Note: This is an excerpt from a longer article called “You’re Not Enough” published on October 19, 2022 at Splice Today.
The proliferation of personality as a core competency tracks with the economic mirage that predominated after 2008. As Derek Thomson recently wrote: “With interest rates near zero, many investors were eager to put their money into long-shot bets. If they could get in on the ground floor of the next Amazon, it would be the one-in-a-million bet that covered every other loss. So they encouraged start-up founders to expand aggressively, even if that meant losing a ton of money on new consumers to grow their total user base.”
This was all unsustainable. Even in normal times, you can’t build a robust economy by flooding the market with cheap capital to fund start-ups that sell the ludicrous notion that repackaged taxi and food delivery services are “innovations”—provided the labor is done by insecure contract work. But these weren’t normal times. The destruction of working-class and middle-class wealth and earning potential that came with the housing crisis was devastating.
It didn’t help that the previous decade saw manufacturing employment crater from over 17 million in 1998 to less than 12 million by 2009, even as the population went from 275 million to 306 million over the same period. Much of this was thanks to the normalization of trade with China, sold on the lie that this would lead to liberalization in Beijing. In previous recessions, like those in the 1970s and 80s, there was still enough of a domestic productive base for workers to return to. But such options had thinned severely by the late-2000s.
The recovery in manufacturing after 2008 was slow-going, reliant on large, upfront capital investment. While there was growth in some sectors, and the picture gets complicated when you consider output, a lot of money that could’ve been used on cultivating domestic production went into crap. It was the economic equivalent of skipping toast for breakfast and just eating the entire can of jelly in one sitting.
This situation reached its apex during the response to the Covid pandemic. Unbelievable amounts of money were printed to keep the financial system afloat and society from collapsing from shelter-in-place orders, lockdowns, school shutdowns, business closures, and all the other measures that we now know probably weren’t necessary. As the example of Sweden bears out, a more targeted approach would’ve made more sense. Instead, it was the golden age of the central banker, making the money printer go brr to keep a less productive economy from bleeding out.
A modern economy requires a mix of goods production, white-collar service work, public sector administrators, and some dynamic and perhaps off-kilter ventures. Far from being the result of “the free market” left totally on its own, this requires the robust support of central governments, and either a civic-mindedness or at least a set of attractive incentives on the part of investors. The most cursory reading of the history of 19th-century industrialization bears this out. A healthy economy takes real strategic work that channels market forces without strangling them.
This isn’t a screed against “email jobs” or “creatives.” Every economy that has existed has required some sort of administration. This is true of feudalism, mercantilism, modern capitalism, and every attempt at socialism or communism. And this will continue to be true, regardless of the mode of production. Also, so long as people place sentimental value in the arts, there will always be a potential economic value there as well.
The time of low interest rates has ended. And while there will always be some garbage sold as the key to unlocking the Promethean spirit of Western civilization, I think the wider enthusiasm for this will be muted for some time. This also means that the world of business, media, academia, and other institutions will have to lean down and focus on value and performance. Administration will remain necessary, but largesse will not. As for the arts, after years of discord and tearing things down, we may find ourselves needing to genuinely support great work for its own sake again.