Here’s what Grok has to say about my essay this morning:
This essay is designed to provoke, using alarmist language and direct challenges to make readers question their career paths and the broader economic system. However, it’s rooted in real trends: the growth of service-oriented jobs, the prioritization of geopolitics in policy, the risks of offshoring, and the need for practical skills in a changing economy. While the delivery is dramatic, the underlying concerns have merit, making the post a mix of provocation and truth that’s likely intended to spark discussion about economic resilience and personal preparedness in an uncertain world.
Are you the froth?
The US/global economy has developed a frothy top over the last 30-40 years.
It wasn’t that apparent at ground level if you too are 30-40 years old.
If you zoomed out though, the idea that we could enjoy cheap abundance by maximizing the benefits of comparative advantage on a global scale seemed a bit tenuous.
Of course it was wonderful for the consumer experience. It also ballooned the managerial class as the world’s production moved outside US borders but the impresarios of that production remained inside the borders and built towering edifices to this system within its urban centers.
But geopolitics has always trumped economics.
Proof of this lies in, for example, US laws like the Farm Bills and the little-known Jones Act which have always acted as geopolitical bulwarks against comparative advantage.
The logic goes something like.. sure country XYZ can farm better or faster or country ABC can manufacture and man ships better than we can, but if or when push comes to shove — like a hot war scenario — we will have hollowed out our manufacturing infrastructure and human/financial capital in those critical areas and we’d be annihilated.
This is why concerns of economics, the stock market, trade will always be subordinate to the management of perceived existential crises. We can argue whether these 30-40 years have in fact been brewing such an existential crisis — in the sense that other core goods beyond food and ships have been growing in geopolitical importance — or the degree to which we can continue to export the dollar ad infinitum.
Either way, there was obvious froth because it’s not “normal” to just work some finance or media/content or strategy or managerial career generation after generation (a generality observed in the % of GDP sourced from these areas).
If you are the froth right now, I would be very worried.
Do you know how to swing a hammer? Have you ever soldered or welded something? Have you ever driven a commercial vehicle?
Wake up and skill up.
Because even if the past few days were “blips”… what I have said here still applies and the froth may very well blow away eventually.