Mike Winerip has a fine, sad story in the New York Times about a 58-year-old man who went from a highly paid executive position to 18 months of unemployment. Of course billions of people (in war-zones, hospices, etc.) are worse off. But what I found interesting about the piece is that this man's life seems to encapsulate everything that is best and worst in American life.
On the one hand, he enjoyed a level of freedom and affluence that would have been unimaginable to most people not long ago--or to many of the world's people today. On the other hand, he's a strange, free-floating form of being, lost in time-space, a victim of the intense specialization and mobility that modern life fosters. When things were good, he used this freedom to leave his wife. Since he could work from home (at a job he can barely explain), he moved from suburban Washington, DC, to somewhere in Florida. Then his job went away and he moved to suburban New York, where he thought there would be more opportunities. But there are none. Prospective 
employers want applications to be submitted electronically, then never respond to them, so that the whole thing seems an exercise in futility, like yoo-hooing frantically into the void. Now he has no job, no apparent community and no particular prospects. He lives alone, of course. I should think his current situation, to many of the world's people, would be terrifying.
Yet he strives to reinvent himself. He's writing genre novels, taking notes on his Blackberry. It's great that he doesn't just sit home, drinking beer and watching TV (like everyone else!), but what a sad pickle. I cannot think of a recent article that captures more effectively both the great opportunities and terrible pitfalls of life in our society.
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Daniel Akst
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Interesting that he's opted for a creative-economy path instead of an entrepreneurial path.
Dan,
Don't you think the bad publicity attaching to the student loan industry has hurt even its laid-off executives with impeccable reputations, like the article's subject? And the person working in an ethical company is actually at a disadvantage in the self-reinvention business. Consider a displaced financial person of the 1970s, the theologian-economist-journalist-banker Paul Erdman, who used jailhouse networking, Swiss-style, after arrest in connection with his bank's failure, to launch a career as a best-selling novelist.
Lesson: choose a business sufficiently colorful that people will want to read about if you ever have to leave it.
Ed
Ed, this was my mistake precisely. By the time I left the newspaper business all the raffishness had been wrung out of it. We had the worst of both worlds: low esteem, low pay and colorless personnel.
Macro Economics Are Rigged
This always has been the case and it may remain this way, unless a free press and our national will can prevent it.
Wealthy families believe they make and save politicians. Political families believe they protect and preserve wealthy families. Each think they are smarter than the other. Both are multi-generational and are unbelievably corrupt. These families comprise our ruling class... We can admit this to our self now and deal with it. It is no new discovery.
Forms of government and modes vary from culture to culture, but all submit to a ruling class, whom always abuse the weaker citizens. Middle and lower classes live in a different dimension - Busyness and compliance with regulations, imposed by the ruling class keeps them there... they mostly remain oblivious to what is being planned or implemented by the ruling class, as they let media spin propagandize them. Only extreme events attract their attention.
Some not so funny results from history for us to consider.
Citigroup banking families in the USA and the Rothschild banking families in Europe finance government regimes. They were the primary source of financing for the Nazi regime, as it came into being. Politicians in the Nazi party had some peculiar ideas however on how they would repay their debt. They used other peoples money...and they planned to take both England and the Rothschild family assets....why they reasoned repay creditors when you can rob and plunder them ?
The IMF and our own Fed. Reserve families play a similar game. They take other peoples assets on a regular basis. Ask Argentina how much of their assets IMF families and related foreign investors now own in Argentina. Ask other nations about IMF assistance, about inflation and their currency... have they helped the economy.... Ask world leaders who has control of; world wide water rights, oil and gas, prime real estate, the most valuable corporations, and military protection. Some estimates include that 24,000 families now control 80% of all the stock in the whole world. Guess who benefited most from the tarp bailout? Run a google search: “map economic benefit tarp bailout”. See how the East beat the West in September 2008, saving themselves at the expense of the majority of Americans. All with the sharp elbows and courtesy of our own Fed. Reserve Banking families – Trusting them to distribute the wealth was insane. Can anyone be so blind as we are in 2009.
HR 1207 Audit the fed., is a start towards sanity.
Trusting the Fed. bank or the IMF with wealth, is like asking the foxes to guard the hen house. SY Mike. mikejaeger@live.com