Reminder: Insecurity is Manufactured

Astra Taylor and Peter S. Goodman remind us that the game is rigged -- there is no reason why we all shouldn't have everything we need.

I don't want to be ~that person, but I have been doing some reading lately which has reminded me that -- so to speak -- the game is rigged against the poor and hardworking people and always has been. Here are two excerpts from their respective books to explain.  

From p. 34-36 of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart by Astra Taylor:

The powerful have never wanted the masses to be secure. In the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers denounced security as a sin and an insult to God-"perverse security, as one seventeenth-century theologian memorably called it.51 And as we've seen, insecurity has long been viewed as a useful mechanism to incentivize people to perform or suffer the consequences. "Along with the carrot of pecuniary reward must go the stick of personal economic disaster," John Kenneth Galbraith observed. 52 Manufactured insecurity reflects a cynical theory of human motivation, one that says people will work only under the threat of duress, not from an intrinsic desire to create, collaborate, and care for one another. Insecurity goads us to keep working, earning, and craving - craving money, material goods, prestige, and more, more, more [...] In a world beset by staggering inequality, it is easy to see what poor people lack-cash, most obviously, and thus the means to acquire basic necessities. But we should also remember those ineffable and invaluable things that all human beings need and seek-connection, camaraderie, meaning, purpose, contentment, safety, self-esteem, respect. These are things that our highly competitive society makes artificially scarce, despite the fact they don't actually have to be in short supply. Indeed, far from being zero-sum, these immaterial things become more abundant the more people use them. If we're going to disentangle the insecurities we face today-distinguishing the manufactured insecurity of capitalism and the existential insecurity [...] in order to alleviate what unnecessary suffering we can, we must recognize the trick being played on us. Manufactured insecurity encourages us to amass money and objects as surrogates for the kinds of security that cannot actually be commodified, the kind of security we can find only in concert with others.

- Astra Taylor, emphasis mine

From p. 262-263 of How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain by Peter S. Goodman:

Companies that produced and distributed a vast range of goods, from shaving cream to medicine, had captured dominant holds over their markets while concentrating production in enormous, centralized factories. That allowed them to limit supply, which tended to push prices higher. And it left consumers vulnerable to shortages and price spikes whenever something went awry.

The journalist Barry Lynn had once dissected the impact of a single merger, the 2005 takeover of Gillette by the household goods behemoth Procter & Gamble. Through a variety of brands that conveyed the illusion of robust consumer choice, the combined entity sold more than 75 percent of men's razors, and roughly 60 percent of laundry and dishwasher detergent. It sold half of all toothbrushes, diapers, and nonprescription heartburn drugs. One single brand-- Bounty--controlled nearly 45 percent of the market for paper towels.

Lynn detailed how Kraft, then the world's second-largest producer of food, had used a 2000 merger with Nabisco to capture major brands like Oreo cookies and Planters peanuts. Then, Kraft shut down thirty-nine processing plants and eliminated one-fourth of its products to boost its profit margins.

Engineered scarcity was an excellent way to lift prices and satisfy shareholders, but it came at the expense of reliability. Every shock risked producing shortages. The consequences frequently involved more than ersatz chocolate cream cookies.

In the spring of 2022, parents in much of the United States found that baby formula had suddenly become nearly impossible to find, an emergency for many families. The immediate explanation seemed reasonable. A plant that made formula in Michigan had become contaminated with a lethal strain of bacteria, an episode blamed for the deaths of two babies. The operator of the plant, Abbott Labs, had shut the factory and issued a recall, yielding shortages.

But as the monopoly expert Matt Stoller pointed out, Abbott was not some niche supplier of baby formula. It controlled 43 percent of the market, selling through popular brands such as Similac. Abbott and two other major conglomerates, Mead Johnson and Nestlé, collectively owned 98 percent of the market.

In a truly competitive market, companies would feel pressure to safeguard the quality of their products and ensure adequate sup-plies, or otherwise risk losing sales to rivals. But dominance meant that rivals were few, diminishing the usual incentives for responsible stewardship.

- Peter S. Goodman, emphasis mine

More like this over at Aeon.com 

No, this is post is not sponsored.

• The spectre of insecurity: Liberals have forgotten that in order for our lives not to be nasty, brutish and short, we need stability. Enter Hobbes by Jennifer M. Morton
• It never was golden: ‘The good old days’ is a virulent falsehood that infects those whose defences have been weakened by fear and insecurity by Alan J. Levinonitz
• Men at work: The age of austerity has transformed work, but what it means to be a man has not caught up by Allison J. Pugh
• Who gets to feel secure?: Security is one thing to a Black mother in a favela, another to a politician keen on law and order. They should be the same by Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò