> We badly want to believe that we still live in a non-zero-sum nation, in which good-paying jobs for low-skill workers are abundant, and opportunities for adva

> We badly want to believe that we still live in a non-zero-sum nation, in which good-paying jobs for low-skill workers are abundant, and opportunities for advancement are always just around the corner. Instead we have taxi drivers who are being driven to suicide because they can’t bear the competition from slightly more desperate people who want the little that they now have. It's common sense that, even if "the market" will adjust and those displaced workers will change skills, that adjustment isn't instantaneous. Thus unemployment insurance, etc. The trouble is those taxi drivers weren't employees. The US social contract is almost entirely implemented through the relationship of employee to corporate behemoth. Since that's dissolved, so too has the mechanism for softening the impact of economic change. > And all this is unfolding at a moment when the labor market is the tightest it has been since the turn of the century This "tightness" is misleading, because labor is less collective than last century. The low unemployment rate has not caused higher wages (in most fields) like it used to.