Space Enough, and Time

In many ways, Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic is a documentation of the broad changes in American culture over the last century.  He does that on a large scale (and in large chunks) with his “ages” of conformity, frenzy, and anxiety.  And he does it on a smaller scale when looking at four particularly economic transformations that are good to be aware of: globalization, automation, immigration, and consumerization.

Globalization, of course, is more present in the popular vocabulary now because of events like the British referendum to leave the EU as well as a number of other countries having “particularly populist” moments right now.  Levin on globalization’s effect on the American economy:

Globalization has increasingly meant that rather than our national economy offering fairly plentiful low-skill, medium-skill, and high-skill jobs (and therefore opportunities for people with a wide range of aptitudes and in a wide variety of circumstances), it is the global economy as a whole that features those same three categories of work.  And the United States, as the world’s wealthiest nation, has increasingly specialized in higher-skill work, while countries with lower costs of living and labor have specialized in lower-skill work.

Two other economic transformations work hand-in-glove with globalization and its effects.  Automation has to do with the number of jobs that are reproducible through mechanical means (which excludes vocations on competing ends of the spectrum).  With globalization and automation comes immigration, which is one of the touchiest subjects in our current climate.  Levin’s take:

As an influence of the labor market, immigration is almost inherently a bifurcating force.  Immigrants tend to match one of two profiles: they are either lower-skilled individuals from poor nations looking for greater opportunity through low-wage work that pays them more than they could earn at home, or they are high-skilled individuals from more advanced nations looking to benefit from the exceptional opportunities at the high reaches of the American economy.  Those with skills somewhere in the middle, and in the middle class of their own countries, are less likely to undergo the rigors of emigrating for what would often be a lateral move.  For this reason, immigration tends inherently to increase the specialization of our economy and to reinforce its bifurcation.

These three feel like “nothing new” on some level.  It’s Levin’s assertion of a fourth transformation, which he calls consumerization, that interests me most.  He asserts that the American tension between being a worker and being a consumer is fraught in new ways as our economy continues to grow and change (and specialize):

Simply put, nearly all of us in a market economy are both workers and consumers at the same time, yet our expectations of the economy in these two roles are vastly different.  As workers . . . we want well-paying jobs with appealing terms of employment, flexibility, security, and satisfaction.  As consumers, we want low-cost yet high-quality goods and services that are delivered on attractive terms.  Obviously there is a tension between these sets of expectations.

I think consumerization plays out in different ways in different areas.  You can definitely see effects in educational and religious institutions.  These are definitely trends and transformations worth thinking about . . . and finding healthy ways to talk about.

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Yuval Levin was recently interviewed by Ezra Klein concerning The Fractured Republic.  It’s a good podcast interview that wanders into some interesting places (including how culture and politics has changed over the last decade or so, with the early 21st century debates over stem cell research being one example).  If you’ve got the time, I think it’s worth the listen.