The Economic Profession's Artificial Narrative: The increasingly anachronistic capital versus labor debate.

• Author: Levine, Seth

The recent uproar over musician Dolly Parton's celebration of the gig economy revealed a problem with the English language today: A worker is no longer a worker. She sang in celebration of entrepreneurs:

"Working five to nine you've got passion and a vision 'Cause it's hustlin'time a whole new way to make a livin' Gonna change your life do something that gives it meaning..."

Some criticized the lyrics, saying they celebrated an "empty promise" of capitalism, as if people aiming to establish their own businesses were "workers," who needed to be protected from powerful corporations. Others grasped that there is more nuance in our economy than ever before and that, perhaps, Parton was on to something. In fact, her updated lyrics represent a shift in the primacy between capital and labor in the forty years since she penned the original, "9 to 5." Gone is the idea that getting ahead is only a "rich man's game... puttin' money in his wallet." Workers today have a different potential than they did in 1980 when she first sang:

"There's a better life andyou think about it, don't you? It's a rich man's game no matter what they call it, Andyou spend your life puttin' money in his wallet."

There are abusive corporations, and we do need a better social safety net so that people aren't at the mercy of the doctrine of shareholder primacy, but that truth disguises a more complicated reality. The divide between capital and labor increasingly looks like an anachronism, a throwback to the language and illusory simplicity of another time. Yet still the media persists in pushing this false dichotomy--this mistaken idea that labor and capital are two separate and oppositional forces in our economy. Perhaps doing so is human nature. Or perhaps it simply sells more newspapers or generates more social media clicks. The media certainly thrives on conflict (real or imaginary) and, along with human nature to try to group things into black and white, the continued framing of our economy as somehow consisting of individual actors who exist solely on one side of the capital/labor line makes for easier narratives.

As with most things, the truth exists in the gray areas, in the nuance and the movement between groups. The American economy has always been uniquely entrepreneurial, from the discovery of the "new land," to the formation of our government, to the expansion of our country, and eventually the industrialization of our country. Entrepreneurs have long led the way.

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