Entry tags:
interesting times
The brewing consensus among economists is that the economy is entering a "double dip" recession, which is kind of ridiculous from the perspective of the tens of millions of Americans whose lives have already been destroyed between 2008 and now. When you haven't been able to find work in over two years, the bank is taking the house, feeding the children is a weekly struggle, who cares about variations in the GDP?
A couple of years ago I ridiculed a Boston Globe article which offered a very rosy picture of what a modern depression would look like. What the author was describing was a recession, the kind of short-lived economic downturn (1-3 years) that our country is able to weather by means of its social safety net, savings accounts, and credit cards.
That we are "entering" "another recession" is an extremely candy-coated way of saying: okay, you thought the last three years were bad?
This is when it starts to look like a depression. The safety net is exhausted. Millions of Americans have used up their lifetime 99 weeks of unemployment insurance. Cities and states are starting to cut essential services -- laying off teachers, firefighters, police; closing schools on Fridays; literally tearing up paved roads and laying down gravel which is cheaper to maintain, or turning off street lights. The election-year band-aid just drawn up will not even begin to stem the damage, as school districts warily contemplate the utility of keeping teachers on that they will not be able to afford next year. This is what things look like right now and the economy is not even technically in recession.
The US has built its culture and expectation around the nuclear family -- one breadwinner, one homemaker, and two or three children -- as the basic household unit. The problem with this household model is that it relies on continual economic growth, or at least the existence of a safety net to get the household by for a few months during times of recession. (Note that there's no room in this model for single-parent households; such households have had to live as if there's basically always a recession going on.) It's not a model that can easily accommodate the 10-20 year economic downturn we've entered.
The point of this post is not to dwell in doom & gloom; it's to comment on the fact that for many folks our way of life is going to change, and probably in ways that feel like a downgrade. But it's not the end of the world and the future is quite survivable, though we will have to learn how to live cooperatively and stick together in ways that were discouraged when the expensive, high-resource, high-cost, high-maintenance nuclear family model was sold to the American public during the post-WWII boom. My first instinct was to promote ideas like cooperatives, gift economy, and bartering, but I think they will develop spontaneously. It will be interesting to see what role the internet plays in this.
A couple of years ago I ridiculed a Boston Globe article which offered a very rosy picture of what a modern depression would look like. What the author was describing was a recession, the kind of short-lived economic downturn (1-3 years) that our country is able to weather by means of its social safety net, savings accounts, and credit cards.
That we are "entering" "another recession" is an extremely candy-coated way of saying: okay, you thought the last three years were bad?
This is when it starts to look like a depression. The safety net is exhausted. Millions of Americans have used up their lifetime 99 weeks of unemployment insurance. Cities and states are starting to cut essential services -- laying off teachers, firefighters, police; closing schools on Fridays; literally tearing up paved roads and laying down gravel which is cheaper to maintain, or turning off street lights. The election-year band-aid just drawn up will not even begin to stem the damage, as school districts warily contemplate the utility of keeping teachers on that they will not be able to afford next year. This is what things look like right now and the economy is not even technically in recession.
The US has built its culture and expectation around the nuclear family -- one breadwinner, one homemaker, and two or three children -- as the basic household unit. The problem with this household model is that it relies on continual economic growth, or at least the existence of a safety net to get the household by for a few months during times of recession. (Note that there's no room in this model for single-parent households; such households have had to live as if there's basically always a recession going on.) It's not a model that can easily accommodate the 10-20 year economic downturn we've entered.
The point of this post is not to dwell in doom & gloom; it's to comment on the fact that for many folks our way of life is going to change, and probably in ways that feel like a downgrade. But it's not the end of the world and the future is quite survivable, though we will have to learn how to live cooperatively and stick together in ways that were discouraged when the expensive, high-resource, high-cost, high-maintenance nuclear family model was sold to the American public during the post-WWII boom. My first instinct was to promote ideas like cooperatives, gift economy, and bartering, but I think they will develop spontaneously. It will be interesting to see what role the internet plays in this.