The Problem

I suspect there is something wrong with society, but I am not quite sure what it is, much less what caused it. Say you identify the problem, you know what the problem is. Say it's taxes, or immigration, or too many people with hair. If that's the problem, why hasn't society already fixed it? Why is that? If this thing you have identified is the source of the problem, surely everyone else would realize it too and we would put someone on to fixing it and it would get fixed. Surprise, surprise, it doesn't seem to actually work that way.

So we back up a step. The problem isn't whatever is wrong, it's that not enough people (or not enough of the right people) know about the problem. So what we have here is failure to communicate. (Previous posts on that subject here). 

But we have many means of communicating (all the old methods, like talking, letters, telephones, newspapers and television, and all the new methods, like computers, internet, smartphones). Here the problem is not the mere transmission of information, but reception, processing and analysis. You can jabber all you want, but if nobody is taking it in, it doesn't mean a thing. This is how people get followings, they say stuff that connects with some people.

Now if you want to change things, if you think you have a solution to the problem of what's wrong with our society, you need to get those people who have followers on your side. And when you are talking to a bunch of people with diverse world views, you need a message that has very broad appeal. And that's where we get political parties.

We are getting a lot of noise about all kinds of problems with our society, loss of freedom, the homeless, rising levels of crime and drug addiction. I suspect the noise we're hearing wouldn't be quite so strident or offensive if the economy was doing better. I mean, even if the economy was going great guns, we would still be hearing noise about 'problems with society'. That's like a feature, not a bug. Anyway, the 'noise' wouldn't be so shrill.

There is an opportunity here for someone to step up and offer a solution that will band the disaffected together. It could be another Hitler or FDR. Or maybe that's how we got Biden. Problem is that I don't think Biden or the democrats have a solution. They are all part of the 'I'm gonna get mine, I don't care about anybody else' clan. As long as there is something in it for them, they'll vote for it.

None of the entrenched powers are going to give up anything. They are all banking on having a zillion dollars socked away in some investment, like real estate or the stock market. If you want to sell them on something, it can't cost them anything. It would be better it if paid them something, then you might actually get some votes. So that's what Biden is doing. He's sending out a zillion dollars into America. Some of it might actually get to working people, some of it might go to 'the poor', but you can bet the bulk of it will end up in some fat cats pocket where he will invest it in something solid. This, of course, will drive up the price of the those investments. The increase in price looks good on paper, but it is essentially meaningless. The investment still has the same real value, it's just that the value of the dollar has gone down. Some investments do increase in real value, but do not confuse the price with the real value.

So when the dollar goes down in value, all those people with a solid chunk socked away (a million dollars might be enough today) are going to be okay because they have a solid base to stand on. All those people who haven't acquired a base are going to be in worse shape. Wage increases have not kept up with inflation, so every time the government prints another trillion dollars that it doesn't have, inflation goes up, the value of the dollar goes down, wages don't keep up, and the cost of a solid base to stand on gets even farther out of reach.

But while more people are getting crushed, more people are also finding a place to stand:

The most interesting part of the 2015 Pew report, though, was its finding that the middle class is shrinking not only because more people are poor but also because more people are rich. The percentage of lowest-income earners—those earning less than two-thirds of the median income—had grown four percentage points, from 16% to 20% of the population. Over that same period, though, the percentage of Americans in the very highest-income households also rose by five points since 1971, taking that group from 4% to 9% of the population. - Investopedia

Will things ever get so bad that a majority of the people will realize things have got to change? Maybe, maybe not. As long as the majority of voters think things are okay, nothing is going to change, and being as people who are invested in the system are doing okay, they are not going to vote for change. Those who are being crushed are not going to find a lot of sympathy. Oh, there will be people making sympathetic noises, but no one is going to risk upsetting their personal applecart for those without applecarts.

There is a slim chance that someone will come up with an idea that would somehow improve the lot of the poor while not having a negative impact on the rich. Ideally, that idea would make the rich even richer, because who doesn't want to have a fatter cushion to sit on? I don't know, but Amazon might be one such idea. Amazon put a lot of people to work. Of course, they also destroyed a lot of retail jobs, but they definitely increased the demand for delivery drivers. These jobs don't pay much, but for some people it's better than nothing. Or maybe it's not. Maybe it's just another step on the road to oblivion.

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I don't know about retail work. From what I hear it's just as rough as the restaurant business. Long hours, low pay, but every now and then you latch onto something that's going great guns and that makes you think it's actually worth it. The part that bugs me though is the waiting. You've got waiters waiting in restaurants, and you've got clerks waiting behind counters, waiting for a customer to show up, a customer who typically doesn't want to spend any money and will eat up your time just because they don't have anything better to do. I might be able to that now, now that I have more patience, but I certainly couldn't do it when I was younger, like as recently as last year. I have to be doing something, my mind has to be engaged, even if it is doing something like playing solitaire. I hate waiting. Anyone who has a job that involves spending long hours waiting has my sympathy and admiration.