Since at least 2008, in various settings including this blog and the long forgotten social network known as "app.net", I have explored the topic I called Mass Disability. Mass disability was my own term; it's fundamentally about the mismatch between the skillset distribution of the population and the skills demanded by the marketplace. In a world where all employment that supports a bourgeois lifestyle requires both abstract cognitive skills and high level emotional skills many are effectively disabled. These are not universal skillsets.
The mismatch may come from multiple sources, but I believe it's primarily automation. It began when some pre-sapiens primate discovered tools, accelerated enormously with the industrial revolution, jumped up again through the IT era, and is now reaching a new peak in the AI era.
I came at this understanding through the lived experience of being a parent of two persons with significant cognitive disabilities and slowly realizing that there was no qualitative difference between my (now adult) children and many "non-disabled" who live and die at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum. Disability is fundamentally a mismatch between skillset and environment - where the environment here is socioeconomic.
Over almost two decades Google searches never found anyone else who thought like me. Until I started using Perplexity, a much better search engine with support for searching the academic literature.
A few weeks ago Perplexity/Claude found that Marta Russell thought like me. She also came from the world of disability. I'm going to quote from the ai summary without any validation:
“Mass disability” refers to the large-scale disablement of workers through structural economic forces, particularly under capitalism, rather than through individual medical conditions. This concept emerges from critical disability theory and Marxist analysis, most notably articulated by disability scholar Marta Russell in her theory of disability as tied to economic production systems.
The Money Model of DisabilityRussell’s “money model” argues that disability under capitalism is fundamentally an economic category, not merely a medical one. When automation and changing labor demands render workers unable to participate in wage labor at profitable rates, they become structurally “disabled” by the economic system itself. Russell identified disabled people as the “New Reserve Army of Labor”—workers excluded from productive employment but still exploited through systems that profit from their physical needs and survival requirements...
... Research shows that rapid automation in manufacturing and clerical work has contributed to significant wage declines, with men without high school degrees experiencing 15% drops in inflation-adjusted earnings between 1980 and 2016. This economic exclusion functions as a form of mass disablement, where societal structures rather than individual impairments create inability to participate in wage labor
As best I can tell with a cursory review she started publishing on this topic around 1998.
Marta Russell came to the same conclusion as me from a very different origin. We both shared experience with disability; her experience was as a person with a disability, mine as a parent of persons with disabilities. She came from a Marxist/Left perspective, I came from an economics/ecological and medical perspective. Russell appears to have been classically anti-capitalist, I have more mixed opinions. Still, we both ended up in a similar place.
Maybe it's not just my personal obsession. Maybe mass disability does have something to do with the 2024 collapse of the United States of America and the global crisis of the underclass.
PS. Over the past two years I've been doing courses in sociology at the UMN as part of MN's "senior student" (audit non-filled classes for free). The world from which Marta Russell came is much more familiar now. I have much I could say about that world. It's obvious flaws remain obvious, but I have a better appreciation for what has been done. But also greater sadness about the tragic divorce of economics and sociology. Both are broken without the other.
PPS. I got the great Marta Russell result from an ai search, but when I reran the exact same query as a standard search I got nothing of value. That's 2026 for you.
