More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Among the unfortunate effects was the national consensus that the way to deal with urban neighborhoods full of old buildings (and black people) in older cities was wholesale demolition and replacing them with massive new buildings and highways.
The differences between 1963 and 1969 were dramatic—the clothes, the hair, the sound, the language, the feelings—and the changes happened insanely fast, in a couple of thousand days from shiny earnest Apollonian Progressland to crazed and furry Dionysian hordes.
Specifically concerning what computers implied for the future of work and jobs, however, the consensus suddenly did the reverse: for two decades, experts had worried about where automation was leading our economy, but starting in the late 1960s the smart set couldn’t wait to get to superautomated Tomorrowland. A significant early worrier had been the mathematician Norbert Wiener—college graduate at fourteen, Harvard professor at nineteen, at MIT the godfather of artificial intelligence—who back in 1948 published Cybernetics, a groundbreaking book that gave a new technological field a name.
What Marx and Engels had written 120 years earlier about capitalism’s collateral impacts was coming true, too true—all fixed relations swept away, all new-formed ones antiquated before they can ossify, all that is holy profaned, all that is solid melts into air.
Economic equality, as a result of all those countervailing forces I talked about, was at its peak in the mid-1970s. It was the same in the United States then as it is in Scandinavian countries today, the share of the nation’s wealth owned by nonwealthy Americans larger than it had been since measurements began. The system was working pretty well, and the national consensus about fairness endured. People took for granted all the progress we’d achieved. It really seemed irreversible.
My senior thesis argued that more and more white-collar jobs, thanks in part to technology, were apt to become more and more proletarian, and it discussed whether workers in such professions might follow the lead of federal air traffic controllers, who’d recently unionized.
Until the 1980s, when private equity firms arose, Wall Street bankers were just bankers, middlemen providing capital to companies but not actually presuming to run the companies, let alone remake or dismantle or loot them. Now there are more than two thousand private equity firms in America owning and running businesses worth around $2 trillion. But finance came to dominate the rest of the corporate economy most profoundly by changing the job of the top executives at America’s several thousand public companies. The number one responsibility became not producing better products or satisfying
...more
It’s a huge concentration of economic power. I always imagined the market as a vast democratic hive mind producing the self-correcting wisdom of crowds. But for practical purposes, the financial market has been reduced to a small group of people, in the low thousands, who share a mindset. That’s financialization.
By the end of the first year of that first Bush presidency, Sununu had almost single-handedly halted the political momentum in Washington, turned climate change into a partisan issue, and put denial of the science on its way toward Republican orthodoxy.
Even earlier in the 1990s, the conservative Charles Murray, of all people, published an essay in the conservative National Review, of all places, about the specter of inequality haunting America. It was clear-eyed and prescient. “The numbers of the rich will grow more rapidly in the coming years,” Murray wrote.
Real wages for low-skilled jobs will increase more slowly, if at all….I fear the potential for producing something like a caste society, with the implication of utter social separation….All the forces which I can discern will push American conservatism toward the Latin American model….The Left has been complaining for years that the rich have too much power. They ain’t seen nothing yet.
Cowen dedicated his short 2011 book The Great Stagnation to Peter Thiel, who he calls “one of the greatest and most important public intellectuals of our entire time. Throughout the course of history, he will be recognized as such.” Thiel is the libertarian billionaire cofounder of PayPal who donated $1.25 million to the 2016 Trump campaign.
As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it, we’re “converting higher economic inequality into greater political inequality. Political inequality, in its turn, gives rise to more economic inequality.”
College degrees make it much easier for people to earn enough money, but higher education is also supposed to make it easier for people to keep educating and amusing and occupying themselves, like aristocrats, and to help others, like aristocrats with a sense of noblesse oblige. Again, as the future first Baron Keynes predicted in 1930 about 2030: “We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines.”
There are no silver bullets, and I have no detailed master plan, just two strong convictions: that without effective counterweights to the power of big business and the rich, the United States will continue morphing into a superautomated plutocracy, and that how people work and get paid needs to become a primary subject of our politics.
Even my ancestors in Europe experienced a prelude to this in the late 1300s, when the Black Death changed everything economically. With the supply of workers suddenly cut by a third or half, the economic power and incomes of the surviving masses shot up, landlords lost fortunes, peasants rebelled, capitalism started replacing feudalism, and the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance.
