Atlas Shrugged
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills"
- Ernest Hemingway, Farewell to Arms
No sooner did I write my prior blog post on Globalized failure, than the author of Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance got nominated for Vice President. His book ascribes the failures of Globalization to personal choice as opposed to economic circumstance. Full disclosure, I have not read the book, and I doubt I will ever read this book because I disagree with its overall conclusion, however I have now read several reviews of the book, both good and bad. I conclude that he is the ideal candidate for these times:
"Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions about the responsibility of his family and people for their misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot. Comparatively, he feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role. To lend credence to his argument, Vance regularly relies on personal experience"
To be sure, when I was in my mid-20s straight out of business school and in the prime of my ascendant consulting career, I would have loved this book, the Atlas Shrugged of Applachia. Unfortunately over time I grew to realize this one-sided view of the economy is due to survivor bias as is the premise of the Vance book:
"Survivorship bias is a type of sample selection bias that occurs when an individual mistakes a visible successful subgroup as the entire group"
Just like JD Vance, I grew up in a working class family so I don't need to read about it, I get to watch it first hand. My grandparents on both sides were farmers and fishermen. I was the first one in my family who went to college. I worked summers on fishing boats to pay my tuition. My cousins are/were loggers and fishermen. I say "were" because two of my male cousins my age (55) have already died from addiction. My last male cousin is a logger and he's in very poor health, still smoking and drinking as much as ever. My brother already has pancreatitis so doctors say if he drinks again he'll be dead. But one thing I never believed is that I was any better than the rest of my family just because I went to college. Not a day goes by when I don't see people all around me doing zero upward mobility shit jobs day in and day out, when I don't thank God for my own luck. Nor do I consider myself harder working than them.
This is ALL survivor bias, and who better to pick for the GOP ticket than someone who can point to a culture of failure during globalized collapse and claim that it's all solely due to personal choice. Really, who else would the so-called "elites" choose at this juncture? Because outside of the Democratic urban "hellholes", those rural spaces in between are ALL rotting Appalachia. It's frightening how much blight is taking place in BOTH inner cities and rural towns and yet we are still confronted with rampant denial.
Remember what Warren Buffett had to say about Globalization's left behinds in 2019. He compared them to roadkill:
“You have this huge national benefit unseen but you ruined the economic lives of people who are 50 or 55. They are not going to be retrained and relocated ... they became uneconomic in the world economy"
Clearly we are in the very late stages of denial to believe that the fate that has met the working class since Bruce Springsteen lamented it back in the early 1980s is not going to befall an entire generation of upwardly mobile Millennials who are now stretching themselves to buy record overvalued homes while they are being imploded by 20 year high interest rates. In addition to paying their RECORD college debts and the unprecedented cost of healthcare. When they implode they will become permanent liabilities to their parents who are just getting set to retire. One domino will implode another.
The stock market rallies when the economy weakens because global multinationals are the prime beneficiaries of free trade and immigration. Mass layoffs increase profit margins. What is good for financial markets is now bad for the domestic economy. Unfortunately, in an aging society too many people are now dependent upon financial markets for retirement and therefore they are no longer voting for what is in the best interest of the country long-term.
One side believes that only personal responsibility matters. The other side claims that only social responsibility matters.
Unfortunately, we need both.
