We keep grieving a thing we’ve mistaken for permanent.
The middle class that the postwar decades built, the single earner who could buy a house, the factory wage that carried a family, the sense that ordinary work bought an ordinary security: we treat its passing as a wound, a theft, a system that has failed. And it may be all of those. But before it is any of them it is something simpler and harder to accept: the end of a cycle. A thing that had a beginning, ran its course, and is now spent.
The beginning was rubble. In 1945 the United States made more than half of everything manufactured on earth. With seven percent of the world’s people it held over forty percent of the world’s income, poured well over half its steel, pumped most of its oil. This was not capitalism working as it is supposed to work. It was one economy left standing in a field its rivals had burned to the ground. The high wage, the strong union, the house on one salary, these did not grow because the country had discovered the right arrangement. They grew because there was, for a while, no one else to make anything, and a worker in that position can ask for a great deal.
We called that arrangement normal. We built our sense of what is owed to a working life around it, and we have been reading its slow disappearance ever since as though a promise were being broken. But the arrangement was never the baseline, never the principal: the underlying wealth that is yours to keep and to draw on. It was the dividend: a payment thrown off by a condition that could not last, and did not.
What ended it hardly matters to the person left standing in the emptied town (in Wilkes-Barre, say, where the anthracite once came out of the ground and the reason for the place went with it), and this is the part that resists us most. There is a story about trade: the rebuilt economies of Europe and Japan, the customers we deliberately created, becoming the competitors we did not intend. There is a story about machines: the work that left not for another country but for no country, absorbed by automation that needed no wage at all. The two are difficult to tell apart and there is no need, standing where he stands, to choose between them. They point the same way. Whether the job went to Guangzhou or to a robot, it went, and it left the same person in the same place. To the one who has to live in the aftermath, the cause is a debate. The displacement is not.
The dividend even had a peak, if you want a year to hold. In 1979 the number of Americans employed in manufacturing reached its highest point and began a descent it has not reversed in the four decades since. Every recovery since has left the number lower than the recovery before. It happens that this is also, near enough, the year the country’s rising productivity and its rising wages, which had climbed together for a generation, as though tethered, came unfastened from each other, the one still climbing, the other going flat. We tend to file these as two facts. They are one fact seen from two sides. The tether that held wages to output was the same condition that held the factory in the town, and when it loosened, both let go at once.
We reconstructed the world, and the world we reconstructed no longer needed us to make its things. That is not a failure of the reconstruction. It is its success, arriving on schedule, wearing a face we would rather not recognize.
When an arrangement that has delivered for a generation begins to fail, the failure does not announce itself as structural. It arrives as grievance, as the sense that something is being taken, and grievance goes looking for a politics. So a politics arrived, one that named government the enemy, cut the taxes on capital, and loosened the hand of organized labor. And it arrived, if you watch the dates, just after the turn rather than before it. The factories had already begun to shed their workers. The peak was behind us before the new order took office. It did not start the descent; it inherited the first year of it and gave it a language: a set of reasons that pointed at government, at taxes, at the unions, at everything except the conditions that had actually changed.
And what came through, once the arrangement loosened, was not merely lower pay. It was a change in what production is. The economy that has grown up in the space the factory left runs on something other than the old circuit, the circuit in which a company made a thing, which took workers, who earned wages, who became the customers who bought the things. The largest enterprises now make very little you can hold. They make arrangements, systems, claims on attention; they grow without hiring in any proportion to their size; a handful of them now carry a third of the market’s whole value, a concentration that did not exist a decade ago. Value and work, which the old arrangement had bolted together, have quietly come apart.
This is the piece that ought to trouble us most, and it is the piece we are least equipped to see, because we are still looking with the instruments the old arrangement handed us. We expect a great company to mean many jobs. We expect a large market to mean broad prosperity. We expect that if the country is rich its working people are secure. Each of those expectations was true, once, under a condition that has expired. And we go on holding them against a reality that stopped honoring them some time ago, and we call the gap between expectation and reality a crisis, when it is closer to a mismatch of eras. We are standing in one time and reading from another.
This is where the perplexity comes from: the widespread sense that things no longer add up the way they once did, that the rules have changed without anyone announcing it. And they have, though not in the way the feeling suggests. It is not that the world has become harder to read. It is that the ground it rests on has shifted, and we are still expecting the old returns from it. Europe is no longer prostrate; the conditions that paid us are gone.
None of this is a case for despair, and I want to be careful here, because the end of a cycle is easily mistaken for the end of possibility. What has closed is not the future. What has closed is a specific arrangement, a set of conditions, historically particular, that produced an unusually broad prosperity and could not have produced it forever. You cannot restore it. You cannot legislate your way back to a world in ruins, and it is only a world in ruins that would return the leverage that arrangement rested on. The promise to bring the factories back is a promise to bring back the conditions that made them. Those conditions were the outcome of a world war. And that is a misunderstanding of what the good years actually rested on.
But not being able to go back is a different thing from not being able to go forward. Something will be built on the far side of this. What it is remains genuinely open, more open, perhaps, than at any point since the rubble. The only move that is foreclosed is the nostalgic one: the belief that what we have lost was the natural order, and that the losing was a crime we can reverse by finding the criminal.
We were not robbed. We were paid a dividend, out of a condition that has run its course, and we mistook the payment for the principal.
The work now is to see clearly where we are standing: somewhere else than where we were, and later than we think.
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