How Austerity Economics Kills Creativity and Stifles Social Change

What happens when the economic powers that be decide that there can be no more investment in new ideas, no more bones to throw at marginalized people, and that we all have to make money as quickly as possible? Can increased interest rates and tighter monetary conditions create changes in culture and behavior? If you have been feeling like the world has been getting more “boring” in terms of culture and hope for new social movements and social change, and less innovative and consumer-friendly on the business side, this may be why. I explore more in this episode, discussing a variety of examples in politics, movements, and popular culture, not to criticize or blame the individuals or organizations themselves, but to explore the pervasive, systemic influences of capitalism in preventing progress in favor of wealth accumulation.

References:
Recession Vibes: Predicting the Pop Culture Trends That An Economic Downturn Could Bring: https://zeefeed.com.au/recession-pop-culture-trends/

The book I mentioned on gendered narratives around recessions, but had not read yet: Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1131fr9

My article in Pro Wrestling Musings: https://www.prowrestlingmusings.com/post/keeping-it-elite-stand-tall-don-t-back-down-be-elite


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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
This is the Fixer Punk podcast,the podcast that, like Orange Cassidy,
does not have a catchphrase. I'mGrayson Peltier. I know I haven't done
an episode in a while. I'mjust getting back to this. Have a
little bit more time over the Thanksgivingweekend, although not really much the because
we've had so much like family stuffgoing on. But I thought, let

(00:23):
me try to get an episode goingin between all of these family parties because
I have a lot to say rightnow. There's gonna probably gonna be two
episodes this week. Actually, thisone is gonna be more economics and social
movement focused. But the inspiration forthis, A good part of the inspiration
of this is professional wrestling. Iwas at AW Full Gear last weekend.

(00:46):
It was an amazing event, butI just didn't feel right. It felt
wrong. It felt like something positivewas being eroded in favor of something commercialized.
It felt like the social and culturalmovement of AW is being eroded right
before my eyes. And that's whyI felt so sad with what went on

(01:08):
with the Young Bucks with Adam Pagelosing his match. Although there is good
reason why he lost that match,and I totally get it, that match
was so amazing. But this isn'tgonna be the wrestling episode. I'm going
to do a separate episode on what'sgoing on professional wrestling specifically, but I
want to focus on a larger overallcultural and social trend that I believe is

(01:30):
stemming from economics. So wrestling fanshave been talking about hashtag AW. Specifically,
AW fans have been talking about hashtagrestore the feeling, the feeling of
AW, the culture, the movementof AW has felt off. But I
don't think it's just AEW. Ifeel like a lot of things have been
feeling off. I feel like alot of progressive social movements and content and

(01:53):
things like that have been really slowingdown and kind of grinding to a halt,
and a lot of the social anddical progress we've made is kind of
eroding to and regressing towards the mean. My hypothesis here is that it is
not a coincidence that this is happeningas monetary policy has tightened up and we're
seeing increased interest rates. And whatthat does is it causes a decrease in

(02:15):
risk taking, a decrease in investment, and that causes less new things to
be tried, and it causes thecapitalist overlords to throw fewer bones at things
and to really regress things back tothe way they were or what they think

(02:35):
is reasonable or what they gaslight youinto believing is reasonable and correct and good
business and only the stuff that makesgood business sense, and of course they
are the ones who define good businesssense is what's going to be done.
I talked about the economic police state, which is kind of where you start
to have things where we're enforcing economicnorms that benefit capitalists on each other.

(03:01):
And that's part of why it infuriatesme. Going back to the wrestling thing,
which I'm going to try to savemost of the wrestling stuff for the
wrestling episode. But when wrestling fansjudge whether or not something is good based
upon how high of ratings it gets, or how much money it's making the
company or how much merch sales,why should that matter to you? And

(03:22):
that was kind of the AEW alternativeculture thing, that it was going away
from that kind of model, andpeople have not been feeling that anymore.
But there's an off feeling in theworld right now, especially with how people
have interpreted the economy as well,and that feeling off I believe is attributable

(03:45):
to the fact that new things,new positive developments are being slowed down and
there's a regression towards the mean.We see this in terms of like labor
movements. Thankfully unionization is going strong, but quiet, quitting and all of
that stuff, all the worker powerstuff is kind of going down a bit.
You start to see the increase invictim blaming narratives like the huge rise

(04:10):
the monumental rise of Caleb Hammer,the personal finance influencer I think is emblematic
of this, who basically shames peoplefor not saving enough for retirement. So
you're trying to see these austerity narrativesgoing around. There's a book that I
probably need to get my hands on. It's talking about how in recessions there
are these gendered austerity narratives. I'llput the link to it in these show

(04:35):
notes. Let me see if Ihave it here. It's called gendering the
recession. Media and culture in theage of austerity. In an age of
austerity, but media narratives are changinga bit, and the way that organizations
and content creation are happening, Ibelieve in general, is moving towards try

(05:00):
to get as big of a massaudience as possible and trying to make things
as commercialized as quickly as possible.Now, I'm a big believer in creating
alternative cultures and movements and things likethat, but the money the bones to
be thrown, the corporate overlord's kindof decide they're done throwing bones at alternative
movements. And when you have ahigher interest rate environment, you have less

(05:25):
investment into things that are new,into new ideas. That's why tech companies
were the first to get hit byall of this economic recession stuff. Because
tech companies run losses, they takeon debt in order to basically innovate and
create new things and differentiate themselves inthe marketplace. You start to see a
lot of market consolidation when it comeswhen you have towards those who have existing

(05:49):
incumbent wealth, and it creates thatincumbency bias. And at the same time,
what that results in is any sortof challenger brands sort of losing their
identity because they want to try tomass commercialize as much as possible, getting
a profit as quickly as possible.But in fact that that's really the wrong

(06:09):
approach creating and maintaining an authentic socialmovement has benefits, but you don't see
that in the short term. Yousee a lot of stuff just for short
term profit. It gets you gettoo focused on that, and that's what
we're seeing quite a bit. Sowhen you have a situation where these new
ideas are perceived as basically running aloss, as lost leaders, you have

(06:33):
that move towards things that are goingto have as much broad appeal. So
you start to see a lot ofselling out in the economy. In terms
of political and social movements. You'reseeing like the Jankuiger and Young Turks.
You're seeing that whole thing where they'regoing into the tough on crime type narratives.

(06:53):
You have Jenkuiger running for president,which is ridiculous in and of itself,
in a complete waste of time.But you see this shift towards those
things because those are considered to bemore secure. And there's also sort of
a shift in the consumer base,not just into a broader consumer base and
instead of going into smaller niche groupsbecause the money and to invest into smaller

(07:14):
niche groups kind of drives up.They're like, okay, it's not as
good because they're because things cost more, you have to make them appeal to
as many people as possible. Solike creating a niche group and appealing to
that group is not going to bevaluable, except if it's a niche group
of high income earners with a lotof money in savings. Because when you

(07:35):
have a higher interest rate market,that is meant to incentivize people who have
a lot of money, people whohave existing wealth. So you always have
to build things not for the workingclass wes some disposable income because of inflation.
Being of the disposable income, youhave to go towards the upper classes
if you're going to make something that'sa niche product, And that reflects in

(07:59):
how content is create too, justlike any other product, and they see
like the stuff that's quote unquote moresecure, the conventional capitalistic ideas, not
the new ideas, not the killingthe business type ideas, to borrow some
words from the young Bucks. Sothat is a lot of what we're seeing

(08:22):
in the world today right now.So if you feel like something is off
in the world, you feel likefor some reason, you just can't scratch
the feeling that like the scene thatyou love, even the activism that you
love, is kind of not reallythe same anymore, like even in the
labor activism, because even though we'reseeing good financial results, the D Triple

(08:45):
C is actually out raising the NRCC, the D Triple C Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee, and I believe the NRCCis National Republican Congressional Committee, if I'm
getting those acronyms correctly. So Democratsare out raising Republicans right now. But
Democrats have focused their identity around thingsthat have extremely broad appeal, and that

(09:11):
that broad appeal appeals to people whoare higher earners and who have a lot
of money in the bank, becauseunfortunately, we have this situation where we
people who have six figure earning jobswill have a nice house of money in
a four to one k for somereason, feel like they are members of

(09:33):
the rich upper class. They feellike they have more in common with multimillionaires
and millionaires than they do with thelower working class, when in reality they
aren't as close to billionaires as theythink they are. And I think that's
the reason why we have to getlabor movement narratives into the minds of people
who are higher earners and professional workers. I actually posted on this TikTok the

(09:58):
on the TikTok at Fixerpunk about ascientists union in California that was on striking.
I think it's a very positive thingthat we that people see themselves as
part of the working class and thatthe labor movement can benefit them. But
that's going to be a whole differentepisode. But you have working people with
less disposable and to contribute, youremove investment and the idea that you can

(10:20):
that you can do that, thenthat changes things. Now twenty twenty was
pretty unique. Twenty twenty. Wehad a lot of investment after George Floyd
into diversity, equity and inclusion intoDEI. Now we're seeing the conservative pushback,
the counter revolution of conservatives against that, and conservatives are ones the conservative
funders and organizations and all of that. Feels like a lot of progressive diversity

(10:43):
based causes are really driven by corporateAmerica throwing a bone because they see that
consumers have power. And at thattime in twenty twenty, because there were
a lot there's a lot of moneybeing sent out in terms of stimulus things
like that to keep the economy goingand not as many goods to chase,
consumers had a lot of power,so companies were like, okay, let's
throw a bone to diversity, equityand inclusion initiatives. Money is cheap,

(11:05):
we can get more money in thedoor. Let's do this. And that's
how you saw an increase in DEIinvestment and a lot of progressive social movements
that got seated in terms of capitalbecause of the racial reckoning. And it
worked, and it got a lotof really good ideas out there, and

(11:26):
that started to spur further and furthercultural change from the George Floyd protests.
But now that that stream of moneyis going down, consumers have less power
and institutional power. People with alot of money in the bank in general,
people have existing assets are the oneswith power that becomes less important to
corporate America. This is how wewhy we can't be relying on macroeconomic cycles

(11:50):
to ensure that marginalized populations and workersare being treated right. You have to
set these things in stone into lawsthat they're prioritized, and we never have
a situation where we're randomly designed togo ahead and prioritize people with tens of
millions of dollars in the bank becausethey're getting five times the interest that they
normally get on their savings. Accountsand that human dignity is human dignity regardless

(12:18):
of what the economic situation is.But that was so different from any sort
of recessionary type situation because the amountof money that was being put into the
economy and businesses had a different setof incentives and they want to invest in
being more inclusive, even if it'sjust the optics of it. It put
money and it put energy toward progressiveideas. But now we have consumers with

(12:43):
less leverage, people in charge havemore leverage, And I really want to
examine how these things affect culture aswell, because you're seeing, just as
we're seeing this sort of shift interms of economic thinking, it used to
be sort of the economic thinking oflet's focus on do good going through the
pandemic. We're all in this together, to every man for himself, protecting

(13:03):
themselves and trying to hoard money forthemselves with some of these finance related narratives,
and that you're also seeing sort ofthe erosion of alternative cultures and a
lot of alternative culture's ideas turning towardmass, turning toward mass appeal, and

(13:24):
you're seeing this is weird moderation ofthings, and I think that they are
really all connected. It is somethingthat is connected to the economic state in
the mindset of people. I wasreading when I was doing research for this
episode that I actually read something sayingthat that in terms of media and entertainment,
there was good spending even for likemovie tickets back after the two thousand

(13:46):
and nine recession because people wanted tohave an escape. But also there was
a shift to cheaper intellectual property remakesof things, and that's because those are
things that they know won't consistently makeprofit again. This type of environ it
creates risk aversion, economic risk aversion, so you have to do the safer
thing, and even if the thingthat you've been doing over the past three

(14:09):
years is good, then you're stillhaving some risk aversion. And also for
cultural and social movements that have goneinto the mainstream, like aw did in
wrestling, they're feeling the rush toowhile they have money in the bank make
things more commercial and institutional and conform. And of course there's always the general

(14:33):
selling out cycle that any punk rockfan could talk to you about. But
I see there's a little bit ofpressure to kind of get into that mass
commercialization mode more quickly, even ifit means more spending more money. But
they're not only to spend money necessarilyon doing things an alternative way, even

(14:54):
if it's less money, try anddo things alternatively. They want to rush
to commercialization because they're seeing who knowsand the horizon. Maybe won't be able
to do this in the future,but let's try it now. Let's try
to commercialize things as quickly as possibleand appeal to a big of an audience
as possible right now, and especiallyaudiences that we perceive we the capitalists perceive

(15:16):
as being more valuable, larger,and doing more of the commercially and business
appropriate thing in general, culturally andthen of course in economic practices. Now,
treating workers well is no longer consideredto be in vogue in the business
world. That's no longer the thing. Now. The thing is how can

(15:37):
we screw the worker over and makesure that they're as professional as possible.
Now, these things can be totallyunrelated. These things could be one hundred
percent totally unrelated. This is merelya hypothesis. Before you go at me
in the comment sections and saying thisis ridiculous, this is merely a hypothesis.
Is that as we're seeing the worldget more and more business appropriate and

(16:00):
not taking that mindset that we adoptedin the pandemic of doing things a new
way, creating new things, andwe're seeing the world try to return to
a more professional, buttoned up kindof environment. That killing the business mindset
as it's leaving the business world.Is it a surprise that it's leaving the

(16:21):
world of culture as well? Isit a surprise that a lot of our
are so we're seeing a rise inthe social media of people that are shaming
people about spending money right now andsimping for capitalism, and we're seeing progressive
content creators at the same time goingthrough and going on the tough on crime

(16:45):
boat. I don't think so.I think it's that people right now are
looking for consistency and to shift backto the old way of things being of
how things are done, and incapitalism, progress just tends to erode itself.
I forgot was it a punk rockartist that said nothing erodes faster than

(17:06):
progress, but the mood, thefeeling, the feeling of progress. And
this is also why I think peopleare like unhappy with the Joe Biden economy
is because for reasons unrelated to JoeBiden, there is less positive social progress
going on right now because the moneyand the energy has gone away and has

(17:27):
gone into Even if the numbers lookgood economically, they've gone into an austerity
mindset. They've gone into an austeritymentality. Even that mentality of it is
bringing a black cloud over things.So that is what I think is happening

(17:48):
right now. If there's some otherplace in culture, business community where you
feel like social change is just kindof eroding, kind of quietly and subtly,
and again, these are very subtlesignals, so I could be getting
things wrong for sure, But wherethings are getting a little too commercial,
getting away from positive changes that wesaw through the pandemic and through some of

(18:11):
the social progressivism, I want tohear about it. You can leave me
a voicemail message at eight four fourfour seven seven Punk eight four four four
seven seven seven eight six five.I want to hear about those. And
then now I'm going to give youactually you know what, I'm going to
save that for the next episode,for the wrestling specific episode. If you

(18:33):
want more of my work through theweek, make sure you follow the TikTok
at Fixer Punk Fix c r pu n K Instagram is also fixer Punk
f i x e r p un K Twitter is ac Rason Nation g
a U y s O n NA t I O N and I will
be coming back with another episode discussingspecifically restoring the feeling in a you,

(19:00):
what's happened with Being the Elite,and I do also have a wrestling specific
discussion discord. Being the Elite hasinspired me a lot. The Young Bucks
Kenny Omega, their series Being theElite has inspired me a lot to make
a lot of positive changes in mylife, and their attitude, just as
you've seen those killing the business referencespeppered in their attitude towards things has really

(19:25):
inspired me in terms of my approachto social and cultural change. So I
want to create a group discussion aroundthose ideas. Even as the Being the
Elite YouTube series that really brought AWinto prominence has apparently come to an end.
I'll talk more about my thoughts onthat in the next episode, but
I have a discord now that isthe Keeping It Elite discord that is available

(19:51):
through the fixerpunk dot com website,as is a bunch of other information.
If you are involved in a progressivesocial movement and you want to keep a
good going in your progressive social movementor campaign, and you don't want to
conform to the conventional median way ofdoing things and want to see success,
continue to see success through taking thatalternative path, which I believe is absolutely

(20:15):
possible. The people who are doingall of this stuff to try to conform
to the dominant culture when they're reallyleaders of an alternative culture, it is
going to blow back on them inthe face. It's not going to work.
What does work is maintaining authenticity whileusing appropriate practices in combination with the

(20:37):
alternative cultural native knowledge that you havebuilt up through the culture and community you've
built. And that's what my consultingpractice, off Speed Solutions seeks to help
organizations to do communicate that alternative,radical cultural vision of your socially responsible business,
your movement, your nonprofit, yourcampaign, keeping these things prominent in

(21:00):
keeping those ideas at the forefront whilehelping you to achieve success. You can
go to offspeedsolutions dot com for informationon my consulting services there, and I
hope that you will join me againfor the next episode. Thank you for
choosing to spend some of your timewith me today. This content is for

(21:25):
entertainment and general informational purposes only.We do not warrant or guarantee the accuracy
of the information herein. It doesnot constitute medical, financial, legal,
or business advice. The listeners shouldnot rely solely upon such, and consult
a common and professional before deciding tofollow any course of action.