Notes on Homelessness, Neoliberal Economics, and Other Things.
Preliminaries to decisions about the future: ours (family level), and our world's (civilization level).
Note: unlike most of my pieces this is a potpourri. Portions were written for other pieces but I was unable to use them before now.
Publications Past and Forthcoming; a Few Other Random Items.
First item. On the first of January I published an article on America’s broken health care system which proposed primary prevention as the fix. You’ll find it here, and I include it here because there’s a chance someone might see it, and the article won’t be useful to anyone otherwise. Medium isn’t a particularly Big Ideas friendly platform (but are any large platforms Big Ideas friendly these days?).
Primary prevention is definitely a health idea worth spreading!
Second item. During January of the past couple of years I’ve penned a “Who I Am, What I’m Doing Here” kind of piece (last year’s is here), and I’ll definitely do that this year before the end of the month.
The material below should tide you over. None of this will be available elsewhere. Twenty twenty-five is going to be a crucial year: both for myself and the family I married into, and — I suspect — for the world.
The former is easier to predict and control than the latter — to say the least! So, in accordance with the Stoic in me, I find myself wanting to focus more on the former than on the latter. I don’t know if readers will find personal stuff interesting or not. Probably not. It’s not glittery like gold or sexy like Nicole Kidman. We’re moving in perhaps four months. I’m already devoting time to preparations. I expect the effort to be a grind and will have to resist the temptation to say, “Wake me when it’s over!”
I’ll try to keep latent narcissism to a minimum.
The larger, civilization-scale issues won’t leave me alone anyway. The Christian in me reminds us that this is God’s world, and that ultimately He is in charge. Even if it isn’t always clear what that amounts to, and even if it doesn’t appear to be His policy to save us from our screw-ups.
Public Immiseration Revisited: The Homelessness Pandemic.
This was intended for “Three Existential Threats” and axed because that was already too long. Even though it perfectly illustrates, in brutal fashion, Peter Turchin’s public immiseration: this woman’s sad downfall after she couldn’t work and was thrown to the wolves.
Her name is — or was — Joanne Marie Erickson. She lived in the Los Angeles area. She’d been an occupational therapist. Helping others, that is, and according to past coworkers, with an impeccable bedside manner.
She had to stop working at age 65 because she was struggling with health issues of her own, including injuries sustained in falls. She lived alone: had family back East but was estranged from them (we aren’t told why). She’d sought work, been unable to find anything, was living on Social Security which was paying her $1,800/month. She’d all but burned through her meager savings.
You cannot live on $1,800/month in California. With inflation having skyrocketed, you can’t rent a decent apartment for that.
Months behind in rent, she found an eviction notice taped to her door, courtesy of her landlord, last January. With no legal representation she had no chance of keeping her place. The neoliberal system structurally benefits those with money at the expense of those without money. The latter cannot afford decent representation or sometimes any representation at all.
She passed away last May: homeless, broke, and probably broken-hearted.
She’d found a homelessness advocate, a woman named Naomi Waka, who’d found her a couch to sleep on in a friend’s house, so she was never forced to live in a shelter or in her vehicle: old and without functioning heating or air-conditioning.
She also came to the attention of the author of the article I linked to above.
They weren’t enough.
Erickson’s having an advocate able to write about her plight is doubtless the only reason I’m able to write about her. How many homeless people die alone, under worse circumstances in neoliberal America, because no one ever noticed them?
Homelessness hit a record high in 2024.
I see red whenever someone tells me how the economy has “boomed” during the Bidenista years, because the Dow went over 40,000. This is not the real economy, in which millions of people struggle daily with part-time temp work, or in “gigs,” while the cost of rent, groceries, utilities, continue to arise in our financialized economic environment even though “inflation is coming down.” This is the economy of one-percenters — the Second Gilded Age — and in many cases, that of point-zero-zero-one percenters.
In this system, the haves worship money like a god. For many of the have-nots, it’s more of a controlling, demonic force, the absence of which slowly destroys their lives.
Yes, some homeless people made bad choices. Others, like Joanne Marie Erickson, are victims of circumstances beyond their control. Whichever of these is the case, are any of them less human?
Turning the reins of this soliloquy to one of the haves, a billionaire named Nick Hanauer who, ten years ago, penned an essential article warning his fellow haves that “the pitchforks are coming.” I recall when his article first appeared. It brought me up short. I don’t think I was ready.
The majority of 99 percenters can’t afford pitchforks! Which doesn’t mean they won’t find a younger political advocate who can! (And do what? Do we really want to know? For some ideas, check out French history just prior to the Revolution.)
Hanauer, in accordance with what little there is of an economic left* in America, identifies neoliberalism as the enemy. He has credibility. A lot of it. He knows how to make the system work on his behalf, and he’s figured out why it’s not working for others. He developed solid criticisms of this system in his TED talk. He sounds like he actually cares about the future.
Nick Hanauer on Neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is a philosophy of political economy. Economists don’t like the phrase political economy (although Adam Smith used it). They’d like to think that what they’re doing qualifies as value-neutral science and doesn’t simply use its charts, graphs, and mathematizations to rationalize an ideology. To Hanauer, it’s “dangerously wrong” (his phrase)?
By way of preliminaries: “it isn’t capital that creates economic growth, it’s people; … it isn’t self-interest that promotes the public good, it’s reciprocity; and it isn’t competition that produces our prosperity, it’s cooperation. What we can now see is that an economics that is neither just nor inclusive can never sustain the high levels of social cooperation necessary to enable a modern society to thrive.”
So what went wrong. It goes back at least to 1970, the year neoliberal godfather Milton Friedman penned The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.
Neoliberalism’s first false assumption, according to Hanauer, “is that the market is an efficient equilibrium system, which basically means that if one thing in the economy, like wages, goes up, another thing in the economy, like jobs, must go down.”
There’s never been data to support this claim. Despite their vast differences, Karl Marx and Henry Ford both realized that for capitalism to function, workers must have money to spend. Ford accomplished this by raising his workers’ wages, so they could actually buy the cars his factories produced. His corporation thrived, as did other corporations that did the same. During one period of U.S. history — the late 1940s through the early 1970s — this mindset built the strongest economy in human history. The dirty little secret here for the rich is that this meant less skimming off the top of what Marx called surplus value. Heavy taxes on the rich disincentivized compulsive profiteering. Eventually, of course, credit cards replaced higher wages as a means of getting “money” into consumers’ pockets, and financialization partially replaced production. What evolved structurally was a system based on debt which incentivized and monetized fiscal irresponsibility.
Markets don’t move towards “equilibrium.” This is a myth. “Raising wages doesn’t kill jobs, it creates them; because, for instance, when restaurant owners are suddenly required to pay restaurant workers enough so that now even they can afford to eat in restaurants, it doesn’t shrink the restaurant business, it grows it….”
Neoliberalism’s second false assumption “is that the price of something [or someone] is always equal to its value, which basically means that if you earn $50,000 a year and I earn $50 million a year, that’s because I produce a thousand times as much value as you… [I]t will not surprise you to learn that this is a very comforting assumption if you’re a CEO paying yourself $50 million a year but paying your workers poverty wages….”
Then he drops the bomb.
“People are not paid what they are worth. They are paid what they have the power to negotiate, and wages’ falling share of GDP is not because workers have become less productive but because employers have become more powerful…. And by pretending that the giant imbalance in power between capital and labor doesn’t exist, neoliberal economic theory became essentially a protection racket for the rich.”
Add to this the tax cuts on the rich and the “trickle-down economics” of the 1980s, the decade neoliberalism became entrenched as the official narrative of the Republican Party (in the 1990s it became, along with neoconservatism in foreign policy, the official economic narrative of the Democratic Party).
Hanauer then identifies a third false assumption built into neoliberal economics which he calls “by far the most pernicious.”
Homo Economicus.
It’s an idea I’ve studied philosophically, because it reflects one of Western philosophy’s worst mistakes: the Cartesian distortion of the mind (by the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes) into a private “inner stage” of pure intellect, its only tool being logical calculation. The world outside this “inner stage,” in this worldview, is made up of something neutral and lifeless called “matter.” Something to be extracted from to our heart’s content!
This is a longer story than I can get into here, but the idea of the essence of a person as a kind of rational homunculus stuck. It filtered into classical liberalism in the broad sense, fell on hard times at the hands of psychologists such as Freud and others who actually tried to study human motivations empirically; but neoliberals revived it in spades. All forms of liberalism offered “a behavioral model that describes human beings as something called homo economicus, which basically means that we are all perfectly selfish, perfectly rational, and relentlessly self-maximizing.”
The financialized system incentivizes acting on this — for the haves, anyway, and ambitious elites in Turchin’s sense who want to enter the Big Club.
As I’ve put it previously, this system assumes that what cannot be monetized is worthless.
This, obviously, is the prevailing philosophy of Big Tech controlled social media. It’s the reason that when you log onto Facebook (if you still do) you’re feed now pummels you with ads instead of showing you posts from your friends and relatives, as it did if you signed up back in the ‘00s.
Hanauer continues:
“[J]ust ask yourselves, is it plausible that every single time for your entire life, when you did something nice for somebody else, all you were doing was maximizing your own utility? Is it plausible that when a soldier jumps on a grenade to defend fellow soldiers, they’re just promoting their narrow self-interest? If you think that’s nuts, contrary to any reasonable moral intuition, that’s because it is … but it is this behavior model which is at the cold, cruel heart of neoliberal economics, and it is as morally corrosive as it is scientifically wrong, because if we accept at face value that humans are fundamentally selfish, and then we look around the world at all of the unambiguous prosperity in it, then it follows logically, then it must be true by definition, that billions of individual acts of selfishness magically transubstantiate into prosperity and the common good….”
This, of course, is Gekkoism: “greed … is good.”
And, like Friedman said, the only purpose of a corporation is to maximize gain for its CEO, top brass, and its shareholders, often other corporations (today, think: BlackRock!).
Widening inequality? According to neoliberalism the have-nots are exclusively made up of losers who made bad choices.
Let Darwinian natural selection take care of them!
Like the Joanne Marie Ericksons of the world, who chose to get sick, or injured, I presume.
A Different Economics Based on a Person’s Intrinsic Value.
A different economics is urgently needed, argues Hanauer, an economics that reflects how most real human beings (as opposed to an abstraction) are cooperative, reciprocal, and intuitive moral agents. Young children are conscious of unfairness and will cry foul if one child is given more toys than a sibling. The amorality of neoliberalism is not our default setting. It is learned.
If our superpowers are in fact our capacity to cooperate on productive actions, reciprocate, and employ our built-in sense of right versus wrong, justice versus injustice, then a sound economic philosophy and business practice ought to reflect this. Otherwise we get more and more of the tragedies we are seeing, as human beings are thrown to the wolves and unable to survive.
It becomes a dystopia where the “pitchforks” might come out at any time!
Imagine what we could accomplish with a worldview holding that all human persons have intrinsic value, once this is identified and set out as a fundamental principle, built into family structure and parenting, and then into education however conceived and delivered!
Intrinsic value is the value human beings have by virtue of being human beings, without regard to their economic status or any other group characteristic.
The best foundation I’ve found for this idea holds that we were created in God’s image as finite versions of God’s infinite Logos (capacity to understand the world as it is) and Ethos (capacity to act morally with respect to the world and to each other).
Imagine what could result if this idea could be built into parenting, into education at all levels, into politics, and into business practiced by responsible adults!
Would it not offer a higher perspective that resolves the various “us” versus “them” dichotomies that are presently siloing as many of us as possible into mutually antagonistic camps?
It wouldn’t be Utopia. Nothing can offer that. We’re fallible, and always will be.
But such a worldview could offer an alternative to the prevailing materialism (the descendent of that mysterious “matter” in Cartesian philosophy) which holds, among other things, that every spiritual experience of the world and sense of contact with a Transcendent Reality is reducible to neuro-chemical firings and sequences inside our heads. Materialism as the worldview or philosophy underwrites not just neoliberalism but Marxism and fascism. We need to get rid of it before it gets rid of our civilization — and us. I wrote a book about this. (See below.)
Things to Come.
Systems are what is most real in the spatio-temporal world. They are everywhere, ubiquitous: our bodies are systems; our immune system is, well, a system; a business corporation is a system; the economy is a system; civilization is a system. Historical cycles are systems. Process is also everywhere, moreover; processes are how systems come into being, develop and change in response to their environment, and either thrive or falter.
All systems have needs or they die. Human beings have needs; and so do civilizations. I have a piece coming that works out some of the systemic needs of our civilization and how they’re not being met. Its context will be the failure of a purely “voluntarist” (entirely market-based) system cannot be made to work on any scale larger than a group of people small enough to fit inside your front room, if even that.
Beyond that, I am unsure. I’ve formatted what has been, for going on three years now, my most popular article on Medium (“So You Want to Get a PhD in Philosophy?”) for separate publication as a slim booklet, should I decide to leave that site. Stay tuned.
*A number of Chileans have told me: “there is no left in America.” For years this puzzled me. It seemed obviously wrong. Then I realized: the cultural left I knew from American academia and an economic left are very different animals.
The primary difference is that the problems the latter sees are real: problems of economic inequality, the relationship between labor and capital, how resources are distributed, how “economic hit men” have helped advanced nations colonize and destroy less advanced ones through global-scale swindles, and so on.
Cultural leftism advances nonsense about microaggressions, pronouns, gender fluidity, etc. When not obsessing over sex, it is bedeviled by Donald Trump as a person and political figure. Its advocates seem to have little or no interest in the factors that enabled Trump to become the first person ever to win the presidency never having held a previous political office. I would think this would be of great interest even to his foes. The cultural left, in the end, is a product of academic cubicle-land insularity, unaware of its own tremendous advantages, finding slights where none exist, misusing systems thinking, and dismissing legitimate calls for responsibility. In most cases the answer really is to tell its Ivy League educated professors and other advocates, all of whom are numbered among the haves in academia at least, to grow up.
There is a parallel distinction between the economic right and the cultural right. If you’re guessing that I don’t think much of the economic right these days, you’re pretty much on target.
_______________________________
Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).
First supplement:
"Baby Boomer Homeowners Fear Losing Their Properties as they Spend Down their Savings."
https://www.businessinsider.com/older-homeowners-at-risk-of-homelessness-retirement-2025-1 or https://www.yahoo.com/news/baby-boomer-homeowners-fear-losing-100102425.html.