You've got a great point about culture, but I'd say low rates (or more accurately, large undirected outflows from the Fed) are important for supporting most of

You've got a great point about culture, but I'd say low rates (or more accurately, large undirected outflows from the Fed) are important for supporting most of the white collar meta jobs that enable said culture in the first place. The biggest sector of the tech industry isn't factory automation or product development (physical world application), but rather self-justifying centralizing surveillance/control - capital is desperately trying to invest today's dollar to create any type of future recurring revenue stream, because that is what low rates demand. The overfinancialization is also what keeps the productive workers trapped under unproductive structures. They can do informal jobs for friends of friends, but what keeps them from setting up a web page, doing some marketing, and offering their services publicly at drastically better rates? I'd think one of the issues is the carrying cost of insurance - another malignant growth of the financial industry - which ties right into your "diffuse responsibility" culture point. To expand on my last point - while I'd believe that bona fide tradespeople are doing more informal trading, I think there's a larger contingent of amateur DIY replacing professionals, and perhaps trading for that. Lets say someone wants to add another electrical receptacle somewhere, and they don't want to pay an electrician $1000 or whatever it costs for one to get out of bed these days. They can search "how to install receptacle" and other basic wiring things and get a video that shows clear instruction of how to do it, plus social encouragement telling them they can! (And yeah I know that's a pretty simple example for most DIYers, that's actually part of my point)