Hat tip to Atrios for pointing to a piece by David Dayen in The American Prospect:
Welcome to the Bullshit Economy
The Iowa caucus disaster is a function of a broken economic structure that rewards con artistry over competence.
The caption under the headline summarizes it neatly. While Iowa is the eye-grabber in that caption, Dayen is talking about a broader focus; Iowa is just the latest example. Or, as Dayen puts it,
The Iowa disaster is a sign that our economic structures are breaking down, that private enterprise has become a shell game, where who you know matters more than what you can do. The bullshit economy has bled over into politics, with the perfect president but also the perfect amount of grifting and consultant corruption and unbridled tech optimism. This has long been part of politics—anything with that much money sloshing around will invite a little corruption—but the combination of political grift, the ardor for public-private partnerships, and the triumph of ambition over talent has created a fetid stew.
It’s much easier to cannibalize the economy for immediate gain than it is to invest time, resources, and money in building something up. It’s the difference between actually creating ‘value’ versus just extracting it. It’s a sign of a society where the smart money has figured the handwriting is on the wall, so the goal is to grab what you can while you can.
You see this manifesting in many ways — vulture capitalists descend on a company and extract all the value from it for immediate gains, then move on when all that’s left is a dried husk to be sold for compost. (As per Eddie Lampert and Sears.) Or take Uber’s business model: spend money like water to destroy competition in hopes of creating a monopoly on transportation. The Iowa example is selling a ‘solution’ to a ‘problem’ that isn’t really a problem. As Dayen notes:
The story of Shadow, makers of the app that utterly failed to deliver in Iowa, is a perfect example of the bullshit economy. It starts by being a tech solution to a non-existent problem. Iowa counties are compact; the largest one has a landmass of 973 square miles, and it’s close to twice the size of the average county in the state. Even there, no major city is more than a 30-minute drive from the county seat, Algona. Even with that ancient technology of the car, you could have each of the 99 counties report final results within a couple hours of the end of the caucuses.
A consequence of this is that real problems go unaddressed because no one can figure out how to financialize them into money machines — and that’s the only paradigm that seems to be acceptable for tackling anything in the Bullshit Economy. (What — would you choose Socialism just because market forces can’t come up with a magical solution?).
Bullshit is eternal — it goes over so well because it’s usually flavored with things we want to hear or validates opinions we hold. A little bit goes a long way; a steady diet is fatal. Plus it goes along with the American tradition of always doing right thing — but only after exhausting all the alternatives. Bullshit is a perennial ‘solution’ when alternatives are being evaluated. (Indeed — Bullshit is all some have to offer — see Paul Krugman on Zombies.)
Dayen doesn’t offer any specific remedies, but he does end with this:
The voters have a rare choice in 2020 to put clamps on the bullshit economy, to end the froth in our financial markets, to put the needs of the people ahead of inflated stock returns and boasts about revolutionizing rental housing or food delivery or juice machines. We don’t have to live in the bullshit economy. We can reject it. Or, we can wait for the app to work and find out who our leaders will be.
It’s the Bullshit Economy stupid this time around among other things. Do we get it?