Mass Disability Retirement: Fill & Download for Free

The first big one occurred when I was a sophomore in college. I’d get upper abdominal pain, usually Saturday nights after my parents visited. I went to student health a couple times; after giving me pain pills, they said to go to the ER the next time it happened. I went to the ER associated with the university I was attending. I have them my history and the doctor, after palpating my abdomen, said I was just homesick. I actually had gall stones and needed surgery.About six years later, I was in Illinois for grad school. I went to student health regularly for a cough that would not go away. As time went on, I was so tired; I used my limited energy on the classes I was teaching, Intro to Psychology, instead of my own studies. I insisted on a chest X-ray to see what was going on; after a year, they finally did so. They said nothing was wrong and that I was “just a California girl who couldn’t handle Midwest winters.” After two years, I wasn’t making progress towards my MA/PhD, so I was stripped of my tuition waivers and my TA position. I went home to California and my regular doctor. He gave me a steroid shot because he thought it was an allergic cough, like so many I’d had before. The steroid was supposed to treat the cough for three months; after the weekend, the cough was back. I had an X-ray which showed a large mass in the center of my chest. My California cough was actually Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. When my oncologist requested the X-ray done at school, they said they had no records. Being cynical, I’ve always thought that they spotted something that they had missed and made it “go away.”The third time was after I was on a disability retirement. I was having left flank pain. My primary doctor said it sounded like kidney stones and sent me to a urologist. He said he found small stones in my right kidney that could cause pain when passing and a staghorn stone in my left kidney, which he said couldn’t be causing the pain. So he said the left pain was referred pain from my right kidney. After a few laser procedures to blast the right kidney stones, he said that too much scar tissue had formed in both kidneys and that I needed surgery to remove my left kidney. I decided to go to a different urologist — who specialized in kidney surgery (the urologist I had been going to was my father’s who specialized in prostate issues) — for a consultation. The new urologist tried removing part of the left kidney, but eventually had to remove the rest; a stone had blocked the left ureter and killed the kidney. This time they medical community didn’t say my pain was “in my head,” but didn’t trust my self-reported pain levels. I have now been left with chronic pain and a damaged right kidney.TL;DR. Doctors who were to lazy to do proper studies assumed that I — an obese young woman — could not be sick, blaming psych issues.

There are secrets that I have been told that are mine to keep. The whole idea of being trustworthy is not telling them. So I thought back about issues that are not officially secrets but that are avoided instead,and ones that I am allowed to repeat.A friend was on disability retirement from the LA County Sheriffs department. After the Watts riots in the 1960s she had been assigned to load trucks with bodies and drive them up into a valley in the San Gabriel mountains for mass rave burials. Hundreds of bodies. The way those riots were stopped is by the National Guard shooting people until word got around. It took vastly more shooting than ever made the news.

Remember that one of the immutable laws of economics is that actual demand (desire) for goods and services is infinite, regardless of the ability to pay (which is used to measure "positive" demand). If there's mass unemployment due to consolidation of labor productivity from automation, positive demand would crater as tons of people permanently lose their incomes and earning power. Where are the capitalists going to find paying customers when those customers are obsolete and broke?Ergo, if we ever see technology that automates the production of basic living necessities extremely cheaply, to the extent that human employment in those sectors becomes unnecessary, the assumptions of capitalism and labor economics will have to adjust to new realities of scarcity.Modern economic systems, and the theories that justify them, all make axiomatic assumptions about scarcity. Communism was a disaster partially because it downplayed problems of scarcity and how to calculate the "right" allocation of resources. A transparent price system and a free market are supposed to allocate scarce resources efficiently and according to genuine signals of supply and demand. Economics has very little to say about breathable air because it's not scarce. If more basic goods and services start becoming extremely abundant and cheap, the importance of 'employment' and 'income' will shift in the economic calculus.We could see a situation where {oversimplified} 20% of humans are producers/super consumers and drivers of the economy, and the remaining 80% will largely be passive consumers, (their economic value being defunct for one reason or another), whose consumption of super cheap goods and services is subsidized by the 20%. In fact, this is one of 2 inevitabilities if a huge subset of human labor becomes obsolete. The other is revolution.Bear in mind, the actual unemployment rate in america right now is about 19--21% (those of working age and ability who, either by circumstance or by choice, are not working) and unemployment of the total consuming population (including children, disabled, retired etc.) is over 50%! The "Active Workforce" is much less than the total number of bodies to shelter and mouths to feed in America.So we're already living in a world where transfers of resources like this occur, public and private, at a lesser ratio. Can we not conceive of a world where this is true to a much larger degree?If we're stubborn and think that everyone will realistically be a "contributing" member of society, and continue to devise policies around that mode of economics, we're going to have serious structural problems. Economists dismiss concerns of human labor obsolescence as "neo-Luddite" alarmism because innovations of past eras created new commercial sectors, employment opportunities and need for human capital that reconfigured the obsolete paradigm. The buggy whip maker was probably able to find another job in the automotive industry, for example, or at least his son was.The feasibility of this classic cycle depends on the new paradigm also requiring a growing amount of human input, to match population growth, and fuel capitalism. Except the need for human capital is decreasing as productivity from leveraging automation and computing skyrockets. These are 2 intersecting lines going in opposite directions. It's one of the most interesting and foreboding political dilemmas of our time.Get ready: What Jobs Will the Robots Take?