How the 2010’s Taught Us to Hate the Rich

By Matt Taylor, and Maxwell Strachan; illustrated by Hunter French  Nov 26 2019,

 From the gig economy to supervillains like Martin Shkreli to the college cheating scandal, this is the story of "late capitalism" coming to life.

In the past ten years, we lost hope in American politics, realized we were being watched on the internet, and finally broke the gender binary (kind of). So many of the beliefs we held to be true at the beginning of the decade have since been proven false—or at least, much more complicated than they once seemed.

The Decade of Disillusion is a series that tracks how the hell we got here.

If you squint hard enough, you could theoretically be optimistic about capitalism in America right now. Technically speaking, the U.S. economy is currently in the midst of the longest expansion in its history—a record that started when the country dragged itself out of the Great Recession and back into something resembling growth in 2009. Middle-class incomes have shown (at least fleeting) signs of life after decades of stagnation, too.

But if the first decade of the 21st century was defined by the rise and fall of what George W. Bush described as the American "ownership society,” the second saw that myth permanently disintegrate, replaced by the realities of economic precariousness. Even as stock markets started booming again, politics shifted leftward and socialists gained clout—and hackneyed terms like "late capitalism" gained followings.

Along the way, the very idea of what counts as money—what wealth looks like and how it's represented, what people aspire to earn and how popular figures flaunt it—shifted radically.

This is the era of memes about the horrors of student loan debt and temp gig labor, about young people subsisting on GoFundMe campaigns and Seamless coupons, about plowing all your savings into brand-new digital currencies.

If the economy's capacity to atomize workers and conjure up wealth were part of the story of our unraveling confidence in capitalism, this decade also saw a surge in awareness of pay disparities, discrimination, and scams. The Women's National Soccer Team. Theranos. Fyre Festival.

This was the time when the spectacular display of wealth reached its zenith, and also when society started to turn up its collective nose at the ugly truth.

End of 2011: U.S. Student Debt Tops $1 Trillion

In late 2011, as the Occupy Wall Street movement communicated millions of people’s frustrations with the economic policies of the last decade, the country quietly eclipsed a statistical marker that would help to define the next one: $1 trillion in student loan debt.

Over the following years, the amount of student debt accrued by Americans would continue to steadily rise as the nation came to grips with the true extent of a college-affordability crisis that disproportionately affected lower-income families and people of color.

By 2018, total student debt would reach $1.5 trillion, leading to calls by Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to eradicate most (if not all) of the debt that continues to hamper an entire generation.

For a huge percentage of the millennial generation, the debt they took on in hopes of obtaining decent-paying jobs also became the reason they stayed at home with their parents, put off having children, and lost hope that they’d ever own a home of their own.

July 2012: Uber Launches UberX, Mainstreaming the Gig Economy

In the middle of 2012, a three-year-old tech company called Uber announced a new version of its service: Uber X. Until then, Uber had only offered rides in fancy black Town Cars. But Uber X allowed regular people to sign up to pick up customers in their regular cars. Riders would pay less—35 percent less to be exact, according to then-CEO Travis Kalanick at the time.

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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne8xpd/2010s-decade-money-wealth-debt