We Need A New Measure Of Economic Health––A Misery Industrial Average

The DowJones is at record levels, likely because of mouthwatering promises to remove regulations on pollution and regulations against gouging consumers and other antisocial corporate behaviors, as well as further tax cuts and forgiveness on the 1% and large corporations that Trump has outlined or suggested or promised.

But a lot of Americans are not enjoying robust economic health or feeling economically secure. As pollution regulations are relaxed we can expect cancer rates and deaths to rise and deaths and illness from various mysterious causes downwind and downstream from industries to rise also. These ills will not be reflected in the Dow. As consumer safeguards go away lots of large companies will breathe easier and have a healthier bottom line because they will be able to get away with things they used to be prevented from doing. This will not elevate average Americans' feelings of well-being.

We need a different metric, another gauge of our economic health at the level working people feel it, not just at the level where the stock portfolios of workers lucky enough to have stock portfolios feel it. Regardless of what SCOTUS says, corporations are not people.

I am recommending what I call

The Misery Industrial Average

(compare DowJones and Standard&Poors averages)

Private prisons

Collections companies

Pawn companies

Private security firms

Predatory lenders

Polluters

Payday lenders

Day labor companies

Weapons manufacturers

Gambling and casino companies

Porn companies (like Manwin)

(Plus other categories of publicly traded corporations who create or profit from the misery and vulnerability of working people.)

When these firms flourish it likely means that American workers are not flourishing. Their robust health comes at the expense of working people. Corporate lobbyists like to refer to working people in need as parasites, as unproductive, but these kinds of companies are the parasites because their profits subtract from working people’s standard of living.

This idea has been broached in various ways before, but not as a daily metric that people could follow the way they follow the Dow. They watch the Dow and figure its happiness and security is their happiness and security. Even when it isn’t. Even when the Dow might very well reflect the opposite of their own economic position.

This, from Upworthy, calls the private prison industry the Misery Industry

The right wing UK tabloid The Daily Mail equates the “misery industry” with the professionals who try to treat human misery and depression, because it is a “conservative” belief that nothing is wrong if we ignore what is wrong. Shut up and stress and fear and anxiety and depression will go away without costing the fortunate happy people anything.

But the pharmaceutical companies that provide the medication to treat depression and anxiety should also go on the Misery Industrial Average.

Something called the “misery index” was invented during the Johnson administration. It reflects the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate. President Carter called it "malaise" which described it pretty well. This malaise peaked during the Carter administration because the Arab oil monopolies tightened supplies which dramatically raised prices and depressed the global economy, which made people uneasy and threw people out of work.

Because the unemployment rate and the inflation rates are low right now, we’re fine, right?

But what if inflation is low and has become low and remains low because wages have been suppressed. We all know higher education and the cost of medical care and food and housing have risen more every year than the inflation rate shows, so how can inflation be low and how are depressed incomes among working people causing them to be less miserable instead of more miserable?

An actual index measuring the value and the profits and the scale of misery-related industries would be a better measure. When a town loses its local merchants because a Walmart goes in just outside the city’s tax boundary and begins paying low wages requiring its employees to obtain public assistance to live––that is misery. When the small town main street loses its local druggist and its local hardware store and those local taxpaying businesses are replaced by a Pawn America and Dollar Store and Payday Lenders, that is misery. When more of those businesses show up on main street those companies are flourishing, and that industrial average in share prices would be a useful, even a vital, measure of how hard American life is getting. When private prisons are supplying a captive and obedient labor force competing with workers not in prison that is a reflection of negative economic growth. But it seems likely that many of the business categories buoying the Dow Jones right now may be helped by the robust health of the misery industrial complex.

One more key driver of American misery is the right wing media, which provides a steady 24/7 diet of fear mongering and hate mongering and dark descriptions of where America is at that don't have anything to do with reality but serve to drive reality in that direction. People who watch FoxNews have a weaker hold on fact and reality and tend to be whipsawed by the indoctrination they receive from their preferred news media. They tend to be driven by fear rather than hope, by hate rather than love, by suspicion rather than trust.

Scientific American summarized the differences between the right wing mindset and the liberal mindset

There is a tendency toward fear and anxiety among conservatives. There is also a tendency for Red States, Republican run states, to be less successful and less happy by a whole range of measures, and yet those citizens held captive by those beliefs and by their Republican leaders continue to elect them and perpetuate their misery. In a recent study, discussed in USAToday, the ten most miserable states to live in all fall into the Republican column.

This NPR interview addresses the odd paradox of how Red States where "family values" are a core issue are failing in those areas

Red states hate the federal government yet they need it more than blue states do because their systems are failing in so many key categories, in the education rate, the domestic violence rate, in family stability and income stability

This NPR story discusses how the Red States who distrust and despise the federal government the most also need it the most

So in the Red States where Republicans rule and right wing media promotes its mixture of fear and anger, we find a vicious cycle: negative policies create negative results.

Most Agree With Sanders But Understand We Can't Elect Him...Why?

Noam Chomsky discussed this democratic quandary. We agree on what we want but we also agree we cannot have it.

Most Americans agree with Sanders.

Most are persuaded he is radical and impractical.

Therefore what most Americans want and believe in is radical and impractical. And we can't have that.

This is an undemocratic problem. It may also be the key rationale of voter suppression.

Public opinion seems driven not by what the public wants but by fiat from the persuaders, the persuading class, who are employed by the people with greater wealth.

(The rich persuasions are also obeyed by those with less wealth, who own for a living on a more modest scale, whose financial security is held hostage by equity markets, the people who have retired from working life and joined––as junior members––the body of those who “own for a living.”)

This conundrum is difficult to explain in one sentence, and therefore not useful in persuading people. Fiats are one sentence.

Experience is a better persuader. The persuading class uses hard experience against us. In most cases it is hard experience their rich clients have caused.

The psychological control exerted by the people with money is our larger problem.

The defection of retired workers is understandable; their sentiments run one way but their fears dictate the safer choice of doing what their money says.

For working people the rhetorical trick works like this:

They are earning less than their parents did, but the tax burden has been shifted off of the owning classes and onto them.

This persuades them that they/we cannot afford good government and public sector spending. (Even if government-run programs and projects are less wasteful and less expensive because they’re not driven by profit.)

Their experience of lack of money persuades working people that they do not DESERVE good government and public services.

You pay for what you get.

You get what you deserve.

What you cannot afford you do not deserve.

Hence those with riches are deserving, those living in poverty deserve nothing. Working hard has nothing to do with it.

Working for a living makes you less deserving than owning for a living. In this sense Americans are participating in a violent upending of fundamental American values.

We have returned to the brutality of an earlier age.

Hillary may accomplish more in the hurly-burly of Washington politics than Bernie would. Practicality has a place. But the demands of working people, the grievances of working people, are not radical, and practical politics can solve them if we don't relegate them to second class status, which is the danger right now.

Goodbye Middle Class Life

A milestone was passed this month: America’s middle class is now a minority of the population.

The story on NPR.

How much income have American workers lost? The details from MarketWatch.

Reaganomics has divided the population into haves and have-nots, and has done so with a vengeance. Initeconomics has that story here.

Joseph Stiglitz on the politics of inequality.

The revolving door between our lawmaking branch and the corporate lobbying industry is part of a vast engine of inequality.

Robert Reich discusses the problem of income and wealth inequality.

From that bastion of communist orthodoxy, MONEY magazine: an examination of the cockeyed economics of the Republican candidates.

Power once lost is hard to regain. Workers’ rights and the prosperity that came after were won after a century of sacrifice and outright battle with corporations’ strong-arm tactics. This is the kind of history they don’t like our kids to learn in school. If we turn the dial back they won’t have to worry; we are on the way back toward child labor instead of universal free education. Get a quick review of labor history here.

Young workers are going to experience their work lives as one long slump. This is exactly how the 1% want it and Republicans have made it happen. This important story in the Atlantic.

Of course not all rich people are against working Americans. (Some Republicans actually like Bernie Sanders.) Working Americans are the consumers who make the economy hum. Can it still hum?

One of the things forcing incomes down is what’s called The Gig Economy. In place of full employment (with benefits) workers learn to come when an employer whistles. The Gig Economy explained by MarketWatch.

And those safeguards and benefits? A relic of past times. ProPublica describes how Tyson Foods has carved up its employees' workers' compensation. And their workers suffer a lot of injuries.

The safety net? The 1% succeeded in persuading the other 99% that Welfare protections made people lazy. Actually it doesn’t. The story about the welfare laziness myth from VOX.

How does the 1% get the rest of us all worked up? They own the media for one thing. And a worried, fearful public is easier for them to hustle. Panic is good for the 1%. Krugman explains why the rich love generalized panic.


Workers used to have certain rights. An expectation they weren’t being spied on being one of them. No longer. Who's behind this? Walmart, of course.

Income inequality tends to show up in key areas: how inequality is perpetuated by housing.

And while the 1% is scooping up money that used to trickle down to working people, they are sharing one thing. They are letting working people have all the tax obligations. Another in a very thick file of similar stories, from the Guardian.

Are Workers Expendable?

Efficiency is measured by corporate economists as revenue minus expenses. Profit is created the same way. Profit therefore equals Efficiency. Profit is the ultimate good and the only obligation, an obligation only paid upward. What’s the expense economists are most eager to eliminate? The cost of labor.

Workers present downward obligations and such obligations are a burden. They are, by definition, inefficient, because obligations owed to workers are always counted as a negative. Corporations don’t feel obligations to plants and machines. Plants and machines don’t make them feel angry or guilty or deprived of profit. They can be bought and sold and don't need to be paid. They do as they're told. They can be insured and depreciated. They can be replaced with more efficient machines and don't require severance or unemployment or a pension or healthcare.

Keynes thought the unending march toward greater efficiency and greater productivity would pay a dividend to everyone in the form of leisure. He didn’t think that leisure would be unemployment and poverty. This is the looming likelihood nobody wants to discuss. We all have mixed feelings. Our retirements hinge upon the profitability of the companies in our retirement portfolios, which hinge upon the suppression of labor costs, and our retirement portfolios are purchased with wages we are paid for the work we do.

People who work for a living have a conundrum that people who own for a living never have to worry about. We’ve always been a country that worships hard work, but that god has been replaced with Profit, a higher god that believes work should be as poorly rewarded as possible. The god Profit likes the fruits of work but believes those fruits belong in the profit column. Profits belong to those who own for a living.

It would all be much easier if all work could be done by machines which don’t need to be paid, which can be depreciated and sold and moved almost like slaves. Welcome to the age of the robot.

Even China, with its endless and captive labor force, is falling in love with robots. How will this unfold? In China every human being is expendable. (The New York Times reports.)

Look at this map of most common jobs per state over the past 40 years. It’s also a map of mostly very expendable jobs, jobs that are being relentlessly robotized.

Did you notice how many states employ more truck drivers than any other kind of worker? Read this article about the replacability of human drivers.

Discuss.

The Poor Pay. The Rich Don't.

"Johnny is a cheating teacher on a train traveling 80 mph west, to jail. Charlie is a cheating Wall Street executive on a train traveling 40 mph…. I'm kidding, it's a helicopter and he's going to a party where a giant ice sculpture of David is peeing vodka." ~Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart examines with his usual sharp wit and perceptiveness how the rich get away with everything.

The working stiff pays for his crime by doing time. The rich are given a pass… Heck, they’re rich and therefore not culpable.

You may remember this story about the rich kid excused for killing someone with his car while driving drunk because he was also driving while rich. Wealth was the excuse.

We have high-end crime in America because they are rich enough to ignore the law. For them Crime Pays.

In Scandinavia they can at least wipe that smug look off their faces. (The Atlantic reports)

This demonstrates again that the biggest force in the economy is something no news story will report on and no news anchor ever mentions.

It’s called THE RULE OF ACCUMULATED ADVANTAGE.

The more advantages you have the more they leverage every other advantage you have.

The more disadvantaged you are the more those disadvantages leverage other disadvantages to keep you down.

The rich defy gravity. The poor sink.