Six on History: "our" Economy
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Two decades ago, influential American liberals believed that sweatshops in the Global South would help the world’s poor. Countries with no export industries, the argument went, could strengthen their economies, create jobs, and slowly move their way up the income ladder. Bangladesh’s experience over the past 20 years shows that the pro-sweatshop argument has failed. It’s true that the country’s garment factories are booming: Overseas clothing sales reached $33 billion by 2019, which made up 84 percent of total exports. But a closer look reveals wage stagnation, dangerous factory conditions, and little broad-based economic development. Despite the many years since its establishment, the garment industry has not helped push most Bangladeshis out of poverty. Clothing companies and a small Bangladeshi elite are still exploiting young garment workers, most of whom are women, to add to their profit margins.
An alliance of European unions, the courageous women who are at the forefront of Bangladesh’s labor movement, and international solidarity groups successfully fought to win the original Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, shortly after the Rana Plaza horror in April 2013, when 1,134 workers died in the rubble of an eight-story factory building north of Dhaka. The original deal was legally binding, requiring 200 international clothing brands to pay for widespread factory inspections and to blacklist local manufacturers who did not meet safety standards. That agreement worked, and there have been no more tragedies on the scale of Rana Plaza. That same global coalition pushed to make this new deal happen: two big European union federations, IndustriALL and UNI Global; local groups including the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity; and overseas organizations like the Clean Clothes Campaign in Amsterdam and the Worker Rights Consortium in Washington, D.C.
But this month’s victory is only partial. The agreement, now called the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry, will expire after only two years. Major US brands—including Walmart, the Gap, and J.C. Penney—have declined to sign it. The number of signatories has also dropped from 200 to 103. Except for a brief report in The New York Times, the US mainstream media has largely ignored the deal’s extension.
The Krugman/Kristof argument was simple. Both conceded that working conditions in sweatshops were often bad. But, they contended, there was no alternative; other work was even worse or nonexistent. Kristof, who is now considering a run for Oregon governor, found a laborer in Thailand who was thankful his 15-year-old daughter was working in a clothing factory, earning $2 for a nine-hour shift, six days a week.
The pro-sweatshoppers provoked a heated controversy, and the two responded by accusing their critics of being unrealistic. Krugman struck back directly: “You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative?” In a 2006 column from Windhoek, Namibia, Kristof provocatively told American college students “to stop trying to ban sweatshops, and instead campaign to bring them to the most desperately poor countries.” In 2009, he wrote from Phnom Penh, Cambodia: “But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.”
What the world’s most impoverished people need isn’t fewer sweatshops, but more of them.
Krugman and Kristof asserted that sweatshop jobs were the necessary first step on a ladder that led upward, toward balanced, broad development. Krugman, the more thoughtful of the two, wrote in 1997 that “the growth of manufacturing…has a ripple effect throughout the economy…rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise.” Kristof wrote three years later that “sweatshops are a clear sign of the industrial revolution that is beginning to reshape Asia.” He noted that South Korea, Taiwan, and then China had started by sewing clothing, but then progressed toward more sophisticated, value-added products: cars, computer chips, and cell phones. He implied that nations like Bangladesh now had one foot on the ladder’s first rung, but would eventually leave the dirty low-paid jobs behind.
In fairness, this part of the Krugman/Kristof argument seemed plausible at the time. But over the past two decades, no other nation has followed South Korea, Taiwan, and China up the ladder. And meanwhile, the string of factory fires and building collapses in Bangladesh and elsewhere has shown that sweatshop work is not merely low-paid; it can be deadly. Only global action, such as the just-signed extension, can protect workers.
Krugman and Kristof also did not fully reckon with what American union organizers call “the runaway shop.” Kalpona Akter, a former child garment worker who is now a prominent union leader in Bangladesh, points out that whenever workers press for wage increases and better conditions, corporations threaten to move their business elsewhere. The big brands are nimble because they do not actually own the garment factories; they source through sub-contractors and so have no local investments to lose. “When we ask for more pay, the owners bring up Ethiopia or Jordan,” Akter said.
Jasmin Malik Chua, the labor editor at Sourcing Journal, which covers the global garment industry, told me that there is nowhere in the Global South where garment workers make a “living wage.” The minimum wage in Bangladesh is $94 a month. “It is common for the factories to demand excessive overtime, more than 60 hours and seven days a week,” she said. “But even with the additional hours, workers aren’t paid enough, and they often have to rely on predatory lenders to meet their monthly expenses.”
Chua also explained that wages for garment workers amount to only between 1 and 3 percent of the final cost of our T-shirts and trousers. That means consumers in wealthy countries could spend slightly more on clothing and barely notice the difference. The scholars James Boyce and Betsy Hartmann lived in a poor Bangladeshi village in the mid-1970s and published their classic account of the experience, A Quiet Violence. Boyce told me, “Take an item of clothing that retails in the US for $15. Of that, let’s say 2 percent—30 cents—is going to the worker. Double that to 60 cents, and you could improve safety, raise wages, and transform the lives of millions of people.”
Chaumtoli Huq, an associate professor at CUNY Law School, has done extensive research among garment workers. (Her documentary film, Workers’ Voices, focuses on women union organizers, and is an intimate look inside the factories and the crowded living spaces.) Huq praised the extension of the Safety Accord, but made clear that it didn’t go far enough. “In my interviews, women workers regularly raise three demands,” she said. “They’re naturally concerned about workplace safety, but they also want to raise the dismally low wages and end the repression of their right to unionize.”
After 50,000 Bangladeshi workers struck in December 2018, the police cracked down violently, and the owners fired almost 12,000 people. (The New York Times, to its credit, editorialized against the repression.) Huq emphasized that unions are an indispensable element of factory safety. Survivors of the Rana Plaza collapse have cell phone photos that show how the interior factory walls had cracked the day before the disaster. Despite their hesitation, they say management forced them inside the next morning. An independent union could have protected them.
Krugman stopped writing much about sweatshops. By contrast, Kristof did continue to defiantly push his view through the 2000s—but after 2009, he seems to have gone silent. He was on leave when Rana Plaza collapsed, but he wrote nothing after he got back to the Times. And over the years, he hasn’t found his way to Bangladesh or anywhere else to interview the young women who make our clothing.
Krugman and Kristof were mainly wrong because they put their faith in a capitalist model to automatically raise living standards across the Global South. They, especially Kristof, also ignored the workplace danger to millions of garment workers, and they failed to see that ensuring labor rights across borders is crucial to enforcing even minimal standards of safety. Nor have the two influential columnists used their platforms to vigorously endorse global action.
Helping garment workers stay safe at work and earn a living wage will require new strategies, and the Bangladesh Safety Accord is showing the way. The world has profoundly changed since 1911, when the fire at New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist factory killed 146 garment workers, most of them also young women. David Von Drehle’s compelling history of the Triangle disaster explains how labor activists and a shocked middle-class citizens’ movement mobilized immediately and pushed safety legislation through the New York State Legislature within two years. But the New York sweatshops were owned by locals, who could be pressured. Today, giant corporations like Walmart, whose profit was an astonishing $129 billion last year, can quickly move production to countries that still have lax regulations.
Yet Walmart, Gap, and J.C. Penney are not invulnerable. Children used to work in garment factories in Bangladesh. I visited one in central Dhaka in 1991, and felt I had stumbled into a junior high school home economics class. Then, in 1992, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa proposed legislation to ban imports made by children. The law was never passed, but union leaders in Bangladesh say it was enough to nearly end child labor in the industry. So at least there were no 11-year-olds among the Rana Plaza victims.
The Safety Accord includes a pledge to extend it to at least one other garment-producing country—although it is unclear how binding that provision will be. Huq told me Pakistan is most likely the next target. Eventually, though, she said that the campaign will have to challenge the big brands in their home nations. In the United States, the 1935 Wagner Act guaranteed American workers the right to unionize without losing their jobs. If Bangladesh’s parliament alone passed similar legislation, Walmart’s top managers would contact their suppliers in Cambodia and Myanmar and immediately shift their orders. “The only solution,” Huq said, “is to fight to require the brands to only source from supplier factories that are unionized—everywhere.”
Newspaper columns that promoted that campaign for justice would be worth three cheers."
"I write these words on Labor Day, a holiday that President Grover Cleveland decided should come around in September rather than May because he worried about the socialist connotations of May Day and the fact that May 1 was too close for comfort to the anniversary of the Haymarket affair, which happened on May 4, 1886.
We’ve long since ceased celebrating labor in this country. In fact, what we mostly do now is talk smack about workers of all kinds. This has taken on a special ferocity in right-wing circles since the onset of the pandemic and the government’s response. The checks the government has been sending people, according to the right, prove that America’s working poor are a burden—a bunch of indolent do-nothings who’d rather sit at home and collect a government check than be out there in the world sprinkling salt crystals on pretzels or wiping down the leatherette interiors at the local car wash.
I take the opposite view. The fact that people would rather cash a government check than perform menial, underpaid work is an encouraging sign. It’s a form of protest against the way our economy has evolved over the last 40 years, and it’s a welcome development that we can only hope forces a change in the way our corporate and political classes think about labor.
I’ve been cogitating along these lines for months, but now an officially smart and credentialed person has come along and said it. If you missed the op-ed in the Times over the weekend by the renowned MIT economist David Autor, you need to give it a read. He corrects a few key misconceptions—untruths that are spouted as gospel on cable news—and he offers a radical new thesis on why the current labor shortage is in fact a good thing.
First of all, Autor writes that, conventional wisdom aside, actual empirical research shows that while the government checks have had an effect on the labor supply, the effect has been small. “States that terminated federal pandemic unemployment benefits ahead of schedule this summer saw only a minuscule decline in unemployment relative to those that didn’t,” he writes.
But then he goes on to make the real point. Most speculation about the labor shortage revolves around two points: first, the government checks; second, the lack of child care, which has perhaps made mothers in particular decide to remain at home rather than go back to work.
Autor then raises a third possibility. It may be, he writes, that “people’s valuation of their own time has changed: Americans are less eager to do low-paid, often dead-end service and hospitality work, deciding instead that more time on family, education, and leisure makes for a higher standard of living, even if it means less consumption.”
Precisely. People are sick of crap jobs paying crap wages. Of course, hard, unattractive labor has always existed and will always exist. Somebody needed to sweep the stables back in Ancient Rome, and while some hard jobs can be automated, someone will need to clean offices as long as offices exist.
So the current labor shortage is not a problem. It’s a blessing. If workers deny employers their labor, employers have to do something to make the labor more appealing. That something is most likely to be higher wages: exactly what working-class America needs.
My biggest disappointment of the Biden era to this point is, by far, the failure to raise the minimum wage. This isn’t necessarily Joe Biden’s fault. If you insist on blaming a Joe, try Manchin rather than Biden. The West Virginia senator said earlier this year that he could see going up to maybe $11 per hour, but not the $15 that Biden wants. But it’s really more on the Republicans, who are almost unanimously opposed. A minimum wage increase can’t be done through the reconciliation process, which means a raise would need 60 votes in the Senate to clear cloture, and that’s impossible with the party of the oligarchy, most of whose elected members would prefer doing away with a federal minimum wage entirely. It’s currently $7.25 and hasn’t been raised since 2009.
Fortunately, some cities and states, and some businesses, too, have moved toward the $15-an-hour goal that Biden is working to impose on businesses that win federal contracts. Bank of America says it plans to hike its minimum wage to $25 an hour by 2025. Target is aiming for $15. Progress is happening here and there, a little bit more each day.
The current labor shortage is, in essence, a strike. It’s low-wage workers rising up and saying: We’re sick of doing mindless, repetitive work for horrible wages. We’d rather spend the time with our kids. We’d rather spend it not earning money. Their behavior flips all the neoclassical assumptions of economics, about people being self-interested actors who make “rational” decisions, on their head. Except that these are rational decisions. Get a machine to flip your burgers, boss. You’re not paying me enough to make standing over your grease pit all day worth my valuable time.
"BURLINGTON, VT.—Bernie Sanders does not want to be mistaken for an optimist. “I’m a glass-half-empty kind of guy,” he grumbles, as he works his way through the stacks of budget documents that are strewn across the desk in his spartan office on the third floor of a 123-year-old red-brick building on the north end of downtown Burlington. That’s the image he’s fashioned for himself across five decades of political campaigning, and he’s comfortable with it. But the thing is, for all his genuine cynicism about the political and governing mechanisms he has long decried as corrupt, Sanders keeps erring on the side of what the writer Rebecca Solnit refers to as “hope in the dark.” He’s willing to take chances in order to push the boundaries of the possible: to run for and secure a seat in the US Senate as an independent, to bid for the presidency as a democratic socialist, to propose a political revolution. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that—from his recently acquired position of prominence and power as chair of the Senate Budget Committee—Sanders has launched a new campaign to achieve “the most progressive moment since the New Deal.”
For Sanders, this is an urgent mission that is about much more than the proposals outlined in the budget plan he joined Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer in outlining on August 9. It is a necessary struggle to address the simmering frustration with politics as usual that Donald Trump and his Republican allies have exploited to advance an antidemocratic and increasingly authoritarian agenda.
“What we are trying to do is bring forth transformative legislation to deal with the structural crises that have impacted the lives of working people for a long, long time,” Sanders says. “Whether it is child care, whether it’s paid family and medical leave, whether it’s higher education, whether it is housing, whether it’s home health care—we’re an aging population; people would prefer to get their care at home—whether it is expanding Medicare to take care of dental and eyeglasses and hearing aids, what we are trying to do is show people that government is prepared to respond to their needs.”
That’s an echo of the big-government-can-do-big-good message that Sanders has carried for the past five decades through all of his campaigns. Yet now, for the outsider who has become a somewhat uncomfortable insider, the message has found its moment. He is heading to the White House to consult with President Joe Biden about strategy. He is taking on what Politico describes as “a central role in the Democratic caucus” of a chamber where critics once dismissed him as a left-wing scold. He is appearing with Schumer to declare, not from the sidelines anymore but from the eye of the media maelstrom, that “the wealthy and large corporations are going to start paying their fair share of taxes, so that we can protect the working families of this country.”
Bernie Sanders hasn’t changed—amid the budget documents arrayed across his desk in the old Masonic Temple building in Burlington is a book on Eugene V. Debs, the labor organizer and Socialist Party presidential candidate whom Sanders has revered for decades. But Washington has. Suddenly, the democratic socialist with ideas that were once labeled “radical” is being taken seriously by partisans who would not nominate him for president but who are ready to embrace substantial sections of his agenda. Biden takes the counsel of his former rival, often on the phone, sometimes in private meetings in the Oval Office—one of which secured presidential support for Sanders’s proposal for a sweeping build-out of the Medicare program to include full coverage of dental, vision, and hearing care.
“The most difficult thing in politics and governing is to be pushing ideas that most people in power aren’t ready to accept. But when people in power recognize that those ideas are popular, and that they’re necessary, everything changes,” says Ben Jealous, the former NAACP president and Maryland gubernatorial candidate who now serves as president of People for the American Way. Jealous, who delivered a stirring address at the 2016 Democratic National Convention on behalf of Sanders’s first presidential bid, says the senator has entered a new stage in his long political journey. “I think that what happened is that Bernie went out and talked about these ideas. He showed how appealing they are, and that had an impact,” Jealous explains. “Now people in power—the president, members of the Senate—are listening.”
Sanders recognizes that he can define only so much of the process.
He was angling for a $6 trillion budget plan, and what he ended up with is a $3.5 trillion package. But that’s still, as the senator says, “a big deal.” The plan anticipates funding to expand Medicare, federal paid family and medical leave protections, and major investments in child care, including an extension of the groundbreaking child tax credit that was included in the American Rescue Plan; to reduce the cost of higher education and make community college free; to develop initiatives to reduce reliance on fossil fuels; and to return to old-school progressive taxation that really does “tax the rich.” Sanders ally Ro Khanna, the Democratic representative from Silicon Valley, says that if anything akin to this budget is adopted, “it will be a historic shift in how we view the role of government.”
That’s what Sanders is counting on—not just for the purposes of budgeting but for the future of American democracy.
“Why it is imperative that we address these issues today is not only because of the issues themselves—because families should not have to spend a huge proportion of their income on child care or sending their kid to college—but because we have got to address the reality that a very significant and growing number of Americans no longer have faith that their government is concerned about their needs,” says the senator. “This takes us to the whole threat of Trumpism and the attacks on democracy. If you are a worker who is working for lower wages today than you did 20 years ago, if you can’t afford to send your kid to college, etc., and if you see the very, very richest people in this country becoming phenomenally rich, you are asking yourself, ‘Who controls the government, and does the government care about my suffering and the problems of my family?'”
Sanders argues that restoring faith in government as a force for good is the most effective way to counter threats to democracy. The senator, who has opened up more and more in recent years about his own family’s history as Jews who fled Europe but lost most of their relatives in the Holocaust, reads a lot these days about the rise of fascism in pre–World War II Europe, and he is highly engaged with conversations about contemporary threats to democracy. This is not just a reaction to what happened on January 6, when Trump incited an insurrection by supporters of his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. It is a concern Sanders has been speaking to with increasing urgency over the past several years.
Sanders devoted much of his speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention to the topic. “At its most basic, this election is about preserving our democracy,” he said. “I and my family, and many of yours, know the insidious way authoritarianism destroys democracy, decency, and humanity. As long as I am here, I will work with progressives, with moderates, and, yes, with conservatives to preserve this nation from a threat that so many of our heroes fought and died to defeat.”
Almost a year later, on a summer afternoon in Burlington, I ask Sanders about a reference he made in that speech to Trump refusing to leave office and about even blunter expressions of concern he had made in conversations we had in the fall of 2020. “If you recall, I came pretty close to predicting exactly what Trump would do in terms of his response to the election,” he says. “I asked people to think about whether he was going to accept defeat and say, ‘Oh, gee whiz, good campaign. Congratulations, Joe. How can I help you?’ That wasn’t going to happen.” And, of course, it didn’t.
Since January 6, Trump has doubled down on his false narratives about the election, and his allies in legislatures across the country have made an ongoing assault on democracy central to their political project. “I take this threat of authoritarianism and violence very, very seriously,” Sanders says. “I don’t think that January 6th is a one-time situation. We’re seeing the growth of militias, and…even in rhetoric, the talking about violence from Trump on down.”
Sanders voted to convict Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors—twice—and has evolved into an ardent supporter of efforts to overturn the filibuster in order to pass the democracy-defending For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Those reforms are necessary, he says, to preserve democracy. But so, too, he argues, is the proposition that government can solve seemingly intractable problems and make the lives of working-class people dramatically better.
“If we do not restore faith on the part of the American people in their government, that we see their pain and we respond to that pain, that we have the courage to take on powerful special interests—if we do not do that, more and more people are going to drift toward conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and even violence,” Sanders explains. “So I think that this is a pivotal moment in American history.”
Put that way, the responsibility is a daunting one. But Sanders got comfortable with daunting tasks a long time ago.
As an independent member of the House from 1991 to 2007, and as a senator since then, Sanders earned a reputation for forging left-right coalitions and for masterfully amending pieces of legislation. He has shown a skill for leveraging committee chairmanships to achieve major goals. He did so during Barack Obama’s presidency when, as chair of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, he led a successful bipartisan effort to strengthen the VA health care system by authorizing 27 new medical facilities and providing $5 billion to hire more doctors and nurses to care for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he has continued to do so since he took over as chair of the Senate Budget Committee in January.
When I interviewed Schumer recently, he praised Sanders for his role in passing the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan using the Senate’s arcane reconciliation process, which allows spending measures to advance without being blocked by a filibuster. Schumer, who relied on Sanders in the relief act fight and who will again rely on him if and when reconciliation is used to approve the budget, recognizes the Vermonter as an essential ally. “I have always believed that government is the answer, and that I share with…Bernie,” he says, echoing Sanders on the vital importance of making government work in this turbulent time. “I believe that democracy is at risk, and we cannot fail.”
“This democracy is at risk,” Schumer adds. “But if we show people that the American dream is still alive—and the Biden plan does that in many very significant ways—we can restore and improve it.”
It sounds like Schumer gets it. Does Biden?
When I ask Sanders that question in Burlington, he doesn’t hesitate. “Yes! Interestingly enough, I think he does,” Sanders replies. “When he talks about the competition between democracy and authoritarianism all over the world, I think he is talking about that. I do believe he understands this.” The challenge, of course, is to move from understanding to action. “It’s not enough to talk about it. You’ve got to act.”
That’s where Sanders comes in. He is already campaigning for the president’s new budget in ways that Biden and Schumer cannot. In his bids for president, Sanders did not just build a name for himself, as most candidates do; he built a movement that pushed progressive ideas about governing to the forefront. To a far greater extent than any campaigns since Ronald Reagan’s in 1976 and 1980, Sanders’s campaigns transformed the way people think about government. While Reagan convinced a great many Americans that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Sanders convinced a great many Americans—especially younger ones—that Reagan was wrong. “There’s been a real change in how people think about government,” says the law professor and author Jennifer Taub, “and Bernie was a part of that.”
One afternoon in Burlington, we took a walk through the city. Or, to be more precise, a series of stops. Sanders is a fast walker, but he was constantly stopped by locals and by visitors from Idaho and Colorado and Texas and other states across the country. They all knew who the senator was. They all felt they could approach him. They all wanted to express their gratitude.
“Thank you for taking on the corporations.”
“Thank you for talking about taxing the rich.”
“Thank you for telling the truth.”
“Thank you for being there for us.”
Block after block, until we got to the edge of downtown, Sanders stopped and talked for a moment, smiled for the selfies, and moved on. Sometimes he would say, “I’m going to need you. We’ve got some big fights ahead of us.” Invariably, the response was: “Tell us what we’ve got to do.”
"In response to employee shortages and hiring difficulties, 25 states in America ended enhanced unemployment insurance payments early.
The thinking: If we curtail generous unemployment benefits of the CARES act, these people would then go back to their former low-paying and/or unsatisfying jobs. The US still has 5.7 million fewer employed than before the pandemic.
Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Nonfarm payrolls rose 1.33% in July from April in the 25 states that ended the benefits [early] and 1.37% in the other 25 states and the District of Columbia [that did not].”
In other words, the promised benefit of ending UI benefits early was not evident in the data.
This should come as no surprise: As we have detailed here, those pushing for early benefit termination 1) used an outdated, misguided model of lower-wage workers; 2) ignored data about the state of the labor market; 3) assumed a positive impact on labor shortages that was highly unlikely.
Start with a lack of available child care and concerns about Covid so often cited by economists. That only gets you part of the way to why those ending UI had little or no impact. There are myriad underlying reasons driving this phenomenon — and if you understand these, you will understand a lot more about what is going on today.
It is also why I am so constructive: My view of the expansion is the economy is mid-cycle, not late-cycle/Fed dependant; this implies the market has further — perhaps much further — to run. Let’s look at the data that is informing my perspective
Consider those changing careers: As noted in Elvis (Your Waiter) Has Left the Building, “Waitstaff, bartenders, hotel maids, busboys, dishwashers (and others) used the year of lockdown to level up, gain new skills, find not new jobs, but new careers. They have exited difficult, thankless, dead-end jobs for a chance at the American Dream.”
Any hypothesis is just an empty theory without the data to back it up. There are two key data points that support this idea:
1) New business formation has been substantial; in 2020 it was near record-breaking pace.
2) The Quits Rate is not only above pre-pandemic levels, it reached an all-time high at 2.7%.
We’ve never had more gainfully employed people quitting their jobs to do something else, and we never have had more people starting up new businesses than ever before. The balance of power between employers and employees is shifting. As noted here in June, “Job openings at record highs, Quit rates at record highs, new business formation at records highs . . . why, it’s almost as if these things are related!”
What are the new gigs that have people refusing to go back to their old jobs? We have seen an explosion in:
-Mobile apps
-FinTech & finance
-DeFi, Crypto/Blockchain
-Content creators, influencers, and new media
-Non-traditional assets
-Creator/Etsy retail
-Online services
-Angel round funding of countless tech start ups
And so much more.
There is a Tsunami of available capital washing over the land. It is not just the$ 4 trillion in the various CARES Acts’ monies, but an endless sea of seed dollars and angel funds and venture capital and private equity and investor dollars ready to be put to work. If you have a smart idea and a half-decent team, lack of capital should not be your impediment.
And while that much cash will always lead to pockets of froth, that should not paint your view of the entire market. If someone wants to pay $12 million dollars for an NFT of a rock, and someone else wants to pay the same for a 60-year old Ferrari, those are one-offs, not necessarily reflective of broader deeper more liquid markets.
The genius of the gig economy is not a million serfs driving cars for someone else, but that apps like Uber and Task Rabbit opened so many people’s eyes to starting their own business versus working a menial job for low pay and zero satisfaction. Why hate a low-paying job when you can take a risk with launching your own firm? If it doesn’t work out, you end up in similar places financially, only one gives you valuable experience and much more satisfaction and control.
Sometimes the world is a confusing mixture of crosscurrents, unseen causations, coincidences, and randomness. These are the times when nothing seems to make much sense, you cannot figure out what is going on, and are forced to grope about blindly.
2021 was not one of those times.
Select the correct data set to review and you can discern the world quite clearly: You see other people’s biases and motivations, you understand the causal relationships occurring, and even though it may lead you to an outlier conclusion, you can have sufficient confidence in your own methodology to comfortably embrace being outside of the mainstream.
To get this right, all you need to do was look at the data without outmoded, ideological, and yes, racist views of the bottom quartile of the labor market."
"Flying through the sky with hundreds of other people in a cramped metal tube may seem luxurious, but you’d be surprised at how many corners airlines will cut behind your back. Here are the most horrifying things low-cost carriers will do to keep tickets cheap."
