The Anxiety Economy
We’re told to stop being so darn negative even as the tsunami of inequality washes away the beach chairs of the bottom 90%.
The disconnect between the happy story of the economy is growing healthily, so all is well and the insecurity and stagnation experienced by the bottom 90% of wage earners has been widening since the wheels fell off in 2008. One would be forgiven for assuming that a smartly growing economy would increase the general sense of security and reduce the general awareness of precarity. But alas, this assumption is false: the sense of precariousness is rising as the sense of security has slid off a cliff.
Welcome to the Anxiety Economy, a term coined by longtime correspondent Bart D., who describes the term thusly:
“By my reckoning the Anxiety Economy is an adjunct to (and perhaps to some degree a product of) the Landfill Economy model.
There was a time when the economy was designed to provide surety and stability. Jobs were stable, opportunities to create increasing wealth (particularly small business creation) were uncomplicated and products were designed to be genuinely better and longer lasting with every iteration. I think this typified the late 1800s to the early 1970s.
Since the 1970s we’ve seen stable jobs drastically reduce along with the durability and usefulness of new product iterations and trying to comply with the massive regulatory burden of businesses as simple as washing dogs or growing vegetables has become mind bending and expensive.
We get bombarded in news and other media with stories of house fires, chronic illnesses and car crashes in places very far away and disconnected from us (interspersed with, and no doubt sponsored by, marketing for insurances of every kind) that make us feel that the risks we face of loss of assets and health are waaaay bigger than they actually are. So that we buy expensive insurances.
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