Poverty–Sociologist Herbert Gans wrote a piece decades ago about how the poor often pay coming and going. Think about it–society gets ‘dirty work’ done (low-wage, often menial work, no opportunity for advancement, etc.); Wealthy can find domestic help; there’s a market for recycling goods (e.g., clothing, appliances, cars, etc.); there are business niches like payday loan companies and personal injury lawyers, and the social work profession has a niche as a result of poverty and inequality; the poor pay a disproportionate share of income in payroll taxes; Etc. Investors in companies that underpay employees do well, and those companies are essentially subsidized by public welfare assistance that makes up the difference between people’s wages and what they need to survive.

Divorce–Well, for starters, attorneys who do divorce law can fare pretty well in divorce settlements. This doesn’t mean they’re all predatory, it just means there’s business in divorce–someone has to figure out the legal angles, after all. And that might take a lot of billable hours (and the newer associates may have the elder partners breathing down their backs). Presumably people involved in divorce benefit, in the sense that they are able to leave dysfunctional marriages. The wedding industry is surviving–hard to know how the pandemic might have influenced the large and expensive wedding spectacle–and what couple on the cusp of nuptials wants to think that their marriage is the one out of two that will end in divorce (on average)?

The financial crisis–This one’s trickier, but obviously those who made bad decisions and were promoting risky lending and financial instruments with names like collateralized debt obligation and credit default swap (that’s where you bet against loans, some of which you encouraged your investor clients to buy) benefited while the value of their stocks increased. To the extent this was built on the ‘housing bubble’ (that is, overinflated value in the market that eventually ‘corrects’ itself), the real estate industry did quite well, as did developers and investors in real estate. Now they aren’t doing so well, but the bailout ultimately seemed to be protecting ‘too big to fail’ bank shareholders/investors, and banks have been rewarding their upper-level executives with large bonuses (otherwise, how could they keep ‘good people??‘). The banking industry has been so consolidated (fewer, larger companies) that the largest players may emerge from this stronger, the industry less competitive. In the last 30 years or so, the amount of profit in US business that went to the financial services industry increased from about 15% to over 40%, so obviously some people were making huge sums of money even though their practices have in the aggregate led to a worldwide economic crisis. How should we understand the functioning of an economic and political system that rewards the plunderers?

And when all those people’s dreams are dashed, their abandoned houses going unsold, the prices plunge, and the housing market may look attractive to investors who can hold onto them until the market recovers. Pretty sweet, huh? There were government programs designed to help people stay in their homes and get more conventional loans with reasonable interest rates. But the banks were often non compliant, government regulators insufficient. Maybe 5-10% of the funds actually were released, and the dire circumstances of those who were helped were hardly made whole.

We have many students at EOU who benefited from Trade Act funds that helped people who’d lost their jobs return to school. When jobs are scarce, people do tend to enroll in school, and in this case yes, Congress passed laws facilitating that. You have to use a microscope, but there were some silver linings that didn’t just benefit those whose actions contributed to the financial meltdown.