Shirley Jackson's THE LOTTERY: Federal Reserve Edition

Making millions unemployed to bring prices down for the rest of us is an unethical nightmare- so why aren't we talking about it?

(A little experiment adding this voiceover/podcast to the post. Let me know if it’s worth continuing.)

In 1948, Shirley Jackson published a short story, “THE LOTTERY,” that told the iconic story of a small town holding an annual lottery, the “winner” murdered by the rest of the town in an annual, barbaric ritual

That lottery “prize” was unmentioned until the last paragraphs of the story, but a dark foreboding does begin to creep over conversations as the story nears the end, with one town elder defending the lottery as needed for the good of the town:

“They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery.”

Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. “Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody.”

“Some places have already quit lotteries,” Mrs. Adams said.

“Nothing but trouble in that,” Old Man Warner said stoutly. “Pack of young fools.”

The Hunger Games tribute lottery no doubt owes its inspiration to Shirley Jackson as do a number of other stories, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” where a community prospers only because a child is kept imprisoned and suffering for their benefit.

The question is why are we enacting this monstrous trolley car problem hypothetical as social policy via the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, where the explicitly understood goal (or at least recognized collateral damage) will be millions of Americans losing their jobs with untold hardship to their families? We are told, as Old Man Warner says, it’s for the good of everyone else, but it’s no less barbaric.

Like the indirect language and hidden ending of Jackson’s short story, few in the media regularly talk about that likely end product, instead speculating euphemistically about whether we will have a “soft” or a “hard” landing. But we are collectively discussing whether we will sacrifice the livelihoods of a random set of families to mass unemployment so the rest of us can have cheaper shopping trips.

And like Old Man Warner’s scorn at those questioning the Lottery, anyone asking whether hiking interest rates is the best approach is scoffed at as economically unserious or ignored altogether in the media.

The oddest part is that American voters are pretty clear in every survey that they DON’T agree with this Federal Reserve version of the Lottery. This Economist/YouGov survey found that less than 25% of the public supported raising interest rates to increase the cost of borrowing money- and far fewer (~10%) supported increasing unemployment. Far more supported measures to reduce worker shortages by providing more child care (~50%) or punishing companies for raising prices in monopolistic behavior (44%).

A poll writeup by the conservative group, APM Research Lab, emphasized the 25% of Americans calling for reduced government spending as a solution, but their results similarly found only 9% of Americans supported raising interest rates.

It’s hard to think of a policy area with such consensus media support that is as opposed by the public as much as is raising interest rates. And that is without even explicitly including the tradeoff of higher unemployment- although Americans are savvy enough in the polling to already sense where the Federal Reserve’s Lottery is going. And they want none of it, despite the Old Man Warners telling them to keep it to themselves.

But the media is herding them towards stoning the victims, with their Federal Reserve hype drowning out all alternative solutions.

The thing is, just as people questioned Old Man Warner about the need for the Lottery and whether it even helps, there are serious doubts that raising interest rates is the solution, even aside from its clear human costs. Most Federal Reserve inflation hawks hark back to Paul Volcker raising interest rates to crush inflation (after crushing the economy as well), but it’s worth remembering that Volcker’s policy was adopted in the context of not only rising inflation but also already high unemployment and stagnant corporate profits - the so-called “stagflation” of the 1970s. Many saw Volcker’s austerity economics as a poor prescription even for that situation, but in a time like now of obvious post-Covid supply chain problems and predatory corporate profiteering, focusing on wages and consumer spending driving the inflation problem is just plain bizarre.

Or maybe not so bizarre, since the companies benefitting from price hikes - and the raging profits they are feeding - have an interest in a Federal Reserve Lottery as a distraction from their own actions. Unstated in Shirley Jackson’s story is who set up the Lottery in those communities, but we can see the elite interests driving our current one at the Federal Reserve.

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BTW I came across this relatively new graphic novel version of THE LOTTERY that’s been published, so I will end with some of its striking, foreboding images of the unethical random sacrifice we are currently enacting on a national scale, as we wait for enough unemployed victims to satisfy the Federal Reserve.