This May in Finland I was lucky enough to spot this beetle on a tree stump. The stump was also hosting a fungus, recycling nutrients. Life goes on.
Now I am in California. The job situation is bad. The official US unemployment percentage for July 2025 was 4.2%. Functionally unemployed in July 2025 were estimated by Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to be 24.7% of US labor force. With AI, especially white collar unemployment is estimated to soar further. I think AI is an excuse for job cuts resulting from austerity enforced elimination of Bullshit Jobs.
David Graeber estimated in his 2014 book Bullshit Jobs – A Theory that about 40% of the jobs are unnecessary and people are being paid, often well, to do nothing useful.
Meanwhile, we have printed money, that is accumulated debt, faster than productivity has grown since the previous century, but now the buy-now-pay-later Ponzi scheme is unraveling. Most of the printed money seems to have been soaked into stock market and complex derivatives, benefiting governments and their servants and ‘NGOs’ and the 0.1%, which have sucked the money (plus interest) away from real world investment. While also saddling the people with unpayable public debt loads, the consequences of which manifest as increased taxation, reduced services, and proliferating licensing requirements and fines, which both are additional taxes in disguise to government coffers.
Now the production is no more, despite the inshoring attempts of the current administration of US and the 99.9% are doing price discovery. The economy is shedding jobs. Optimally the lost positions should have been the 40% Bullshit Jobs, but it seems that many useful positions are eliminated, too, further damaging the economy.
Part of this is the loss of consuming power driven by the mass functional unemployment. While the people with Bullshit Jobs may not have produced anything, they used their salaries to keep up the consumption demand, being vital for the survival of many small real businesses like pizzerias, lawn care companies, cosmetologists and car dealerships.
Another part of it is the pathologies of the system itself. After years of promoting incompetents into leadership positions, be it by nepotism, political clientilism (including DEI) or slack allowed by easy (freshly printed) money, the managerial class no longer recognizes which workers are necessary for operating a business. A case example: Boeing.
The regular people (including many of the 40%ers) are now suffering from another effect of money printing, inflation, including food inflation. Although food (and other) inflation is not driven by money printing alone but by money supply growing faster than food (or other) supply. The demand is semielastic, if that is a word. The former middle class downgrades consumption and the poor skip meals, but the number of mouths to feed depends on immigration plus births minus emigration plus mortality.
Unfortunately, thanks to the globalization, also problems are global. I think food inflation in the West is not only due to reduction of food production per capita or collapsing Western economies but also due to increasing wealth in poor and middle income countries, that now can better compete for the global resources.
I also believe that the global food production has not kept apace with the global money printing, and though the poorest in the West have traditionally outspent the poor and even the middle classes in poorer countries, now even in West we now have food inflation because other countries can pay for the food on global export markets. For example, China has during recent years bought massive amounts of grain, pulses, oils, meats, fruits increasing price pressures.
Meanwhile, people with money to travel are leaving global south for global north increasing pressure in the Western countries. Traditionally, if food supplies or economy grow tighter people emigrate. However, it is not the poorest of the poor who can apply for visas or pay for human smugglers if they are not eligible for a visa. Nowadays the situation in the departure country does not does not need to be catastrophal to induce emigration. Just the perceived better economic opportunities in other (including Western) countries – thanks to mass media and ubiquitous internet -, and the comparative ease of traveling are now major drivers of mass migration from poorer countries to wealthier, and if the situation in the country receiving the immigrants changes, the flow of people will head some other place.
Thus, I think that fewer people are starving to death but the price of the global affluence paradoxically is that more people in West go hungry.
Some time ago I was in a grocery market here in California, not a hugely expensive one. They advertised for two avocados for seven dollars. The economy may be toast but it won’t be an avocado toast.
PlanktonPunkt 