It shouldn’t be this hard

On fighting and clawing to survive in the richest society in human history

It’s, like, a metaphor….

Everyone who goes through the academic job market has very strong emotions to process. Even for those who “land on their feet,” it can take a surprisingly long time to let go of those resentments and regrets. As I’ve written before, my emotional trajectory was unusually long, as various complications regarding the Shimer faculty’s status after the merger kept those types of concerns more front of mind than they normally would have been at this stage of my career. Thankfully, though, I believe I have almost entirely let go now, thanks in large part to the fact that I have wound up in a more or less secure position with an appropriate rank.

Yet there’s another reason I have been able to let go: the kind of status or security I once coveted simply doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe I didn’t get the job I “deserved,” by whatever metric, but at this late date the relevant fact is that I did get one of the ever-dwindling number of spots. Maybe I don’t have tenure, but at this point tenure effectively doesn’t exist—no one is really secure anymore.

More concretely, I can’t think of anyone in my broad age range in the humanities I would trade places with. By and large, even the people who have the privileges and resources I might have benefited from aren’t happy. This problem may be especially pronounced in the academic humanities, which Western society has basically declared not to be “a thing” anymore, but it seems to be true everywhere. People with the kind of job that in a past generation might have meant they had “arrived” are still fighting and clawing. Everyone seems to be hustling like a 22-year-old, but they’re seasoned professionals with advanced degrees and decades of experience. Especially for people in their fifties or older, work life seems like an exercise in clinging on for dear life to secure some kind of livable retirement—finding a new job in the same field, much less starting over in something else, feels impossible. The concept of a “career” has been replaced by a series of elaborate heists. It’s not just anxiety-producing, it’s humiliating to think of having to scrape and beg for the chance at a living all over again.

Why do things have to be like this? Why can’t someone who has trained for a professional career and shown themselves to be competent enjoy some expectation of job security? Why should experience and seniority actually be a kind of death sentence on the job market? And in terms of my own career path, why is society basically attempting to abolish the type of education that virtually everyone in the older generation received, which was apparently adequate to allow them to succeed in the workplace? Why is every young person forced to pay to frontload directly work-related skills, at a time when past generations were allowed the space for intellectual exploration? Why do they have to kill themselves racking up formal qualifications for positions that are, I’m sorry, not that difficult to walk into and learn on the job—positions that high school graduates were able to fill competently a generation earlier? Why have we given up on the idea that if you can read Plato, you can certainly read a quarterly report?

The job market, writ large, is only one of the aspects of the economy that simply is not working, if the goal of the economy is to fulfill basic human needs. People need to work and contribute. They need to feel their contribution is meaningful and reflects their capabilities and gifts. We had a system that at least broadly did that, and we broke it by marketizing it. People need a place to live, and those costs need to be a reasonable percentage of their income if it’s going to feel secure and sustainable. We had a system that mostly achieved that, and we broke it by turning housing primarily into an investment vehicle. People need access to basic goods on demand. We had that, and now you literally can’t even take items directly off the shelf in many retail stores. People need functional infrastructure to undergird their everyday activities, and that needs to be provided unconditionally by the state. We had that for a while, and now we have complex public-private partnerships that get bogged down in decades worth of lawsuits.

Politicians and pundits do sometimes address this problem, but in abstract and piecemeal ways. We hear about the affordability crisis, or the proposal of an “abundance agenda” to help society get things done. But the economy is still treated almost as a force of nature or a fickle God to be placated. Maybe it will bring down prices for us if we offer tax incentives. Maybe it will let us build a highway if we give it some deregulation. At the outside edge is the notion of universal basic income, the ultimate kludge that will allow everyone to keep feeding money into the machine forever.

The actual answer is radically excluded—we need to take democratic control of the conditions of our lives and livelihoods. We are not doomed to let the economic algorithms set up in the late 1970s and early ’80s keep running until they kill us. As Keynes says, anything we can actually do, we can afford. There is nothing materially preventing us from rapidly building enough housing to solve the shortage and relieve pressure on market prices. We have enough building materials, enough labor power and know-how, enough land. Everyone says they want more blue collar jobs that make things, and even at so-called “full employment,” there are always millions of perfectly capable workers sitting idle. There is no physical obstacle. It is emphatically possible. The reason it’s not happening is that we can’t push money into the right parts of the economic Rube Goldberg machine we’ve decided is an irrevocable suicide pact—in which the most powerful spring is the conviction that the state may not ever simply do something directly.

The same is true of almost literally everything. The knowledge and potential workers and material supplies are there. All that’s missing is the ability to do the things we need to do in a way that guarantees ever-increasing returns to incumbent asset holders. I am not making this up. One of the points of reference for the “abundance” agenda is China’s ability to get things done. Not all of those things turn out to be beneficial or necessary—it’s a shame about those ghost cities. But when push came to shove, they were able to build entire hospitals in a matter of days. On a longer timescale, they were able to commodify solar panels, using a mixture of state subsidies and incentives and managed market competition to drive down prices to previously unimaginable levels.

I don’t idealize the Chinese Communist Party. Like all Communist regimes, they seek an excessive amount of social control for its own sake and display a profound paranoia about the slightest hint of subversion. I wouldn’t want to live in China. At the same time, I daresay we could take at least some of the good parts of the Chinese model and get rid of the bad. This is not an idle, pie-in-the-sky speculation. I know for a fact that such a thing is possible. It happened here, within living memory for many older Americans.

No, it was not possible to continue the postwar growth trajectory indefinitely—but responding to the falling rate of profit by rebuilding society around asset price appreciation was a political choice. By prioritizing the market over the state, Western societies have willfully tied their own hands and rendered themselves unable to guarantee the basic needs and dignity of the population. Now that that choice has been made, it has had material consequences for state capacity and the concentration of economic power, both of which the Trump administration is gleefully exacerbating.

The path to a truly democratic future where the economy works for people instead of the other way around is far from clear. But we will never get there if we don’t allow ourselves to even say what the solution is—not tax credits, not deregulation, not tariffs or coerced foreign investment, not nudges or deals, but meaningful democratic control over the economy.

Building the institutions that would make that possible will doubtless be hard work. It will involve conflict and compromise and will likely generally suck. But luckily for us, life already totally sucks! Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your side hustle, your networking cocktail hour, your tips and tricks to rejig your résumé to look younger than you are, your unpaid internship and tragically sincere “passion for marketing”—in short, your constant humiliating effort to placate an impersonal Rube Goldberg machine that hates you.