Falling Behind

I was surprised that Ruth Milkman [“Falling Behind,” interview by Staci Kleinmaier, June 2022] did not acknowledge white supremacy and the abuse of natural resources as basic building blocks of the American economy. Milkman says that in the mid-twentieth century “you had the sense that you knew what your life was going to be like. There was a feeling of security and predictability, though maybe it was an illusion.” It absolutely was an illusion.

The illusion was that the U.S. economy was not built on the labor of enslaved people and exploited immigrants and maintained with structures of white supremacy and sexism. The illusion was that the use and manipulation of natural resources could be endlessly profitable, without consequence for humanity or the planet. The illusion was that it was logical to produce fossil fuels, manufacture cars, mine coal, churn out trillions of single-use plastic items, and create tons of junk food from millions of acres of commodity crops requiring gallons upon gallons of pesticides.

It’s not just about creating “secure jobs.” An awful lot of our human ingenuity and labor has been poured into creating systems and products that are fundamentally unsustainable and inequitable. We can do so much better.