After Capitalism: What the Signals are Saying Q2 2024

Here is the second installment of a quarterly check-in on what the signals are saying regarding After Capitalism. (See Q1 2024 here.) Drum roll please!

Recent Trends in U.S. Labor Mobility: Not So Fast

“U.S. labor mobility has declined steadily since the 1980s. This decline spans demographic categories of age, income, and education levels. This recent migration trend counters America’s historical experience of “restless mobility.” The authors, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, find that home attachment or “rootedness” (people prefer to live near family and social connections) accounts for about two-thirds of the recent decline in migration. Furthermore, people who lived away from home were significantly more likely to return home.

AH comment: We have seen much written about people feeling isolated and alienated and some say we are in a mental health crisis. I think this trend may suggest we are starting to do something about it. The pursuit of money and career at the expense of rootedness may be shifting.

How Brainerd’s New Ice Machine Exposes Community Apathy and Decline

Brainerd, Minnesota has unveiled an automated ice dispensing kiosk machine. The authors of the piece notes with sarcasm that “we’re very proud of it here .. we can now buy ice in bulk from a machine instead of, say, the far more burdensome method of getting it from a cooler at one of the many gas stations or grocery stores. The vote in favor included ‘screening,'” the jargon term planning officials use to describe the token shrubs and ornamental trees that we pretend will someday hide this abomination from view. At the same meeting, the chair of our planning commission fatalistically remarked that, while he didn’t want to see a failed restaurant torn down and replaced with this ice machine, ‘that’s capitalism.’ ”

AH comment: This one really struck a chord with me about all the micro-choices that are made that in and of themselves seem insignificant, but piled upon one another leave us with outcomes we wouldn’t have chosen. It also reveals an opportunity to make different choices. Getting over the state of apathy we are in is vital to After Capitalism.

Major Bank Fires Employees for Pretending to Work via “Simulation of Keyboard Activity“

Bloomberg reported that the American banking institution Wells Fargo had fired more than a dozen staffers after discovering that they were using some sort of clever automated trick to register keyboard inputs to make it look like they were hard at work on their computers.

AH comment: This one pretty much speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Oh my.

BTW, shout-out to Futurism.com for providing some excellent scanning material! — Andy Hines