The Laundry Bag

If we divide people into categories based on their socio-economic status and observe how many people move into other categories during their lifetime or in the span of a generation, it makes an interesting study. In fact, it’s a powerful indicator of equality to opportunity, and yet another useful indicator that is conveniently ignored. But nonetheless, some sensibles are still studying this, and call this Social Mobility.


Where are we?

A high upwards social mobility equals having more opportunities to climb the socio-economic ladder. US, the seat of capitalism, unsurprisingly has the lowest social mobility. Ironically this is in the face of the ‘American Dream’ (while practical economics’ whisper ‘I told you so’ is drowned in the capitalistic cacophony). The probability of upward mobility in India is also very low, and in fact many face high risk of downward mobility. Indians however, are the strongest believers of upward mobility.

The American 'Dream' was aptly named

To understand how hollow that belief is, here’s a fact: American confidence in upward mobility is also increasing despite mobility is declining sharply specially since the 80s. Confidence here is thus as valuable as a condo in the housing crisis.

It takes 7 generations for a low income Indian to get into average income strata. Bollywood dialogues like "ye karz tumhaari 7 pushtein nai chuka payengi" now make sense.

So what can be done?

In the chandelier-champagne-chauffer elitist pinnacle of polite speaking, you can’t do shit. It turns out, the biggest drivers to social mobility are education and parental status (birth lottery). And a lot (and I mean a lot) of level of education depends again, eventually on the family you are born in.

Before you get all hopeful with education being the turning stone, be cognizant of the fact that cost of decent education is obscenely high. Worst, the rate of increase in cost of education has by far outpaced the rate of wage increase  among middle class, let alone the lower economic strata. With education (and similarly healthcare) getting rapidly costlier, not much of ‘spare change’ is left with the non-rich to invest in improving their condition. The lesser proportional ‘spare change’, the worse it is. If I have a crore, I will be clearing 4 lakhs yearly even with a savings account for just keeping it in the bank. Not enough, but I can give up my job and still survive. I just freed 5 days a week for my lifetime. I can surely use it to move from rags to, well, less rags. See how 1 crore ‘spare change’ just lying unused can change my life?

As a welfare state, the role of governments (as against blaming catastrophic economic decline on millennials’ app usage behaviour) is to maximize people’s spare change by keeping healthcare and education cost in control, so that people can invest on their improvement. But with powers shifting from of governments across the globe to capitalist corporations, we are clearly headed the wrong way. And with capitalism's capacity to shift money from the poor to the rich, it's a slippery slope we are on – sliding towards an abyss of extremely disproportionate wealth distribution. That begs the question - what exactly is wealth? Too deep a question? As Heisenberg said, ‘you are goddamn right!’ But then where’s the fun in figuring something as mundane as how to make your selfie look happier than you actually are.

But first, let’s look at the clock.

Time is something (almost) everyone has in equal quantity. Jeff Bezos and I get the same 24 hours in a day. While he spends it creating the next market disruption, I spend it doing laundry and such. Thus it comes to making most of that time – and utilizing the time by doing what gives you maximum ‘return’ (which should be happiness, but then it’s easier to count notes).  The productive time is maximized by not doing things that create no productive outcome - like laundry (yes, I hate it). You can achieve that by paying someone else to do it (what a utopia would it be where people just do things for each other), someone who feels that the money you will pay is equally or more than worth the time he/she spends doing my laundry. Since everyone has equal time, the intrinsic value of time is same for everyone. So why the difference in value of time among different people?

There's a popular theory in economics: the law of diminishing returns. The more of something you have, the lesser utility will an additional unit of that thing will give you. Getting a second burger after having one will make you more happier than getting an 11th after the 10 (and get some digestive pills while you are at it). Similarly, getting 5 more dollars will get a $20/day person more happiness, than one making 2000 a day. The value of five dollars is much lesser for the more affluent. Surprise, surprise! The richer will spare lesser thought to dishing out five dollars, while the less fortunate will be willing to do more to get it. Essentially, more willing to spend his/her time doing something you find not worthy of your time. Enter the laundry bag.

If you asnwered yes, welcome to the Middle Class. And thank you for participating in this lifelong experiment

Its all about Money 'Laundering'

However, does it mean doing laundry is a productive use of the launderer's time? Keeping aside my hate, laundry is a ginormous waste of all of humanity’s time. Anyways, the launderer is deprived of time he could have used to acquire skills, do another or additional work, spend time with his family, or simply not do laundry for a while. On the other hand, the $1000 person is freed of a chunk of time while shelling out only 0.5% of his money. And with this freed time, he can earn more, learn more, become even more valuable and be able to earn increasingly more, quite the opposite of the $10 person.

Wealth is thus essentially the access to time. Time is, thus not money, money is Time.