It seems that most Americans really didn't like their jobs.
I'd guess that jobs have incrementally sucked more and more each year, and the pandemic reset the tolerance level.
The frog doesn't want to jump into that hot water.
I maintain that the Republicans knew in their very bones it was all fuckin' over the minute the proletariat learned their shit wages were a choice, not a necessity. You don't unlearn that. You don't come back from that. You aren't suddenly cool with it again after you've starved for a while. People will lower their standard of living before they'll lower their standard of dignity and the pandemic demonstrated to a lot of people that their standard of dignity had been set for them. I've been soldiering through Black Reconstruction in America. It's rough. Essential, eloquent, spirit-breakingly rough. DuBois makes the argument that the Civil War was fundamentally Crony Capitalism vs Feudalism, and that the principle white argument against slavery is that the white proletariat couldn't economically compete against slave labor. He also makes the point that if you have a two-class system with two races, you can make poor whites put up with anything so long as they're free while blacks are enslaved. He also makes the argument that the entire period from 1965 to 1933, when the book was written, had been a period of enforcing the misery of slavery and serfdom on the proletariat in order to maintain the country in the economic conditions of oligarchy, and that de jure slavery and de facto slavery are spiritually distinct but economically similar.
yeah that "most businesses created" line gets used by capitalists a lot. They then skip right over the fact that 80% of small businesses fail in five years, or the fact that the businesses that got started because the entrepreneurs behind them had no other choice are a lot less fit than the ones who put some planning into it. Got a buddy. He's older. His wife died shortly before the pandemic, and then the pandemic hit, and he decided being an IT guy sucked so he retired. He's gonna make watches now. Now - he taught me watch repair. he knows his shit, mechanically. But I watched him sit in front of a rose engine and failwhale the shit out of it for two days. dude can fix shit? but fixing shit is different than making shit and "beats workin'" is not the entrepreneurial spark that launches a new era. School my wife graduated from wanted to hire her to teach a couple courses. They charged her $200k for the education and were willing to go all the way to $17 an hour. Had to do some calcs for insurance the other day. The FTE for our naturopaths is $436 an hour. this kills the schoolI also just learned that grad student pay scale hasn't changed even a single penny since I started grad school in 2006.
When I read that fact I assumed that a large percentage were people selling wares on Etsy, but still, I found it encouraging. I wonder if it says anything about a basic income, since a lot of those people who started businesses were probably getting extended supplemental unemployment as a backstop. I'm sure 2021/22 are going to see a lot of business failures (to the extent people stop selling on Etsy or whatever), but a percentage, and hopefully a statistically significant one, will stick around. (Also, $17/hr for a class is criminal at any level (and I include preschool in that) even if it includes prep time.)
Every WSJ or NYT or WaPo profile is someone who decided to make their grandma's jambalaya to sell as box lunches to people sick of cooking or artisanal toothpicks or deer scrotum coin pouches or whatever. I'm sure there are people out there doing mundane shit that isn't getting profiled but the overwhelming majority of it is "I'm not getting money for shit that I don't enjoy, I might as well not get money for shit that I do enjoy." Which, sure. I support that choice. deer scrotes for glory. But when they all go tango uniform the story will be "business conditions" not "Softbank tried to give $47b to a guy who marketed onesies with kneepads."
This speaks volumes The only downside is Generation Hustle is entirely too chummy about the scammers. They are not portrayed as criminals.
Over a decade ago I tried to start a public speaking business/startup networking enterprise I called "22 Million Strong", because US Census data showed - at the time - that there were 22 million sole proprietor businesses registered in the US, compared to 16k big businesses. Now, the US Census calls anything under 400 employees a "small business" (cough, cough), so they aren't exactly in tune with 20th century reality yet... but sole proprietors are a different thing entirely. A lot of them are tax dodges. A lot of them are Etsy businesses and aspiring graphic artists and housecleaners... but they all make a little money here and there. But it was HARD to start a new business, get a domain, set up a web site, etc. The Nokia Lumia was the big exciting tech in 2013! The iPad had just been launched and people were still pissed off the name sounded like women's feminine hygiene products and slagging it off as a toy for old people. 22 Million Strong was my attempt to make a nationwide business networking group of sole proprietors, based around a common experience of attending a business-building and networking workshop. Help these people get launched - today! - and get the shell of a business plan in place, and a group of fellow local entrepreneurs to form a cohort to support each other in their growth. I was very excited about this. And - like most small businesses and brand new motorcycles - it crashed after 6 months. Now, we (read: American workers) have a second chance at real entrepreneurship... but it may just be when every big business adopts the Uber/Lyft strategy and simply makes life shittier for their workers (note: NOT 'employees'), because there's always a single mom in Kansas who will do your work for cheaper. I don't see how this ends up well for the workers. Like me. Any time you get the peons fighting each other for scraps, it goes really well for the Bezos strata, and really badly for everyone in the lower tectonic layers...