The faster we destroy jobs, the more chaos we create and the faster the society will end up having to fix the broken “everyone must be busy working even if there’s no meaningful work to do” scheme, one way or another. Bring it on. Jobs are just a means to an end, and if we don’t need jobs, then we don’t need jobs. Stop hanging on to them.
Until then, a lot of people really have to struggle with this current system where they aren’t needed or valued or even wanted, they have no negotiation power because they’re unemployed (read: poor. employed or unemployed shouldn’t matter) and miserable, so all they can do is beg for work, eat shit and hope luck or god or someone intervenes and makes life good again.
The OP is interesting, but I don’t think that it captures the more typical meaning of “social capital”.
This is the unwritten, almost unknowable collection of knowledge and practices that the staff in a corporation follows and use to create their magic, their differentiation.
Social capital, typically described, consists of connections, credibility, and access to privileged resources. It’s much more blunt, exclusive, and weaponizable than the amorphous and generic cultural capital (know-how, awareness of events, ability to navigate public information). Cultural capital is slowly acquired because there is an undocumented prerequisite graph in human knowledge, but there’s no malevolent force preventing, say, a woman in Africa with an internet connection from learning math or business. It’s hard to do, but there’s no malicious gatekeeper. Social capital is even scarcer, and guarded by the worst sorts of humans.
For example, there are a couple hundred universities in the United States where one can get a good education (cultural capital) but there are only two or three that can make you a startup founder, and maybe twenty that can get you into an investment bank. Worse than the steepening economic inequality (a mere symptom of the greater problem) is that of power. The new economy is making almost everyone irrelevant. The “economic anxiety” that produced Brexit and Trump (and this is not to excuse either of those ill-considered choices) is one of the first social consequences of this. People will always have jobs because humans telling other humans what to do is the oldest game there ever was, but a lot of people are losing relevance and purpose to their work.
Two items of the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, and tuition) that is murdering the middle class are driven by a panic rush to buy social capital. Tuition is obvious; people aren’t paying $300k for a four-year degree for education, but for the connections and prestige. Housing itself isn’t expensive, but housing in places with access to jobs and important people is.
Here’s what’s actually going to happen. The nationalistic impulse has its ugly side, but we’re going to rely on national governments to get us out of this mess. Back in the 1950s and ‘60s when we had 4-6 percent annual economic growth (“Great Again”?) that was because of heavy government investment in R&D as well as education (making the latter affordable). Countries that throw their weight behind clean energy and ramp up research funding will be OK. Affordable education and training will take people off the market and prevent an unemployment catastrophe. Countries that fall prey to divide-and-conquer demagogues blaming “The Others” for national misfortune, while globalist corporate malefactors are permitted to rob the people blind, will fall further into ignorance.
The faster we destroy jobs, the more chaos we create and the faster the society will end up having to fix the broken “everyone must be busy working even if there’s no meaningful work to do” scheme, one way or another. Bring it on. Jobs are just a means to an end, and if we don’t need jobs, then we don’t need jobs. Stop hanging on to them.
Until then, a lot of people really have to struggle with this current system where they aren’t needed or valued or even wanted, they have no negotiation power because they’re unemployed (read: poor. employed or unemployed shouldn’t matter) and miserable, so all they can do is beg for work, eat shit and hope luck or god or someone intervenes and makes life good again.
The OP is interesting, but I don’t think that it captures the more typical meaning of “social capital”.
Social capital, typically described, consists of connections, credibility, and access to privileged resources. It’s much more blunt, exclusive, and weaponizable than the amorphous and generic cultural capital (know-how, awareness of events, ability to navigate public information). Cultural capital is slowly acquired because there is an undocumented prerequisite graph in human knowledge, but there’s no malevolent force preventing, say, a woman in Africa with an internet connection from learning math or business. It’s hard to do, but there’s no malicious gatekeeper. Social capital is even scarcer, and guarded by the worst sorts of humans.
For example, there are a couple hundred universities in the United States where one can get a good education (cultural capital) but there are only two or three that can make you a startup founder, and maybe twenty that can get you into an investment bank. Worse than the steepening economic inequality (a mere symptom of the greater problem) is that of power. The new economy is making almost everyone irrelevant. The “economic anxiety” that produced Brexit and Trump (and this is not to excuse either of those ill-considered choices) is one of the first social consequences of this. People will always have jobs because humans telling other humans what to do is the oldest game there ever was, but a lot of people are losing relevance and purpose to their work.
Two items of the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, and tuition) that is murdering the middle class are driven by a panic rush to buy social capital. Tuition is obvious; people aren’t paying $300k for a four-year degree for education, but for the connections and prestige. Housing itself isn’t expensive, but housing in places with access to jobs and important people is.
Here’s what’s actually going to happen. The nationalistic impulse has its ugly side, but we’re going to rely on national governments to get us out of this mess. Back in the 1950s and ‘60s when we had 4-6 percent annual economic growth (“Great Again”?) that was because of heavy government investment in R&D as well as education (making the latter affordable). Countries that throw their weight behind clean energy and ramp up research funding will be OK. Affordable education and training will take people off the market and prevent an unemployment catastrophe. Countries that fall prey to divide-and-conquer demagogues blaming “The Others” for national misfortune, while globalist corporate malefactors are permitted to rob the people blind, will fall further into ignorance.