A SOCIAL LIFE STRICTLY ORGANIZED around encounters facilitated by the transactional service economy is almost by definition emotionally vacant. Hence the outsize importance of the latest black music (trap) in selling everything: Sweetgreen salads prepped and chopp’d by the majority minority for minimum wage, real estate roll-outs, various leisure objects with energetic connotations, the tastefulness of certain social gatherings. In the city of the mobile user and their memes, signs, processed and recoded desires, the desperate energy and beauty produced by the attempt to escape the narcocarceral jaws of death becomes a necessary raw fuel, a lubricant for soothing, or rather perfecting, the point of sale.

TRAP IS INVESTED in a mode of dirty realism. It is likely the only literature that will capture the structure of feeling of the period in which it was produced, and it is certainly the only American literature of any kind that can truly claim to have a popular following across all races and classes. Points of reference are recyclable but relatable, titillating yet boring, trivial and très chic — much like cable television. Sports, movies, comedy, drugs, Scarface, reality TV, food, trash education, bad housing: the fusion core of endless momentum that radiates out from an efficient capitalist order distributing itself across a crumbling and degraded social fabric, all the while reproducing and even amplifying the underlying class, racial, and sexual tensions that are riven through it.

The peculiar condition of being ceaselessly co-opted for another’s profit could arguably point to an impasse, to despair. But here’s the counter: the force of our vernacular culture formed under slavery is the connection born principally in music, but also in the Word, in all of its manifold uses, that believes in its own power. That self-authorizes and liberates from within. This excessive and exceptional relation is misunderstood, often intentionally. Black culture isn’t “magic” because of some deistic proximity of black people to the universe. Slavers had their cargo dance on deck to keep them limber for the auction block. The magic was born out of a unique historical and material experience in world history, one that no other group of people underwent and survived for so long and in such intimate proximity to the main engines of modernity.

The money they saved arrived back in India through the imperial postal system. Letters carried promises of families reuniting and making America their home. But the California Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited immigrants from buying land. A 1920 report from the California State Board of Control described Indian workers as unfit for association with American people. Three years later, the Supreme Court ruled that Indian men were ineligible for naturalized citizenship.

One muggy evening, I realized the time had come to say goodbye. I asked Harjinder to remove the oxygen mask and leave the room. My mother and sister sat on the edge of the bed. I opened my father’s mouth and gave him the first dose of morphine. Over the next few hours, I poured into him all the morphine I had.

The air in the room grew thick. Each breath sounded like a sea roaring for an eternity. He was slipping, he was drowning, and at times he appeared to be resisting. Tears flowed from his eyes until all the air left him and his body sank.

The power went out. The entire house fell into darkness. It felt timely; we didn’t have to see each other’s grief-stricken faces.

As Solow remarked when he received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1987, “One of the achievements of growth theory was to relate equilibrium growth to asset pricing under tranquil conditions.” In other words, private investment and distribution goals could be made objects of indirect planning if capital markets sent meaningful signals about social priorities. But “the hard part of disequilibrium growth is that we do not have — and it may be impossible to have — a really good theory of asset valuation under turbulent conditions.” High securities prices might signal that a corporation or municipality was satisfying public wants through its provision of sales or services — or that it had been thrown on the betting table or the chopping block. Profits and profitability in the capital market, it turned out, no longer told us anything about what kind of products and services the public wanted to consume and how. Maybe they never had.

When economists aggregate all the various types of capital into a single quantity — corporate paper, equipment, patents, real estate, et cetera — they make it impossible to know whether the right tax incentives will channel this abstraction into labor income, productivity, or growth. Most often, liberated capital flows into asset bidding, more debt, corporate stock buybacks, dividends, and idle cash to be hoarded. You might call it wealth, but you’d need the right education to believe it.

Historically, the tendency in American economics has been to conflate investment talk with trading talk, which opens the door to the argument that cutting tax rates for large savers will increase the funds available for starting businesses and creating jobs, rather than for taking bets and protecting status. Since high rates of return should mean available investment opportunities, the confusion leads people to oppose any limits on profits. This makes it difficult to determine what type of social activity our financial institutions are sustaining — increasing the income of ordinary workers or safeguarding hoarded wealth. The devastating effects of this confusion are now self-evident, and they cast a shadow over the Clinton and Obama Administrations.

[...] Yale Law professor David Singh Grewal asks how our theory of history changes when we see capital as a “social relation” rather than “simply a stock of assets, whose equilibrium rental price may be established through conventional supply and demand considerations.” Grewal argues that the ability of the state to “limit — or buttress — the prerogatives of capital” is rooted in the legal distinction between a government constitution and a government administration. In this analysis, it is the law, rather than productivity, that determines the distribution of income. Conflicts that emerge between a new administration and constitutional law — as with the campaigns to abolish slavery, to institute the graduated income tax, or to establish a federal minimum wage or universal health insurance at the state level — “are only to be overcome, if at all, in extraordinary moments of popular constitutional lawmaking.” [...]

[...] As Naidu writes, financial markets and labor relations are both arenas in which state power plays the determining role; both are shaped by the contingencies of government interference or lack thereof. When values collapse and debts go unpaid, or when a strike threatens the health and safety of the community, it falls to the courts and the police to decide which groups will come out ahead. If we follow this line of thinking, property values represent more than expectations about social desires; they represent confidence that ownership will continue to carry influence and power. Property rights are best understood as “the ability to call on the government to secure the promised flow of income.”

As Steinbaum writes with startling frankness, income and wealth “tend to diverge because the ideological commitments of capitalism prohibit policies that would check divergence.” If there is a formula here, it is about power and ideas, not a purely economic understanding of r>g. The state produces inequality by ensuring a constant rate of return to capital, even when growth is slowing.