Cyreenik Says
This 25 Nov 11 WSJ editorial, Are the Unemployed Victims of Discrimination? by Michael Saltsman, cites an example of unrelieved stress feeding wild rumors, and those rumors are having people call upon the government to deliver a Blunder.
The fearful issue is: Are companies posting want ads saying, "Unemployed Need Not Apply"?
Here is a quote from the article, "The closest thing to a data point came in a report released this summer by NELP, which identified 150 'exclusionary' ads during a one-month review of major job-search websites.
One of them, Indeed.com, releases estimates of the total number of job postings online. Last year, in the same month that NELP used for its data this year, there were three million job posts available online. NELP's sample, in other words, represents 0.005% of one month's job postings. Monster.com found a similar result, announcing this summer that 'less than one one-hundredth of one percent of the postings on Monster had any language excluding the unemployed.'"
What is happening is people are calling for a government fix to an instinctive problem not a real one. If the government takes any action on this beyond talking about it, it will be a Blunder.
This is an example of the Time of Nutcases warming up for some big action in 2012. And as long as acrimony on the economy's problems remains our Problem of the Decade, it will be just the beginning.
Just in time for Thanksgiving, the Congressional family feud ends in a walkout. This 22 Nov 11 WSJ article, Deficit Panel Folds Its Tent by Janet Hook and Naftali Bendavid, describes that the deficit Supercommittee has given up -- it can't find an agreeable plan so it's letting the default happen.
The most significant aspect of this is the magnitude of acrimony it indicates. This lack of ability to come together is unprecedentedly un-American. The consistent strength of America has come from being both very vocal about difference and being able to work together in spite of those differences. This is the heart of American exceptionalism.
As this on-going crisis is making clearer and clearer, our leaders have forgotten that being able to work together is essential.
With the failure of the Supercommittee we have taken another big step towards repeating the acrimony of the 1930's.
The Time of Nutcases draws a step closer.
The various Occupy protests of 2011 seem to be occupying the same social niche that the 1932 Bonus Marchers of the Depression Era did.
o In both cases you see a lot of unhappy people camping out in high profile locations to protest their economic plight.
o In both cases the movement is tolerated for a couple of months, then the powers-that-be clear them out with modest violence.
o In both cases the protesters do a good job of symbolizing discontent with the current conditions, but can't get behind any kind of good solution.
Add to this that in both the early 1930's and the early 2010's there was a bond crisis roiling in Europe, and... whew! Check that picture again to see how identical these twins are!
But history does not repeat itself exactly. So while there are a lot of parallels this does not mean that they will continue. In particular, we have a lot more people-oriented communication systems in 2011 than we did in 1932. In the 1930's high tech communication was Fireside Chats and newsreels at the cinema, now we have Youtube and Twitter. These new communication techniques are likely to keep the violence down. It's not likely that Fascism, Nazism and Communism will rise up this time. They leaned hard on newsreel-oriented propaganda which was easy for governments to control.
And that political trio are also governing ideas well adapted to times when heavy industry is the core of productivity growth, and information processing is being done by clerks writing in ledgers, and secretaries are typing reports on manual typewriters for their superiors. High tech and biology are now the cores of industrialized growth and that changes the social ground rules of employment.
These new communicating techniques and new social ground rules mean we will see new kinds of craziness. What is common is these 2010's are times when the emotion for social justice runs just as strongly as it did in the 1930's -- the heart is in control again.
Will the results be just as crazy?
Good chance of it.
How will crazy express itself this time?
This we will have to see.
We are living in interesting times.
This 7 Nov 11 WSJ Heard on the Street, Europe's Struggle to Keep Growing—and Avoid Vicious Cycle by Richard Barley, describes how the desperate times surrounding the Euro-zone crisis just "keep on keeping on". This article warns of a coming vicious cycle of a recession being caused by austerity measures trying to solve the debt issues, which just makes the debt issues even harder to solve.
What this means in emotional terms is that conventional solutions still aren't solving this painful problem. This means that stress is still rising and the emotion backing the upcoming Time of Nutcases is still growing.
Some time soon, something wacky and populist is going to be proposed, and to the surprise of many people it will be enthusiastically supported. But, sadly, it will be a Blunder. It will be expensive, it won't solve the underlying problem, but for a while it will make a lot of scared people feel like they are experiencing a solution.
<Roger peers into his "crystal ball" -- his experiences with how people think.>
This economic stress we are experiencing is now clearly the Problem of the Decade. It has replaced terrorism, which was the Problem of the Decade of the 2000's.
This angst about debt, finances, and their relation with social justice ("greedy Wall Street" and "We are the 99%"-style thinking) will likely last until about the 2018-2020 time frame. There will be morphing of the issues and a string of sharp crisis as this goes on, but the harsh polarization and difficult cooperation will be a constant through the decade.
The end will come as mainstream American thought moves on to the next Crisis of the Decade. The next crisis will be something big enough that people become willing to put aside their social justice differences and move their attention on to "the next big threat". The 1930's Great Depression acrimony was displaced dramatically by the "We need to support our troops in the Great Cause"-thinking of World War II. The war thinking provided a chance to reset on acrimony, and it also reduced unemployment, and, because of war-time rationing, produced a lot of personal savings. By the end of the war the US and world economic landscape had changed so much that the old Depression-era social justice acrimonies were obsolete. They weren't revived. They were replaced with Cold War worries. The Cold War became the next Crisis of the Decade.
Hopefully we won't need a scary war to move us on this time. But what we will need is some kind of Big Cause that much of the nation can get behind and while they are supporting that we can lose much of the social justice acrimony we are currently experiencing.
This is the way I see this Crisis of the Decade ending.
...But please note: There is nothing inevitable about ending this with a good solution. Ending this acrimony crisis well is a big challenge. It can end badly, drag on. And the longer it does the more likely it is for some outside force to provide the solution. In history books this having an outside force solve an acrimony crisis is called a dynasty change.
-- The End --