Entrepreneur, professor, and podcaster Scott Galloway has written a book of sorts.
The 100 charted portraits of America tell what Galloway sees as a nation in crisis, torn by inequality, economic decline, partisan anger and rising extremism. increase.
of “driftingGalloway’s numbers go a long way in explaining our politics, from the rise of the Tea Party and Donald Trump to the growing number of young people who endorse left-wing economic views and want to dismantle the system altogether. I’m here.
Galloway, who speaks like an accomplished TED talker, said in an interview, “Storytelling is key to our species, so we chose a graphic-heavy format over pure text. It’s a way to remember.”
Despite spending months curating rigorous data and building a series of alarming charts, Galloway said he walked away from the exercise “optimistic” about America’s future.
“The problem is huge,” he said.
inequality crisis
Galloway points to 1973 as the year when economic inequality in America began to spiral out of control.
It was then that wages began to be decoupled from productivity. As the economy became more efficient, wages couldn’t keep up, hollowing out the middle and working classes.
Social scientists have studied this phenomenon for decades and have offered multiple explanations. The rise of computing and automation. Union decline. Reagan Revolution.
Galloway doesn’t dispute that, but he believes the wage-productivity gap is due to a number of obscure factors.
Inflation FAQ
What is inflation? Inflation is the loss of purchasing power over time. So your dollar won’t go as well tomorrow as it did today. This is usually expressed as annual fluctuations in the prices of commodities and services such as food, furniture, clothing, transportation, and toys.
The first is that “consumers have decided that they are king.”
He estimates that the shift from a manufacturing-driven economy to a consumer-driven economy will have the detrimental effect of restructuring America’s business sector around catering to disgruntled and entitled customers. brought about.
He remembered when he was a child, his family used to take broken TVs to repair shops and pay for the repairs. Because globalization and automation have made electronics so cheap that it usually makes more sense to simply replace a flat screen when it fails.
Now he said, “You expect a nice man in a brown suit to come pick it up and give you a new one and a handwritten apology note from customer service.
To demonstrate the growing power of consumers, Galloway charted the number of goods carried by shipping containers each year. This increased from 1980 he 102 million tons to he 1.83 tons. a billion Metric tons as of 2017.
Factor 2 is what Galloway calls “the gross idolatry of the ‘innovator'”, which reduces economic inequality by rewarding tech entrepreneurs enormously while hurting the people who work for them. making it worse.
For example, Time magazine, owned by Mark Benioff, founder of customer service software company Salesforce, regularly features the Silicon Valley giant on the cover of its annual “Person of the Year” issue.
“Our new idol is an ‘innovator’ and a tech billionaire because technology is the closest thing to godlike mysticism,” Galloway said. “I don’t know how my iPhone works. I know it’s great.”
One particularly interesting chart in the book is the S-1 Filing, the federal document required to list on the stock exchange, which counts start-up founder mentions.
Top? Adam Neumann has his name appear 169 times in his 2019 prospectus for WeWork, a temporary office company that went bankrupt just months after its initial public offering. Steve Jobs, in 1980, he appeared in Apple’s paperwork only eight times.
Galloway contrasts the downward trajectory of America’s middle class adversely with that of China, which has lifted more than half a billion people out of poverty over the past few decades.
As for the United States, Mr. Galloway rummaged in statistics showing how poorly financially 30-year-old men and women are compared to their parents of the same age.
In one of the book’s startling stats, Galloway found that “Americans born in 1940 are 92% more likely to do better than their parents.” Today, millennials born in 1984 are only 50/50 likely to outperform their elders.
“The new American dream is to be born rich,” he concludes.
The rise of girls and the fall of boys
Galloway is most concerned about the fate of young men. He said it “decayed more rapidly than any other cohort in history, relative to other groups.”
As women and girls in America rise, boys are “failing,” Galloway said.
Understanding Inflation and How It Affects You
Boys, on the other hand, are twice as likely as girls to be suspended for the same offense, and the difference is compounded by race. A black male student is five times more likely to be suspended than a white male student, and this often leaves a permanent record that undermines her chances of getting into college.
For example, at New York University, where Galloway teaches marketing, he found that some schools within the university were 70% female when they blindly enrolled in identity.
As a result of this yawning social imbalance, Galloway said: And it is a young, broken, lonely man. “
The decline in young men poses a serious threat to America’s political system, argues Galloway.
That’s why Trumpism has such a strong impact on white men, he says. So, whether the country is Egypt, Sri Lanka, or, increasingly, the United States, extremist groups are almost always made up of angry young men.
“In the world’s most violent and unstable society, they all have one thing in common,” he said. “They have young men who are not attached to work, school or relationships. Combined with the fact that it develops, it makes men much more risk-aggressive.”
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