How Do We Fix the Collapse of Quality?

Every product now has an "extended warranty" admission of the collapse of quality and durability.

There's a great uplifting hope swirling around the potential to fix what's broken, and so here's my question: how do we fix the collapse of quality and durability that we now take for granted? What do I mean by the collapse of quality and durability? Here are a few examples of many.

1. Appliances that were once built to last 70 years now fail in 7 years (or less). A reader recently shared the story of a GE chest freezer his parents bought 70 years ago--not a fancy freezer, or a top of the line unit, just the standard model everyone bought. That freezer is still running great, 70 years later.

Compare that to the anecdotal accounts we hear all the time of costly new refrigerators failing after a few years. The repairperson is called in, they check it out, and inform the owner it's not worth repairing. So the three-year old fridge is hauled off to the landfill.

Let's say the fridge lasts a grand total of 7 years. That's a 90% decline of durability. Under what sort of bewitchment do we declare this something other than a complete collapse of quality and durability? Think about it: we now have to buy 10 appliances over three generations, where we once could buy one appliance that would last three generations.

2. Off-the-shelf shoes from Costco that now literally fall apart long before they wear out. For the past 30 years, I've bought whatever shoes Costco is stocking as work shoes--for yard work, light construction repairs, etc. Now the Costco shoes literally fall apart before I can even put much wear on them. Please examine the following photos.

First, the soles detached from the toe of the shoes. I re-attached the soles with epoxy glue.



Then the rest of the soles detached.



Note the paucity of adhesive. The manufacturer scrimped on perhaps 25 cents of adhesive and 75 cents of extra labor (if that--how much time does it take to apply more adhesive?), in effect guaranteeing obsolescence / failure. Meanwhile, Costco profits are soaring.



How much would it have cost Costco to demand some actual quality control and pay an extra dollar for a product that wasn't designed and manufactured to fail? Would I have paid an extra dollar for a product that was assembled to last long enough to wear out? Yes. After all, what's the difference between $29 and $30? Not enough to matter, but the difference in quality does matter.

I often mention shadow work, the work we consumers have to do to keep the crapified products and services Corporate America sells us functioning. So Costco profits from selling products designed to fail because I'm supposed to throw these rubbish shoes in the landfill and dutifully go to Costco to buy a replacement pair of planned obsolescence.

But being irksomely frugal, I did the job that Costco's manufacturer was supposed to do, which was apply sufficient adhesive so the sole of the shoe would actually stay attached to the rest of the shoe. In other words, I had to perform this shadow work at my own expense, enabling Costco's profits to swell because I did their work for them.

Like the slowly boiled frog, we've habituated to the collapse of quality and durability, as the cartels and monopolies only sell a dizzying array of planned obsolescence.

3. The app is crap. It takes an endless amount of shadow work to keep all the digital devices and systems we now depend on running, as the devices and software are KPO kludgy planned obsolescence. I laid all this out in recent posts: Is Anyone Else's Life as Stupidly Complicated by Digital "Shadow Work" as Mine Is? (5/22/24)

Digital Service Dumpster Fires and Shadow Work (2/14/24)

If AI Is So Great, Why Is Managing the Digital Realm Eating Us Alive? (3/1/24)

4. The extended warranty admission of the collapse of quality and durability. A friend recounted a telling experience when he and his wife bought a new car, the Japanese brand always listed first in quality and durability. My friend passed on the costly extended warranty and the salesperson guffawed. "So you want to roll the dice?" In other words, buying the highest rated vehicles is now a gamble that nothing breaks down after a year, and so you better pay extra for an extended warranty as you'll probably roll snake-eyes and be handed a repair bill for thousands of dollars.

Every product now has an extended warranty admission of the collapse of quality and durability, a profitable admission that look, we both know this product/service is designed to fail, so pay us more now or pay us more later, but this extended warranty is cheaper than the outrageous repair bill or replacement cost.

How is this not another example of Addiction Capitalism, in which the consumer has a monkey on their back? We can either get the nickel bag of smack (extended warranty) or the dime bag (Limited Edition, Premium, Elite, paying more for the quality that was once standard).

Move Over, Disaster Capitalism--Make Room for Addiction Capitalism (7/1/24)

So how do we fix the collapse of quality and durability? I'm all ears.

The Slow Death of the Single Family Home (30:57 min).

---

My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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The Cure for What Ails Us: Market Crash and Mass Defaults

The system has reached extremes that can no longer be rebalanced by policy tweaks, borrowing another couple trillion dollars or inflating asset bubbles.

There are many possible answers to the question "what ails us?" but they all boil down to one reality: the socio-political-economic system has slowly transmogrified into one that benefits the few at the expense of the many by its very structure. There are many moving parts in this transmogrification, hence the multiplicity of answers to "what ails us?"

The net result is extreme asymmetry in wealth and income, a reality I've often explored, most recently in The Seeds of Social Revolution: Extreme Wealth Inequality. As documented in the data-rich history The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, extreme asymmetries of wealth / income get rebalanced one way or the other, either by policy changes or social upheaval.

Correspondent John recently proposed a third rebalancing mechanism: a crash of The Everything Bubble markets and a mass default by the bottom 90% that erases a major chunk of debt, which as often noted here, is somebody else's asset: default on the debt and the asset is wiped out.

Here are John's comments on this third rebalancing mechanism:

The wealth divide has been my (very) hot button issue for years, overriding all others. I agree with your two options, but you left out door #3.

As for policy change, I think that is fanciful thinking. The top 10% (who think everything is wonderful) will never vote for substantial change, as they'll never vote for anything other than feel-good minor change ...with loopholes, of course.

I think Door #3 will be taken ... which the Deep State will have to allow as they see civil unrest coming ever clearer on the horizon if not. What is Door #3? A Crash of assets, which will flatten the divide. In a credit-based economy, it will be easy to let it all fall. Assets fall everywhere ... including debt (an asset for top 10%) as the bottom 90% just walk away (as there are no debtor prisons). A crash of assets requires no vote ... just The Powers That Be standing back. (Of course, half measures will be taken to show the top 10% we're DOING SOMETHING ... but in reality this only stretches out the collapse).

Thank you, John, for an insightful description of a third option that rebalances extreme wealth inequality by reducing the assets of the top 10% and the liabilities of the bottom 90%. As John noted, this process is easy in a debt-based economy: just reduce the expansion of debt and the asset bubble pops, the economy craters and debtors default en masse, reducing the liabilities side of the ledger.

As John so presciently described, The Powers That Be will oversee this reduction while wringing their hands and promoting their ineffective efforts to stem the collapse as "we're giving it all we got, Captain!"

The asset bubble and debt load are so enormous, tens of trillions of dollars will need to be shaved off both ledgers to rebalance the system. All bubbles pop under their own weight at some point, and bubbles often deflate in a symmetrical fashion, dropping at the same rate as the bubble inflated. This chart of NASDAQ illustrates how bubble symmetry might play out going forward.



Since the top 1% own 50% of all stocks, guess who this drop will hurt the most? The top 90% to 99% own close to 40% of the remaining equities, so the top 10% will absorb roughly 90% of the losses as the stock market bubble pops.



Here is total systemic debt. The federal government debt isn't going away, short of a complete systemic collapse, and the legal pathway of local governments defaulting on their debts is murky, but there are no obstructions to private-sector defaults of all lender-generated debt: commercial real estate mortgages, housing mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, etc. As for student loans, the old phrase you can't get blood from a turnip may describe the futility of trying to collect blood (student loan payments) from turnips (debtors without assets or income.)



We can play the game Japan has played for 35 years, keeping non-performing loans on the books at full (i.e. phantom) value, but look where that artifice got Japan: 35 years of stagnation as everyone knows the "assets" are phantom and so the value can't be discovered by the market. Since accurate valuation is impossible, trust dissipates and the system rots away from within.

As a thought experiment, let's project writing off $50 trillion of debt based on phantom collateral that's evaporated. That is of course a writedown of assets by $50 trillion, too, which would reduce household assets to around $100 trillion--still substantial, just no longer a bubble.



The system has reached extremes that can no longer be rebalanced by policy tweaks, borrowing another couple trillion dollars or inflating asset bubbles. What ails us can be rectified by adjusting (ahem) assets (collateral) and debt to rebalance the extremes that are destabilizing the system from within.

The Slow Death of the Single Family Home (30:57 min).

---

My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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The Seeds of Social Revolution: Extreme Wealth Inequality

The seeds of social revolution have been sown and sprouted. What we harvest is up to us.

If there is any potential catalyst for social upheaval that attracts less attention than extreme wealth inequality, it's mighty obscure. As I noted yesterday, the present extreme of wealth inequality draws an occasional bit of lip service or handwringing, but very little serious focus, despite ample historical foundations for its role in sowing the seeds of social revolutions.

As I tried to explain in yesterday's post, extreme wealth inequality might not be the spark that ignites a revolution, but it is a tectonic shift that destabilizes the social order. For extreme wealth inequality isn't a consequence of fate or sorcery; it is the consequence of policies that favor the few at the expense of the many, a reality that is exceedingly uncomfortable for those benefiting from the asymmetry.

For a rundown of the policies that have exacerbated wealth inequality, consider the following excerpts from Time magazine, September 2020: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% -- And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure.

"There are some who blame the current plight of working Americans on structural changes in the underlying economy--on automation, and especially on globalization. According to this popular narrative, the lower wages of the past 40 years were the unfortunate but necessary price of keeping American businesses competitive in an increasingly cutthroat global market. But in fact, the $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn't inevitable; it was a choice--a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people."

In other words, extreme wealth inequality is not the result of economic forces outside our control; it's the result of our policy responses to changing social, political and economic conditions. While those benefiting from the policies attribute the asymmetric distribution of the economy's gains to "forces outside our control" such as globalization and automation, those losing ground sense that this is an excuse for taking advantage of the situation, to the detriment of the national interest.

We can best understand extreme wealth inequality as the destabilizing result of one set of competing economic interests gaining dominance over other economic interests: broadly speaking, the balance between labor and capital has collapsed in favor of capital. To take one example, consider the minimum wage, which did not kept up with inflation for decades as a policy decision.

The different interests within each sector can also destabilize into asymmetric distributions. For example, within the broad category of capital, there are many competing interests: industrial capital, financial capital, land-based capital, domestic and global interests, and so on. Within labor, there are blue-collar and white collar interests, and gradations of skills, regional interests, and so on.

Broadly speaking, globalization and financialization greatly increased the share of some interests at the expense of others.

The social boundaries of what's acceptable and unacceptable change, enabling or restricting financial policies. For example, in the postwar boom of the 1950s, corporate CEOs earned multiples of their average employee that by today's standards were ludicrously low, as present-day CEOs routinely take home compensation (including stock options) that are in the tens of millions of dollars annually.

In the broad sweep of history, extreme asymmetries in the distribution of the economy's output are rebalanced one way or the other, if not with policy changes than by the overthrow of the status quo. The book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century breaks down the various pieces of this complex puzzle.

The history and data are too varied to be easily summarized, but we can start with humanity's innate sense of fairness in social organizations: we sense when our contributions are getting short shrift while others are grabbing shares that are not commensurate with their contributions--despite their claims to "earning" their outsized shares.

Some write this off as envy, and to be sure envy is an innate human response, but fairness and envy are two different things. If someone strips us of power that we once held to benefit their own accumulation of wealth, our sense that this is unfair is not envy.

We seem to be approaching the point where a rebalancing of extreme asymmetries is at hand, and so we have to choose between policy changes and social upheaval. Those benefiting from the current asymmetrical distribution naturally feel that all is right with the world, while those whose purchasing power and political power have been stripmined feel that regaining what was taken from them is only fair.

Here's the data on our asymmetric distribution of wealth again. You can skip this if you've already seen the charts.

The RAND study Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018 concluded that capital siphoned $50 trillion from labor from 1975 to 2018.

Using data from the Federal Reserve's FRED database (series A4102E1A156NBEA), correspondent Alain M. calculated the actual sum for the period 1970 to 2022 (2022 being the most recent data available) was a staggering $149 trillion: his spreadsheet is available here as a PDF: Employees Share of Gross Domestic Income 1970-2022.

If wage earners' share of Gross Domestic Income had remained at 51% instead of declining to 43%, wage earners would have received an additional $149 trillion over those 52 years.



As GDP and household wealth have soared, he bottom 50% of American households' share of the nation's financial wealth has declined.



The top 0.01%'s wealth soared far above inflation.



The ownership of stocks in concentrated in the top 10% households, who own 90% of this asset class.



Housing prices have risen sharply, becoming unaffordable for the majority of households. Those who bought homes long ago in desirable areas have reaped enormous gains, a generational / class / regional asymmetry.



The seeds of social revolution have been sown and sprouted. What we harvest is up to us.

The Slow Death of the Single Family Home (30:57 min).

---

My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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The Elephant in the Room--No, the Other Elephant

No one is going to finger extreme wealth inequality as the proximate cause of what's going down in the next decade, but that doesn't mean it isn't the tectonic cause.

Ah, yes, the elephant in the room, a problem that's 1) big and obvious and 2) can't be solved with the usual painless policy tweaks, so we act as if it's not there. Denial and delusion are the preferred "solution" because they work just fine until the elephant starts rampaging, at which point we blubber "no one could see it coming."

Yes, the elephant in the room, what everyone should be focusing on instead of ignoring it. In the current zeitgeist, the room is so jam-packed with elephants, there's hardly any room left for those ignoring the elephantine crush.

For the elephant in the room is also shorthand for YICBIC (pronounced Yick-Bik): yes it's clickbait, but it's important clickbait, so click here and I'll enlighten you about the really really big problem no one else dares address, the problem that's going to disrupt all our nice little plans to continue getting richer everyday, in every way.

So shift your gaze from the herd of elephants in the room to the other elephant, the one that's truly ignored: extreme wealth inequality. This elephant gets an occasional pat on the rear end, more or less equal to the heartbreak of psoriasis or the odds of a Carrington Event frying every digital device on the planet.

So what if wealth inequality now exceeds the peak of 1928-29, just before that decade-long spot of bother, The Great Depression?. That was mere coincidence. The cause wasn't extreme wealth inequality, it was a Fed policy error, blah blah blah.

The reason why it's so easy to ignore extreme wealth inequality (EWI) is that we don't experience EWI as a thing, we experience a decline in our standard of living as wealth is siphoned up into the top 10%. We sense we're falling behind, that our situation is increasingly precarious, and the source of this decline seems to be inflation--a decline in the purchasing power of our earnings as prices soar--and global competition from low-cost labor.

Yes, these are factors, but the real driver of extreme wealth inequality is hard to pin down because it works its magic behind the difficult-to-understand convolutions of finance: financialization, which has morphed in the past 15 years into a supercharged hyper-financialization in which capital has risen to dominate the entire economy and the cultural zeitgeist. Everything is now subservient to capital increasing its dominance.

We all understand inflation, soaring prices and rising asset valuations, but understanding the financial plumbing that generates these consequences is difficult, and it's made more difficult by purposefully misleading fictions designed to obscure, mis-direct or explain away the actual mechanisms of financialization.

For example, the Social Security Trust Fund, a fictitious facade designed to obscure the reality that Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are pay-as-you-go programs, funded by tax revenues and borrowed money (i.e. federal deficit spending).

If we ask cui bono, to whose benefit?, the answer is obvious: the top 10% who have experienced an unprecedented expansion of their private wealth as financialization bled earnings and diverted the economy's gains into the incomes and assets concentrated in the top 10%.

Yes, the very same 10% which sits atop every sector in the entire economy, from finance to the media. If we strip away the cultural / political differences in the top 10%--all the hot-button elephants in the room they're noisily pointing out to the rest of us--we find a foundation of unanimity / consensus that crosses all cultural-political divides: our wealth should continue increasing because we're so smart / valuable / worthy, and there is no reason for us to sacrifice our wealth to rebalance extreme wealth inequality.

The top 10% is united by their belief that their rocket-launched wealth is earned and deserved, and the "solution" to extreme wealth inequality is to toss a few crumbs at the 90% who have been bled dry / left behind: a handful of subsidized "affordable housing" units, a tax cut of which 95% of the gains goes to the top 10%, and so on: feel-good virtue-signaling that changes nothing in the financial system that generates extreme wealth inequality.

So the "solution" is to leave the engine of extreme wealth inequality running, and pat the rear end of the elephant in the room: you can extricate yourself from the quicksand of precarity and a declining standard of living by becoming an influencer, or day-trader of zero-day-expiration options--the sky's the limit, baby.

In other words: America is a classless society, anyone can get rich if they work really hard and they play to win in the financialization casino. This illusion of classlessness neatly obscures the reality that virtually all the wealth generated by the economy has flowed to those who bought assets before the Everything Bubble sent asset valuations and finance-related earnings into low Earth orbit.

The employee making $13 an hour in 2010 might make $17 or $18 an hour now, maybe just enough to keep up with the 46% inflation since 2010, or maybe not. Meanwhile, stocks have gone up ten-fold, and housing has risen 2.5-fold. So who fell behind and who got ahead, the wage-earner or the owner of assets?

(I maintain a spreadsheet of my earnings adjusted for official inflation and purchasing power--what an hour's wage could buy in the real world--going back to 1970--and by this measure, I have never earned more in terms of purchasing power than I did in 1976 at the age of 23. Please see the chart below of how wages peaked in the 1970s.)

The ceaselessly repeated cliche is that the system doesn't generate winners and losers, while the reality is the system generates winners and losers by its very design. Free admission to the casino isn't actually the same as taking advantage of the games being rigged.

Longtime readers are probably tired of these charts, because they dismantle all the self-serving rah-rah and distractions spewed by the top 10%. The RAND study Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018 concluded that capital skimmed $50 trillion from labor from 1975 to 2018.

Using data from the Federal Reserve's FRED database (series A4102E1A156NBEA), correspondent Alain M. calculated the actual sum for the period 1970 to 2022 (2022 being the most recent data available) was a staggering $149 trillion: his spreadsheet is available here as a PDF: Employees Share of Gross Domestic Income 1970-2022.

If wage earners' share of Gross Domestic Income had remained at 51% instead of declining to 43%, wage earners would have received an additional $149 trillion over those 52 years. That's roughly $3 trillion a year, which works out to an additional $22,000 annually for America's 134 million full-time workers or an additional $18,000 annually for the nation's entire work force (full-time, part-time, self-employed, gig workers) of 163 million.

No wonder wage-earners sense their standard of living has been falling for decades: it has been falling doe decades, despite all the cheerleading about what a great economy we have. Yes, but great for who?



The bottom 50% of American households didn't get a 10-bagger; their share of the nation's financial wealth actually fell. We got your great economy right here, big fella:



The top 0.01% have had a considerably different experience as their wealth soared far above inflation. These are the folks flustered by the agony of choosing which foreign enclave they're going to retire to; oh heck, just buy a villa in each one:



It's a classless society, at least looking down from the top. Those looking up have a different perspective:



What bubble? We don't see any bubble. No elephants, no bubbles, just blue sky ahead:



Look, I've gained ground along with everyone else who bought assets long ago, for the same reason: asset appreciation scooped up all the gains. It wasn't my smarts, or my education (come on, a degree in philosophy?) or all my hard work (oh, please--all the truly hard work is paid poorly) or anything other than dumb luck.

In my view, there should be zero taxes on all earnings up to the median wage of $60,000 annually--no Social Security taxes, nothing--and progressively steeper taxes on all income / capital gains from capital/finance above some modest amount, say half of the median wage ($30,000 annually), along with a transaction tax for every financial trade submitted, whether it executes or not. Shifting the tax burden from labor to capital/finance would at least start the overdue rebalancing.

So here we are, smugly ignoring the the extreme wealth inequality elephant in the room, hurrying to explain it away with a pat on its rear end. Yes, the economy changed, and by golly, we're the winners, but it's not the result of the game being rigged to our favor; it's globalization, better education, we worked hard. Yes, now it all makes sense: we're the winners as the natural order of things.

No one is going to finger extreme wealth inequality as the proximate cause of what's going down in the next decade, but that doesn't mean it isn't the tectonic cause. While we're glorying in the wonders exposed by the sea strangely receding from the beach, we're blind to the tsunami racing toward us. We don't call extreme wealth inequality the cause, but that's the temblor that set the tsunami in motion.

One last thought to those patting the rear end of the extreme wealth inequality elephant on the way out the door to collect their winnings: making the rich even richer with more tax breaks, more financialization, more rigged-casino winnings and continuing to inflate the Everything Bubble (AI!) isn't going to fix what's broken; it's going to hasten the breakdown of the entire status quo, which has put all its chips on capital / finance.

It's a pretty simple choice: either radically rebalance the economy now or hang on to your beach chair when the wave washes it all away.

The Slow Death of the Single Family Home (30:57 min).

---

My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

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Machiavelli's Sage Advice to Transformational Leaders

Looming over the entire reformist enterprise are the costs and risks posed by debt.

Machiavellian has negative connotations--cynically unscrupulous scheming to gain or maintain power--but this misses the mark of Machiavelli the man who sought a livelihood in the cutthroat political street fighting of Italy's city-states circa the late 1400s and early 1500s.

As he made clear in other writings, Machiavelli favored democracy over competing political arrangements, and he wrote The Prince (the entire book in PDF format) as a sort of extended resume seeking to bolster his chances for employment.

First and foremost, Machiavelli explores the psychology of power and leadership. For leaders who seek to change the polity rather than merely maintain the status quo, Mr. M. lays out the challenge facing transformational leaders in Chapter Six of The Prince:

Here we have to bear in mind that nothing is harder to organize, more likely to fail, or more dangerous to see through, than the introduction of a new system of government.

The person bringing in the changes will make enemies of everyone who was doing well under the old system, while the people who stand to gain from the new arrangements will not offer wholehearted support, partly because they are afraid of their opponents, who still have the laws on their side, and partly because people are naturally skeptical: no one really believes in change until they've had solid experience of it.

So as soon as the opponents of the new system see a chance, they'll go on the offensive with the determination of an embattled faction, while its supporters will offer only half-hearted resistance, something that will put the new ruler's position at risk too.

In other words, those who are diminished by the proposed reforms will resist with all their might, while those who might benefit are lukewarm in their support because the benefits of the reform are not yet in hand. Put another way, one person's efficiency reform is the loss of a livelihood / gravy train to another, and the gains of the proposed efficiency are 1) in the future, while the livelihood is threatened in the present, and 2) the gains of the efficiency are disbursed over the entire populace, so that the recipients of the reform have little incentive to fight tooth and nail like those defending their slice of the status quo pie.

This presents the transformational leader with a difficult choice of strategy: the first option--to attempt a wholesale transformation of the status quo in a Big Bang reformation of every agency and institution's budget, leadership and culture--is tempting, as the political capital of the new leadership is strongest at the start, before its opponents have had time to chip away at the new administration's support.

The second option is to choose one or two critical reforms and devote every ounce of political capital to pushing these through. This option is less grandiose, more cautious, but it's also the one most likely to succeed, as the risk in Option 1 (The Big Bang blitzkrieg) is that the political capital of the reformers will be diluted by engaging the armies of opposition that will arise in every threatened agency and institution.

The benefit to this strategy is one or two big wins at the start solidifies the political support of the reformers. Supporters will see significant victories as proof the reformers are sincere and their power is sufficient to push through reforms despite the resistance of incumbents / special interests.

On the other hand, the incremental approach of winning a few key battles at the start might miss the opportunity to bulldoze all opposition before they can organize resistance. Much depends on the general zeitgeist of the time. If those benefiting from the status quo believe the system is sustainable as is, they will fight tooth and nail to water down reforms to protect their gravy train.

If the status quo is crumbling, then insiders are incentivized to make a deal with the reformers as a better option than losing everything as the system unravels beneath their feet. It also matters if the general public and movers and shakers are solidly behind the reformers, or if their popular support is an inch deep and a mile wide.

Machiavelli's advice to transformational leaders is: don't underestimate the fierce resistance of those losing their grip on power and all the financial rewards of that power. Be prepared to use every trick in the book to dilute and fragment opposition: buy off those who can be bought off, offer face-saving deals to key players, compromise to get key changes, set opposing factions against each other, and be generous and humble in victory rather than triumphant.

Looming over the entire reformist enterprise are the costs and risks posed by debt. Living on borrowed money is splendid in the beginning, when the cost of servicing the debt is low. But as the debt mountain grows, the cost of servicing the debt incentivizes borrowing more to pay the interest, accelerating the expansion of debt in a self-reinforcing feedback.

The cost of servicing the debt soon squeezes out other expenditures, and the borrowers' incomes no longer support investing and spending on the scale to which they're accustomed. The solution is of course to borrow more, and pass through the portal to the Magical Kingdom of Magical Thinking where we believe that we can "borrow our way out of debt" because borrowing more will enable us to "grow our way out of debt."

Once the mountain of debt is towering, this notion is fantasy. The only sustainable options are painful: 1) devalue the currency, wiping out both the debt and the currency's value, 2) tighten our belts and pay down the debt by reducing consumption, or 3) default on the debt and absorb the enormous losses, as every debt is somebody else's asset.

That choice already looms large, and reformers must reckon with that as well as their reformist agenda. Here is total debt:



Here is federal debt:



And no, we're not going to be "saved" by interest rates going back to zero: higher for longer is the future, as bond yield / interest rates cycles are multi-decade affairs. Zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) was delightful in the moment but the full consequences of that stupendous error have yet to play out.





The Slow Death of the Single Family Home (30:57 min).

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When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
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The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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