What the claw arcade game tells us about the cost of living crisis | Zoe Williams

What the claw arcade game tells us about the cost of living crisis Zoe Williams No matter how you crunch the UK data, prices are rising while average wages stagnate. The system is rigged – and it’s time we kicked over the toy dispenser

A bout a decade ago, the financial crash was almost a decade old. Unrelatedly, my kids were under 10, so I was spending a lot more time in arcades. There’s a particular game involving a metal claw – it goes by the name of claw-game. You put in a pound, and try to manipulate the claw to grab a toy that is worth nothing like a pound. You would take that as the price of a bit of family fun, except the claw never grabbed a toy.

The frustration for a six-year-old was immense, every lost pound making the probably flammable stuffed hamster more urgently desirable. But it was way worse for me, because I was clinging on to some residual 80s idea of arcade-honour. Surely, after pound #7, the machine would just give you a sodding toy? That would represent an astronomical return, lessen the possibility of an adult kicking the machine to death and assure a returning market of maybe 10% of the dumbest or most spineless parents. But no, nada. No toys, ever.

So it wasn’t a good game, but it was starting to feel like a really good metaphor for the economy. This was in the twilight period between 2015 and Brexit, after which politics stopped troubling itself with day-to-day liveability. Previously, if you studied hard you got a job, then if you worked hard, you could afford to live; and in the fullness of time, if you met another person who worked hard, you could have a family and afford to feed them – this was basically the honour-code of capitalism. But it was breaking down and nobody wanted to admit it.

Trade unions noticed: the TUC crunched the numbers in 2014 and found that only one in 40 new jobs were full time. The geographer Danny Dorling noticed that a fifth of people needed a cash benefit to make rent, and average house prices were nearly nine times average salaries in England and Wales. The NHS noticed, in the same year, inasmuch as the number of children with vitamin D deficiency and rickets had tripled since 2009. A lot of people privately thought, “This whole thing is rigged,” though, as far as I know, I alone noticed the irresistible likeness to the Ramsgate arcade.

Scroll forward a decade and people are much more public about their noticing – but expectations have changed and with them, the language. We talk about a cost of living crisis, but we don’t cast ourselves as agents in the economy, whose wages aren’t keeping pace with prices. Rather, we’re a bunch of luckless dopes to whom bad things keep happening. The New Economics Foundation thinktank, with Best for Britain, has dropped into these new times an “ attainability index ”. It takes the wage data from the past 20 years and calculates how many hours you would have to work to attain a set of things: a holiday, a night out, an outfit, a car.