“Upgrade or Die”

New Yorker contributor George Packer offers an “unprovable hypothesis … that obsessive upgrading and chronic stagnation are intimately related.” A little more:

It’s almost a tale of two countries—on the same news day, in the same story, in the same sentence, in the violent yoking together of apparent opposites. “Around the country, as businesses have recovered, the public sector has in many cases struggled and shrunk.” “Although experts estimate that sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, Wall Street does not expect the cuts to substantially reduce corporate profits—or seriously threaten the recent rally in the stock market.” “The wealthiest .1 per cent of Americans now enjoy a life expectancy of 107.3 years and typically die in their sleep, while the bottom sixty per cent can anticipate living only 56.8 years and are statistically more likely to perish in hideous car accidents and firearm incidents, from drug overdoses, or after losing their lower extremities to diabetes.”

All right, I made up the last one. But it’s thinkable, even probable.

Read more at the New Yorker‘s site.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 25th, 2013 at 7:00 am. It is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.