I picture someone who buys all their stuff from Amazon and regularly uses Uber to get to their job in a WeWork office. That person looks like a comfortable middle-class citizen, and that’s how they see themselves; but in fact, they’re a poor person (perhaps destitute, when you consider their debt), and their supposed status is being propped up by blank checks from entities on the financial plane.
Question one is, why are investors paying for this? It only makes sense if you assume (or have no other choice but to hope) that these people will be able to afford the unsubsidized versions of these things in the future. Or to put it another way, investors depend on a world of materialistic Reaganite consumers, and they are paying to keep that world alive even though people increasingly don’t want, and can’t afford, to live like that.
It’s a kind of wealth redistribution, but a very selective kind. You’ll notice that while investors are happy to subsidize aspirational stuff like slick offices, taking cabs everywhere, and conspicuous consumption, they’re not subsidizing co-housing projects or credit unions. This isn’t about protecting the 99%; it’s about giving an economic edge to the hardcore Consumers among them, in the hope that when mass extinction arrives, the survivors will be disproportionately plutocrat-friendly.
ETA: that’s the “malice” interpretation, but of course there is also much to be said for the “incompetence” theory which summarises the whole situation with an image of Wile E. Coyote pedalling his legs in thin air over the middle of a canyon.
