Before you gag into your choice of beverage, let me write out the exact lines: “A young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food.” A Modest Proposal, 1729.

So obvious. Utterly brilliant.

Picture Credits : Pressbooks.pub

The essay was written as an act of rebellion against the exploitation of the Irish people under oppressive English rule. This was the time when wealthy English landlords were extracting everything of value from poor Irish peasants, exacerbating a devastating famine and leading to extreme poverty. When the policy debates became cold and rational, thereby ignoring human suffering, Swift decided to out-rationalize them. If people were being considered as economic units, why not, literally, commodify them? Through the grotesque act of dehumanizing the most vulnerable unit of the human race – a baby- he succeeded in shocking the readers through extreme satire that exposed the yawning moral lacuna in that society. His essay is one of the most biting works of literature, so much so that its teeth seem to have teeth.

Fast forward three centuries and one would think that we are more evolved and enlightened. Far too civilized and sophisticated. We would never eat children. Nope. Instead, we slow-cook them. Right from childhood, through the teenage years to adulthood with systems designed for efficient extraction.

The modern economy has unknowingly perfected the recipe that Swift mocked. We feed the babies debts from birth. Marinate them in unattainable aspirations. Roast them slowly over the coals of unpaid internships, insecure contracts, and evaporating pensions. A healthy young adult, well-nursed by social media fantasies and mounting student loans, is at twenty-five years old a most tender, palatable resource, ready to be devoured. Today, investment in the future would cost an arm and a leg (the cliche probably has roots in truth), or, to update Swift’s terminology, a baby could be offered up as asset-backed security because they would eventually grow into a consumer, ready for extraction.

The gig economy today offers another ‘modest proposal’: why not have people sell their time, their rest, their health, in bite-sized, algorithmically managed, portions?

Of course, we no longer feed on babies; instead, we feed on the future à la melting glaciers, razed forests and depleting savings. Swift’s world dressed cruelty in the language of economic prudence. Our world wraps it in better marketing speak- ‘innovation’, ‘opportunity’, and ‘disruption’. We applaud it when families work three jobs to stay afloat. The ‘progress machine’ is grinding everything down to marketable metrics. And to hark back to Swift’s analogy, it is still a feast. Only now, no one remembers to ask who is on the menu or who is paying the price.

If Swift were to land in this generation, he might nod in grim recognition and wonder if we looped back into the same grotesque circle, only now with better lighting and faster Wi-Fi. Or perhaps, seeing the scale of it, he might politely excuse himself from the table. This fare may be too much even for him…