A conservative friend of mine sent me to this Mark Manson article explaining how times are changing and how our best days are basically behind us. Data is presented as well as citations, so take that for what it’s worth - I don’t know the author. My friend went on in a supportive and cautionary way about this article - which is surprising as most of the time he reads the headline, but rarely the content.
The general thesis is that we have no more frontiers, and more people are competing for fewer good jobs, and everyone’s life is cheaper as a result. The American Dream (whatever that is, or was) is gone. The article asks at the end:
The question is how well we will adapt and mature to this new reality. Will we accept it and modify our ethos to match the 21st century? Or will we become petulant and angry and scapegoat our cognitive dissonance of our national consciousness away?
I don’t think there is a death of the American Dream, it’s just that identifying the “dream” is not as easy as it used to be - because we now need to include lots of differing sorts of dreams - not everyone wants a big house in the suburbs with 2.5 kids and a dog. However, I wanted to ask the denizens of the dope about the figures the author uses - and if the expansion of part-time and contract jobs does portend a shift to a service economy with less security than the perceived golden age of American manufacturing might that a lot of people associate with our best times of the past?
First I would have to take him at his word that belief in the American Dream as he describes it is still prevalent. I’m not familiar with it, it sounds like something from my grandparents’ era, and generational ethos is something I associate with people who went to Woodstock before I was born. I’ll be 50 at the end of this decade, so I’m wondering, who is he talking to?
Whoever they are, they may not realize how other industries sprouted and grew and diversified and became the giants they are today within my lifetime. We could debate whether or not working at Walmart is worse than a factory assembly line, or Comcast is worse than United Steel, and in the process we would come to an understanding of what makes a “good” job and why we think good jobs are tied only to manufacturing - last century’s manufacturing at that.
Yes, we have to deal with structural unemployment - that to me is the most compelling part of the article, reason enough to be concerned but not enough to say that economic opportunity is largely a thing of the past (which he does.) It’s all somewhat hyperbolic opinion focused on his own and other peoples’ attitudes, with not enough attention focused on the main point you supplied in the OP: less security, real or imagined.
My opinion: write your own instead, it’ll be better.
Read the article. Basically agree but have a big caveat:
Every country in the world that is not still “developing” has hit the same wall. Yes, the US had some advantages that made things especially good and easy for us, but the dream is not dead because those advantages have been used up. The American Dream and Japanese Dream and EU Dream is dead because capitalism can only balance its books and work as an incentive system when the growth rate is extremely high. Why? Because everything is an investment that demands a return above the “risk-free rate.” Once a capital base is established and population growth levels out, the system becomes extremely dysfunctional. Even before capitalism reaches its “end state,” it is prone to sudden collapses, as in the Great Depression. Once it reaches its end state, it is the doldrums at best. Japan’s bubble burst in 1989, and the country has never been the same since.
Beyond the ailments of capitalism, we have the secular trend of automation, and we just don’t know how to handle it as a global society. Until the early 20th century, we needed dumb people to survive: they would work in the fields, and without their labor, we would starve. Now only a tiny fraction of the population is needed to make food… or anything, really. We don’t require the labor of dumb people any more.
Well, a huge percentage of the human race really isn’t that smart, creative, competent, etc. They are not going to “retrain” and get “high-tech” jobs. 100 years from now, barring some eugenic intervention, we are still going to have a lot of dumb people with nothing to do. And that’s a major fucking social problem to deal with. (Put more accurately, we have jobs appropriate for dumb people, but not enough to go around and keep everyone employed. Our tendency as a species is to keep upping the requirements for jobs until we have PhDs sweeping the floors.)
Capitalism no longer works, but even if we figure out what to do about that (hint: it’s not Communism), we still have the problem of how to give everyone a purpose in society. It’s to the point where even pretty smart people face a lack of opportunities. It also affects big companies and supposedly privileged as incomes and therefore consumption collapses. Yeah, everything is pretty much fucked.
Call me a doe-eyed optimistist, but I kind of think people will always define the American Dream so that it is something lofty but reasonably attainable.
Our grandparents had a different version of “American Dream” than our parents did. I know my grandparents were satisfied with just owning property–size and location didn’t matter so much. But my parents’ dream was bigger. My grandparents dreamed of sending the smartest kid in the family to college. But that would have been a small potatoes achievement for my parents.
So I think we’ll just shave back the Boomer’s version of the American Dream bit by bit, to fit the economic times. Of course we will. The natural resiliency of people demands that we will.
I think one reason a lot of Millennials mope around is because they know they have fallen short of their parents’ success. And their parents constantly remind them of this (“Back in my day, no one over the age of 18 lived at home! What’s wrong with you?!”) But when living with one’s folks through the 20s and early 30s becomes normal, along with delaying marriage and home-buying until one’s 40s, then you should expect to find people better able to cope with what seems like suboptimal conditions to our pampered eyes.
Yes in America, but in Asia the economies are still growing strong and people are seeing their incomes and standard of living increase pretty linearly. That is my impression. The average Chinese person is better off than they were 15 years ago. Same in India, Southeast Asia. In China a grandfather may be an illiterate subsistence farmer, the father may be a factory worker with a secondary school education and the son may be a white collar worker with a college degree.
There really is no solution. The major culprit is automation, there isn’t enough work for people to do. Also there was no real mention of income inequality in that article, the fact that all the wealth that does get created goes to the top, which results in people at the top having surplus wealth to push a social and political narrative that income inequality is good and we should have more of it.
Yes. I think this is true of all economies building up from a much lower base than what we have. Though I have heard there is a huge bubble in China, economic growth has slowed, and its economic model of being the world’s cheap factory is slowly dying. Thoughts on that?
Right. It’s insanely rapid change. And, similarly, I think it is bewildering to many Americans who remember our economy working for us that way 1945-1970 (with a kind of silver age 1970-2000)… and why can’t we just get back to that? And the only idea the GOP has to sell is we can get back if we lower taxes and regulation. (One thing I don’t get is why American politicians always talk about our economic ails as though they are local [the guy in the article more or less fell into this trap as well] when they are clearly global in nature.)
Japan is certainly an interesting case as well. It also shipped off all its low-end manufacturing to China and elsewhere–something that a lot of people don’t know. But it has also managed to keep unemployment rather low. BUT it also has massive social malaise and a cratered fertility rate that will cut the population by 1/3 by 2050. Japan keeps its unemployment rate artificially low (from what I have read and seen with my own eyes by living there) through a kind of government-corporate understanding both explicit (it’s legally hard to fire people) and implicit in which a LOT of deadwood is allowed to remain on the corporate rolls. I once said to my boss (who hated me and had no particular incentive to agree) way back in 2001 that half of the people in the offices of our company were deadwood; he demurred and coolly gave the figure of one-third. He was serious! (Companies have gotten cheaper, however, and even then that company was abusively using contract workers by “firing” them and rehiring them when their contracts expired instead of taking them on as hard-to-fire full-timers.)
So it may be that even giving people busy-work and money won’t solve the malaise we are in and that it runs much deeper even than that.
Spot on. Yet income inequality is much lower in Japan, and, well, see above. We have a DEEP and global problem to solve.
The “American Dream” was created by a unique set of circumstances after the end of WWII.
we hadn’t had our shit bombed into rubble, and had no re-building to do
we had stopped production of many manufactured consumer goods to build military hardware, which meant
we had pent-up demand for things like cars, white goods, etc.
we had a ton of manufacturing capacity ready to go, and
we had thousands of returning servicemen who would step right into those jobs.
And it didn’t really last that long, despite what that boiled ham in a wig would want you to believe. The US auto industry was already starting to fall by 1958. Packard was gone, Studebaker had a few years left, and Nash-Kelvinator had to merge with Hudson (forming American Motors Corp.) in order to survive.
“The American Dream” was basically dead by the '70s, but we have a large chunk of our society which refuses to come to terms with that. in the '50s and '60s, you used to be able to walk down to “Ford’s” and get a decent-paying job screwing together cars. Not anymore; now you need to spend tends of thousands of dollars to get a degree just so someone will look at your resume for anything more than a minimum wage job.
or be some savant at coding and get investors to throw money at you at Y Combinator.
Yes: if you still had a strong solid middle class in America with secure jobs, then a suburban home is still much more possible in America than in England at least due to the enormous housing costs. And I assume that holds for much of the rest of the western European area (at least in the Low Countries and France: I have no idea what housing would cost if you go further south or east), and places like Japan. I also have no idea what housing is like in Australia but I assume it’s comparable to America (i.e. somewhat expensive anywhere people want to live, cheap elsewhere) due to the large area available.
I’m not sure if the concept originally was simply ignoring the rest of the world even if they aspired to the same thing, or was deliberately used in contrast to the privations most of the rest of the world was still under in the aftermath of WW2.
Oh, and a big part I forgot above was the cheap land on which suburbs were built, so one could achieve the “American Dream” of getting away from those people.
The point about not needing uneducated people is interesting, and supports the meme about everyone “must” get a college education to compete. I think it is true young people today need to choose their path carefully, so they don’t end up with a useless degree and tens of thousands in debt. Rather than “follow your dreams” maybe we are at a point where they need to “follow the money”, when considering a college degree. Perhaps getting a college education is now the base requirement now, the way a high school diploma was a generation ago. But, with the soaring cost of going to college now, I can understand the pessimism of today’s youth - they are getting squeezed by high expectations and high costs, but low opportunities.
You can’t say that the American dream is dead without first figuring out just what you mean by the American dream. Since the article is clear that it makes no effort to define it, the rest is meaningless.
Well…traditionally the “American Dream” has been if you work reasonably hard, you should be able to get a decent education, afford to own a home (whether that is a suburban house or urban condo is your business) and raise a couple of kids who were likely to enjoy a similar lifestyle and save enough to retire reasonably comfortably.
The main challenges to that dream is that college has become extremely expensive for most people and is no longer a guarantee of a decent income. Even if you do find a “decent job”, much of the jobs I’ve seen in Corporate America are soulcrushingly dull cubicle drone jobs or intensely competitive. There is little longevity or opportunity for advancement in most jobs. In in fact, as more and more companies turn to contractors, freelancers and outsourcing firms, this “Uberization” effect becomes more pronounced.
Even the concept of living in the suburbs is becoming untenable. Suburbs have evolved from a sort of idealistic family-friendly utopia into a vast, resource intensive wasteland of conformity, consumerism, gridlock and cultural stagnation.
The article was self contradictory. He clearly has no idea what caused the economy to grow. It says both that the America dream was built on a surplus of cheap labor and then that it is ending because jobs are not paying enough. He cites the lack of land as a problem for the economy. If you look at the list of top countries by GDP per capita you get tiny countries like Quatar, Luxembourg, and Berumda, and city states such as Macau and Singapore. He also says that geographic isolation helped America avoid damage from the wars. So did South America and yet Germany and Japan which were both destroyed by WW2 quickly became much rich. The only thing he gets right is the importance of innovation.
What the articles misses is that we are undergoing a huge demographic change as the baby boomers get older and retire. That is the basic reason fewer people are in the labor force and the economy overall is not as dynamic. An economy that is filled with older people is just not as innovative. We have moved from an era of 3% yearly growth to a era of 2% growth.
The other big change the article misses is the rise of the welfare state. It makes sense that if the alternatives to working have gotten better, more people will leave the workforce. We currently have the healthiest workers in history and the easiest jobs ever yet more people are taking disability than ever before.
Manufacturing jobs peaked 60 years ago and has been going down ever since. Yet the country’s economy has continued to get better. The type of jobs are changing just like they alway have.
I largely agree w/ much of the article. My biggest difficulty is his failure to clearly define “the American dream.” IMO, the American dream/way of life - is little more than a feeling that we are entitled to increasingly more consumer goods, while expending increasingly less effort to obtain them. No sense of such a lifestyle being scalable worldwide, or acknowledging the externalities of our consumption.
But yeah, a lot of Americans seem to feel we are uniquely deserving, when we owe a good portion of our wealth to circumstances beyond our control.
Not sure why we feel the world should happily desire to continue to subsidize our wealth/idleness. Never really understood the necessity of a “growth” economy. Read an article yesterday about machines in manufacturing. American industries are considerably more productive than before, with far fewer employees. I have not seen any real widespread discussion as to what we expect everyone to do. The joke is that 1/2 the population will be employed to provide dialysis and health care to the aged, infirm, and unhealthy other half!
