{"id":68192,"date":"2024-05-18T10:39:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-18T15:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=68192"},"modified":"2024-05-18T10:39:00","modified_gmt":"2024-05-18T15:39:00","slug":"precarious-one-misfortune-away-from-insolvency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=68192","title":{"rendered":"Precarious: One Misfortune Away from Insolvency"},"content":{"rendered":"

Precarious: One Misfortune Away from Insolvency<\/a><\/h3>\n
As a result, a significant percentage of households that are considered middle-class are one misfortune away from insolvency.<\/i><\/p>\n

We can summarize the changes in our economy over the past two generations with one word:\u00a0precarity<\/i><\/b>, as life for the bottom 90% of American households has become far more precarious over the past 40 years, despite the rising GDP and “wealth” as measured in\u00a0phantom capital<\/i>.<\/p>\n

This reality is expressed in the portmanteau word\u00a0precariat<\/i><\/b>, combining proletariat (someone whose livelihood comes from their labor) and precarious: outside of government employment, work has become far more precarious. Where it was still common 40 years ago to work for a company for much or most of one’s career and have a private-sector pension, now private-sector pensions have vanished, replaced by self-managed 401K funds, and private-sector work is characterized by a series of not just job changes but career changes.<\/p>\n

The source of one’s livelihood can dry up and blow away almost overnight, and to fill the hole many turn to gig-work with zero benefits<\/b>\u00a0that saddles the worker with self-employment taxes (15.3% of all earnings, as the “self-employed” gig worker must pay both the employee and the employer shares of Social Security-Medicare payroll taxes).<\/p>\n

This isn’t true self-employment, of course,<\/b>\u00a0as true self-employment means the owner-worker can hope to extract the full value of their labor; in contrast, much of the value of the gig work is skimmed off by corporate platforms (Uber et al.). The gig worker is a precariat wage-slave, not a self-employed owner of their own labor and enterprise.<\/p>\n

Forty years ago, households with healthcare insurance being driven into bankruptcy by medical bills was unknown.<\/b>\u00a0Now this is commonplace. We’re forced to ask, what exactly does “insurance” even mean if our share of the medical bills is so burdensome that we’re forced into insolvency?<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Precarious: One Misfortune Away from Insolvency As a result, a significant percentage of households that are considered middle-class are one misfortune away from insolvency. We can summarize the changes in our economy over the past two generations with one word:\u00a0precarity, as life for the bottom 90% of American households has become far more precarious over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24078,1935,34594,3076,587],"class_list":["post-68192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-charles-hugh-smith-2","tag-household-debt","tag-household-solvency","tag-insolvency","tag-of-two-minds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68192"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68193,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68192\/revisions\/68193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}