Homeless People: Harbingers of Economic Decline
I have lived through more economic recessions than I care to recall, and I believe I have spent more than my fair share of days coping with the daily ravages of up close and personal poverty. Unpleasant memories of such events motivate my tendency to keep close watch on the money scene. Given what I am currently witnessing where that scene is concerned, I am becoming increasingly convinced that the phenomenon commonly referred to as “the global financial crisis,” is going to reshape the world we have come to regard as “normal” during the last few decades.
As is always the case when major, globalized, financial shifts occur, there will be winners and losers. Windfall profits will flow to those who reap the unprecedented income that will eventually flow to the winners. Unfortunately, the cumulative impact of the massive economic transformation currently threatening financial stability around the world is, in the short run at least, going to produce far more losers than winners.
Every section of the world is involved, and fear of a massive collapse financial collapse hovers in the air. Gorbachev provided one of the best descriptions of the confusion I perceive in the comments of many of the economic experts commenting on our current crisis in his book Perestroika. In the section recalled, Gorbachev described the disorienting confusion, and vast alarm, he and his colleagues in charge of the Soviet system experienced when they realized the levers of power they had normally used to manage their system were no longer functional.
I don’t mean here to suggest that the current global crisis is akin to the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, I am asserting that similar processes may be at work, including the inability of those in positions of authority at the highest levels to provide coherent explanations of what can and should be done to help the nation survive the crisis in the best possible shape. I fear that too little of the overall crisis is understood by too few of those responsible for making appropriate political and economic decisions pertinent to the nation’s best interests.
In any event, I will begin to believe that a necessary critical mass of the nation’s leaders understand the crisis, and the steps which need to be taken to mitigate its most negative social impacts, when they publicly acknowledge that we are witnessing the end of the era when every able-bodied American citizen can be expected to experience fulltime employment at live-able wages throughout his or her prime earning years. In other words, they need to acknowledge that the global economic system has evolved in a manner such that the labor of a large, and growing, number of U.S. citizens is no longer necessary for premium operation of the national economy.
The growing population of homeless people that has become a more or less permanent component of the social, political and and economic fabric of the U.S. over the past few decades is proof of this fact. Through good times and bad, the number of homeless people continues to grow. Moreover, there are many good reasons to conclude that they constitute a lead indicator of larger problems to come, absent the implementation of radically different social, economic and political policies. I anticipate that the number of people who share my perspective on this matter will increase as the current economic crisis exacts its increasingly destructive impact on members of previously comfortable segments of the middle and upper classes.