America’s Invisible Depression

Welcome to what I call the Invisible Depression. It’s not a metaphor, it’s not a symbol, it’s not an allusion. It’s very much the real thing, a bona fide economic depression, just like the 1930s. Which is why history seems to be repeating itself

di Umair Haque

I’ve been writing about some pretty dystopian numbers lately. The most recent ones coming out of America. They’re genuinely astonishing, heartbreaking, and alarming. Let me give you a little recap (feel free to skip it). Almost half of Americans struggle to afford a budget that includes the basics: food, housing, transportation, healthcare, childcare, and bills. 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. 70% can’t raise $1000 for an emergency. The majority have nothing saved for retirement. The average American has a negative net worth — he’s never broken even his whole life long.
What do all those numbers say to you? They say three things to me, two of which I’ve already discussed. One, America’s effectively a poor country now. Two, it’s a caste society, composed of a tiny class of super rich who became ultra rich, an old poor, and a new poor, the people formerly known as the middle class. And the one I want to focus on in this essay.

America’s been undergoing of what I’ll call an Invisible Depression. Depressions are cataclysmic things, and America’s is no exception. They rip societies apart, pit neighbor against neighbour, test democracy, norms, values, freedom. Sound like America recently to you?

And yet. An Invisible Depression. You don’t hear America’s plight put like that, do you? If I said to you, “America’s having a new form of the Great Depression”, you’d probably laugh at me. Where are the breadlines? Where are the hobos? The dust bowl farmers? “Dude! The economy’s growing! The stock market’s booming! Unemployment’s down. Depression? Get a clue, bro!!”, might come the rejoinder. And yet the faces, my friends, of America’s invisible depression are everywhere around us, hidden in plain sight. I’ll come to that. First, though, let me prove America’s really having an Invisible Depression to you (and you can judge if I succeed or fail.)

Now, you wouldn’t be alone in laughing at my idea that America’s undergoing an invisible depression. Every single American pundit and economist would probably agree with you. But should they? They’d agree with you because the technical definition of a depression is a year or more of economic contraction. And hey — the economy’s growing! — we can’t be in a depression, brah! He doesn’t even know how to count!! Grin. They rest their case. But they shouldn’t, because that’s a (badly) superficial interpretation.

The super rich now take the lion’s share of economic growth — and they have done so for a long time. How much is “the lion’s share”? Close to 100%, sometimes more than 100% — for example during the decade following the last financial crisis. Since when? Since the 1980s.

In fact, from the period from 1980 to 2014, the average American’s share of the distribution of economic growth was negative, not positive. That means that the richest took more than 100% of gains for all those years, while the average person gained less than nothing. In plain English, that means: the average American was living through a depression for the last forty years..and still is.

Yes, really. Think about it with me for a second. If a depression is a “sustained period of economic contraction lasting a year or more”…and the top 1% or 0.1% in the economy are taking more than 100% of the growth in the economy…and sometimes more…what does that mean for everyone else? It means that everyone else is living through a depression. But that’s precisely what happened in America for the last forty years.

Welcome to what I call the Invisible Depression. It’s not a metaphor, it’s not a symbol, it’s not an allusion. It’s very much the real thing, a bona fide economic depression, just like the 1930s. Which is why history seems to be repeating itself, but I’ll come to that. Go ahead and pore over the concepts and numbers all you want — you don’t need to be a PhD, anyone, and I mean anyone, has the math skills to be able to follow along and understand here.

(Sure, if you want to be technical, you can subtract the growth rate from that calculation. If the growth rate’s two percent, the super rich can get away with taking just 98%, for example, but maybe you see how absurd this is getting. Rather than nitpicking, what you should see is this: how strikingly easy it is to prove America’s invisible depression. And how iron-clad the logic is, too. You can’t have it both ways, after all. Either a depression is a sustained period of contraction, or it isn’t, and if it is, then the super rich taking all the economy’s gains or more is a depression for everyone else.)

So where’s the face of this depression? The breadlines and dust bowl farmers and so on? It’s everywhere. It’s in a suicide epidemic amongst middle aged men, who, bereft of hope, stick shotguns in their mouths, in a last desperate cry for support. It’s in an opioid epidemic ripping through rusting towns and cities empty of opportunity, hope, chances. It’s in young people who can’t afford to start families of their own…so they’re having less and less sex. It’s in a middle class becoming a minority for the first time in history. And then making a classic sharp U turn to authoritarianism, at just the moment of its implosion. It’s in farmers losing everything they have — and taking their lives on the land they’ve loved and nourished.

America’s invisible depression is everywhere around us. It’s in every weary heart, every lined face, every medical bankruptcy, every struggling family, each and every parent sleepless at night over their kids’ futures. So why can’t we see it?

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