WHILE we're on the subject of decadence, makers and takers, Washington, King's Landing, and so forth, I wanted to make one more point about the way the makers/takers issue is treated in "The Hunger Games". There is, in the movie version at least (I haven't read the books), a curious plot hole. The Capitol, the decadent capital city, is portrayed as a corrupt and fashion-obsessed Versailles that has divided the North American continent into twelve oppressed districts in order to extract the surplus labour value of their enserfed populations. District 12, home of heroine Katniss Everdeen, is an Appalachia full of miners living on subsistence-level wages who supply coal to power the Capitol's fancy maglev trains and so forth.

The confusing thing is that the Capitol turns out to be so technologically advanced that not only does it have those maglev trains, it also (as we find out during the Hunger Games reality death-match itself) has the capacity to instantly create giant computer-generated canine predators that are not mere holograms, but are physically real and can dismember human beings. The question arises: if this society can spontaneously create giant attack dogs, why can't it create robots or giant single-purpose mining beasts to replace the oppressed workers in District 12? How is it possible that a society this technologically advanced could require a workforce of dusty 1930s proletarians living in wooden shacks? What need could it possibly have for uneducated labourers like Katniss and her family?

The guess I would hazard is that this elision in the plot is actually obscuring a deeper anxiety which "The Hunger Games" doesn't know it has. That anxiety is not that the Capitol needs Katniss and her worker peers, but that it does not, that it has in fact no earthly use for them. The movie is an effective figure for the anxieties of contemporary Americans about the relationship between our working classes and our dominant elites. It reflects those anxieties the only way it knows how within the current American political vocabulary, depicting terrifying inequalities of economic power as relations of slavery, serfdom and the coerced extraction of surplus value from workers. But the really scary prospect for working-class Americans today is not so much that the elites need their labour and are conspiring to cheat them of its value, as that the elites can replace them with low-cost foreign labour or robots, and have no need of their labour at all. As Felix Salmon wrote the other day, the labour share of national income has been declining since the 1970s, and the trend has only gotten worse since the financial crisis. If you buy the structural-unemployment argument as an explanation for the persistent falling wages of the American working class over the past couple of decades, the implication is that lower-educated Americans will likely continue to see their wages decline going forward because the high-tech economy of the future can find nothing to do with them. Working-class folks in West Virginia will not be spending long days slaving in the mines for subsistence wages. They will be spending long days sitting on the couch collecting unemployment, or disability, or TANF, or food stamps, or perhaps nothing at all, depending on how entitlement reform goes.

Of course a lot of what happened during the industrial revolution was similar, with farmers and weavers trying to figure out what to do with themselves in a mechanised economy that didn't at first appear to need them. That ultimately worked itself out, but there's no guarantee that technological progress will create well-paying jobs for those it displaces this time around, too. It's interesting to consider the "redistribution" theme from this point of view. The antipathy to the idea of redistributing income that many people have is often interpreted as a manifestation of racial divisions, but at some level it may be about something very different: fear of admitting that in today's economy, you may not actually be worth a damn.