Problem / Solution: We've flipped our priorities
Greetings fellow Conformists,
I hope you are staying as well as can be in the midst of this crisis of health and leadership, which has exposed the failure of our current priorities.
Problem: We’ve made the economy more important than people
We’ve used economics as a stand-in for human prosperity for so long that we’ve forgotten it’s a proxy measure, and now are putting economic prosperity above real human outcomes.
Under our current system, economics have become the only measure for prosperity because we filter all needs through the lens of how much money people make working - and how much money corporations produce for shareholders.
But we’ve got it backwards. People wouldn’t need to risk their lives going to work during a pandemic just to pay their bills if we instead helped provide the essentials of life. Rather than bailing out companies, we could bail out humans.
We’re taking the indirect approach to this bailout, sending a small cash infusion - less than a month’s rent here in high-living-cost Seattle - to our citizens, but pledging massive amounts of money to private companies. And not even the companies where most people work - the service industry, filled with lots of small businesses - but large corporations that are part of the stock market and yet somehow cannot pay their employees through even a few-month loss of business. We’ve forgotten that the worker drones of the world are essential to keeping our society running - that companies are nothing without their workers.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-ukxSTjYKT/
Our obsession with the stock market, with the economy, has led some to suggest that the elderly would gladly die to make sure their grandchildren don’t live through (another) recession. These are our citizens. Human beings. Taking care of people should be the most important outcome for our society, not keeping the stock market numbers strong.
It’s become the humane thing to do, during this crisis, to not shut off water and utilities. Not to evict people and put them on the street. But was it humane to shut off basic necessities and make people homeless before this because they’re poor?
Coronavirus isn’t the only reason people are poor. A lot more people have suddenly become poor, unexpectedly - has that opened our eyes to the fact that it’s very easy, in America, to fall into poverty?
Maybe being poor isn’t a moral failure at all.
Maybe it could happen to anyone.
Maybe it’s not our fault, but a flaw in the system.
What if we made the system better, instead of returning to the same “business as usual” that creates extreme inequality and provides no safety net for people or society?
What if we worried less about freeloaders and instead of punishing everyone to stop a small number of people, valued our citizens for more than just their economic contributions and took care of all people?
Recommended Reading
- Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting by Julio Vincent Gambuto on Medium
- The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed. by Nicholas Kulish, Sarah Kliff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg in the New York Times
Solution 1: Value workers and social outcomes over corporate profit.
- Raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
- Link executive pay with worker pay.
- Crack down on corporations identifying their employees as “independent contractors” and regulate worker protections.
- Provide free college and worker training to develop worker skills without burdening workers with excruciating debt. Forgive past student loans to make workers more mobile.
- Incentivize B-corporations, worker collectives, and profit-sharing models.
- Make it easier for workers to organize, and harder for corporations to stop their workers from doing so. (The opposite of what the current administration is doing.)
- Stop giving mega corporations tax breaks while making workers give up their relative pittance of pay.
Solution 2: Prioritize people.
- Provide a Universal Basic Income.
- Don’t tie health insurance to employment.
- Protect air quality and enforce regulations on pollution to save lives and improve human health. (The opposite of what the current administration is doing.)
- Mandate (and increase) minimum worker leave policies.
- Shift our perspective to value other forms of work and contributions to society that are not compensated, such as childrearing, housekeeping, caring for elderly relatives, volunteering in classrooms and soup kitchens, and even simply creating art that enriches our lives.
Yours in Conformity,
Drake Starling
Director, Bureau of Conformity