Image by Mediamodifier - source: Pixabay
When a politician is criticized on his or her policies, their reaction often is to point to the positive effects their policies have on the economy. This is almost ubiquitous, but I'll use Trump once again as an example; he is the most recognized politician in the western world after all, and he's an adequate model for the kind of right wing nationalist populists we see rise to power in many western or European countries. The economy is doing great under Trump; GDP is up, the stock market is up and unemployment is almost at a 50-year low! The problem here lies in the assumption that the people in the country are doing good because the economy is doing good. This has never been true, but we've been raised and indoctrinated to believe that GDP, stock market and unemployment are valid metrics to gauge a population's actual well-being.
These types of implied or concealed assumptions are a bane on political discourse. For example, the question "did you stop beating your child?" implies that you are indeed beating your child; your guilt is implied in the question, which makes it a "loaded" question. In modern politics we might see this in a question like: "why don't we ever see moderate Muslims denounce the terrorist acts from their radicalized peers?" I'm sure you've heard such questions asked, but are they honest questions? Following every cowardly attack by radicalized Muslims, almost the first thing that happens is that Muslims cry foul, publicly denounce the attack, and publicly sympathize with the victims, their families and friends, sometimes even raising thousands of Dollars in support of them. The assumption that they don't is misleading and dishonest.
The assumption that the economy doing great is the same as the country, the people in it, or the world doing great is not only misleading and dishonest; it's outright dangerous. I'll briefly highlight the three components that are used most frequently to shower us with good news about the economy: GDP, stock markets and unemployment, starting with the first, the Gross Domestic Product. From Wikipedia:
Gross domestic products (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced in a specific time period, often annually.
source: Wikipedia
The main problem, among many others, is this: the profits and monetary value of everything that's bad for us is counted in this metric. If a hurricane strikes, causing mass displacement of people and lots of loss of human lifes and mega destruction, this will cause GDP to go up. If you have an accident, causing you much discomfort and pain, well, congratulations I guess, because you just caused a massive impulse in the economy that will surely grow the GDP; think of all the people you've just employed, the ambulance driver, the medics, the surgeons, the insurance companies, and if you're not alive to read this, the undertakers, the police, the justice apparatus... The economy is doing great, but you aren't.
What about the stock market? If you still believe the concept of the "trickle-down economy", you might fall for this argument. Sadly, we live in a trickle-up economy... Stock market going up can never be representative for the well-being of the general population because of one simple fact. Just ask yourself: who owns stock? Sure you might indirectly have some via a pension-fund, but who really owns stock? Measuring by household-wealth the distribution is like this: the bottom 50 percent owns no stock at all, the 50-90 percentile group owns 7 percent of the stock market, the 90-99 percentile group owns 43 percent, the 99-99.9 percentile group owns 34 percent, and the top 0.1 percentile group owns 16 percent of the stock market. These are the 2016 numbers (source) and the decades long trend is unmistakable; more wealth has gone to the richest 10 percent, who already own 93 percent of the stock market. How well Wall Street is doing, is at best a measure of how well the top 10 percent are doing.
Unemployment is a special case, as this touches most closely on our real lifes and the way we interact with the world and people surrounding us, at least that's how I see it. What I mean is this, and this might come across as somewhat radical and "out there", but please bear with me: we should be aiming for higher unemployment levels. Really. The fact that Americans on average work most hours per household should immediately strike you as antithetical to human progress. The future vision of all science- and technology conventions back in the 1950s and 1960s was one in which the human race was set free by scientific and technological progress. The kind of future we now only see depicted in re-runs of a cartoon like The Jetsons, or as some horrific collective fate in the beautiful animation Wall-E. Progress should mean that less work is necessary to do everything that's necessary to maintain a certain level of well-being. Not wealth, but well-being.
And besides all that, the way unemployment figures are calculated gets way less attention than necessary to really understand what's going on. For example, and this is a rather big one, it only includes people that are actively seeking a job. It doesn't count the hordes of people who simply gave up on ever finding a job. It doesn't account for under-employment; if you have a job working 8 hours a week, you're counted as employed. Employment is important, don't get me wrong. But not because of the economy or some presupposed "debt to society"; employment is important because basically no one wants to feel useless, no one voluntarily wants to be a burden on the group they are part of, that's not how we evolved, we're still tribal people. But don't call it a debt to society when that society teaches us to be selfish. Don't say that a job or "hard work" is the only true ticket to a happier life, when the real path are the robots and AI's that will eventually erase the need for most jobs. Which is NOT a bad thing in itself, only in the system we stubbornly perpetuate.
The unemployment we fear should be the unemployment we looked forward to during the scientific and technological conventions of the 1950s and 1960s, when there was a well-founded belief that in the year 2000 we'd all enjoy a 3 or 4 day work-week due to massive technological progress. Well, the progress has happened, it's the economy that went wrong. An economy that's painted before our eyes with bogus statistics that say nothing at all about how good or how bad the people driving that economy are doing. Or the planet that's feeding that economy with its recources; we can never hope to find real solutions to the destruction of the environment, the atmosphere and climate change under the capitalist paradigm of perpetual growth. Don't be fooled by the modest numbers they use when talking about this economical growth boogy-man.
The number 70 is the most important number you'll ever learn in this regard. Let me explain briefly. Economists and so called "experts" say in the media that 2 or 3 percent growth per year, on average, is enough to guarantee the health of the economy. The nearly 10 percent growth managed by China is internationally acclaimed as some sort of miracle for this reason; "they" managed to out-grow "us" by a factor of 5! Here's why 70 is such an important number: you can divide 70 by the percentage to calculate how long it takes to DOUBLE the size of the economy. Two percent growth per year means that in 35 years the economy is doubled in size. I've written an entire post on this number 70 in the past, but this is all you need to know really. I hope you can see how an economy that wants to double its size in just 35 years, quadruple in 70 years, and so on, can never lead to any kind of stability or incentivize less (over-) production.
Other solutions predicated on economical growth are also bound to fail or be bogus to begin with. Like the whole emission trading scam, better known as "Cap and Trade" maybe. All this amounts to is a system in which industries can trade carbon-emission rights among each other. Industries that pollute less make money by selling their left-over polluting-rights to the biggest polluters. This does not incentivize those big polluters to lower their emissions, as paying for the rights is cheaper than to actually take measures to reduce emissions. It's yet another scheme to prop-up the GDP and the stock market at the expense of the planet and all living things on it, including us, the 99 percent that can't afford a house in the hills when the flooding starts...
Okay, rant ends here. Here's a nice video on another buzz-word to indicate technological and economical progress, all in one, while ignoring the many negative influences on our daily lifes it implies: "disruptive." Only in our economy can something as miraculous as technological progress be perceived and used as something wholly frightening and negative:
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