A reader writes:
I generally agree with your assessment of the economy and the various Occupy protests happening right now, but I have to take exception to something you wrote:
Shit is fucked up and bullshit all right. Except that this isn't a conspiracy. It's a function of choices we made as a democracy: to defeat Soviet and Chinese communism; to ramp up private and public debt in good times rather than tackle deeper problems in education and infrastructure; to enlarge the global economy; to foster innovation. We are, in this sense, a victim of our own success.
Who is the "we" you refer to? Many people who are adults today had no say in any of those choices and have not profited from them. I was born in 1985, too late to vote
against Reagan or Bush Senior. I was raised by a single mother who worked as a house cleaner and landscaper. She never used a credit card because she believed (and still believes) that it was irresponsible to spend money she didn't have. As a teenager and young adult I watched the insanity of the financial markets (the tech bubble, and later, the housing bubble) incredulously. How could anyone believe that it was a good idea to invest in companies that did nothing useful or build homes that no one actually wanted to live in?
As an adult, I've followed my mother's example, avoiding credit and trying to live within my means, but I now find myself with $1000 of medical debt (despite having health insurance) and no income. Meanwhile, I'm trying to decide whether I should take out a student loan to continue my education when my financial aid runs out. Will there be a decent job waiting for me if I pursue a degree, or will I just get stuck with more debt?
From where I'm standing, it looks to me like I'm a victim of other people's success. And I'm not alone. If you look at the protest crowds, you'll notice that many of the protesters are about my age. We've all come to the same realization: while our elders were mortgaging their future, they mortgaged our present. The economic injustice in this country is not just a result of collusion by the rich against the poor, it's also a result of collusion by the old against the young. That may not be a conspiracy, per se, but it still feels like a swindle.
I'm with you mostly. But you're not a victim of someone else's success. The economy is not a zero-sum game. You're a victim of collective decisions made by majorities in the last three decades, and especially the last catastrophic one. I too saved for retirement, never took on credit card debt, diligently paid off mortgages within my financial reach … and I landed in the top 5 percent. To do all that and end up in the bottom 20 percent and see reckless bankers destroy the economy and still give themselves massive bonuses … well, I sure understand the anger nonetheless. Niall Ferguson blames the boomers here. To have been the wealthiest generation ever … only now to bankrupt the rest of us through Medicare, while the young have so few jobs and often no health insurance: it does anger up the blood.
So my collective "we" is not meant literally. But it does mean that all of us who have participated in the polity for the past thirty years are not blameless. We lived beyond our means; and created bubbles we really should have known to avoid. We bought houses we couldn't afford, leveraged by financial instruments no one understood. And we expected it to go on for ever. Yeah, some financiers committed crimes of recklessness and greed. But our elected officials changed the rules to help them. And we voted for them.
The Dish 