Why “Growing the Economy” Doesn’t Even Make Sense

Last night I was trying to explain to my friend why production doesn’t actually mean anything. Production has been climbing fairly steadily during the Obama administration. But jobs have fluctuated and income has remained stagnant. How can this be?

So I pulled out my sticky pad and outlined an antiquated lie: increased GDP trickles down to the rest of us.

But if you’ve been alive for the past 10 years, you know the relationship between productivity and prosperity has been broken. The model theorizing their relationship been disproven. There is no rise in production that predicts an increase in employment. If employment goes up, it has nothing to do with productivity. If incomes are stagnant it does not mean we’ve been insufficiently productive.

Whatever theory you want to draw connecting product to people, you’re probably drawing on antiquated analysis that has so long been repeated by powerful people that it has become our common sense. But our common sense, what social theorists call ‘doxa,’ is often itself the product of ideology, not reflective of any actual social truth.

Examples of doxa include the myth that men are less emotionally mature than women. Historically, this was reversed and for much of the 19th and 20th century, the doxa was that women are perpetually infantile. Today, in my interview projects, I investigate how men and women in their twenties and thirties agree: men are less mature. Which is to say they agree with a prevailing myth that only kind of sounds true because it’s premised in bodily truth.

But don’t boys physiologically mature later than girls? Sure, that’s what everyone says, but there’s also no relationship between adult conscientiousness and onset of puberty. There are no noticeable differences in the brain by age 25 that would explain why maturity--however you want to define it--would be gendered in adulthood. We have to conclude that maturity is a social construction used to explain observed social phenomena biologically but has no actual basis in human biology. My theory is that immaturity is a manifestation of male privilege, a semantic catch-all for being a dickhead society universally accepts because we keep insisting “boys will be boys.”

Right, so the doxa is that men can be reckless in their early adult relationships because they are said to be emotionally immature. But that’s a myth, legitimated poorly, used to justify the infliction of pain in the name of preserving privilege.

And in the same way, you hear politicians, most often in the Right, talking about how we have to increase our economy. I don’t know what that means. The economy is just a yardstick. It’s like saying we need a bigger ruler to measure something else.

But I guess what they are trying to say by that is they want us to increase our productivity. But as I’ve said before, our productivity has no bearing on average income, standard of living, happiness, health, etc. Countries that are far less productive than we are doing far better on those metrics. As Americans, increasing productivity is not necessarily in our interests.

But America is number one! Sure, we have lots of money but most of it is monopolized in the hands of a very few. So the direction of productivity in America is oriented around their needs, concerns and interests. The shape of the economy is distorted by the concentration of wealth in too few hands. So even if we were to increase productivity, it would benefit primarily this tiny group of elites.

But sucking the dick of the rich makes jobs! You say. Except it doesn’t. Not anymore. You’d be foolish to think this. Catering to the rich has no established relationship to job creation.

The American economy is largely premised on wealth extraction. The elite become Wealthy by taking wealth away from poor countries, especially resources, and the labor power of the American poor. This is why so much of the economy is now premised on the proliferation of debt products. This is why Paul Graham is so eager to disrupt unions. The meager wealth of the vulnerable is easy prey for the powerful and so they hunt it for sport. Sticking your VC dick in the trusted revenue streams of the poor can make one startup founder rich and famous so better for him to make millions than for hundreds of families to have a living income.

Automation and the internet consolidate inefficiencies and kill a lot of jobs. Obviously, we have figured out a way to increase productivity without increasing jobs or average income because we have figured out a way to move towards a jobless economy.

This would be fine except our entire infrastructure remains organized around another bad idea: your worth as a human being hinges on your wealth-earning capacity. If you can’t extract wealth from this jobless economy, you will starve. Worse, you will probably get very sick, go to a hospital, and become horrifically indebted because the American Medical Association is another tiny group of wealth extractors who have figured out a way to farm the American people for profit. And they are donating hugely to Hillary Clinton to ensure their bonanza continues.

This isn’t to say people stop producing value, of course, just that the rich won’t pay for it. What do they care if you build your community a public garden? They don’t give a fuck if you teach low-income kids. They don’t give a shit. Have you met any rich people lately? They’re obnoxious.

The problem of a jobless economy isn’t the jobless part. We are moving to a jobless future. Productivity in an age of automation needs fewer hands. The relationship between product and human will be, in a word, disrupted.

The problem, though, is that our doxa is this myth that humans are only worthy if they’re extracting wealth from each other somehow, be it a salary, disruption or exploitation.

But we can no longer afford the doxa that “increasing the economy” is a sufficient economic policy platform. First of all, that doesn’t even make sense. Second, increasing production under prevailing circumstances will only benefit the privileged few which makes it a variant on trickle-down economics. But lastly, the reiteration of it has been numbing in the sense that so many people still nod along as if this what needs to be done. It sounds good in the way God once sounded good and people suffer for it the way people were made to suffer for God.

And when things sound good, even if they aren’t, people fail to question them. This is bad. This is why people suffer. Ask questions.

I just wrote this in my phone, so my apologies if it’s less coherent than usual.