Yelp has a hundred million unique monthly visitors, up from seventy million at this time last year. The Dow Jones average just reached an all-time high, having passed 14,000 last week, while, according to the Times, corporate profits are enjoying “a golden age”; as a share of national income, they are at their highest point since 1950.
Day by day, problem by problem, American life is being fine-tuned to the point where experts now confidently predict a state of near-complete perfection by Season Five of “Girls.”
In other news, America’s economic and social decline continues. The percentage of corporate profits going to employees is at its lowest level since 1966. Unemployment remains stuck around eight per cent, and the long-term jobless make up almost forty per cent of the total—historically high figures that continue to baffle economists. “We have an unemployment crisis and only a debt problem,” says Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate at M.I.T. The concentration of wealth at the top grows ever more pronounced. From 2009 to 2011—the years of the financial crisis and the recovery—the income of the top one per cent rose 11.2 per cent. The income of the bottom ninety-nine per cent actually shrank 0.4 per cent.
Eighty per cent of Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are. Analysts predict that the figure will pass ninety per cent at some point during Season Three of “House of Cards.”
The good news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies saw its profits increase by thirty-five per cent.
The bad news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies hired a net total of zero workers. Last month, four days after the price of its shares passed a record high of ninety dollars, the company announced that it would eliminate three thousand employees, after having let go four thousand in 2012.
Detroit is experiencing a boom in private investment, with two new clothing stores already open, and a boutique hotel, coffee-bean roasters, and a Whole Foods store planned for downtown.
Detroit is so broke that its firefighters don’t have enough boots and toilet paper. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has announced the appointment of an emergency manager to run the city’s finances.
“It’s almost a tale of two cities,” Rachel Lutz, the thirty-two-year-old owner of the clothing stores, told the Times.
It’s almost a tale of two countries—on the same news day, in the same story, in the same sentence, in the violent yoking together of apparent opposites. “Around the country, as businesses have recovered, the public sector has in many cases struggled and shrunk.” “Although experts estimate that sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, Wall Street does not expect the cuts to substantially reduce corporate profits—or seriously threaten the recent rally in the stock market.” “The wealthiest .1 per cent of Americans now enjoy a life expectancy of 107.3 years and typically die in their sleep, while the bottom sixty per cent can anticipate living only 56.8 years and are statistically more likely to perish in hideous car accidents and firearm incidents, from drug overdoses, or after losing their lower extremities to diabetes.”
All right, I made up the last one. But it’s thinkable, even probable. Things are moving in that direction. Peter Thiel—perhaps the only conservative libertarian tech billionaire who spends much time worrying about this situation, and who also contributes part of his fortune to finding the “cure for aging”—once told me, “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.”
