Place your face or the face of someone you know on this picture
The scattered paper shards lie clotted against the parking lot curb, each torn edge testifying to the moment when someone’s dreams hung in the awful moments between fulfillment and reality. Pull tabs, lottery tickets, and gambling in general have become big business in the United States, as any state or tribal government can testify. That so many people should engage in trying to buck odds where their chance at hitting the big one is just short of throwing their hard-earned dollars in the air, should give us all pause.
Yet each day millions of Americans live a very real version of those expectant seconds, only these moments have everything to do with their lives and futures. You see, we live in the Pull Tab Depression where a sudden, seemingly random event can take a family from relative prosperity to the food shelf in an instant. In this era of the mortgage crisis, $4 gas and milk that costs almost as much, everyone is stretched thin.
An unexpected illness, an upward tick in that adjustable rate mortgage, or the feared corporate merger or downsizing that brings with it that dreaded word, “layoff.” Almost anyone in America today, through no fault of their own, can fall through the holes in what used to be referred to as the “safety net.”
As various studies have shown, we live in an economy in which the benefits seem to be distributed not so much rationally as randomly. One minute you are driving a Beemer and the next minute you are nursing a beater. One minute you are dining out and the next you could be eating out of a dumpster. One minute you can run to the doctor for a runny nose and the next minute you are lying in the ER with a running bill.
Perhaps no one has chronicled the Pull Tab Economy better than Barbara Ehrenreich. Her three books: Fear of Falling, Nickle and Dimed and Bait and Switched–form a tryptic whose titles capture the volatile nature of today’s working world. The opening of her first book captured perfectly the psychology of the Pull Tab Depression and the themes of the books that followed,
Whether the middle class looks down toward the realm of the less, or upward to the realm of the more, there is the fear, always of falling.
If Ehrenreich provides some of what I see will come to be the definitive portraits of our times, economists themselves remain somewhat divided about the impact of today’s economic volatility. Of course they look at our times through a different lens than Ehrenreich, who shows us what it is like to stack shirts in Wal Mart or sit through a workshop designed to reemploy you. To simplistically sum up the literature I have read, some see the glass as half empty and some as half full.
A major source of the data comes from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) at the University of Michigan. Begun in 1968, the PSID is a longitudinal study of a representative sample of U.S. individuals (men, women, and children) and the family units in which they reside. It issues no studies of its own, other than updates on the data–which is enough of a task. In some respects it is not inaccurate to think of it as a scientific, longitudinal study of Ehrenreich’s subjects.
Public Television’s NOW reported the findings of several papers that had used the PSID. One by economists Katharine Bradbury and Jane Katz found:
income inequality has grown in the United States and upward economic mobility for the lowest income groups has not increased.
NOW also noted:
A federal study found that about 25 percent of Americans and 34 percent of children experienced poverty at some point between 1987 and 1996.
Those figures, by the way, are not far from those of the so-called Great Depression.
But the most widely-cited and important studies of volatility have come from Professor Mark Rank of the University of Wisconsin. His book, One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All, should be required reading for everyone who has read Ehrenreich’s books, for they quantify the impact of the Pull Tab Depression. Rank states,
I believe that the manner in which we have traditionally thought about poverty has been misguided. This outlook has led to exceptionally high rates of poverty and our overall acceptance of the status quo. [p.vii]
The most eye-opening finding in Rank’s book is that a majority of Americans will live in poverty at some point during their lives! That means you and me and the couple next door and the woman in the next cubicle. Rank believes we need a new paradigm for looking at poverty and suggests policies to help bring it about. These include:
The creation of adequately paying jobs, increasing the accessibility of several key public goods, buffering the economic consequences of family change, building individual and community assets, and providing a sensible safety net. [p.10]
The other essential piece of reading about the Pull Tab Depression is Louis Uchitelle’s The Disposable American. If Rank provides that statistics about the Pull Tab Economy, Uchitelle tells us what happens to people who find themselves caught up in one of those massive layoffs that have become more and more common. The picture is a sobering one.
In essence virtually none of the laid off workers Uchitelle writes about EVER recovers their former economic status. A great many of them find jobs but the jobs pay considerably less and, perhaps more important, they do not even begin to utilize the skills of highly trained workers. To go from being one of the best airplane mechanics in the world to a McJob is like taking Michael Jordan out of the NBA and putting him to use parking cars. The psychological and social costs of this are enormous. The economic loss of this precious human capital is inexcusable.
Even after reading books like Rank and Uchitelle’s, getting a handle on volatility can sometimes seem as absurd as buying lottery tickets or pull tabs based on some personal numerological system. As Rank points out, the usual indicators that have served as the familiar guide posts for most of us lay people have little utility, leaving us groping blindly in the dark, where we grab onto familiar anecdotes to maintain our equilibrium, the way a disoriented drunk clings to a lamppost at three in the morning.
Take something as simple as unemployment. Some people know that once someone finds a job after a layoff, any job, they are considered employed. They may have gone from $40 an hour to $8 an hour but the stats make no mention of that. Nor do they tell us tales of part-time workers, independent contractors and all the other dodges today’s corporations have found to not pay benefits. In fact you have to run more cross-tabulations than the average person has the time or knowledge for to gauge that impact.
The second dimension of unemployment is that if you strike out after a layoff you essentially disappear. You are no longer considered unemployed, but rather enter some statistical shadow world that you roam like a specter as you figure out how to make ends meet. There are a lot more of those specters out there than you realize. Former corporate executives who refer to themselves as consultants, former factory workers who are on “early retirement,” anything to keep that resume from going blank.
The unsettling thing is that each of us can name someone–a relative, a friend, a coworker in the next cubicle, a neighbor–who has dropped from sight like one of those specters. In suburbia the signs are often subtle, a “for sale” sign, the garage sale, the U Haul pulling up on a weekend afternoon. Then a family disappears into the dark, leaving no forwarding address, no story, and most of all, no mourning. Picked off by the snipers of the Pull Tab Economy, their bodies are collected and spirited away just like those of the anonymous homeless who happen to keel over on a street corner. Everyone walks around the corpse, eyes averted, as if the victim were some modern plague casualty.
There have always been economic winners and losers, especially in time of great social change. To study the early years of the Industrial Revolution is to evoke every economist’s major case. But how many of those economic history classes read Dickens? In the history courses, those times take on a certain rationality: trades such as weaving gave way to machines. Hence the misguided Luddites.
Ironically, the Pull Tab Depression holds much similarity with those history classes. The party line coming from the Republican Counterrevolution is that the losers represent losing causes in a changing economy. They should have seen it coming. It’s their fault. And besides some training program will easily move them to their next job.
Behind this, though, lies something terribly disturbing, for the Counterrevolution believes in “survival of the fittest” as surely as did William Graham Sumner, the Yale professor and Skull and Bones member, who wrote that society gets stronger by not “coddling” the poor and the unfortunate. Three Counterrevolutionary apologists, Clair Brown, John Haltiwanger, and Julia Lane, have actually written such an apology. A direct quote from their book, In Economic Turbulence Is a Volatile Economy Good for America? argues
Another way of thinking of this is that the job market within a firm is like a tournament: workers compete for good jobs, and those who are selected do well, and those who don’t move on to another job.
Welcome back to the age of Social Darwinism. The quote could have come directly from the mouth of oil baron John D. Rockefeller, who believed:
The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. The American beauty rose can be produced in the splendour and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it.
Faced with such rhetoric, there is something about the Pull Tab Depression’s victims that works against them in a way it never has before–their invisibility. Perhaps if we had our equivalents of London’s Gin Lane, where the desperate and the devious hung out it might inspire some action. If someone like Walker Evans were to photograph today’s victims as he did those of the Great Depression, someone might take notice. In the 1930s, everyone could see the Hooverville’s and the boxcars crowded with people looking for a better life. But there are no Bushville’s–at least not yet.
Maybe the closest we have come is Katrina and its trailer cities, which lifted the veil for a moment. The Pull Tab Depression is thousands, millions of individual Katrinas, each sitting empty-eyed on the curb of what had been their American Dream. Tearing yet one more lottery ticket.
Note: This article and title are copyrighted.
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