Part 3- Lifecycle for the Median Person in West is Damaged Beyond Repair

In the previous post of this series, I wrote about how all of the negative socio-economic changes caused by neoliberalism in the public sphere (highly inflated cost of education and housing, decrease in job security, lack of well- funded pensions etc) in combination with a simultaneous negative changes in the personal sphere (large increases in single parenthood, persistently high divorce rates and a general increase in social atomization) undermine many of the basic assumptions which underlie the current system in western countries. To illustrate this point, the explicit and implicit assumptions which underlie the typical length of residential mortgages in western countries (25-30 years) were discussed. While the current system can weather a few negative trends and still remain functional, a combination of adverse trends which synergize with each other will corrode the system- first slowly and then quickly. Let us explore how some of the negative trends which have gained prominence in the past 20-30 years actively destabilize the system- starting with the effects of delay in entering the workforce.

To make this easier to explain, let us go back to the titular family in the long-running animated TV show ‘The Simpsons’- because its first ten seasons was one of the most realistic and accurate media representations of how things used to work in USA. In that show, it is shown in flashbacks, that Marge and Homer were able to get their mortgage shortly after they got married in their early 20s because Homer had an acceptable job at the nearby nuclear power plant- straight out of high school, even though he wasn’t bright. The house itself, almost a character in its own right, is shown to be old and bit run-down, but in a reasonably middle-class neighborhood. When the show first premiered in 1989, this was considered to be totally normal. Fast forward to the present day, how many jobs or vocations still provide an income necessary for someone to purchase a house in their early to mid 20s? While careers in certain areas such as healthcare, finance, software etc still provide a good and usually stable income, the majority of people in these fields do not finish their “credentialing” until they are in their late 20s to early 30s- at the earliest.

Once we add in the time and money necessary to pay back all those the inevitable student loans (esp in USA, Canada, UK etc), it becomes obvious that even those in the rather few careers which still promise stable and well-paid jobs cannot afford their own houses until they are well in their 30s. While some manual trades (plumbers, electricians etc) can still make decent money at young ages, this is not relevant since the majority of those without university education make far less. Furthermore, it takes only one unexpected medical bill, acrimonious divorce etc for people to lose a lot of money and their house. To put it another way, we have gone from a society where the majority of people were in a stable and well-paying profession by their mid-20s to one where it takes about a decade more for a noticeably smaller percentage to reach a similar point. But it gets worse, since the majority of jobs and careers are no longer stable or dependable- and this adds a whole new level and class of problems.

Consider a career in teaching, long seen as a very stable, respectable and relatively well-compensated career. While the precise conditions vary across countries and regions, this career choice is now far less lucrative than it was just 20-30 years ago. Firstly, there is the issue of teacher overproduction which reached comical proportions in some parts of the world such as the Canadian province of Ontario. During a period about 10-15 years ago, they managed to produce three credentialed teachers for every open job position in that province- and the situation in other parts of Canada was not much better. Note that even today; this overproduction problem has not been satisfactorily resolved. Consequently the majority of these newly minted teachers ended up working in overseas “international” schools or as English teachers (decent pay but zero job security), fought for the small number of available jobs in Canada or eventually dropped out that career altogether. To make matters worse, many school districts used this unfortunate situation to hire some of them in temporary part-time positions but kept delaying their transfer to permanent full-time status. As a result, many of those “fortunate” enough to land these part-time temp positions has to moonlight in other jobs such as bartending, working in coffee shops etc because they still had to make enough to survive and pay back their student loans.

Now let us ask the next obvious question- what happens to aspiring school teachers who could find a permanent teaching job well into their 30s or in a decent minority of cases- never. Are they going to follow the same life path as their predecessors from 2-3 decades ago? We could also go into whether enough children are born in western countries to fill existing schools, but that is best left for another post. Returning to the topic of this post, it is obvious that for most of them, every major stage of the average life (buying first house, deciding to have children etc) is going to be pushed back by a decade or more- at least. Furthermore, their lifetime discretionary income and savings and will take a significant hit. While they could work a decade longer than they had expected, the other negative trends (ever-decreasing ability to save or spend, decay of social safety net etc) are not going away. It does not help that in this neoliberal era, their work pensions are heavily dependent on the stock markets performing very well decades into the future. Then there is also the issue of whether a common but relatively stable profession such as teaching will remain so over the next 10-20 years, let alone a longer time span.

We can already see signs of these problems in USA where, in an increasing number of states, defined benefit pensions for public school teachers are no longer the norm for those who have entered this career in past 10-15 years. It is likely that this unfortunate trend will continue since the teacher union-run pension plans in many states have been seriously under-funded for many years. Nor is career stability likely to improve since, bar some massive influx of young immigrants, the total number of school-age children is on a long-term downward trajectory. This has already started to create problems for many universities and post-secondary educational institutions. So far, post-secondary has been able to bridge the numbers through a large increase in number of foreign students. But that is also not going to last, because the countries responsible for the majority of such students are themselves not grow in numbers like they used to, and some such as China and urban India are actually starting to shrink and stabilize respectively. Getting back to major focus of this post, K-12 schools cannot easily import students from other countries for obvious reasons and therefore cannot even buy themselves some extra time.

In the next part, I will go into how the negative trend illustrated with the example of school teachers is the default and is much worse for those in other areas of work. Will also try to go into more detail about how the combination of delayed entry into the workforce, unstable jobs and careers, social atomization etc are creating a strong and accelerating downward demographic spiral.

What do you think? Comments?