What do you want me to do about it?

Ask yourself: How do I help the average person get a foothold?

I recently wrote about how teen depression and self-harm likely stems, at least in part, from the fact that most residents of the US can reasonably expect their kids to be materially worse off than they are. This is pushing parents to push their kids to do what’s necessary to get one of the few spots in the upper class.

A reader emailed to ask, “How can I support what you are saying on this extremely important article?”

Which I interpreted as “What can I do right now to help reduce US precarity so fewer parents feel the need to pressure their kids to "perform?"

Which is essentially the same question I was asking myself in another recent post:

Friday diary 29: Who the hell is this for?

Basically, I think one of my main goals right now is to influence the people who have influence to, first and foremost, think about things like economic precarity.

There’s a reason I’m framing the problem as economic precarity and not, say, poverty or income inequality. Those are bad. But they already get a lot of press, first. Second, standing at the edge of ruin has important ripple effects that aren’t necessarily the same as being in poverty or existing in a very unequal society.

Let’s just extremely briefly talk about some of the ripple effects of precarity specifically.

As I wrote, I think it contributes significantly to teen depression, anxiety, and self-harm.

Looking extremely systemically, I strongly believe economic precarity makes people less innovative. Innovation is the only way to get more net wealth out of the same materials. It’s the only way to “grow the pie,” economically speaking, over the long-term. Innovation requires taking risks. When you do something new, there’s always a risk your return will be lower than if you did things the way they’ve always been done. On a micro level, one reason government agencies tend to be less innovative than private companies is that they reward innovation far less than they punish failure. If a bureaucrat at the FDA, for example, saves a bunch of lives by streamlining part of the approval process he might get a pat on the back. But if that streamlining causes one death, even if it saves a shit-ton of money on net, he risks being fired.

Innovative companies take the opposite approach. “It’s okay to fail. It’s not okay to not try new things.” There’s a reason Facebook’s mantra was “Move fast and break things.” Innovation isn’t always good. But it’s necessary for growth.

Everyone talks about how many startups started “in a garage.” No one talks about how not everyone has access to a garage they can commandeer for months or years for free. Startup founders all tend to have one thing in common: They’re willing to take risks.

But who’s allowed to take risks in the US right now?

If a person living in economic precarity chooses to forgo a steady income for months or years to work on a startup, that usually starts a slide downward that may very well not end until they’re dead, homeless, or in prison. A study of San Francisco’s homeless population found that most of them had housing the Bay Area. They were living on the edge, and then something pushed them off. Millions of people are at risk of losing their housing if they lose a spouse to death or divorce, lose a job, or become disabled. Spending any time homeless vastly increases your likelihood of developing severe mental illness, which then makes it harder to find and maintain stable housing. Again, in a society without a functional social safety net that criminalizes poverty, once you lose your footing it’s a steep slide down to the bottom.

Startup founders are usually able to live with their parents and/or otherwise survive without a steady income for months or years.

Merely having a family that can let you live with them without fear of eviction is actually a huge privilege. Many people are part-time homeless people. Their families can’t let them stay full-time because their landlords will evict them for having too many people in the home.

By forcing most people to live in precarity, we’re robbing them of the ability to safely take risks. They’re forced to do work they don’t enjoy as much. And everyone else is robbed of the prosperity we’d otherwise enjoy.

How many people would start businesses or take a job at a small startup if they didn’t have to worry about health insurance? Everyone is poorer and many of us are living more miserable lives because as a society we’ve decided it’s okay for most people to have to choose between a full-time job at a huge company or living in fear of a medical bankruptcy.

Economic precarity, more than income or education or racism, predicted support for Donald Trump over other Republicans in the 2016 primary. It’s fueling populism and authoritarianism.

Research is super clear that kids who grow up in poverty and have unstable home lives have worse adulthoods. Economic precarity exacerbates mental illness, incarceration, sickness, early death, STIs, crime, lower educational attainment, etc.

You get the point. Economic precarity is bad. So what’s to be done?

I want everyone who reads to look at every question from the standpoint of, “How do we help the average person get a foothold?”

What can we do to ensure most people don’t face total ruin as a likely result of taking a risk? What policies will help ensure the new wealth our economy creates stops disproportionately accruing to the top 20% of households? How do we change the tax system to be less regressive? How do we reduce some of the barriers to starting a business or building apartments? How do we stop police departments from making tons of money from fining people in low-income neighborhoods for minor traffic violations? What child support reforms will lead to fewer kids and fathers living in poverty? How do we stop CPS from unnecessarily traumatizing kids and exacerbating systemic racism and intergenerational poverty?

I have answers to all of these questions. They’re not *the* answers. Those don’t exist. And if they do exist today, they’ll be different tomorrow.

It’s not possible for every person be intimately acquainted with every policy idea in every sector of government. But I would ask that every person find something to do that’s aimed at helping the average person get a foothold. Maybe it’s volunteering at your local homeless shelter. Maybe it’s advocating for new housing in your neighborhood. Maybe it’s voting for the candidate who promises to hold police accountable.

If I knew what the highest possible leverage move was, I’d be doing it. But it probably depends on your skill set and interests and location and available time and energy. Don’t worry about what the best thing to do is. Start doing something and remain open to feedback. As the startup guys say, iterate and pivot.

But if you really want me to give you a specific directive, advocating for new housing in your neighborhood. Much love, my babies.

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