I have increasingly had the thought that I no longer trust most American institutions. Today, I read an article that said I’m not alone. See this excerpt from “Everything is Broken: and How to Fix It” by Alana Newhouse at Tablet, a website enthusiastically recommended by Bari Weiss.
For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.
But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart. Michael Lind explains this better than anyone else:
The strategy of American business, encouraged by neoliberal Democrats and libertarian conservative Republicans alike, has been to lower labor costs in the United States, not by substituting labor-saving technology for workers, but by schemes of labor arbitrage: Offshoring jobs when possible to poorly paid workers in other countries and substituting unskilled immigrants willing to work for low wages in some sectors, like meatpacking and construction and farm labor. American business has also driven down wages by smashing unions in the private sector, which now have fewer members—a little more than 6% of the private sector workforce—than they did under Herbert Hoover.
This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.
The problem is with the worship of efficiency, the wrong focus. The initial focus needs to be on effectiveness.
Perhaps the best contrast was shown in a resolution of two credit card issues near the end of my mother’s life. She had dementia, the first member of her family known to have suffered from the malady. She also had written rent checks to her assisted living center on promotional blank checks included in her bills. I was called by agents attempting to collect.
I explained the situation to Chase and Citibank, that after paying for rent and meals in an inexpensive nursing home she had no money to pay the bills. Although I was under no obligation to pay the bills, I offered to make payments if they were willing to reduce the interest rates. Chase used a number of phone calls and two months of requesting information before agreeing to cancel most of the debt and reduce interest rate to zero on the remainder. Highly inefficient. I made payments.
Citibank used a different approach. I was referred to a first-level supervisor who resolved the matter immediately. “Citibank would prefer to receive nothing than to reduce the interest rate.” Highly efficient, I ceased payments.
One of these approaches was much more effective than the other.