New and Old #260
Blue-collar culture, the many housing crises, e-commerce deception, and is it the phones?
Low-wage work isn’t a job. It’s a whole world with its own logic and norms, Positive Sum, Abi Olvera, March 9, 2026
This is interesting, and I suspect, as Olvera argues, that most elite-types don’t really grok this:
This is how low-wage work actually functions. Workers stack income sources. They optimize each one (e.g. hours, tips, scheduling flexibility) and fill the gaps with others. Gig work isn’t a separate economy.
Media coverage usually treats fast food workers, gig workers, and home health aides as three separate populations with three separate problems.
Workers switch jobs constantly—and across sectors.
The turnover rate in low-wage work is roughly one job per year to eighteen months. Workers don’t just change employers. They change sectors.
The women around me moved between daycare, home health aide, cashier, and retail depending on who was hiring, which manager was tolerable, and which shift fit around their kids. Those latter three jobs (plus fast food or counter work) are the four occupations that make up 29 percent of all employment paying under $15 an hour.
I’ve mentioned this little story before, about a professor I had in grad school, for public policy, who worked in a factory for a few years in college, many decades ago. He didn’t like it, but he talked a little about how it was useful to him to have some actual experience of another part of the economy.
This is not ideological, or elite-bashing, or “working with your hands is more worthy than working with your brain,” or any of that. It’s just that “policy” is ultimately not an abstraction, but for folks who’ve been privileged and basically always lived in the white-collar world, it can seem like it is.
She also makes a point that isn’t exactly popular, but is also probably true:
A friend worked at a small food stall. When it closed, the owners didn’t pay his last two weeks. Recovery took months.
When Circuit City shut down, I was paid for my last shift without any effort on my part. The corporate structure meant there was someone to complain to. It also meant the media would care if they didn’t. Journalists pay attention when the employer is a recognizable name.
If anything, the common complaint about large employers is that they’re selective. Small businesses are more willing to hire someone with no experience. I didn’t get a Starbucks offer until I had years of waitressing behind me.
Large employers aren’t the bottom of the labor market. They’re something workers must work up to.
Nice piece. Read the whole thing.
The United States Doesn’t Have a Housing Crisis, Arbitrary Lines, M. Nolan Gray, January 27, 2025
This piece overviews the distinct housing problems that different cities/metro economies face, including ones like Detroit, with large housing stocks but too little income to sustain them. This kind of housing situation is sometimes kind of ignored among housing advocates, who tend to hail from opposite economies: where housing is scarce and incomes are high.
It’s not easy to pull a comprehensible little bit from this piece because it includes charts and covers a lot, so give it a read. It’s very good.
These Are Not Real Clothes, 1-800-Vintage, Alex, November 14, 2025
Inevitably some naive shoppers were actually duped, sad and confused by the un-snatched reality of the sweater they bought once they opened their package. But most most people understood that The Cinch wasn’t “real.” Shoppers knew on some level that the clothes didn’t actually look like that, but they loved the illusion so much that they were willing to literally buy into it. This secondhand top wasn’t just a top. It was skinny. It was an hourglass body type. It was literally not shaped like any real person. The Cinch sold you a fantasy of a top. And if the price was low enough, the reality of the top didn’t even matter.
A lot of people are willing to spend $12 on a fantasy.
Well, compared to some other fantasies, that’s not a bad deal.
More:
The Depop Cinch feels like an important marker of a new communication style, exclusive to secondhand shopping online. The technique is only used by independent web sellers, never adopted by mainstream fashion. It’s a product of algorithms, a way to capture attention in an endlessly growing feed of products. The Cinch is a workaround, allowing sellers to offer the suggestion of a body without the labor, tools, and access required to actually present one. It signaled a growing emphasis on listings as content, forgoing the reality of what you were selling for an image created solely to entice online attention.
I’m seeing The Cinch less these days. I’m hopeful that increasingly discerning shoppers are tired of the blatant obfuscation, but I think the novelty may have just worn off. But in its place, I’m seeing a new, more evil type of listing pop up: ones with AI generated product images.
(The issue being that the AI images do not match the actual product, and therefore in a serious retail setting would be considered dishonest advertising, as they no doubt are.)
When I grumble about “things getting worse,” it’s overwhelmingly this sort of thing I’m really thinking of. (One of my go-to examples is the Instagrammable restaurant.) It is the colonization of social media over real life, and the application of pathological, amoral attention-seeking and brazen status-jockeying to every domain of real life.
This strikes me not as a neutral trend I happen to dislike, but as an actual social problem, which subtly erodes a lot of the elements of the “social contract” of the physical world, business, consumer rights, etc. It’s analogous to the stuff that the Naderites fought against decades ago, and that the pure food and drug advocates fought against many decades before that.
What the heck happened in 2012?, The Intrinsic Perspective, Erik Hoel, August 16, 2023
This piece is interesting and includes a lot charts, including a few I’ve never seen, on all sorts of problems and malaises today. It’s not really about smartphones, but it touches on that towards the end and that’s the thing I want to go off on here.
The “it’s the smartphones” hypothesis is a little bit like the mass-shootings-are-caused-by-violent-video-games thing. It’s not been proven, and it seems a bit too facile, yet the timing is eerie. Doom, the ur-first-person-shooter that took a lot of heat over its violence, came out in late 1993 (and later on home video game consoles—late 1995, for example, on the PlayStation.) The Columbine shooting was early 1999.
Part of me thinks it’s impossible that the stark visual of a first-person-shooter—nothing but the 3D game map and your gun, mimicking what it would look like for you to hold a gun in the real world—did not have some impact on the culture; that it did not make it subtly easier for some people to imagine doing in the real world a thing they had done in a game.
“The phones” is similar. It’s probably wrong that smartphones explain every social ill among young people (much less all people) today. But no matter what some studies or statistics say, it is not possible that almost everyone carrying around a pocket computer connected to everything all the time had no impact on anything.
This is one those of sort of elites vs. common-sense issues. I don’t think of this as arrogant (I know more than the experts, who are actually morons.) I think of it as humble: we can’t simply assume everything true about society and psychology is capturable or explicable in a study, and therefore being unable to “prove” something very complicated should not be taken to mean that the absence of harm has been proven.
Related Reading:
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