I joined this subreddit a few months ago and rarely have my interests aligned with a community so succinctly. I am the dirty, pinko commie in my family who thinks that “the pursuit of happiness” includes the relief of necessities like food, medicine, and shelter. How can one pursue happiness when one's only goal is survival? They are fundamentally mutually exclusive. So it is no surprise to me that the great majority of posts here are confessions of wage slaves, exposition of our capitalist overlords, and just the general shittiness of scratching and surviving in late stage Capitalism.
But…what if I told you things are actually going to start getting better? What if I told you that all of us damned Millennials not reproducing at the expected rate is about to really come home to roost?
Let me tell you a little story about The Black Death. In the mid 14th century, Bubonic Plague spread throughout the non-bathing, nasty-ass people of medieval Europe and killed somewhere between 75 and 200 million people. That's literally between a quarter and half the world population turned into worm food. Now, as much as that sucked, what happened afterwards was an economic miracle. The sudden vacuum of labor created opportunities for a middle class to emerge for the first time in history. Serfs were no longer two pence a dozen. In fact, if you could get a dozen together in one place that was quite an accomplishment. Workers began to demand more and more for their labor, and employers had to now compete for those workers. And in the wake of that egalitarian arc we got the Renaissance, the Enlightment, science, medicine; people even eventually quit pooping in their own water. What a time to be alive (unless you thought the Earth revolved around the Sun)! It would take Europe almost 200 years to return to its pre-pandemic population.
Now, this is not a post about the pandemic. This change was hurtling around the bend long before they started serving up spicy fried bat wings at the Wuhan wet market. But I won't pretend that the deaths of millions of people around the world and the stagnation of the entire global market didn't catalyze the whole caboodle.
Boomers: you know them, you hate them, you spend your holidays with them. And starting in the last two years they have begun retiring en masse. If you were born in 1955 (first off, fuck you) then you can retire at the age of 66 years and two months. (1955+66=2021) When the GI's returned from WW2 not only was labor in demand but FDR and Dwight Eisenhower ensured that capitalist fuck bois wouldn't shit in the punch bowl, and as a result wages soared, unions formed, and The Greatest Generation built a country of prosperity heretofore unimaginable. Companies competed for workers by offering greater and greater benefit packages. The minimum wage was only established under the assumption that your employer was offering you a great deal more ON TOP of that wage. The beneficiaries of this magnificent world were the GD Boomers. Given every advantage and spoiled beyond comparison, it should come as no shock that when they assumed the role of political elders that they selfishly kept everything for themselves and pushed their own children and grandchildren to the back of the bus. Companies, realizing that the workforce was glutted with unemployed labor, began to bargain down their offerings until the only thing left was The Minimum Wage.
“If you don't like it, you can be replaced.”–Your Regional District Manager, Asshole Bob.
Well, Peepaw, the cows are coming home to roost with the fat lady. By creating a world of neglect and scarcity, Boomers essentially guaranteed that their offspring would be less successful. That lack of success translated into an arrested development that derailed everything from education to marriages to home purchases, but most influentially, birth rates. Smash cut to 2023. Millennials just plain didn't have as many kids as was necessary to replace the population. I guess we were all too busy destroying the diamond industry with Avocado Toast or some horseshit like that. However, we are on the threshold of something very similar to what occurred in the aftermath of the Plague of Bubons. Companies are on the verge of very seriously needing to compete for workers because the zero-sum game of employment is about to become a harsh reality. And the cold fact of the matter is, there are some things that AI and robots simply cannot do. (Hollywood may find that out the hard way if they don't pony up and pay the writer's guild.) So as Boomers retire, and we Millennials limp to the finish line, Gen Z has made it extraordinarily clear that they are not here to be fucked around. Their Irish Goodbyes are Olympian and I am here for it. Labor shortages will continue to rise and won't begin to level off until 2040. That means that anybody who wants to keep the lights on will have to start competing more seriously for that labor. The only company I can think of that seems to be somewhat moving in the smart direction is CostCo. Everybody else is rapidly approaching the “Find Out” phase.
I know this was a long post and if you made it all the way to this point, Thank you, and I hope you are somewhat encouraged. Believe it or not, there are a lot of reasons to be cautiously optimistic about our economic future and I would recommend checking out Peter Zeihan. He's all Gen X and shits on Millennials too often but he seems to know a lot about what is going on the world and how demographics will influence our future. (Bonus: China is actually so fucked you guys. Guys. OMG you guys. China…)