K shaped economy is concerning in our type of society
It is not a surprise the gap between poor and wealthy is rising rapidly, but I never understood fully what it meant, before I saw articles about K shaped economy.
What it means is that majority of working class and lower middle class people started to think of McDonalds or economy plane tickets as a luxury. Demand for goods targeted towards regular people is dropping, while at the same time demand for actual luxury goods is rising. My argument is that this gap is more dangerous today, than it would be if it happened 50 years ago.
I am not pro socialism nor pro capitalism myself, but it deeply annoys me some people refuse to see the dangers current form of capitalistic society in this day and age poses. Everyone is talking of the symptoms that we see right now, but not the implications of what can happen in the future. It is because there is little talks of the whole picture - capitalism, social media, AI technology, nationalism, societal trends, class war, mental health crisis and the least talked about - social engineering.
Not one of those things is inherently backwards or malicious on its own, they are like nuclear weapons - they each have reasons to exist such as security, creating profits, technological advancement. However, just like nukes they can be pretty detrimental in wrong hands and in the wrong system.
Why does it matter in case of wealth gap? When lower classes, which is majority of people, now deem stuff they previously had access to as outside of their pay bracket and upper class hoards wealth by resorting to law breaking and nepotism, it stops sounding like liberal democratic capitalism. My theory is that now we are at a turning point in history, where society we know is changing too fast to keep up.
- AI trend is locking people out of office jobs, and as much as it is not good yet, it is on its way to be rapidly improved at any cost by being pushed by most big CEOs on the planet.
- The trade off is that workforce can move towards government sector, teaching, healthcare, military or manual labour. The problem is that those salaries rarely compare to private sector and job itself is psychologically more demanding, moreover for a lot of people it requires additional training, which cost money. If most start ups failed in the past, now it is borderline impossible for regular person to build medium and bigger businesses.
- Mental health paranoia is at its height and as much as a lot of it is valid, social media and amount of information is overwhelming and therapy is unrealistic option for most people. So what happens is that people relive their trauma through internet bringing attention to it, it strips them of ability to cope the way they used to, but turns out focusing on therapy and self improvement is off the table for financial reasons. It creates bitter society, that believes they are hurt. Paradoxically raising mental health awareness is what got us there.
- Social media and popular language models are addictive by design and the whole industry spends billions to find out best ways to keep people addicted, ways to manipulate different target groups, ways to extract information and more. But the misconception is that this research only serves gaining more profit and keeping consumer base engaged. In reality this research is often used in different fields, especially politics, military and intelligence. I could go on for hours about how many concerning applications the social engineering knowledge has and how little regular people can do about it.
- Upper class has demonstrated concerning ideological tendencies. Increasing economic gap in the society means in the future they can get away with more.
You may think that the points I raised have nothing to do with capitalism, but I believe they are both a result and future of it. I ask you to think about what happens when an average person can no longer afford a plane ticket, what happens when free travel, service industry, legal help and more become exclusively available to 1% of people.
My theory is that lower classes due to being prone to addiction, disappointment and lack of other amenities will become increasingly reliant on social media. Their psychological pain reinforced by ‚mental health awareness’ makes them susceptible to all kind of social engineering and suggestions. Economic constraints, shame of not working hard enough and lose of wealth will trap individuals in harmful patterns and environments.
I remain optimistic that it will not be dystopian, but at the same time historical parallels teach us that empires fall, states adopt harmful ideologies and humans yearn to be controlled.