[06] The Two-Income Trap
Title Card
YouTube Link
Status
Released
Transcription
Air Date
Oct 17, 2023
Target: 30-45 minutes
Script
Intro
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ZFi: GM and welcome to Moloch Traps, our new podcast here at From Aa to Zzz. I’m ZFi, this Zombie Shepherd, and we’re excited to be bringing you this new show in collaboration with BanklessDAO and its Audio/Visual team. To be clear, opinions in this series expressed by either of us are our own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of BanklessDAO at large.
This week, we will continue to study and discuss excerpts from the "Meditations on Moloch" essay, written by Scott Alexander. The essay provides examples of multi-polar traps and delves into various instances from history, biology, and economics to illustrate how competition often results in collective harm.
In today’s episode we’ll discuss the Two-Income Trap. Let’s start with Alexander’s words on this phenomenon.
Segment 2 — The Two-Income Trap
ZFi:
(reading from Meditations)
6. The Two-Income Trap, as recently discussed on this blog. It theorized that sufficiently intense competition for suburban houses in good school districts meant that people had to throw away lots of other values – time at home with their children, financial security – to optimize for house-buying-ability or else be consigned to the ghetto.
From a god’s-eye-view, if everyone agrees not to take on a second job to help win their competition for nice houses, then everyone will get exactly as nice a house as they did before, but only have to work one job. From within the system, absent a government literally willing to ban second jobs, everyone who doesn’t get one will be left behind.
INSERT HOWL CLIP:
(Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs!)
Segment 3 — Open Discussion
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Zombie Shepherd notes:
single person needs two jobs
then two people per household
then two jobs per person in each household
all funding for entertainment comes directly from Moloch
Faustian bargain
ZFi notes:
kids as top target demo
two working parents = who raises the kids?
capitalism says who cares? get money.
Russel Banks, in a speech for the Harvard Divinity School
First ads were targeted at the house wife
Then kids
Now infants, as the most important demo
Conclusion
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Zombie Shepherd: (start and then hand off as appropriate)
Summary
What would YOU do? @listener?
Outro
Zombie Shepherd:
Thanks for watching today’s episode of Moloch Traps. We hope you enjoy this series. As always, none of what we say is legal or financial advice, and we encourage listeners to do their own research in these areas before making any related decisions.
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We’ll see you next time, frens!
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