What’s Going On?
According to the World Bank, “Progress on shared prosperity has stalled since the pandemic, due to slow economic growth and a divergence in mean incomes. Today, incomes around the world, on average, would have to increase five-fold to reach the level of $25 per person per day, the minimum prosperity standard for high-income countries.”
These seem like lies and staggering stats simultaneously. However we know from several corporations’ quarterly financial reports over the past five years that most of them have made record profits and that their executives have widened the gap between themselves and their lowest paid workers manyfold. How do we end this?
I should also mention that liability and accountability are no longer things anyone’s interested in anymore either, the buck does not stop anywhere anymore, as evidenced in the preamble of the World Bank’s report
Pathyways Out of the Polycrisis, from 2024:
The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or currency of the data included in this work and does not assume responsibility for any errors, omissions, or discrepancies in the information, or liability with respect to the use of or failure to use the information, methods, processes, or conclusions set forth. The boundaries, colors, denominations, links/footnotes, and other information shown in this work do not imply any judgment on the part of The World Bank concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such boundaries.
It actually seems like no one wants to end it. No one even wants to listen to any ideas about how to end it, and we’re all locked into this never ending cycle devoted to working for whatever goods we need to survive and working harder for the things we want, aka keeping up with the Joneses. I’m guilty of it. Everyone in our modern society is guilty of it.
I don’t need a motorcycle, but I love it, and it’s considered a luxury good, despite buying it used with high miles for one quarter of its original cost and doing a ton of work on it myself to save money. It’s the only thing I currently have that allows me to economically get out of the city for a while and explore nature beyond the extremely strict boundaries society has historically forced upon us, essentially with the “economics of greed.”
How long have we been foisting this upon generation after generation? I talk about this when people will actually listen and have written about it before. Jared Diamond is a multi-disciplinary scholar, and I first read him in a Cultural Anthropology class in college with one of my favorite professors. He wrote a short essay in 1987 called “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” where he essentially states that we should’ve remained a nomadic species, “With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.” I mean, that’s big and bold, and it changed the way I thought about everything pretty much instantly.
It’s amazing how much we’ve advanced technologically in the last 38 years, and frankly, we’re on the technological verge of being able to eliminate the need for money entirely, Star Trek style, but the rich and powerful DO NOT WANT THIS. They want a permanent labor class, and they currently definitely have it.
For My Part
I was dumb enough, despite my degree and all the years of experience I have, to sell my body cheaply for steady work in a field that doesn’t pay well, landscape construction and maintenance. I almost feel like I was brainwashed into accepting it by society as a whole, like, “Oh, that’s just what landscapers make around here,” but I also definitely blame myself and feel some regret about my complacency in that field.
I declined to start a second career as an English Language Arts teacher despite working toward my certification and after working as a long-term 7th grade substitute for a whole year. It was brutal. I was commuting two hours a day and working about fifty hours a week, all while trying to spend time with my boys each week and do what was fulfilling to me, which is hardly given a consideration in today’s world.
I loved teaching, and I feel that I’ve taught and trained many many people throughout my adult life, especially in the construction industry, but the teaching “industry” has totally corrupted the concept of pedagogy entirely. I was at one point instructed to not spend so much time on kids’ assignments making editor’s notes, to just put a grade on it with some general notes. So, how are the kids supposed to learn?
I did all kinds of fun stuff in my classroom, and I had some very liberal practices. I waited for the kids to calm themselves down before class started; I wouldn’t yell. There was a single bathroom pass, and while you didn’t have to ask to go to the bathroom, you were responsible for whatever you missed while you were out. I did kinesthetic lesson plans where kids were allowed to work in groups on color-coded parts of speech, which we would later use to diagram sentences that spanned the length of our classroom.
I loved all of that, and my kids did extremely well on the STAAR test, which is what Texas uses to evaluate its students and teachers, somewhat unfairly in my opinion, and I was offered a position to return the next year, but I turned it down. I could’ve made quite a bit more money than I was making in landscaping at the time, and I turned it down. I felt like teaching would take me away from my kids and make me feel drained constantly, and I probably wasn’t wrong. Out of the hundred students I taught that year, I estimate that maybe ten of their parents cared about them at all, and that was the most draining aspect of teaching for me. This is modernity.
I went back to working in landscape construction and maintenance, and I enjoyed it for the most part. The money sucked, but I enjoyed the work most of the time, and it kept us housed and clothed in the neighborhood I wanted to live in during my elder son’s high school years. I was able to see the progress I made each day, but the ironic bit is that I still ended up working 50+ hours per week. So much for saving time away from work. During the pandemic I worked a short stint at a music store, which is an ideal job for me. Oh, I get to talk about music all day and help people figure out how to make it for themselves? Amazing. Too bad the money was even worse than landscaping.
My job now is totally fine. It is not fulfilling in any way, other than doing it well and not having too many hiccups, nor is it stressful in any but one way, one horrible coworker, and I make good money, but I am required to do it Monday through Friday, 8:30am - 5:00pm, longer on the last Friday of each month. I have very deep philosophical grievances with being paid so much to do less physical work than I’ve ever done for many reasons. I definitely get paid for what I know now rather than what I do, and at my age and breadth of arthritis, I’m truly and utterly grateful for it.
However, I don’t feel that the guy laying bricks a block over should be getting paid less when he’s been doing it for twenty five years, which is as long as I was in landscape construction. It’s a skill, and he’s well practiced at it. He deserves to be paid well, and he likely isn’t, at least not in San Antonio. Also, while unions are great in theory and have definitely helped us move to forty hour work weeks and paid overtime for a lot of people (but not if you’re salaried, a gimmick I fell for), new progress needs to be made and old corruption rooted out. The work to improve can never end if we’re going to keep going down this rabbit hole of capitalism, and maybe in our constant endeavor to progress, we’ll find a way out of it and into a better, more equitable realm of existence. There’s literally no reason not to do so, unless you want a permanent labor class.
Globalization and Modern Technology
Why do we accept all these things as given? If productivity has gone up over 60% in the last forty years, then why aren’t we working at least 30% less? I mean seriously? A twenty eight hour work week sounds way better to me than forty. However, when I worked for one of the few companies during my first career that wasn’t a construction job, I was given a book called Good to Great, which is basically an indoctrination book on why you should make selfless sacrifices for your growing company and make the company’s priorities your priorities. I left that job shortly thereafter. I have a friend who still works for them and isn’t happy with his work, which isn’t shocking.
Globalization is a very charged buzz word and concept, and there are parts of it I love and parts of it I hate. The interconnectedness of all people and ideas is awesome, truly one of the most amazing things about technology in general. The exploitation of the people of “developing countries” is awful. According to the World Bank, “44 percent of the global population – around 3.5 billion people – live today on less than $6.85 per day.” Staggering.
A lot of that exploitation is due to US business executives like Republican Jack Welch, the well-known CEO of GE from 1980-2000, who started moving manufacturing overseas and “argued that public corporations owe their primary allegiance to stockholders, not employees,” so that if they could manufacture overseas for far less labor cost and eliminate American jobs in order to appease GE’s shareholders, they’d do it, and boy did they. In his autobiograpy, “Welch stated GE had 411,000 employees at the end of 1980, and 299,000 at the end of 1985. Of the 112,000 who left the payroll, 37,000 were in businesses which GE sold off, and 81,000 were reduced in continuing businesses.” This jackass was also a climate science denier, so there you go.
So, in conclusion I’ll say that I’m writing this to avail myself of these feelings, to get them off my chest, and hopefully put ideas into the heads of as many other people as possible so that we can continue to move forward and out of late stage capitalism and into the Star Trek prophesied world where Captain Jean-Luc Picard says, “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” That sounds really good to me.
I’ll be writing more about this topic on a somewhat-semi-regular basis.
