America Got Prosperity Backwards — And That’s Why It’s Still Collapsing
They call it Striketober — workers across America are going on strike. That’s a remarkable occurrence, because it almost never happens. Americans going on strike is a little bit like finding Europeans playing baseball. What drove Americans to this point? Well, think of what they’re demanding. Not just better pay, interestingly, but… a little bit of time off. Family leave, parental leave, even just a little bit of vacation. That’s stark proof of a fact that Americans who’ve lived overseas know all too well: America offers an abysmally low quality of life. You’re overworked, underpaid, and that’s if you’re lucky enough not to be exploited, degraded, abused along the way. How did America get to this point?
America has the rich world’s lowest quality of life, by a long way — after all, Americans will die 5–10 years younger than Spaniards or Germans, but even that understates the issue. It is uniquely a dismal life: nowhere else do we see opioid epidemics, kids massacring one another at schools, having “active shooter drills,” or:
“Tom Coomer has retired twice: once when he was 65, and then several years ago. Each time he realized that with just a Social Security check, “you can hardly make it these days.”
So here he is at 79, working full-time at Walmart.”
How terrible, no? How did America get here? Not because Americans did not pray enough, marry enough, or even because they’re bad people.
Life’s basics became luxuries, more expensive by the year, instead of necessities — right down to the most basic of things human beings live for at all. I don’t mean iPhones and Facebook. I mean the fundamentals of a decent life. Retirement, healthcare, education, income, savings, safety, stability, marriage, families, and trust itself. All these things are simply now unaffordable for the average American. And worse, they are skyrocking in price every year. 66% of Americans choose between food and healthcare. Do you see what I mean?
Let me give you another example. Millennials are delaying marriage and having kids — into forever. But is there anything more basic to life than that? So social bonds “break” — or more accurately, are never forged at all — and conservatives blame collapse on a lack of family values. But there is a reason millennials cannot form families — and it is not because they are depraved hippies.
Today’s millennial is tomorrow’s Tom Coomer — he will never retire, no matter how hard he works, saves, or tries. It is simply not in the cards for him — Tom didn’t have to pay hundreds of thousands for education or a home, but the millennial does, so if Tom cannot retire, how will the millennial? What else should we expect in a society with stagnant incomes, savings, and life expectancies but the breakdown of social bonds? Social bonds are things we must be able to afford, too — they do not come to us out of thin air.
Yet the most basic of bonds that human beings live for are with their partners and kids. But even those are becoming unaffordable in America. That tells us that all of life’s basics are becoming unaffordable for Americans. A marriage or partnership, kids, and a home itself: they come, for most people, before healthcare, education, retirement, and so forth. But if people are beginning to find the most basic of life’s goods unattainable luxuries — then the rest must be even more so. So when the most primary thing in human life itself — the most fundamental social bonds that people hope for — have become unaffordable, then how can a society endure?
Just as social bonds are basics of life that we must be able to afford, so too are the rest — healthcare, education, media, retirement, and so on. The problem, though, is that Americans cannot afford those anymore, because life’s basics have become luxuries for the richest few. And in that void, people are turning, in desperation, to authoritarianism, magical thinking, extremism, scapegoating, and harder solutions — like drugs and violence. It isn’t a coincidence that all these things are rising while life grows harder, meaner, nastier, and more unlivable.
Now. The interesting part is what happened in the rest of the rich world. While life’s basics in America turned into unaffordable luxuries, elsewhere, the precise opposite happened. These basics grew cheaper and cheaper, until at last, they became goods that were simply freely provided for everyone. Hence, going to see the doctor in London, for example, is free, and a prescription costs a fixed amount, just a few pounds — whether it is penicillin or some cutting-edge drug. Meanwhile, healthcare in the US costs thousands more every year — while barely covering much. See the difference? The US and the world are mirror images — life’s basics became cripplingly expensive luxuries in America, but free everywhere else.
Because education, healthcare, media, transport are freely, universally provided to all, that, in turn, makes having a family, home, kids, something that the average European doesn’t think very hard about affording. The average European thinks it’s very strange — and very sad — that Americans cannot even afford to have a family, because they can barely imagine such a life. And that is because they enjoy a working social contract, that makes the very same basics that Americans can barely now afford at all not just cheap, or “accessible”, but free. Do you see how stark the difference is?
Let me just give you one example. The average rental in America costs $1200. And that’s for an apartment. The average rental in France? 800 euros. For a house. That’s $930, by the way. Perhaps you see my point now.
Why, then, did America never develop a working social contract? After all, it has never had basics provided for everyone at any point in its history. Here the answers are as sad as they are numerous. Slavery made it impossible for every person to have anything. An ideological devotion to “the free market” made it impossible for society to invest in itself. And a society founded upon a strict hierarchy — whites, browns, blacks, each punching down the last — developed no norms or values to push it in the direction of basics of life that were affordable for everyone.
Remember Tom Coomer? I’d bet he’s a lovely old fellow. I’d love to grab a beer with him and learn about his long life. How much does he have to teach us? But he is too busy working at Walmart, eking out a living. How can we judge a rich society whose elderly live without dignity, meaning, and safety, earning pennies, after lifetimes of hard work, as anything but remorselessly cruel? Hence, American life is something the rest of the world now sees as unimaginable cruelty — but it has a working social contract, and America doesn’t.
And so here Americans are. The most basic of life’s basics have become luxuries for the average American, while in the rest of the rich world, more and more advanced basics of life go on getting cheaper and cheaper ever year. That is what a failing social contract means. And because it never developed a working social contract, America had no real choice but to collapse. A society without a social contract is an empty shell, waiting to crack. Its democracy, economy, and polity will fail, as people give up on all three, doing whatever they must to afford life’s unaffordable basics somehow, whether it is turning to strongmen, drugs, religion, self-help, or guns.
The lesson is this. Americans let the basics of life, decade by decade, turn into luxuries only affordable for the richest few — because they were too busy punching one another down to do what the rest of the rich world did: make those very basics of life ever cheaper and cheaper, until they became necessities provided for everyone. Yesterday’s luxuries becoming tomorrow’s basics, freely provided to all, is what the growth of a society really means — but America, perversely, got this backwards — today’s basics became tomorrow’s luxuries, rendering life itself less and less livable, year by year.
Crack. America got prosperity backwards. And that is why it is still collapsing, while its people strike for just a fraction of family leave, and while its peers look on in horror, alarm, and pity.
