An Open Letter to Economists

The problem with the economy is staring you in the face

Dear Economists,

I implore you to stop speculating on the economy. It’s not your fault but you live in an urban-shaped bubble the color of a pink dolphin.

Even if you grew up poor and shopping at the Dollar Store.

Since you can’t understand the economy, the rest of us are consigned to reading speculative jargon drivel math anthropology in the New York Times.

We are right here. Stop talking about us as if we are remote tribesmen.

The problem is simple. It will be hard for you to hear because you are still middle class while watching the end of the middle class, recently profiled in such upbeat classics as Nomadland and that latest movie about the Sackler family.

The Economic Problem in America is Jobs

America has an unemployment and underemployment problem. I’m an expert on this topic because I’ve had 87 jobs in my life.

People think there is a huge variety of jobs, but there are only two kinds.

Good jobs, and crap jobs.

You, Mr. or Ms. Economist, have a good job. This makes you perpetually baffled as to the enormous and burgeoning number of crap jobs.

Your answer is to eliminate crap jobs by having someone else work the job.

Speaking as someone else, I can testify we are all trying our very hardest to get a good job. We sweat, we toil, we take computer training you would not fucking believe. We vote.

If I tried any harder, I’d have to go back to school and get a fourth advanced degree, but I’ve learned my lesson.

Until I rolled down the bottom of the slimy funnel into ground zero of crap jobs, where wilted flowers blanket this barren flyover hellscape, I was unwoke AF.

But now I’m older and age discrimination is real (sorry), and I’ve moved to the country to save money, so I have a birds-eye but mostly a worms-eye view of crap jobs.

The Other Economic Problem Is Healthcare

We have an aging Boomer cohort that still sucks up most of the dwindling oxygen, and they mostly have health coverage through Medicare. It’s not great — it still costs money — but it’s manageable.

Everyone else competes for healthcare, which they can only get through a good job.

We are competing with each other for the prize of being able to live longer and not go bankrupt.

It’s dog-eat-dog out here. You are getting free milk bones at the company buffet.

Crap jobs don’t come with health insurance. If they do, it still costs a lot or is, you guessed it, it’s crap health insurance.

The spectrum of crap jobs, like the varieties of diseases, is a topic economists could drill down but the gist was captured in Tolstoy’s observation about happy and unhappy families.

All good jobs, like happy families, are alike.

They offer a high salary, reasonable working hours, flexibility — which in this climate amounts to remote or hybrid remote — status, and opportunity. Oh — and they have good health insurance!

More accurately, you could have just one from the menu above plus health insurance, and in 21st-century America, it would be the equivalent to a lifetime supply of Schwan’s frozen dinners.

Health insurance is the thing that allows you to get medicine, life-saving procedures, and preventative care, and not pay $800 a month or more while helplessly watching the bill go up every year.

Here in America, a good job means you get to live.

The Third Economic Problem Is Job Blindness

People with good jobs are tone-deaf and mute like tall white men with good hair trying to comprehend why all the presidents are tall white men with good hair, except Obama who wasn’t even born in America.

People with good jobs — you — literally cannot comprehend what crap jobs are like.

You are flummoxed by the cruel reality that most crap jobs are the diametrical opposite of good jobs.

Crap jobs “offer” low wages, bad schedules, lack of flexibility — which amounts to calling an on-call schedule “flexible” — low status, and dead-ends.

The obvious solution is for everyone who is unhappy in their crap job to get a better job.

In the old days, this amounted to getting more schooling and reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.

It’s not that we don’t all want good jobs.

It’s just that crap jobs keep getting crappier and college and voting and shame used to be reliable vaccines that don’t work anymore.

The Last Economic Problem Is the College Bind

On the topic of massive piles of crap, college these days is a crap shoot.

Getting an education is no longer a guarantee unless you are one of those 18-year-olds who knows exactly what he/she/they wants in life and is willing to commit fully to a sensible career like dentistry via deep self-knowledge and family support.

The thing about those 18-year-olds is that they’ll land on their feet no matter what, and always have.

Most 18-year-olds are clueless, and a huge number drop out of college. That’s just how life works, hence the popular expression “young and stupid.”

College has turned into a mindfuckery logic problem with IFs and ANDs and ORs.

IF you can pay without loans through your family AND get the right degree OR get one from a good college, your dice roll comes up 7s.

So everyone has to know things before getting into the college shell game. But the whole point of college is knowing things.

AAAAAAAaaaaaaarrrgghh.

Meanwhile, we need tradesmen and tradeswomen who are willing to get dirty and end up as a 50-something with a broken body and no pension.

The Bootstraps Bullshit

Here is where you, the Economists, get a clear view of the territory and retreat to your cozy room full of maps.

It’s always been tough out there. The economy has ups and downs. Yes — no sane person will argue we’ve always had to compete for jobs and the economy has ups and downs.

We are competing, lately, not just for our jobs but for our lives.

We are in pain. We are desperate for help [see the election of Donald Trump], and you are making it worse by having nonsensical, quasi-academic discussions of “the economy.”

We are feeling gaslit by your failure to grasp the massive growth of crap jobs.

The same tired argument, that anyone who is poor should just get ahead through hard work, gets dragged out.

Anyone who is homeless should find a house.

Anyone who is dyslexic should learn to read.

Your job is to look at the economy and it would help if you would look at what drives the economy: money.

We don’t have as much.

The young are saddled with huge college debt. The old are struggling with paying for healthcare, housing, and inflation while living into their 80s and beyond.

The middles — that’s me — are angry about not being able to find work that includes health insurance. In your 50s, you need health insurance because you are (1) more likely to get sick and (2) vulnerable to losing everything you’ve built through bankruptcy.

Final Exasperated Pleas

Rural Americans are the canaries in the coal mine. They see the decline more closely because their crap jobs — the Dollar Store, Sonic, the shoe factory — are worse.

The better jobs are in cities, but not everyone can move.

The better jobs are remote, but that’s one more thing about crap jobs: even when they can be remote, it’s the essence of a crap job for the crap manager to punish the employee with absurdist micromanagement like requiring them to dress professionally even though they work in a toll booth.

I hope some economist, somewhere, is working on this problem. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if all the economists started writing about it in all the elite publications, where the guys — and they are mostly guys — have the kinds of jobs we can only dream of?

Writing with good pay and benefits and status?

It’s winning the lottery. That’s how many of us feel about employment these days.

And now, back to Indeed.

Signing Off,

Two Master’s Degrees

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Jean Campbell is based in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She has been writing on Medium for years and recently published her first novel, Down and Out on the Road South, with Wings ePress.