Aged to Perfection

 

Who can forget the last line of the 1973 film Soylent Green?

I worry that with the ever-rising price of groceries and Millennials' open contempt for Boomers we may be heading for the ghastly future the movie portrayed.

And why not?

From a public policy standpoint, converting old people into grub makes fiscal sense, when you consider the cost Boomers will soon impose on our nation.

As of 2022, the average retired man in this country has only $118 thousand in savings; the average retired woman, only $57 thousand.

Among retirees, 14 percent of men, and 24 percent of women, have less than $10 thousand in savings.

The average nursing home costs $108 thousand a year.

Safety nets for indigent retirees are in place, of course; but there are nearly 70 million Boomers still living—after the Millennials, the nation's second largest population group.

Who can possibly afford the cost of those safety nets?

Illth

Americans—Republican voters, especially—romanticize the rich. 

They're held up as titans, when in fact they're just lucky.

The Victorian critic John Ruskin felt that Englishmen of his day were equally guilty of romanticizing the rich—and were wrong to do so.

Rich people hoard, Ruskin argued, taking their wealth out of circulation.

But wealth is only useful in circulation.

"If a thing is to be useful," Ruskin said, "it must be not only of an availing nature, but in availing hands. 

"Usefulness is value in the hands of the valiant."

Ruskin, leaning on his Classics education, defined the "valiant" as the "valuable;" as those who "avail towards life." 

In a word, workers.

Ruskin thought the rich were worse than just idle: the rich are like "dams in a river" and "pools of dead water which, so long as the stream flows, are useless, or serve only to drown people."

Ruskin wondered why English didn't have a word for the harm caused by wealth. 

He suggested illth. 

Illth, Ruskin said, is the "devastation caused by delay." 

By hoarding their wealth, the rich postpone its use until after their deaths. 

In this sense, Ruskin believed, the rich act as "impediments" to the flow of wealth.

From their great country houses, nothing ever "trickles down."

Ruskin published these thoughts in 1860, 12 years after Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. 

But whereas Marx's essay, published by a small society of fellow travelers, was largely ignored, Ruskin's, published in a popular magazine, created a firestorm.

The English critics despised it.

Ruskin's essay was declared "one of the most melancholy spectacles we have ever witnessed."

"Absolute nonsense," "utter imbecility," and "intolerable twaddle," the critics wrote.

One critic called the author himself "repulsive," adding that Ruskin was the "perfect paragon of blubbering; his whines and snivels are contemptible."

But was he contemptible in condemning the rich for fostering illth?

I don't think so. 

Illth, you could say, is the underbelly of wealth.

Wealth is a 13th-century word meaning "prosperity." It derived from another Old English word, weal, meaning "health."

Ill, also a 13th-century word, came centuries later to mean "unhealthy;" but its original 13th-century meaning was "wicked." 

Illth, therefore, means "wickedness." 

Ruskin's point was clear: when you look at their underbellies, the rich are wicked.

They block our way to prosperity; they don't create it.

Will Republicans ever get it?

HAT TIP: Thanks to copywriter Nancy Friedman for introducing me to illth.

Screwed. Again.

A team of eminent bean counters at the National Bureau of Economic Research has concluded 2020's $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was "highly regressive" and that Trump screwed middle- and working-class Americans.

A whopping 75% of the PPP funds went to the top 20% of US households. Most received cash they didn't need.

Only 25% of the funds went into the pockets of Americans who would have lost their jobs otherwise.

The PPP bailout exceeded by $100 billion that which followed the Great Recession, when Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac imploded.

Economists have since determined that the 2009 bailout—known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—while failing to correct the causes underlying the financial system's collapse, made Wall Street executives richer than ever.

Ironically, the public's bitter memories of TARP's injustice propelled Trump into the White House in 2016.

Four years later, Trump sent billions of PPP dollars to people like Joe Farrrell, a billionaire developer and Trump fundraiser; Kanye West, wealthy rapper and Trump toady; Jeff Koons, a pop artist who holds the world record for the most expensive work ever sold by a living artist ($91.1 million); Tal Tsfany, CEO of the right-wing Ayn Rand Institute; Elaine Chao, Trump's billionaire Secretary of Transportation; and his vile and venal family members, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

And the little people?

We were screwed. Again.

Love, Work and Bullshit

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanity.

— Sigmund Freud

In 2017, I predicted the "gig economy" would soon enforce downshifting and make a universal guaranteed income mandatory.

But Mother Nature had other plans. 

She used a pandemic to enforce downshifting and PPP to guarantee income.

The pandemic has also unpredictably spurred a popular uprising known as the Antiwork Movement. 

Marxist in nature, the Antiwork Movement calls for an end to slavish, fear-based jobs in favor of "idling" and finds voice within industries like high tech, hospitality, and healthcare—the same sectors leading the Great Resignation.

Whether Covid-disruption or the Antiwork Movement have lasting traction is anyone's guess. 

My money says they don't. 

Covid will soon morph into a common cold, and there will remain plenty of workers eager to step into jobs abandoned by "idlers" (we call those eager beavers "immigrants").

What Covid and the Antiwork Movement have done is cast a bright light on "bullshit jobs." 

Bullshit jobs are those make-work occupations first described in 2013 by anthropologist David Graeber: stupid jobs such as concierge, bailiff, closet organizer, medical coder, tax attorney, Instagram marketer, and human resources executive; demeaning jobs so pointless they represent, in Graber's words, a "scar across our collective soul."

As 2022 progresses, I predict, we will see Covid-19 and the Antiwork Movement run out of steam and be replaced by an Antibullshit Movement.

We'll see more and more workers move from meaningless, dead-end jobs into jobs that combine Freud's cornerstones, work and love. Jobs like school teaching, woodworking, art conservation, investigative journalism, firefighting, farming, fundraising, truck driving, and hospice working.

And we'll see fewer and fewer workers becoming dog washers, pizza deliverymen, telemarketers, community organizers, diversity trainers, celebrity chefs, and professional shoppers.

Idling, too, will fall from grace.

After all, there's no money in it.

The Real Danger of Inflation

I filled my gas tank yesterday and realized it costs 33% more to do so than when I bought the car five years ago. 

A lot of the price increase has come recently.

I'm as wary of inflation as the next guy.

But the real danger of inflation isn't to our pocketbooks.

It's to our republic.

As columnist David Brooks observed this week, run-of-the-mill, white-shoe Republicans are in a lather over federal spending, and will vote for Trump simply to damper it.

They're unaware of the evil Trump and his followers embody.

To these naïfs, he's just a good Republican. 

If inflation becomes chronic, they'll rally to him.

You'll recall from your history books a troubled time in Germany after World War I. 

The government had been forced, by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, to pay war reparations to the Allies.

To fund that debt, the German government printed money—tons of it—sparking runaway inflation.

At one point, German housewives burned piles of Reichsmarks, because they were worth less than firewood.

The inflationary spiral gave rise to extremist political leaders and movements, in particular Hitler and the Nazis.

Burning money soon gave way to burning books and, eventually, to burning people.

Don't think for a minute it can't happen here.

It can.

Inflation—and pocketbook-issue voters—can return Trump to office.

Free Lunch

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

— Milton Friedman

Pioneers of the "loss leader," late-19th-century saloonkeepers offered thirsty customers "free lunch."

Economist Milton Friedman popularized the term a century later by propounding that "there's no such thing as a free lunch." (He didn't coin the expression. He swiped it from critics of the New Deal.)

But when it comes to tasty business clichés, Friedman was wrong. 

Below is a free smorgasboard of them.

We use them every day. 

Who'd have thought what these terms originally meant?

Across the board. In the 19th century, racehorses' odds were displayed on "tote boards" (huge calculators) at the track. When a gambler wanted to back a horse to win, place or show, he placed a bet "across the board."'

The Big Cheese himself,
William Howard Taft

Big cheese. In colonial India, Hindus used the word chiz to mean "thing." British soldiers simply added "big" when a thing was important. The term wasn't applied to people until 1911, when President William Howard Taft appeared at the National Dairy Show in Chicago, where he was invited to slice up and sample an enormous wheel of cheese. As a result, the 350-pound Taft became the world's first "big cheese."

Coach. In the 19th century, you took a coach when you wanted to get somewhere fast. Schools began to use the term to denote tutors, who accelerated students' learning.

Dead wood. Shipbuilders in the 16th century often placed loose timber blocks in the keel of a ship as ballast. Sailors called the excess cargo, which slowed the ship down, "dead wood."

Even steven. The first Afrikaners called an English penny a "steven." When they settled a debt, they would say they were "even steven."

Facilitate. In the 13th century, English speakers borrowed the French verb faciliter, which means to "ease," and turned it into a noun. Facility meant "gentleness." If you're gentle, you don't boss people around. You coax them.

Guinea pig. When a Brit volunteered for jury duty in the 18th century, he received the nominal sum of a guinea a day for his time. If he longed for better pay, he'd join the King's Navy, where a "Guinea pig" was a novice sailor.

Hard and fast. An 18th-century ship that was stuck was "hard." A ship in dry dock was "hard and fast."

Irons in the fire. To do the job right, a 14th-century plumber had to keep several hot irons at the ready all the time. How else can you connect lead pipes?

Draco

Kill with kindness. The Ancient Greek lawmaker Draco was beloved by Athenians. To prove their adoration, they showered him with their cloaks—too many cloaks—when he appeared at the Aeginetan theater in 590 BC. Poor Draco was smothered. What a way to go! (I almost said "What a way toga.")

Lame duck. An 18th-century member of the London stock exchange who couldn't meet his obligations on settlement day was said to "waddle" out of Exchange Alley, mortified.

Mentor. Before he left home for the Trojan War, Ulysses chose his friend Mentor as an advisor to his son Telemachus.

The naked truth. An ancient fable holds that Truth and Falsehood went for a swim. Falsehood stole Truth's clothes. Truth refused to take Falsehood's clothes, and so went naked.

Okay. Like President Trump, Andrew Jackson couldn't spell. On day he spelled "all correct" as "oll korrect." The misspelling became an acronym that political enemies seized on, in order to mock Jackson. The gag worked, because "OK" rhymed with the Scottish expression "Och aye," meaning "Oh, yes."

9th-century taxpayer

Pay through the nose. In the 9th century, Ireland was occuoied by Danish invaders. The invaders placed a much-hated real estate tax on the Irish that was known as the "Nose Tax." If you failed to pay the ounce of gold due, the Danes slit your nose.

Take a rain check. Baseball first became popular to watch in America in the late 19th century. You received a voucher, good for future admission, any time a game was called on account of rain.

Skin in the game. Australians called an English pound a "skin" in the early 20th century. Gamblers liked to "put skin in the game." In a so-called "skin game," innocent players were cheated by sharpers.

Tip. In the 17th century, English speakers borrowed the German verb tippen, meaning to "touch," to denote a "gift." Your could make a gift of money (a "tip") or a gift of information (also a "tip"). The story about signs over tip-jars reading "To Insure Promptness" is pure baloney, invented by cartoonist Robert Ripley.

Upper crust. Pies were symbols of society in the Middle Ages. The top crust represented the aristocracy.

Wild Alpine Burdock

Velcro. Swiss engineer George de Mestrel invented Velcro in 1941, after noticing that the burrs of the wild Alpine burdock stuck to his pants. He named his invention after velours crochet, French for "velvet hook."

Worth your salt. Ancient Roman soldiers were paid monthly, sometimes in money and sometimes in salt. Their allowance was called a salarium. Sal is Latin for "salt."

Yahoo. Before the search engine, Yahoo was the name of a race of louts, "the most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced." The novelist Jonathan Swift dreamed them up when penning Gulliver's Travels in 1726. In 1995, the search engine's inventors borrowed the name, because they thought Swift's description of the Yahoos also described them.

Goodly. "Goodly" combines good with -ly. It was coined by yours truly in 2016 ("Bigly" was already taken). So now you know.

19th-century racetrack "tote board"