THE MAIN STREET MANIFESTO
bashing workers and unions, undermining the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and otherwise favoring policies that hurt many of the people who voted for him. Before COVID-19, or even Trump arrived on the scene, some 80,000 Americans were dying every year from drug overdoses, and many more were falling victim to suicide, depression, alcoholism, obesity, and other lifestyle-related diseases. As economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton show in their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism , these pathologies have increasingly afflicted desperate, lower skilled, un- or under- employed whites – a cohort in which midlife mortality has been rising. But the American precariat also comprises urban, college-educated secular progressives who in recent years have mobilized behind leftist politicians like Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. It is this group that has taken to the streets to demand not just racial justice but also economic opportunity (indeed, the two issues are closely intertwined). This should not come as a surprise, considering that income and wealth inequality has been rising for decades, owing to many factors, including globalization, trade, migration, automation, the weakening of organized labor, the rise of winner-take- all markets, and racial discrimination. A racially and socially segregated educational system fosters the myth of meritocracy while consolidating the position of elites, whose children consistently gain access to the top academic institutions and then go on to take the best jobs (usually marrying one another along
PRECARIAT
As Nouriel Roubini points out in his article, this is a word coined by economics professor Guy Standing, an expert in international development (and lack thereof) at London University. Dr Standing first used the term in his 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Standing’s clever addition to the English language is an amalgam of “proletariat” – from the Latin proletarius, “propertyless citizen of the lowest class” – and “precarious” – from the Latin precarious, “obtained by begging,” which has come to have a modern meaning of “dependent on the will or favor of others” or “dependent on chance.” In a world without predictable economic opportunities where the government owns the economy, everybody becomes a propertyless citizen of the lowest class dependent on the chancy will and favor of the politically powerful.
We are all members of the “precariat.”
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July 2020
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