobs *cheaper*, elsewhere. Thankfully, cheaper isn't the only important attribute for hiring. We'll sure keep some of the job titles in the US. But if the environment changes, and there's significant social unrest as a result, I don't know that it matters.

    To the survivors go the spoils, though…

  • Um…
    In corporate America staffing jobs cheaper is exactly the most important attribute for hiring. Or, in the rare event that they do need additional staff or a new position, the new position needs to be able to either maximize revenue generation or minimize future costs. I can say beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the company I work for could easily use 5-10 people in my department alone for the amount of work we have; however, we also have a good handle on how much we can influence the business – meaning that with the staff we have we can maximize corporate revenue moreso than the proffit from bringing people up to speed, having a slightly higher revenue and incurring their additional labor cost would actually put us in a worse financial situation.

    As such, we run the operation a bit more stripped down, prioritize projects based on proffit models and grunt it out a bit longer – until someone else takes the hit against their proffit margin by hiring people and those people have a bit of extra cash to purchase our products…

    .. and what do I think if my job could be staffed cheaper? Well, lets just say, I'm doing the job that I used to do and my boss used to do before we had a five percent labor reduction. If there was an option to find someone who could do it even cheaper, I'm sure I'd have felt the swing of the axe too. I work in an international company with strong growth in the Far East and Central America – trust me – its only time before my job is duplicated there to minimize my work, and then my job is reduced because the job is duplicated.

  • Workers need to organize and stick together. Right now they are angry and confused and still turning on each other. But the elite keep kicking an enormous sleeping dog and that bitch is going to tear them a new asshole when it wakes up.
    In the meantime watch " Darwin's Nightmare". It doesn't cheer me up to see people who are truly fucked but it does put my problems into perspective.

  • I'm a 37-year old PhD student in the sciences making $25K/year and I feel like I have one of the best and most stable jobs in the country. I was previously in the military for just over a decade, which was stable as hell if you like travel to exotic places with the outside chance of death, but the pay was pretty good and the benefits were great. My point is that of the two stable jobs I've had which afforded some semblance of satisfaction, one involved the outside chance of being blown up and the other requires me to live close to the poverty line. I used to think that not being able to save for retirement given my current income was a horrible price to pay, but I recently cashed out every stock and mutual fund I had because I've come to think that a coffee can buried in the back yard will yield me less of a loss over the next couple years. In this way, I suddenly don't feel like I'm missing anything by simply getting paid enough to cover the mortgage and feed myself and the dogs. Fortunate, indeed.

  • Crazy for Urban Planning says:

    Hi gang. What a great post and comments. The flaw with contrasting us with what happened to Germany in the mid-20th century is that we haven't been as clever as the Germans were. While our policies have been self-inflicted, we have done it all for the benefit of the 1% ruling class – at least the Germans wanted all of the Germans to rule the world.

  • Also the Germans had their economy kick started by the Marshall Plan and rode the post- war boom into economic prosperity. The U.S. in 2010 does'nt have the luxury of having a sugar daddy or a growing economy. Bascically what our globalized ruling class is doing is turning the U.S. into a colony for China. They send us their cheap goods and make a ton of money. Our jobs are destroyed in the inevitable race- to- the- bottom.
    Did you know that now in some industries it is cheaper for China to open factories in the U.S. rather than back home?

  • fuzzbuzz215 says:

    China and India will have to start paying their people. They have a few billion people that, when they unite, will demand higher wages and benefits. In the next 20 years, the Chinese will go through what the US went through after the 1920s and 30s. Chinese workers will demand a better life. Much of the Chinese lower and middle class has begun to taste the fruits of their labor. Soon enough what was once an acceptable standard of living will no longer suffice. The Indians too will demand higher wages.

    The United States will suffer for a long while, as well as the rest of the world. But the Chinese and Indian governments/corporate industrail complex cannot survive much longer without allowing for concessions to workers. The shear number of workers in these countries all but guarantee this.

  • duck-billed placelot says:

    Oof, Crazy for Urban Planning. The Germans wanted all of the Germans to rule the world, sure, except those pesky German Jews. Or Germans of Romanian descent. Or gay Germans. Or Germans who loved any of those groups. And don't get me wrong, I love the people's car, but surely you've seen pictures of the Eagle's Nest and other ultra-luxe 'bunkers' enjoyed by the Nazi leadership? Don't think for a second that WWII was about good things for the German people – even the Aryans.

    Apologies for the Godwin, but I didn't start it.

  • China is going through an upheaval where wages are being forced up. First government workers, now unions are demanding (and getting) higher wages, despite the efforts of the Chinese government to hush up the increasing success of labor by enforcing publication bans on strikes, renegotiations, etc.

    Additionally, while I was in South Asia on a recent trip, there was a lot of reporting on Obama's comment that the path to prosperity would no longer be selling shit to the States while taking their jobs. Doesn't that indicate the Administration is at least thinking about how to rebuild the economy into something more sustainable in the long-term?

  • Anyone read Snow Crash? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash It was recently reviewed by none other than Robert David Steele Vivas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_David_Steele_Vivas): http://www.phibetaiota.net/?p=26197

    Anyway…

    Written in 1992, Snow Crash predicted things like the ubiquity of the Internet, SecondLife, Wikipedia, Google Earth, the political rise of fundamentalist Christians, and the decline of US manufacturing. In its fictional 21st century universe, the only three things the US produces are music, movies, and microcode. I don't see the first two going away any time soon. Given my experience with the "quality" of outsourced software, I don't see the latter going away any time soon either.

  • Monkey Business says:

    The bright spot, as people have mentioned before, is that cheap labor competition from India and China will be impossible to sustain long term. China is already incurring grief from the WTC for keeping the value of it's currency artificially low. At some point, we'll have to make something here.

    I consider myself fortunate in that I'm too young to be seriously invested in any type of retirement, or have enough in the bank to seriously consider investing.

    The irony is that the solution to many of our national problems lies in the form of the third rail of American politics: cutting entitlements and raising taxes. Neither would be unprecedented, but they're almost assured of pissing everybody off.

  • Oh, I am quite concerned that I will be living in a cardboard box under the overpass when I am no longer able to work. The Catfood Commission currently at work advising the president how to reduce deficits (NOT BY CUTTING THE MILITARY BUDGET), is going to have its way with getting rid of, or seriously reducing SS and Medicare. The market, in which my other retirement monies are invested, might definitely crash, taking my money with it. So….what in the hell will I do? Yeah, I'm fucked all right. I figure when it all falls down around my ears, I will find someone who has a garage and go ahead and take the ride in the garage. Seems reasonable to me.

    Or I'll win the lottery and everything will be a-okay.

  • Big-picture thinking, if done correctly, is always depressing. It's amazing, the extent to which the gigarich have the rest of the nation punked out.

    Would it cheer you up to FJM some of the Reagan-fellating tools at Reason? 'Cause that would cheer me up.

  • I inclined to agree that we're fucked, or nearly fucked, or obviously going to be fucked in the medium term. It should be stipulated that "we" means socially-mobile middle / creative class people, though, and that there are already a great many people in lower classes who are already quite fucked and have been for some time. That doesn't mean "we're fucked" isn't a fair point, though.

    It's also important to be clear about what "fucked" means. To my understanding, again in the medium term, it means the masses performing labor with little-to-no security or future in industries where wealth is concentrated ever more tightly at the top. To be fucked is to become permanently declasse. There is a danger in calling such a thing "fucked" because it turns economic conditions into metaphysics. If political and economic demands to alleviate the fuckitude are ever going to be articulated, the metaphysics (and possibly the passive voice) in "we're fucked" need to go away. "We're fucked" would ideally turn into "Fuck you."

    That said, in the worst-case scenario, we could all collectively be very deeply fucked. It's hard to say just how much strain has been put on the polity and how much social instability there is. Are we anywhere near a breaking point? The vaunted austerity (which isn't a done deal) would surely exacerbate social instability; maybe that's the point at which things either start to get better or fall apart entirely. Krugman made the point in a column not too long ago that the Weimar Republic went for austerity (admittedly in a more severe but still comparable economic climate) and, well, we know how that turned out.

  • But a funny thing happened over the next 40 years: the country got better, rebuilt itself, and turned prosperous again. Those guys who thought that their lives had no hope left at age 35 had turned out pretty comfortable and happy after all by age 75.

    Good times don't stay good forever, and bad times don't stay bad forever.

    This is not, actually, reassuring.

  • Crazy for Urban Planning says:

    @duck-billed placelot : You forgot to mention the Gypsies. Yea, shit. Nothing is simple is it? Maybe I shouldn't write dumb things on blog posts anymore…

  • [wipes tear away from eye] Ed! Welcome to my world! You might want to double up on the Prozac, though, until you settle in all right.
    Hey, for what it's worth, one of my closest relatives has assured me for years that humans will never actually bestir themselves to solve a problem until it reaches desperate crisis proportions. I hope he's right – we're about due. Anyway, with luck in a few years we'll all be dead, and it won't be our problem any more, right? Always look on the bright side of life and all that.

  • grumpygradstudent says:

    Yeah, we're gonna be poorer and have less security than they told us we would have when we were being good little boys and girls and getting A's on our report cards.

    One thing i've sort of been able to do over the last few years is just say, hey, so fucking what? The stuff I like to do (read, write, play music, hang out with friends) is cheap. The life I was supposed to have (working long hours and buying expensive shit and raising a gaggle of kids) isn't really what I want anyway. Yeah, I'll probably never "retire," but at least I'm not a highly paid slave for a law firm or something.

  • "This is not, actually, reassuring."

    I did say that it may or may not make you feel better. The moral I take from the story is that everyone's lives are going to include hard times, perhaps catastrophically hard times, but that things will get better. If you're looking for someone to tell you that everything is going to be completely okay and that all your problems will disappear forever… well, I'm optimistic but not delusional.

    "The U.S. in 2010 does'nt have the luxury of having a sugar daddy or a growing economy."

    That's the beauty of the United States. We are our own benefactor. No, we don't have a growing economy NOW – except oh wait, we do. Growing slowly, but definitely not shrinking. That's the result of the bailout that everyone loves to hate so much, and why we're not in a depression right now.

    We've recovered from major crises before, using our own internal resources. We did it after the colonies declared independence from England, we did it after the Civil War and we did it after the Depression of the 1930's.

    Okay, now someone say "but this time is completely different!" Thank you. Of course it is. Each of those previous times was also completely different from the others. But there is always a way out, and people will always find it.

  • party with tina says:

    Jimmy you're wrong, this was a mix of good timing and luck, namely census jobs, cash for clunkers and tax credit for home buyers. But also, what should really really scare you is all the fucked up shit due to the gulf now. It's pretty much fucked bro.

  • While I sympathize with the plight of adjunct college professors, there is a defining truth to earnings (well, except for management:) The harder and less glamorous the position, the more it pays.

    Education has taken a serious beating in the US but college professors are still widely admired and respected by the public at large. Perhaps, part of the shitty pay and lack of stability is that a lot of bright young people want a little bit of that prestige for themselves and have made the pool of available talent too large.

    Garbage collectors in my city average about $90K in pay and benefits. There was a strike recently where they attempted to block a severe decrease in health coverage. Everyone howled at how much they were paid but not many people applied to replace them.

    Why not? because it's fucking hard work and not widely respected in the community despite the fact that they perform a vital service.

    You can have prestige and do stimulating work and get paid like shit or you can do physically demanding, low prestige work and have a measure of job security for no other reason than no one else wants the job.

  • Nunya,
    None of that applies to low-status jobs without union protection. Or are dishwashers and cab drivers secretly pulling down big bucks?

    Some people teach for prestige. Others do it because they've just graduated with a degree in art, literature, philosophy, music, history, journalism… and they're thinking, "Oh, Christ, what the fuck am I supposed to do now?"

  • Bob Hopeless says:

    Nail on the head, just what I have been feeling. And I'm feeling GREAT about it because I am 52 years old, make a pretty modest living and am trying to support three of us, including a three year-old, on it. You mention that we're not creating jobs and seem to have no ideas..but I am not sure anyone in the upper strata really has any problem with that. Seems like a while since I have heard any of the great movers and shakers of our society even contemplating how to create more jobs. I think they have given up on that, and moved to Plan B- cut "entitlement" and demonize the poor and unemployed. I strongly suspect that the move to normalize 10 to 15% – maybe more- unemployment is under way.

  • Stuck in Mediocrity says:

    Finally. I've been seriously wondering if I've been losing my mind lately. I haven't been able to figure out "what the fuck" has changed in my life and my thinking. You know, it feels like I woke up and suddenly, everything was different. And nothing has changed with my life or job or income. There is just 'something' that feels weird. The main problem is that it seems now there is no good way to get ahead, to make any progress, to 'better' oneself compared to years past. I was a seller on ebay for about a decade and that format is practically dead. Disposable income has dried up.

    It's as if there is a huge weight, weighing down on everything I do and it is messing with my thoughts on future expectations. It's a daily mind-battle of caring vs. not-giving-a-shit. The playing field has been slanted against us all.

    I read about the pain we 'all' are supposed to expect with the current and future economy. Problem is, after months of reading and reading and reading, I think that many people are not even aware of how tremendously fucked we really are. There is a slow bleed in progress, one that will get worse. I suppose that if a mediocre job with adequate pay and a fairly stable personal life are present, then one should not bitch, right?

    I'm completely baffled and out of answers to 'solve' this new-ish weirdness. I'm glad I found this blog, because I truly have been thinking it was only me, and that my inablility to stay afloat (forget getting ahead) was my own failings. I'm beginning to see that this economic crisis is like a sleeping monster – creative and aware individuals seem to be feeling the monster's wrath first. I guess the others will need to be TOLD there is a problem with their Walmart card.

    What pisses me the most is media sites with all the wonderful 'suggestions' of how to weather this screwing. Get rid of cable, cut back on food, sell all your shit, etc. I think the best approach is to just COAST, don't do anything to help the situation. After all, WE didn't change – the rules of play did. Thanks for the comments here, I feel better about not giving a damn now.

  • Senate Reform. A majority of people in the last election voted to change some of this fail, but it doesn't take many people in crappy places create an immotile Senate.

    It certainly isn't so bad that there aren't solutions. In a world where we can produce so efficiently, a world where people want for nothing is conceivable and achievable(within reason).

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