So what changed?
Hey it’s Friday night and some time ago, several decades ago, before the days of slangy acronyms a new meme like one had arrived: TGIF. People used to say it at the office and mean it. “Happy Friday” in lieu of a “Good Morning” or simply “Morning” was a standard greeting. It implied, at least to me, that Friday wasn’t a ‘Happy Ending’ at a massage parlor, but the beginning of a weekend. There was a lot I didn’t know then, there continues to be a lot I don’t know now. When someone asks the question “So what changed" it’s worthwhile asking what timeframe are we talking about?
I am still talking about the previous essay on inflation as felt by Americans. I am glad Kimi created the essay that way because most articles on inflation tend to be numerical. In other words, they’re not a lived experience. And each of the lives mentioned there from the police officer to the teacher have their own life stories that could make for a whole book. I am certain Kimi didn’t mean to reduce an entire life into a paragraph. And neither did you, dear reader. I have hung out with Catholics for so long that guilt comes naturally now.
That essay was not truly about inflation, it was about stress. Each income level experiences different levels of stress as they try to survive. And it’s not the eustress sort of stress, it’s the other kind — distress. 2012 wasn’t that long ago. Obama was elected for the second time, Xi Jinping rose to power and Putin returned to the Presidency while Hollande defeated Sarkozy in a turn leftward.
“Turn is in play” was the second part of the Magic Act. The plane disappears in “the pledge”, the turn leftward worldwide after the wars is “the turn” and the reappearance of right with Trump is “the prestige”. True to the magician form, Trump is all about his own personal prestige.
That, sort of pendulum effect, is what the movie The Prestige was about. It can describe many different Overton Windows and “isms” from Capitalism to Communism, from Fascism to Environmentalism. As I was saying, before I got distracted by the magic act, is 2012 wasn’t that long ago. That was an era of school shootings and a major one had taken place at an Aurora theatre for the screening of “A Dark Knight Rises”. Sandy Hook Elementary would happen later that year. It wasn’t that long ago. Back then if you had asked anyone in finance if America could legitimately increase minimum wages by 50%, the answer would have been singular: no. It would cause catastrophic inflation, they would have said. Yet the essay documented exactly that, a rise in wages by a significant amount. And the reader is asked to notice that inflation somehow, magically, kept pace just enough so that Joe was always spinning his wheels like a rat on a hamster wheel. It doesn’t matter if the stuff came from China, prices of other things went up. Take car insurance, the winner of the prize ceremony for this time period. Why exactly did it climb by that much? Did driving become that much more dangerous? Did cars become that much more pricey?
The answer if we think through it carefully, at an entertainment site, is often something like: the wages only climbed because inflation climbed first. So of course they kept pace.
I see. And why did inflation climb?
Because the printed a shit ton of money that’s why.
So printing a shit ton of money explains why car insurance went up?
Uggh I just can’t talk to you anymore. I’m filing for divorce.
Boy things escalated fast there. That’s the other thing I noticed, not many of the couples in that previous essay were married because it would literally be impossible to live on one of those salaries. Only the dentist couple was. That’s the type of stuff, AI tries to pull if you don’t watch it carefully. Still the point makes itself manifest over the longer term and I have written about that before. Joe’s life hasn’t stagnated, he isn’t a rat running on a hamster wheel, he is a rat being slowly and carefully fattened, made sicker and then bled while on a hamster wheel. It needed one income to run a household of many kids, it now requires a minimum of two wage earners and its difficult to pay for raising any kids. That’s the decline of many people in America. America’s decline is a different topic, related tangentially but still more geopolitical.
We have touched upon this theme in previous essays. We live in a right leaning system. The magic trick requires that the system always prevail and most people are always at the hamster wheel all their lives. Entire trains of economic thought have built that idea and built the world in faithful obeisance to it. There is an alternate way to build the world, a world built for the workers and for all sentient life. And it won’t cause runaway inflation. That is the life’s work of the people who have inhabited me over the years that I’ve never met. Or I may have met them without knowing because they can move from person to person without pausing.
As an example, there are two ways to reduce distress that arises from lack of money. One is to make things more affordable. If all prices in America suddenly went back to 1980 prices while keeping current wages. The other way to do it is by increasing wages of the bottom 80%. Or both. That’s just me — bullshitting — on a Friday evening. Don’t take it seriously.
No serious economist would take any of this seriously.
