The Daily: 20 October 2023

Where are all the people?

My mail is sporadic. Before the flood, there were days now and then in which the box was inexplicably bare — there should be something every day because my newspaper is delivered through US Post. Which is questionable in and of itself. How much are the publishers paying for that service? How much am I paying for it? And do I get rebates for the days it does not show up? Apparently not.

The weekend edition comes on Saturday and covers Saturday through Monday. For the last three weeks there has been no mail on Saturday. So that rather expensive weekend edition hasn’t shown up until the weekend is well and truly over. Meaning the calendar of events is a list of things that have already happened. Meaning also that I don’t have time to read it even if there are articles and events that are still relevant. And, on a personal and maybe petty level, meaning I don’t get my Sunday comics and sudoku puzzles, small happy things that go a long way toward taking my mind off all the week’s stress.

But not for several weeks.

It’s not just the weekend delivery, which I might understand if there is an alternate delivery person on the weekend route. Except the alternates tend to do a better job than the regular guy. My regular mailman is old. He has informed me several times that he is past retirement and only staying on as a favor. My house is the last on the route, and he doesn’t make it here until very late in the day. Sometimes he forgets to stop if there is only a newspaper and no actual mail. But on the weekends, there are often younger folks delivering the mail; and for some reason they can get the delivery done by noon. But I suspect there have been no younger substitute delivery people for several months. I know the few times I have seen weekend delivery, it’s been my regular, Bill. And it’s been 6pm or later.

Since the flood, “no younger people to work” has been a common refrain in Vermont. Bill doesn’t get the mail delivered at all about half the week. So there are probably staff shortages in the sorting room also. Today at work, the postmaster came in with a colorful flier advertising a “hiring blow-out”, trying to fill some of the chronically empty positions. We let them hang up the poster, but I was thinking “Good luck with that!”.

Meanwhile, my employer has entry level and middle management positions open in nearly every office throughout Vermont. Before the flood, it was difficult to hire entry level positions. But since? There are no applicants. Or no… there was one applicant and that one canceled after being called for an interview. Undoubtedly, that person did some math and decided there were many better options.

The refrain from all those trying to hire people, which, let’s be clear, means entry-level and minimum wage positions in nearly every case – in Vermont and everywhere else – is “Where are all the people?” In Vermont, the entry-level people are finding better wages doing any number of necessary jobs. Anyone who can wield a shovel or hammer, never mind being competent at electrical systems and HVAC, is needed. People are also trying to tend to their own disasters or helping family, friends and neighbors. Some people have had their lives so upended that they’re living day to day with no way to plan anything beyond that. They may not even be able to fill out an application.

But this has been a problem everywhere for a while. It began to be notable with COVID for some of the same reasons that young Vermonters have largely dropped out of the job market. With COVID precautions, child care became impossible to hire. Coupled with closed schools, that meant many parents had to tend to their own children and could not go to work. Elder care also landed in the laps of those with loved ones who needed assistance. Then, for quite a while after things began to open up, transportation was suspect; and in some places public transport budgets had been decimated during the months of low ridership with the result that many routes never returned. So those without personal transport have had difficulties getting anywhere regularly for the last several years. And of course, we’ve all been sick for years now too. Repeatedly and devastatingly — and, for millions, lethally. 

Which is where the math begins…

This is not merely a tale of disaster response. There are underlying issues, and these will not go away with recovery. Where are all the workers? Let’s do that math.

It begins with a baby boom. Until recently, this was the largest surge in population in the history of humanity. The resulting group of humans has driven the economy in the US, both labor and consumption, since the 1960s. They occupy most of the upper level jobs. They have amassed most of the wealth. But they are old now. They aren’t looking for work, never mind entry-level positions. They are retiring, and they are dying. Those COVID deaths? According to the CDC, in 2020 over 80% of the deaths were of people 65 and older. But even without COVID and other disasters, the Boomers are in the last years of their lives. They are not working. They are not buying either. As a result, both labor and consumer markets are contracting.

The next generational group to come along, labeled Gen X in population studies of the 1990s, was much smaller than the boom. We’ve spent our lives in the long shadow of the Boomers. We are aging now also, not quite in the twilight years, but also not looking for entry-level jobs. We have mid-level positions and decades of work history, though it is much more checkered than previous generations. Few of us have had long careers. Most have changed jobs about once every five years.

In fact, the experience of Gen X is particularly illustrative of the intractable problem in finding workers. So let’s look at it closer.

Gen X came out of high school in the 1980s in the midst of economic stagnation. Manufacturing was being shipped overseas or just shuttered. The tech boom had yet to materialize. Inflation was ludicrous and wages were flat. But we were promised that there would be a trickling down of good times just around the corner. Most of us went off to college believing there would be jobs on the other side of higher education. 

There were not…

But by the 1990s the tech boom had begun. If we just gave that a few years to solidify, we could ride that gravy train all the way to the bank. So we thought. So we went back to school. Some went for training in information technologies. Some went on to get advanced degrees in other fields. We drew out education to the furthest extent, hoping for good-paying jobs. Instead, the tech boom went bust, more and more jobs were off-shored, and Boomers still held all the top positions on what was left. Twice as many of us have degrees as the Boomers did at the same age, but there was no market for our education. And so it came to pass that Gen X invented the barista with a PhD.

Eventually, we settled for the scraps and have shambled from one position to another, trying to cobble together the wages to support our lives and families. As a group, we’ve mostly failed. Boomers own approximately 53% of US wealth, while making up 20% of the population (as of 2022). Gen X comprises 19% of the population but owns just 28% of the wealth. Moreover, we’ve been through multiple financial boom and bust cycles that have wiped out what monetary wealth we’ve managed to save. And we’re watching with trepidation as Social Security teeters on the edge of solvency — or worse, privatization. We are fairly sure there will be no retirement in our old age. At least we know how to pour coffee.

But we did and do have jobs. The next group to come along — a larger generational surge than the Boomers, 22% of the US population in 2022 — the Millennials — owns just 6% of US assets. This group came out of adolescence to a nearly non-existent job market. The gig economy has dominated their employment life. Like Gen X, they have stretched education to its limits, but unlike Gen X, they came out of school with crushing debt — education having more than doubled in cost in the intervening decades. Moreover, Gen X was still squatting in the lowest tiers of academia, holding most of the non-tenure teaching and contract research positions. So there were few avenues for Millennials to work their way through an advanced degree, and they paid dearly for those degrees. Or, rather, they didn’t pay. They took on loans. 

And this is where the math becomes ugly.

They literally can not afford to work for entry-level wages. If they are unemployed, there are deferments on loan payments. If they earn less than $20 an hour full-time wages — about $3300 a month — they may qualify for payment reductions, but they still must make payments every month. With rent costing an average $1700 a month (US 2023 figures) and most entry-level jobs paying substantially less than $20 an hour, loan payments of any level are a hardship. Truthfully, food is a hardship.

Millennials will never dig themselves out of this pit, and they know it. At best they must wait for Gen X to die off — because we don’t get to retire — before Millennials can rise much above entry-level. And that’s if they can find more permanence than a gig job. So why bother?  

But it’s even worse — because there are worse variables in Millennial balance books.

Boomers will largely escape the consequences of their spending spree of the world’s resources. They will spend their twilight years in distinct discomfort, it is true, but they’ve had a life. They also have the wealth to somewhat insulate themselves from the effects of biophysical collapse — as long as economic collapse holds off for a while longer. Likewise, Gen X will get to pour coffee and tend to whatever middling jobs are still around, but we’ve lived over half our lives already. So old age sucks… It always did…

Millennials, however, will spend their entire lives in protracted economic and biophysical collapse. And nearly all the things that can be done for wages make that collapse all the more dire. Working for wages today is not much short of suicidal. Worse than suicide, because the relief of death won’t come soon. For young people, contributing to most parts of our economy will lead to a lifetime of suffering, decades of misery, and destruction of everything they value on this planet. For what? A permanently entry-level job doing crap work for crap wages and no social rewards. Why would anyone take that bargain?

Why did we?

Because we believed in the story. We believed in the myths of money and free trade and rising tides despite manifest evidence to the contrary.

Now, there’s one more variable in this equation. For Millennials, this system is not a given. It has been crumbling for as long as they’ve been alive. It will not outlast them, and many former career paths lead to an abrupt end of work within Millennial lifetimes. Maybe even in Boomer lifetimes.

Here’s an example: Son#2 wanted to fly when he was a child. His dreams of piloting lasted up through high school. He talked of getting his pilot license before he ever showed interest in driving a car. (Truthfully, he still has little interest in cars…) But what chance was there of a piloting career lasting his working lifetime? Air travel was already in decline, shoving more and more bodies into each flight, reducing flights and increasing costs, charging for many formerly free services, retiring planes and pilots and not replacing the worn out husks. Flight will soon be the purview of the few wealthy dinosaurs who can’t bring themselves into the present, never mind the future. Airline jobs will be few and very likely unrewarding, shuttling rich old farts between their winter McMansions and summer time shares. Even my teenage son could see through the twinkling mist of his dream job to this dismal looming reality. 

And that’s just one of many, many formerly lucrative careers that will not be around long enough to support a life.

So add it up. No entry-level jobs pay enough to pay living costs. There are real disadvantages to earning low wages over no wages. There are few jobs that will continue to exist and even fewer that lead to advancement, whatever that means in the context of economic collapse. Then, of course, there is the existential threat attached to nearly every industry that pays wages. Add to all that a few disasters, multiple rounds of flu and COVID, increasingly expensive transport and child care, and you can clearly see that young people have little reason to put much effort into wage work.

And now the tipping point…

Even if they can get wage work and can stomach what it is doing to themselves and the planet, those wages are failing. Because money is failing.

Money was only ever a medium to facilitate trade. It is artificially impregnated with value. It has no intrinsic worth or utility. It provides no nutrition or shelter or other needs. It can be used to purchase needs — if those things are readily available and for sale. Money is the latest in a long tradition of using small, portable value markers to smooth the exchange of goods of real value. Gold and silver, shell and crystal, paper promissory notes, tulip bulbs. All these artificial value media go through boom and bust cycles, and many never recover from a bust, because there is no inherent value in any of it, only social agreement — until there is not.

Today, we are seeing the beginning of the end of our social agreement on money. We name it inflation, but this is merely the inability of money to maintain absolute value — which can’t happen. Money is only relatively valuable, relative to things of actual worth to human bodies. Expecting money to maintain value when actual things are becoming scarcer and more difficult to acquire is idiocy, or at least a deep confusion as to the nature of money, value, and need, along with a complete disregard for the energetic and material costs in actual things. In fact, money itself requires vast infrastructure and intricate processes and daily labor from millions of humans. So of course, money is losing value as all these inputs become more difficult to source and therefore more expensive. And as things become more expensive, we are less unanimous in our agreement to value money as much (or more) than the things we need. Money is not worth as much as a full belly. 

So, many of us are skipping the money and going straight to the full belly. There are already many ways to live in passing comfort outside the monetary system. Witness Vermont. Or the Navajo Reservation. Or East Tennessee. In fact, when we move outside the monetary system, the scarcity that is imposed by this economy — so that we will buy our needs — vanishes. Suddenly, all our needs are met and we don’t need money at all. But even within the present economy, among those who still tacitly agree to place any value at all in money, money is losing value. It is not worth as much as it once was. It takes more and more of it to buy less and less. Because there is less and less to buy.

And this is where we come full circle back to the Boomers. They are no longer driving the economy. They are hoarding up the physical and monetary wealth they have amassed. They are not producing anything. Nor are they spending anything. Even if we weren’t in biophysical collapse and resource depletion free-fall (mostly from the economic lives of Boomers…), there would still be economic contraction, and probably failure, just from the fact that there is less going on as the Boomers sit out the end of their lives. 

Gen X is muddling along, but we were never that committed to this system. So why try to save it? Why not put our backs into something worthwhile while we still have backs capable of bearing loads?

Millennials have nothing invested in it at all and nearly everything to gain in its failure.

And so here we are…

Nobody wants to work in this system that doesn’t work for us. This is not a temporary glitch. This is the fabric of this system unraveling all around us. It has repercussions on everything that money has touched. Which is a good deal of what we take for granted as given in our lives. Regular mail delivery. Entry-level wage workers. Money itself. It is all falling away. 

So where are all the people? Well, if they’re sensible, they’re doing work for themselves. They are building and mending their own lives. Caring for their own bodies, caring for loved ones and community, caring for the things of real value. Tending to their homes and lives and lands. They’ve left the system for something better…

And Boomers?… Well, they’re wandering around wondering where all the baristas went…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023