Look on the Blyth Side

This week we check in with economist Mark Blyth on the pandemic, the economy, and the months to come. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime at our website.

When asked what advice he’d give to an American college student looking for a future, Brown University economist Mark Blyth says to look elsewhere, like “a small country run by a woman.” On this week’s show, he tells us just how lost the U.S. is:

Go to Ireland now. No seriously, go to a place like Ireland. Go to Scotland . . . I’m honestly growing so tired of the United States personally. I can’t wake up in the morning and just feel depressed all the time because everyone’s angry with each other all the time. It’s exhausting. This used to be a place of hope, of possibility. Really where anyone could come and try and do it and make it.

And now, this is just a total fantasy. It’s not even a fantasy. It’s a nightmare because it just simply isn’t true anymore. I mean, even to go to college, unless you go to one of the very, very top schools, it costs an absolute fortune to do so. And what’s happening in labor markets is unless you’re in the top 10 percent, your wages have pancaked. So how is that a good investment?

Blyth’s now even rethinking his choice to emigrate to the U.S. from Scotland: “I mean, I came here voluntarily,” he says. “I was an immigrant who became a citizen. And, you know, eventually you have to reconsider your choices.”

How damaged is this place? To Blyth, the U.S. cannot learn the most obviously reasonable lessons from a bad situation like the pandemic:

Nothing has been learned. If we learned anything, we would basically be doing high levels of contact tracing and testing. If we’d learned anything, we wouldn’t be politicizing masks. If we’d learned anything, we wouldn’t be pretending that this thing isn’t really as damaging as it is. And we just refuse to learn those lessons.

Our system, in Blyth’s view, was designed to prevent acting upon grand-scale lessons, even if they did get learned:

Essentially, we have this system that was set up for eighteenth-century politics, whereby an electoral college made sense, because you’re worried about someone trying to make themselves into a king; whereby this separation of powers are designed to make sure that the state is weak so the individual states themselves govern themselves. And we’re facing global pandemics, we’re facing global warming, we’re facing global security challenges. And it’s just a governmental system which is basically designed to fail.

So we’re now stuck with American thinking that prevents any real change or action:

We managed to take the second uprising in the American civil rights movement that had overwhelming support at the time of George Floyd and politicized it to the point now that among white Republicans, support for the protests are now in single digits . . . Even though it should be something that made us stop and think and come together and say we need to do better. That moment was there for a couple of months and then it was weaponized and then it was turned into party politics.

While something is broken, perhaps permanently, at the national level, Blyth does see glimmers of hope for other ways of being. Like working from home that could make us rethink our public life:

I mean, if you think about Pret a Manger: they’re basically a British company, expanded globally. They exist because of this crazy world where people drive along 95 and 93, they spend 40 minutes in a car park crawling into Boston, and then they finally get to work, and if they’re lucky, they get to stand for 15 minutes on a line at Pret a Manger to get a sandwich that was made by somebody who’s probably making it on minimum wage.

Why is that a good world? In the short term, employers might actually want you to come back to work, but in the long term, there’s gonna be massive over- capacity in all sorts of commercial real estate. So why not do something sensible with it? Some of the some of those buildings . . . are built really well . . . Why not turn them into public housing? We’ve been crying out for public housing.

If you want to have restaurants, your little sushi restaurant with 15 tables in a basement the size of a postage stamp is never coming back. So why not take the fact that price per square foot is going to fall and open up big European grand cafes of the Vienna style with tons of fans . . . We’re going to redeploy all this capital. None of it’s been destroyed. What cripples us is a lack of imagination on what to do with it.

With a little imagination, things could get better. But until that imagination takes over, maybe we should take a cue from Blyth and stop kidding ourselves.

Read: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

What if Americans are, together, having a psychedelic experience? How else could ~200,000 deaths be so successfully “downplayed,” and how else could climate-change denial persist, when this is a representative picture of a large part of the country lately:

Something has happened to our minds. Something makes us accept or downplay what would have been hyperbolically nightmarish not too long ago.

In Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Philip K. Dick’s 1974 scifi novel, a police state defined by mind-numbing entertainment culture gets reviewed through the lens of psychedelia. A character takes a drug that rewires collective thought about how the world works, and facts vanish (especially facts relating to one character’s existence). But at last, the psychedelic reality just intensifies what was there all along in the pre-existing, media-saturated, already-mind-warped reality of the novel. The book is confusing, it’s delirious, and it seems very 2020.

Here’s how the fictional drug KR-3 works in Dick’s sci-fi novel:

“A drug such as KR-3 breaks down the brain’s ability to exclude one unit of space out of another. So here versus there is lost as the brain tries to handle perception. It can’t tell if an object has gone away or if it’s still there. When this occurs the brain can no longer exclude alternative spatial vectors. It opens up the entire range of spatial variation. The brain can no longer tell which objects exist and which are only latent, unspatial possibilities. So as a result, competing spatial corridors are opened, into which the garbled percept system enters, and a whole new universe appears to the brain.”

Has smartphone mediation changed our experience of space and time in a way comparable to that psychedelic drug, allowing for a possible universe to assume a place in our brains in place of the actuality of climate change, hideous narcissism, and mass death? Maybe not, but something is undeniably happening to our thinking, and science fiction can help us reflect on it all.

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This Week’s Ephemeral Library

37 million displaced by the War on Terror. Trump’s mobile app collecting “massive amounts of data.” Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi: a big deal. Janet Malcolm: A Second Chance. George Packer says America’s Plastic Hour is Upon Us. Nathan Robinson remembers David Graeber. We did a terrific show with David about his book Bullshit Jobs.

See you next week, folks. There’s hope, really!