Nomadland

I just finished reading Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland, a book about the houseless — a population of Americans who spend their lives traveling, from low-paying temp job to low-paying temp job. Living as frugally as possible. Most of them were forced into this lifestyle as a result of job losses, economic catastrophe, divorces, and a myriad of other causes. The majority of people featured in the book are older. At least in their 50s, some in their 60s, some even older. They work in seasonal temp jobs at Amazon warehouses, where they get paid $10 or $11 per hour to work ten hour night shifts, keeping the engines of capitalism humming along. They work harvesting sugar beets, as grueling as any other agricultural work. They travel from job to job. Their aged bodies trying to stay together through one more year as they live off the grid, living in vans, old RVs, and, in some instances, cars as small as a Prius.

The book was made into a movie starring Frances McDormand. It won the Oscar for Best Picture. I’m thinking of watching the movie, but I may not. I think the book is so powerful that anything on the screen couldn’t possibly do it justice.

Towards the end of the book, Bruder attempts to sum things up. She states:

“The top 1 percent now makes eighty-one times what those in the bottom half do, when you compare average earnings. For American adults on the lower half of the income ladder — some 117 million of them — earnings haven’t changed since the 1970s.

This is not a wage gap — it’s a chasm. And the cost of that growing divide is paid by everyone.

‘I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,’ reflected the late writer Stephen Jay Gould. A deepening class divide makes social mobility all but impossible. The result is a de facto caste system. This is not only morally wrong but also tremendously wasteful. Denying access to opportunity for large segments of the population means throwing away vast reserves of talent and brainpower. It’s also been shown to dampen economic growth.

The most widely accepted measure for calculating income inequality is a century-old formula called the Gini coefficient. It’s a gold standard for economists around the globe, along with the World Bank, the CIA, and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. What it reveals is startling. Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations. America’s level of inequality is comparable to that of Russia, China, Argentina, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

Early in the book, she quotes one of the subjects of her book: “At one point there was a social contract that if you played by the rules (went to school, got a job, and worked hard) everything would be fine. That’s no longer true today.”

I write regularly about the problems facing America and, I believe, the growing income inequality is the root cause of so much of what we face. People who don’t have anything, who don’t feel a part of the success of our nation, who are left in the shadows, find solace in racism and hate (even people who have nothing need to feel superior to somebody), find comfort in conspiracy theories and are susceptible to misinformation and lies fed by propagandaists. They also don’t contribute to economic growth. How can they?

I’m not necessarily a believer in the need for economic growth. But it’s one of those things that I marvel at. The captains of industry, the masters of the universe, the proponents of capitalism, those who believe such growth is critical to our success as a nation, seem more than comfortable with allowing a sizable chunk of our population to essentially check out of our economy. Our economy is now being kept afloat by an ever smaller portion of our population. As the wages of the lower half stagnate, the middle class shrinks, and more and more people are left behind, the growth a capitalist economy needs is squeezed out of an ever smaller piece of the pie.

I encourage you to read Nomadland. It’s an excellent view at a group of people for whom the social contract was shredded. There was a time when that social contract meant something. No more. Instead, workers in industry after industry, profession after profession, company after company are treated as nothing more than a disposable piece of the production chain. Those captains of industry, those masters of the universe, don’t care about their employees anymore. They only care about their bottom line. The only problem is that their bottom line is being squeezed as a result of that social contract being torn up. If only they were as smart as they believe themselves to be.

But back to my main point. The disruptions in our economy and in our politics, the rise of a man like Trump, the rise of a political debate fueled by anger and rage, the rise of groups like QAnon, so many features of our culture, our society, our politics today can be tied to the growing inequality in this country. An individual who has not experienced the benefits of a society and an economy has no reason to continue supporting it. Instead, that individual might eventually become more than happy to play a part in tearing it all down.

It’s possible that if things don’t change, we may all become nomads.