The “Kitchen Table” Issue
Half of Americans have wealth under $8,000 or don’t have enough cash for an emergency of $400. Picture what that tells us about the even poorer people at the 25th percentile, as opposed to right in the middle: they have zero financial security. We don’t know exactly how much of a factor this was in the 2024 presidential election, but if it was only one fifth of the explanation, that would have made things different. The vote was essentially a toss-up, as it has been — let me remind the losing side — for all of the recent Democratic victories as well. And I’ll also hasten to add that this problem of haves-and-have-nots is across most of the developed world.
The driver for all our problems is technology. But there are also many gears in the inequality machine: the balance between the market and governance; natural resources; global politics; tax laws, and so on. To cut to the chase, what has historically been America’s supposed strength — the unfettered, dog-eat-dog marketplace — is now conversely the jaws of its voracious appetite for eating both its poor and its young.
There are several incontrovertible truths of our technological advances that produce the financial landscape before us. First, with each passing day it takes fewer people to produce the same amount of goods and services. Second, we live longer. Third, technology enables each generation to hoard its wealth even more than in the past… in short, we have less need for the labor of the new generation, so there’s less movement of our wealth to them. Again, we are eating our young.
Sure, technology creates jobs, but far fewer than it eliminates. In the past I estimated it produced only one job for every ten it removed. The advent of artificial intelligence is likely to change this to “100 to 1.” And that’s just on the constructive side of technology, not the destructive side. Global warming is causing epochal problems, starting with the mass migration that is bursting the seams — geographical and cultural — of the ‘have’ nations.
Since the beginning of farming there have been rich and poor, and a steady concentrating of wealth. This has accelerated recently to hideous levels. And until now we’ve been able to pretend it was their problem, not ours. But more change has occurred in the last 50 years — roughly traced to the creation of the microprocessor — than in all previous history. Pretending that 50% of America is destitute because they are stupid or lazy or criminal… is equally stupid, lazy, and criminal. But more to the point, it could be our demise.
I won’t get too deep into solutions here beyond stating that — individual initiative notwithstanding — the vast majority of lower-class jobs are more from willful choices of our society to share the wealth, than from a self-balancing system of dog-eat-dog. And it’s been this deliberate choice since the phrase “promote the general welfare” was enshrined as bedrock of our collective ethos. Personally I recommend things such as complete taxpayer funding of public transportation, public fostering of unions, and ratio (multiples) caps on executive pay. Beyond that, a lot of the solutions are in James M. Stone’s still-prophetic book from 2016, Five Easy Theses… though they are all hard.
