Colliding trends

I am reading an old piece, from The twilight of entitlement by Robert J. Samuelson.  This is from 2013, a decade ago.

Weighed down by these contradictions, entitlement has been slowly crumbling for decades. The Great Recession merely applied the decisive blow. We’re not entitled to many things: not to a dynamic economy; not to secure jobs; not to homeownership; not to ever-more protective government; not to fixed tax burdens; not to a college education. Sooner or later, the programs called “entitlements,” including Social Security, will be trimmed because they’re expensive and some recipients are less deserving than others.

The collision between present realities and past expectations helps explain the public’s extraordinary moodiness. The pandering to the middle class by both parties (and much of the media) represents one crude attempt to muffle the disappointment, a false reassurance that the pleasing past can be reclaimed. It can’t.

[snip]

In the post-entitlement era, people’s expectations may be more grounded. But political conflicts — who gets, who gives — and social resentments will be, as they already are, sharper. Entitlement implied an almost-limitless future. Facing limits is a contentious exercise in making choices.

It occurs to me that some of the general social unsettlement we are experiencing right now is owing to two different movements intersecting, one tidal movement, the other discretionary.  We are not distinguishing them but I suspect people are reacting viscerally owing to the conflict between the two.

The first, and necessary, tidal effect is described above by Samuelson.  We are past the ever rising flows of revenues and prosperity that came naturally for twenty-five years after World War II.  In that generation, many things were easily availed and began to be treated as if they were rights - home ownership, higher education, reasonable tax burdens, falling cost of living, job security, etc.  We became accustomed to those things but they were a product of a particular set of circumstances.

In an environment where there are no free lunches and everything has to be paid through productivity increases, some of those desirable things are harder to achieve.  Nobody likes it, but most can see that the books have to balance.  We still want everyone to be able to have home ownership, higher education, reasonable tax burdens, falling cost of living, job security, etc. but we are wiser (somewhat) than we were.  We know that all these things have to be earned and there are not government programs which can deliver them to everyone.  They have to be achieved through individual and communal effort.  

We fixed some aspects of some of our welfare programs.  Retirement age was raised and is set to rise again.  Many programs became means tested.  There were other reforms.  Doubtless, further could be done.

We still need a solid safety net to catch the worst off and the most distressed and we need more and better programs to raise up or restore those injured or incapacitated.  We definitely need to make it cheaper and easier for everyone to be more productive.  

But the windfalls of World War II and then later of a rapidly industrializing China (which lowered the cost of material goods) are behind us.  Absent dramatic changes in technology or regulatory legislation, we are all looking at bringing effort and reward into closer alignment than it was before.  Which is good for the capable and accomplished but more challenging than we are accustomed for the the less capable and the less accomplished.

That is the tidal movement Samuelson was describing and it is still underway in fits and starts.

But for the past decade or two, we have an opposing tidal movement made up of two merged streams.

On the one hand everyone can see government, academia, NGOs and advocates seeking to make life harder, more expensive and more dangerous.  This shows up via faith-based movements such as AGW with the explicit goal of increasing the cost of fossil fuels, imposing less reliable and more expensive electrical production, talks about banning or controlling cars, etc.  

AGW is a single example; there are scores of others that pulse through the headlines every day.  Often in the context of ESG.  Defunding the police, depolicing, decarceration.  Increasing urban density by edict.  Eliminating single family neighborhoods.  Limiting vehicular traffic by making fuel expensive and parking unavailable.  Eliminating self-defense.  Etc., etc.

The other stream are the various social movements such as DEI, Social Justice, Critical Race Theory, BLM, etc.  Movements that explicitly seek to extract jobs and money from part of society to allocate to others on bases that are not popularly consented to.  Almost everyone agrees that there should be welfare programs, the debate is about the degree of generosity of those programs.  Almost no one (in terms of the electorate) agrees with racial reparations at all.  

The Samuelson tide of trimming expectations because everything now depends on rising productivity (to be paid for) is colliding with the opposite tide which wants to increase costs and impose burdens above and beyond the costs having to be borne through the adjustment of expectations.

The electorate are being asked to adjust and lower their historical expectations, they are being told that everything will need to cost more in the future owing to AGW beliefs, and they are being told that they are going to have sacrifice more future income in order to compensate for past sins by other peoples in times long gone by.

No wonder the electorate is anxious and distrustful.  They have reason to be.