Wilder: The Poor Get Hit First

In his latest piece, "The Poor Get Hit First," John Wilder points out signs that money is tightening and prices are starting surge all across the globe. This will be a problem in the third world and those living on the margins:

    Let’s talk basics.  Even if the price of rice tripled, I wouldn’t notice much.  Rice is still cheap for me.  If I have to give up steak, I can just eat some rice, right?  But that’s not a universal truth.  If all a person in some third-world hellhole can afford is rice, and the price doubles, welcome back, world hunger.

    What a lot of people missed is that world hunger was a solved problem.  People just didn’t starve anymore, except in Hollywood®, and that wasn’t real starvation, it was just skinny starlets mainlining Ozempic® and calling it a diet.

    Global food production had climbed so high that famine was basically extinct outside of war zones and socialist experiments.  Now the dominoes have started falling.

    I expect revolutions popping up like mushrooms in Africa.  Hungry people turn into angry people, and angry people with AK-47s equals a revolution. ...

But, he predicts, it won't stop there, but will hit India and poorer parts of Asia.  It will strike Europe as well: limiting grandma to just one small meatball a week isn't enough to save the system. The refugees that have flooded into Europe will get restive. And here in the U.S.? I've been seeing local news stories featuring farmers complaining of not having enough illegals to work the farms and the high price of diesel fuel--and, if you don't know, almost all the equipment on a farm relies on diesel. But Wilder continues:

    Inflation didn’t hit the hedge-fund guy first.  It hammered the guy stretching a paycheck from one tank of gas to the next.  Fast-food prices doubled, rent climbed, and the folks at the bottom discovered that “essential workers” are only essential until the margins get squeezed then they can be easily be replaced by illegals or H-1B Indians.

    The poor lose first because they have no cushion, no skills that the market values, and no margin for error.  When times get tight, luxury items like $272,000 non-profit jobs disappear, and even the mid-level grift starts to evaporate.

    This culling isn’t random.  Societies have always had layers.  The top layer produces, saves, and innovates.  The bottom layer consumes more than it creates.  When the pie stops growing, the bottom layer gets the smallest slice first.

    The credentialed political-grifter class is about to get the same lesson.

And, according to Peter Turchin, these are exactly the type of people that will resort to revolution or civil war.