Scheisshaus Economics III - The Social Costs

Change Happens.

It is an inevitable part of existence.  The passing of time is marked by change, some big, some small,  but changes all...

We, as human beings adopt well - almost terrifyingly well - to change. In fact, I don't imagine it is too much of a stretch to say that we are here because we can adapt so well to change.  We would have died out as a species millenia ago otherwise.

But just as economically speaking there are costs to changes, socially there are costs as well.  There are (to borrow from economics) Micro costs and Macro costs.  The micro costs we are all very familiar with, all it takes is to watch the news to see them.  The sad casualties of the tumult.  Lost homes, broken families, broken lives in so many ways.  Of course, all the economic despair leads to a lot of personal despair as well, just google "opioid crisis" and you can read thousands of tales of the endless hopelessness.

All it takes is a little imagination, a car, and a couple tankfuls of gas to appreciate this. The procedure is simple.  If you fill up the car, fire it up and drive through the countryside of this once great nation, and avoid most of the Interstate highways, you'll see it almost immediately.  Keep driving from town to town until you are about on empty, then fill up the tank, and make your way back home. In that trip you'll pass through cities and towns big and small, filled with so many hulks of dead and dying businesses, each of which was the livelihood of people - real, actual people with lives and hopes and dreams and aspirations.  True, their lives were different than the typical upscale urban millennial, as were some of their dreams and aspirations, but they were there and they were real.  The key is to try to imagine those lives and think about how their whole existence - their whole reason for being - was ripped out from under them.  Not in a slow gradual fashion either, but in a generation.  When you live through a situation like that, the micro and the macro merge to become one complete hell-hole of a life. The only way to survive is to escape, and that is what happened.  The best and brightest - and most connected -  escaped physically to a different town and a different life, far from the despair.  That left the others - unable to physically escape - to effect their escape in the only ways they had left available. The lucky ones to subsistence living and digital distraction, the less strong to the only other option - the bottle, or the needle, or pipe, or bowl.  Any chemically induced haze to dim the reality of their emptiness and dull the pain that comes from facing the fact that they have no chance - none.


The question is: How could a a huge part of a society go through such a complete foundational collapse and have it go largely unnoticed by popular culture?  The Micro costs are inevitably tied to the Macro costs, period, but the relationship is not rigid at all.  It is, as economists would say, an elastic relationship.  This delay allows one to continue to enjoy the benefits of certain things long after the overt presence of those things fades away.  In other words, if you have been lucky enough to have some economic wherewithal (meager though it may be), you can continue to live a good life even though the productive basis for that life no longer exists.

The de-industrialization of our culture has done just that.  It has allowed the development of a hollowed-out economy, and a hollowed out culture.  The fact that the upscale coastal set has not figured that out is simply because they are insulated from the reality of it - remember Friends? 

But those on the receiving end of the destruction teventually become open to thinking outside the box, and look for something or someone to see things from their perspective.  That is how we wound up with President Donald J Trump.  He told those people that he knew their lives had become shit and he told them that it didn't have to be that way, and that it could change for the better.   They knew that change happens, because they lived it, but this time, they've bet that it can be good change for a change.  About two years into it, and it looks like they're going to clean up on that bet.