The Greatest Recession

Coexistent with the global rise of financial insolvency has been the equal, and yet less heralded loss of cultural capital. Urban dwellers will be familiar with the term “networking.” Prior to the Great Recession, finding a “good job” required on some level to “know someone.” Older friends, peers, and family members all could in theory use their existing employment status as a vector by which someone lacking known experience or credentials could enter their industry or specific company. (Concurrently, the necessity of networking almost certainly prefigured the rise of the intern, for those whose working contacts were either ineffectual or unrelated to a chosen field.)

The collapse of global markets and the attendant hemorrhaging of jobs from across business changed all of this. On one level, the financial ruin of certain companies and industries represented the loss of the Network itself, for if there is no Network for which to aspire to, any attempt to do so is a null and fruitless undertaking. In a different sense, such collapses prefigured the dissolution of networking because as industries shed workers, less and less were in a position for which they could approach, or be approached, about a foothold in the Network.

Under normal employment termination, one should, without much undue stress, be able to turn around and refocus on his or her network of contacts, then re-enter the workforce. In the best of scenarios, such a person’s acquired experience might even obviate the very need for networking. This is no longer the case however. As more and more lost (and continue to lose) their jobs, there were more unemployed workers networking in order to find their next employment opportunity. Unique, however, was that as each new unemployed worker was shed from the Network, their relationship to it was further diminished by every other worker thus shed–for each new unemployed worker is one less person with whom contact can increase a chance at returning to meaningful employment. It is the law of diminishing returns. One works harder for for less and less probability of a successful outcome–in this case, a job.

The unemployed person, thus stripped of financial capital which resulted from his or her loss of wage-earning employment, is now also devoid of a distinct level of cultural capital. Their existence matters less. Under normal conditions, all individuals maintain a basic cache of social worth which is invariably tied up in their concept of self-worth. Stripped of the ability to network or be networked entails a significant demotion in both measures–one inexorably entwined with the other.

The notion need not be abstracted: Individuals unknown to each other will at social events almost invariably ask three questions of one another prior to engaging in lengthier conversation. 1.) What is your name? 2.) Why are you here? (Often, How do you know so-and-so?) and 3.) What do you do? The latter is obviously the question to which we are concerned. It is one of the most uncomfortable and terrifying questions.

Any one person can “do” a number of things, but the question is obviously geared towards ascertaining what someone does professionally, invariably for wages. For the unemployed, there is no answer to this question, and therefore, there is typically no further discussion of it in our hypothetical scenario. Nothing is to be had from the unemployed person. There is no Network from which to entreat or even gossip about. In employment’s place is a void. If both of the parties are unemployed, the effect is no different, only the depth of the insolvency. Instead of one lost soul, there are two. Their worth to the wider social structure diminishes in correlation with their increasing disconnection to the Network. Concurrently, they rapidly lose worth to themselves.

Analyzing the effect of inflation on the individual, the great Bulgarian-born novelist and social theorist Elias Canetti understood the matter thus:

The individual feels depreciated because the unit on which he relied, and with which he had equated himself, starts sliding; and the crowd feels depreciated because the million is…. Together people are worth as little as each is worth alone. As the millions mount up, a whole people, numbered in millions, becomes nothing. [emphasis in the original]

In May, the US Department of Labor estimated the number of unemployed to be 15 million people. When numbers reach such fantastical heights, the resulting social stigma of being without work ceases to be and transmogrifies into an incontrovertible diminution of social value.