Felipe Ossa, a young playwright, debuted a play in New York last week that suggested that billionaires adopt multiple members of the middle class as economic concubines. It’s the only way, he demonstrated satirically, to close the wealth gap.
This has everything to do with a meeting of influential economists three-quarters of a continent away. The Grand Tetons, a ridiculously majestic mountain range in Wyoming, isn’t a place most Americans get to see – but important economists do. Every year the most important of them meet, only by invitation, at the Jackson Hole resort to hash out the world’s big economic problems.
As rare protests this year show, there’s a stark symbolism in having the brains of our economic operations gather so far from civilization. While the economy on the ground is struggling, our best economists are chatting high above the fray, near a substitute Mount Olympus.
The ultimate stimulus
With little help on the horizon from any of the Olympians of US financial world, one playwright has found inspiration for sharp satire. Felipe Ossa, a former financial journalist with Dow Jones, wrote a play that premiered at the New York Fringe Festival this month. The play, called The Ultimate Stimulus, is a bawdy monologue – delivered with dry humor by Tanya O’Debra -– that starts with a battery of economic charts showing the depth of inequality in the US. The end result is part Thomas Piketty, part Occupy Wall Street, and part Cinemax.
The Ultimate Stimulus presents a solution for our economic ills. If America has a very, very, very rich 1%, and an underpaid, debt-ridden middle class looking for relief, why shouldn’t the billionaires adopt multiple members of the middle class as … concubines?
These five-year-long, two-tier marriages, as Ossa calls them, would be a kind of direct economic stimulus: billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg, P Diddy and George Soros would have a harem of five or so middle-class people with high debt. In return for sex and companionship, the billionaires would pay the bills of the underclass. Eventually the billionaires would run into each other at Davos and compete over whose concubines had grown their wealth and education faster. The only catch is that the concubines would have to sleep with the billionaires; “otherwise it’s just adult adoption”, Ossa writes.
The end result: a gradual wealth transfer from the billionaires to the middle class – for services rendered.
It’s absurd and hilarious, which, as good satire does, serves to illuminate just how difficult our economic problems are. The weakness of the US consumer may only become evident when wages are so low and prices so high the only thing left to buy is someone else’s body, and the only paying jobs left are selling sex.
Can we do better than that? Of course we can. But first our politicians, CEOs and economists have to see things levelly on earth, where the rest of us stand.
The high, thin air of Jackson Hole
It’s a matter of perspective: way up there, what’s the vista? Do they see what we see? Most economists, including those of the Federal Reserve, tend to tout that we are in a time of economic recovery. In dense jargon they talk about “improving labor market conditions” (a better job outlook) and use that as a reason to cut down on stimulus efforts.
Technically, that is true. The recession ended in 2009. Except, instead of being a healing period, this recovery is leaving a scar on the middle class.
The middle class hasn’t experienced the recovery that the mathematical equations of economics says it has. Evidence of that includes high debt, low borrowing, and low wages as well as still-high unemployment and people dropping out of the labor force.
US households are struggling with high debt. American households have$8.38tn of loans to pay back, including mortgages, which as much as they owed in 2007 just before the financial crisis. Mortgage loans are still hard to get, meaning that those with houses will have trouble moving for a new job; with mortgages hard to get, housing costs at near-record levels, and paychecks stagnant, the financial benefit of moving for a job is half what it was a few decades ago.
Jobs are hard to get. Over 19 million people want a full-time job but tooka part-time gig because it was all that was available. With moving ruled out, and jobs scarce nearly everywhere, more people are staying put and hoping jobs will open up in their towns. Long-term unemployment, though falling, is still a massive problem.
The Federal Reserve does not have its head entirely in the clouds. Janet Yellen, the chair, has been particularly attentive to the unemployment problem. Where many pundits have excitedly touted the falling unemployment rate as a victory, Yellen acknowledges the dropping rate of the jobless – currently around 6% – “overstates the improvement” for jobs.
Still the question remains: are economists, breathing that thin, high mountain air in Jackson Hole, really aware of the murky atmosphere the rest of us are breathing?
A handful of protesters trekked out to Wyoming this week to ask that question. Even with large signs and bright green “What Recovery?” shirts, they were tiny in size against the backdrop of the giant mountains behind them. Their influence is even tinier when measured against that wielded by the powerful economists who run the Federal Reserve system.
Those economists could do more to acknowledge how far from a real recovery we are. Promising things will get better eventually doesn’t really work when Americans are thinking about how to pay the bills today.
It will take more than group at Jackson Hole to reach this acknowledgement. Here’s the big secret: the economists really can’t do all that much. They can play with interest rates, or add stimulus measures, but their tools are very limited considering the scale of the US economy, with its moving gears and whistles of small businesses, big banks and giant corporations. Congress could be of some help – withinfrastructure investment for instance – but has chosen not to be. CEOs, hoarding cash for their shareholders while cutting costs and jobs, have done close to nothing at all.
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