In “Mother Blues,” Ray Wylie Hubbard sings about his dearest wishes as a young man — having a stripper girlfriend and a gold-topped Les Paul guitar.
Then he adds:
“Be careful what you wish for, you may git ’em.”
That line comes to mind whenever I think about the hard stop coming toward the Money People. Today, after half a century of having the ball and marching up and down the field against those who labor, the Money People have just about everything they ever wished for, starting with most of the money in the world.
But they are about to start losing the game. The people who work for a living, which is most of us, are about to stage an amazing comeback.
This won’t happen due to brilliant political leadership. We don’t have any.
It won’t happen because “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” either.
It will happen because of decisions made by ordinary people around the world about whether to have children. And then, how many children to have.
If any.
The power of demography
The balance of power between the Money People and workers will change because of demography. It happens to be the only future that’s mostly known because the people have already been born and counted.
Let’s start with China. If the opening of commerce with China unleashed hundreds of millions of low-wage workers on the world in 1971 and suppressed the wages of American workers for decades, that “supply chain” is now drying up. China is now one of the…
