November 2022

First it was the “Great Resignation.” Then it was “nobody wants to work anymore.” Now it’s “quiet quitting.” Yet it seems like no one wants to talk about what I see as the root cause of America’s economic malaise — work under contemporary capitalism is fundamentally flawed. As a political philosopher studying the effects of contemporary capitalism on the future of work, I believe that the inability to dictate and meaningfully control one’s own working life is the problem.

In August, Congress passed and president Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a $280 billion corporate welfare bill for US semiconductor manufacturers. In October, the Biden administration added new restrictions on semiconductor exports to China, banning not just sales of semiconductors, but of the tools to make them -- including by and to companies located in neither the US nor China.

Over the past several years public opinion polls have gotten a lot of heat — some of it deserved, some of it not — for not accurately predicting election results. Public opinion is only as accurate as the sample of voters polled and what those voters are willing to tell pollsters.