The End of Job Growth

Michel Houellebecq, men falling behind and more in this week's digest

I am presently in Moscow, Idaho giving a lecture at New St. Andrews College.

I have a new piece in American Compass about the end of job growth. It is about how weak demographic growth in much of America means that there won’t be any way to add jobs. You can’t add jobs without workers to fill them. A declining labor force means the end of job growth. I write:

This has profound implications for public policy. For one thing, it means that, in some places, all policy attempts to create jobs will fail. For example, a Republican state with these demographic trends that decides to cut taxes on “job creators” in order to stimulate job growth will discover that all they’ve done is give away revenues. While individual businesses can perhaps be subsidized to locate in the state—and there may even be a case for playing in the economic incentives game as a result of this decline—business tax cuts won’t result in net job growth overall. Again, you can’t add jobs without workers to fill them.

There are other implications of this. With falling birth rates at the national level, labor markets will be tighter all over the country. Places with an available quality labor forces will attract the jobs to put that labor to work. This means the ability of corporations to, for example, threaten to boycott states because of conservative social or other policies will be much reduced. We’re already starting to see this. The passage of socially conservative legislation in Texas, for example, hasn’t stopped businesses from pouring into the state. Texas has the labor force and a growing consumer market, and so business has to be there. Even Old North states will benefit from increased leverage in this regard.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Michel Houellebecq: “People who have humanitarian ideas are a catastrophe”

A couple of weeks ago, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq was the guest for the Financial Times Lunch with the FT. Houellebecq is one of the most prophetic voices about the state of modern society. I wrote about Houellebecq in Newsletter #74 and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, his work typically contains graphic depictions of sex that many here won’t want to read. These actually aren’t gratuitous, but related to his core points about the deep failures of sexual liberation. Nevertheless, be warned. One book that contains only limited sex is The Map and the Territory, which won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary prize.

This interview has a lot of classic Houellebecq. The first is an interesting look at how he functions as a sort of alpha male.

Houellebecq starts by talking about Poland, where we originally met. He was on a book tour, and I was the journalist tasked with interviewing him on stage in several cities. I have vivid memories of running back and forth along the train with his interpreter and publisher, desperately seeking an empty compartment so he could defy the smoking ban. He, on the other hand, has no recollection of ever meeting me, nor even that I had brought up the encounter in our recent email exchange. Clearly there are more interviewers in his life than Michel Houellebecqs in mine. 

Hah! Later on the talk about a major award he received:

Multiple provocations aside, in 2019 he received the Legion of Honour from President Macron for his literary output. “It was merited,” he assures me. 

His take on populism:

What is it, I ask, that has driven the rise of the French far right in the past 20 years? “Immigration,” he answers without hesitation. “And also, the total scorn of the elites.” 

He’s speaking in a low voice, in short sentences interspersed with long pauses, every now and then popping mysterious pills from a plastic bag. He mentions the 2005 referendum on the European constitution. The result was “No”, later overridden by the French parliament. “It was almost 20 years ago and people still remember it,” he says. “They really made fools of us.”

“It’s dangerous to mock people,” he adds, and pauses. “I mean, you can mock them, but there are limits.” 

…

The elites, he says, think of people as ploucs. “In America the equivalent is hillbilly.” Does he actually like hillbillies? I ask. He takes a while to consider. “Yes,” he says finally, but he pleads to not having any friends among the category. “I’m faithful to my class.”

He’s a great admirer of Christopher Lasch, an American historian who argued that modern global elites have more in common with each other than the poorer people from their own countries. “He was ahead of his time,” says Houellebecq. These elites are harder to dismantle than the nobility, he muses. “Nobility had nothing to explain their right to stay in power, apart from their birth. Contemporary elites claim intellectual and moral superiority.”

And doubling down on his view of the implication of sexual liberation:

As a woman, I must admit, it’s tricky to meet Houellebecq. He’s famous for describing us as sex objects with a sell-by date of pretty much 25. I tell him that I find this problematic — and depressing. He nearly jumps up from his chair, looking genuinely upset. “I think it’s dishonest,” he says. “All women, and really all, try to be as desirable as possible. And then when they start losing at the game, they contest the system that they were the first to uphold.” 

You can click over to read the whole thing. Again, the FT has a hard paywall, unfortunately. So I quoted as much as I could justify.

Best of the Web

Financial Times: Young women are starting to leave men behind - Here’s a chart of young men’s vs. young women’s income in the US.

The American Institute for Boys and Men has a new report on unnatural males deaths from fatal injuries and overdoses.

WaPo: Why Americans are having fewer kids — and why it could be a problem

Ryan Burge: On Evangelicals who rarely go to church

Bloomberg City Lab: Why Turning Churches Into Housing Is So Hard

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week in First Things.

New this week:

• The Bug Out Mindset (paid only) - It says something that more and more Americans are planning for the collapse

• Young Men Will Disrupt the American Church - As more young men than women attend church, that will challenge business as usual

• My podcast this week was with Nate Fischer on the macrotrends shaping tomorrow’s world.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.