> Why should people want to work for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings to make others rich?
Historically, because the alternative is worse -- literally starving. For most of modern capitalism, most men had such jobs, because they had no choice.
I haven't listened to/read the piece, does he go into how these people survive? Are they doing black/grey-market semi-legal or illegal stuff (which I'd actually consider "working", even if they don't get counted in the visible labor force), or getting government benefits, or living off savings, or being taken care of by family, or what?
He does. It's an interesting read and contained lots of surprises for me.
Here's the section that I think answers your question:
> Who’s paying for this? Well, again, if we look at government numbers, it looks like it’s friends and family, meaning girlfriends, other family members, and Uncle Sam. Disability insurance programs pay some benefits for more than half of these unworking men, it seems. Disability benefits do not provide a princely income, let’s be clear about that, but they do allow for an alternative to life in the working world, which is exactly the opposite of the original, and I think quite noble, intention of disability programs, which is to provide for people who couldn’t take care of themselves, couldn’t work.
If they qualify for government disability payments, doesn't that by definition make them unable to be counted as 100% available for employment? The author implies they are unemployed by choice but disability payments suggest that at least some of them have medical reasons to not be considered fully employable.
In some areas, disability has become kind of a hidden early retirement program. If you ask around in economically depressed areas you can find doctors who will sign disability paperwork even for people who are still at least partially capable of working. And many of them would go back to work if there were better opportunities available.
(I'm not justifying or excusing disability fraud, just explaining what's been happening.)
A couple of NPR shows have covered this. Disability is a federal program and states (especially poor states) are motivated to get their unemployed people off of state benefits (like unemployment) and onto disability. For one, it saves the state money and it also removes those people from the state’s unemployment number.
> There's no diagnosis called disability. You don't go to the doctor and the doctor says, "We've run the tests and it looks like you have disability." It's squishy enough that you can end up with one person with high blood pressure who is labeled disabled and another who is not.
The basic premise of the article is an actual problem, though; a sizeable chunk of the population is simply unavailable as labour. This isn't just a US problem either; the situation is similar in Europe as well, including the Nordic countries despite our ever-progressive welfare systems.
> a sizeable chunk of the population is simply unavailable as labour.
That does sound like a problem. If this really is a dire problem, then let's start by forcibly disappropriating multi-generational landlords and people with trust funds of their inherited wealth, thereby forcing them to work. If that doesn't free up enough laborers to keep the machine humming, then we can start thinking about carrots and sticks for the ppors.
It is not. Plenty of people go to jobs for extra income or for satisfaction. Plenty of people who retire get bored and pick something up to pass the time.
The difference is that modern jobs aren't worth it. No pay, no discretion to make decisions, and your entire management chain feels like they're in the same boat.
Working for a small company where you're treated with respect and given a chance to grow or flexibility or whatever is one thing.
Working for a soulless corporate chain that consistently underschedules so that you're overworked and then writes you up if you want to go see your sick/dying relative is soul draining.
Working for a corporation that refuses to give you a consistent schedule but expects you to come in on your day off to cover someone else is soul draining.
Working for a corporation who will schedule you for 36 hours even though they're short workers because otherwise they might have to actually give you some garbage-tier healthcare is soul draining.
>The difference is that modern jobs aren't worth it.
Modern jobs are so much easier than the factory/mine/construction jobs of years past. Even the ones that still require physical labor, have huge restrictions and regulations that prevent the sort of working conditions in years past.
For all of these people complaining about "jobs these days" I would love to hear what period of history they think had it easier.
It's unclear though. Is the data set consistent in its reporting of data since 1960? In that case, the question becomes - why are so many more people on disability now (if that is the bulk of the difference) than there were in 1960?
In fact you might expect there to be more people on disability in 1960, seeing as WWII ended only 15 years before that (PTSD, etc). I suppose that those people simply couldn't get onto disability back then though.
You might expect more. The US has had several more recent wars. Medical technology keeps a lot of people alive that would have died in the WWII era, leading to higher percentages of disabled civilians and soldiers.
From the article: they're native born and male, may have some college or (10%) college graduates, don't work, aren't in school or training, aren't married, don't really engage in society, watch "screens" 6" hours a day and live off familes, friends and Uncle Sam. 1/2 take some form of pain killer daily.
Overall this is a very sad state. The author describes it as a train class for a death of despair, which feels accurate. This is far more than an economic issue.
This is a misunderstanding of the history and development of capitalism.
Yes throughout all of human history you had to do some sort of labor to not die, I'm not disputing that. However until very, very recently you weren't forced to sell your labor to survive.
The current state of needing to sell your labor to survive is unprecedented even in relatively modern time. During the great depression roughly a quarter of Americans worked on farms, a century prior to that virtually all Americans did. During the great depression not nearly as much of our individual survival had been commodified: nearly every family could hunt, farm, create clothing they needed, maintain their home, and cook their food (something surprisingly many people cannot do any more).
The commodification of nearly all aspects of our material lives means today we are much more dependent on Capitalists than ever before in history.
Pretty sure doing labor to not die and selling your labor to survive are pretty similar.
I think for the average person the tradeoff has been very positive - look at life expectancy and health outcomes from any point in history versus today. Just look at the incidence of famine in Europe historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Europe
For sure there are philosophical, etc. questions that come up - but they are decidedly higher on Maslow's hierarchy than basic survival. If the old state of things were so appealing - people have the option to go back and start their own farm. Almost nobody does.
The fact that people glorify (or wear rose colored glasses about) how things were in the past is just exemplary of the bubble we are all living in.
I'm not making any claims about glorifying subsistence farming, that's a straw man.
The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true.
This is healthier for a society, not because of any high moral vision, but simply because the collapse of the ruling class does not mean the fundamental destruction of everyone. Peasants know how to till the land with or without a king.
Today when have an unprecedented interdependence of the two classes. For example this is fundamentally incorrect:
> people have the option to go back and start their own farm.
A select few individuals do have this option, but all of society cannot return to an agrarian system because we do not have the resources for a population of our scale to live off the land without the massive industrial system required to maintain modern agriculture. Billions of people would die in this case.
This interdependence is particularly troubling due to the inherent nature of the ruling class to seek to exploit the labor class. Though it is to the short term advantage of the capitalist class, in the long run it threatens all of industrial civilization. We are quite literally seeing the consequences of this right now.
> The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true.
I don't think this is accurate. We are much less likely to suffer famine than they were (also epidemics, despite recent events). We are much less likely to suffer war. We are much less likely to suffer a neighboring warlord taking our stuff, including the food we need for the winter. And so on.
Viewed from a high enough level, the society may have been stable. Stability wasn't really a characteristic of life at the individual or family level, though.
Stable, yes, until it's not. The OP point was that in case of an extraordinary event of a big enough scale - which your definition of a stable society doesn't exclude - most(?) of the people won't make it because of the very different nature of these relationships. So, while a disturbance is less likely, its effects would be more dramatic.
It is still possible for most people to buy a small farm in a cheap area and grow enough food to survive. But if you want a new cell phone, well you're going to have to sell your labor to afford it.
I get what you're saying. I specifically said "modern capitalism" though, not "human history". I would say that the rise of modern capitalism is precisely the rise of the class of people who have to sell their labor to survive.
But I get your point that initially there were still people -- in the USA -- surviving by owning their own farm not selling their labor, and that this number has continued to decrease. But yes, I think that's precisely the nature of modern capitalism, to decrease this number. (and the number was initially much higher in the USA than, say, Europe, largely because non-elite immigrant settlers were able to avail themselves of "available" land, something not available to the otherwise "working classes" in Europe...)
In any event, it would be suprising if today most of these non-working men were supporting themselves by subsistence farming and foraging/hunting, indeed.
> During the great depression roughly a quarter of Americans worked on farms, a century prior to that virtually all Americans did
We need to be careful about being slippery with these categories though. Some of those people who "worked on farms" historically were, in fact, selling their labor -- and from GP, "working for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings" in pretty dire conditions. And prior to 1865, many of the people in the USA who "worked on farms" were enslaved in forced labor, which is not in fact "selling your labor", but it's of course worse in all respects.
According to the article, everything from government checks to money from spouses/friends. One would have to assume some criminals are included as well, but I'd guess there aren't too many statistics covering people's illegal side gigs.
Of course, if we are talking about alternatives, although you describe "modern capitalism" incorrectly - before the time where supposed "most" would work to make others rich or starve, "almost everyone" would work and also starve :) And whenever they try to build a modern alternative too, the same thing happens.
Anecdotally most NEETs live off of disability that more often than not is for some subjective condition that cannot be verified by tests (back/leg pains, autism etc.)
Some supporting evidence (though notably the trend of increasing disability claims seemed to reverse around 2014)
"But the 1984 change “substantially liberalized the disability screening program,” according to economists David
Autor of MIT and Duggan in their extensive review of the
program. The reforms shifted screening rules from a list of
specific impairments to a process that put more weight on
an applicant’s reported pain or discomfort, even in the
absence of a clear medical diagnosis. In addition, workers
could qualify if they had multiple conditions that affected
their ability to work, even if none of the conditions was
disabling on its own.
Not surprisingly, more and more workers were awarded
disability benefits based on ailments that relied more on
patient self-reporting and that often were not easily
diagnosed independently. For example, “musculoskeletal
and connective tissue” problems, which includes back pain,
accounted for just 17 percent of new enrollees in 1981,
but 33 percent in 2010. The share of awarded benefits
based on mental disorders — ranging from schizophrenia to mood disorders such as depression and
bipolar disorder — climbed from 10 percent in 1981
to 21 percent in 2010. Mood disorders alone now
account for 15 percent of all workers currently on
disability.
Another driving force, Autor and Duggan found,
is the fact that the value of disability benefits relative
to wages has risen “substantially” since the late 1970s,
because of the way initial benefits are calculated.
That’s particularly true at the lower end of the
income spectrum. When the value of SSDI benefits
and the value of the Medicare benefits that SSDI
enrollees qualify for are combined, the share of
income replaced by the disability program climbed
from 68 percent in 1984 to 86 percent in 2002 among lowerincome men aged 50-61. A possible indicator of the effect
this has had, Autor and Duggan note, is that “the increase in
[SSDI] enrollment during the last two decades was largest
for those without a high school degree.”
Historically, because the alternative is worse -- literally starving. For most of modern capitalism, most men had such jobs, because they had no choice.
I haven't listened to/read the piece, does he go into how these people survive? Are they doing black/grey-market semi-legal or illegal stuff (which I'd actually consider "working", even if they don't get counted in the visible labor force), or getting government benefits, or living off savings, or being taken care of by family, or what?