Tuesday 2 October 2012
inequality
Friday 15 June 2012
Government Enforced Inequality ☀
Government appears to have literally begun as an exercise in creating inequality. Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, links the appearance of formal government to the development of agriculture and the consequent food surpluses. Hunter-gatherer communities generally fare well, but rarely experience long-term storable food surpluses. They also tend to have fairly informal governance, just the leadership of the influential person, with little formal or direct authority, in a society that was predominantly egalitarian. But agricultural societies tended to develop formal government. Diamond’s argument is that the governments came into being as a way to control food surpluses. Not a benevolent organizational development with the public service goal of ensuring the protection of the surpluses and a fair distribution, but essentially a hostile takeover by a gang capable of accomplishing the task. They then set themselves up as the elite of society, and doled out the food surpluses to those willing to kowtow to them. As Diamond argues,
[C]hiefdoms introduced a dilemma fundamental to all centrally governed, non-egalitarian societies. At best they do good by providing expensive services impossible to contract for on an individual basis. At worst they function unabashedly as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes. These noble and selfish functions are inextricably linked, although some governments emphasize much more of one function than of the other. The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute exacted from producers is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put. (p. 276)
The history of the world since then has been the effort to tame government, to enhance the public benefactor aspect of it and diminish the kleptocratic aspect of it. Obviously the U.S. is doing better at that than, say, Syria, but I don’t know many people, of any political stripe, who think that the U.S. has reached the ideal state of affairs in that regard. And I don’t mean that the U.S. doesn’t have a sufficient social safety net in comparison with European states, but that the kleptocratic tendencies are still rife at all levels of government. And I’m not sure that most close observers would agree that the kleptocratic tendencies are sufficiently dampened even in the European social democracies.
Thursday 14 June 2012
The 1 percent’s source of power is their excessive, poverty-inducing wealth they’ve amassed for the last 30 years. They used to spend their wealth on racehorses and yachts. Now they spend it on buying elections. By taking away the 1 percent’s excessive wealth, we take away their ability to buy elections. When we get corporate money out of politics, we weed out the politicians who were put in place by corporate money. By removing those politicians and putting in those who will work for us, we simultaneously scare those remaining in office to adhere to our agenda or lose their jobs, and then we begin to fundamentally change the system for the better. Elect Occupy Wall Street in 2014 ☀
Wednesday 30 May 2012
The Great Divergence is a concise, lucidly argued study of rising inequality in the United States, one which starts with the premise that such escalating levels of inequity are unhealthy in a democracy. However, despite having a clear moral point of view, Noah does what all too few polemicists do these days (particularly fatuous clowns on the right like Jonah Goldberg) — he argues using solid facts and sound history, he doesn’t overreach, and he doesn’t pretend to have comprehensive answers to a complex and, in some respects, a global problem. Noah traces the history of studying income and inequality in the U.S., something that began with a handful of sociologists in the Progressive Era. It is an interesting and informative chapter and one of which I knew little. Noah also discussed why he has chosen to focus on income rather than wealth, arguing that the former rather than the latter is the more important aspect of economic life over the last hundred or so years. (I understand this decision but I do not think wealth should be understated as a matter of importance, especially in an age in which pensions are becoming things of the past — the accumulation of wealth is going to have to be part of achieving some security in old age. Moreover, the ability of a small segment of society to accumulate and then pass on wealth — exempt from estate taxes — is likely to further exacerbate inequality.) The Great Divergence ☀
Monday 14 May 2012
Cornel West and Tavis Smiley Rightfully Scare Us ☀
The heart of Smiley and West’s message is simple and profound: the United States is far more economically divided than most people want to acknowledge,and this chasm will destroy our nation. They make their case in their book by using vast amounts of very robust data from credible sources, like the Pew Research Center. (Indeed, this is the same data that drives the work we do at EARN to help low income workers save and invest to foster prosperity.)
There are some of you who will quickly dismiss Smiley, West, and their message. You may dismiss them because you don’t like their politics, or don’t like them as people. You make this dismissal at your own peril, and the peril of our nation. Irrespective of how you view Tavis Smiley or Cornel West, their passionate call to the American public to face the hard facts, is rooted in data that transcends politics or ideology.
In fact, the Smiley-West cautionary message is backed by groundbreaking research from economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, in their new book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. Acemoglu and Robinson conducted expansive research to understand why some nations fail while others prosper. While much of the conventional wisdom among economists on the issue involves natural resources or cultural traits, Acemoglu and Robinson found that it is open political institutions that allow for shared power, and collective decision making about economic opportunity that drive prosperity.
This thesis cuts straight to the heart of what Smiley and West warn us is coming. Tens of millions of Americans toil endlessly, but never find their efforts rewarded with economic security. Increasingly, these hard working people will be disenfranchised and disengaged from the political process, and have less say in how economic opportunity is fostered and distributed. This is precisely the dynamic that Acemoglu and Robinson found at the heart of poverty, corruption, and human beings at their worst. We’re moving down a dangerous path as a nation. Listening carefully to what West and Smiley have to say, however, is a good step back in the right direction.
Tuesday 17 April 2012
Timothy Noah, Charles Murray, and America’s Inequality ☀
Liberals would do well to read Cost’s book, for reasons other than what he intended: it demonstrates how powerful the impulse is to see what you’re for as unself-interested and what the other guy is for as interest-group greed. A full sense of what conservatives object to in the Obama program can be hard to extract from daily conservative discourse. Cost provides this. You can put on his glasses and see that “Obamacare” looks like a set of deals with privileged health-care companies that got a seat at the bargaining table, that the stimulus and the financial rescue were ways of helping banks and unions that contributed to the 2008 campaign, that cap-and-trade environmental legislation was a way of rewarding big environmental groups and corporations. Even the underlying problems that these initiatives were meant to address don’t strike him as having to do with the national interest: you might favor universal health-care as an anti-inequality measure, but Cost views it as just another goody for non-majoritarian groups trying to claw more from the government. The liberal conversation has exactly the same limits: the impulse to see conservative causes as payoffs to interest groups—and conservative political successes as demonstrations of structural flaws in the political system—is well-nigh irresistible.
Because groups with wildly different perspectives dominate politics, the observation that ninety-nine per cent of Americans are being left behind economically isn’t of much use politically. The ninety-nine per cent is too big a category to be an effective political force. For all that, inequality already is a political cause, though in strange and unexpected ways. (Cost is upset about inequality, and comes close to predicting that the Republicans will be the party that takes it on, because the Democrats have become the party of Wall Street.) But if we are to go further—and get the political system to try seriously to reverse the trends of the past thirty years—somebody will have to figure out how to stitch together a coalition of distinct, smaller interest groups that, in their different ways, care deeply about inequality, and, together, can pressure Washington in favor of specific policies. It’s an unlovely business, but if you believe that government is the best instrument with which to address the problem it’s also a morally urgent one.
Thursday 29 March 2012
Capitalism can create prosperity, but left unfettered it doesn’t create broadly shared prosperity — and never will. If belief and participation in democracy are sustained by people’s conviction that democracy produces good economic outcomes, then the growing concentration of wealth and income in the United States is a long-term threat to everything we profess to stand for. A nation where 93 percent of income growth goes to the top 1 percent is not a nation that will embark on great projects, or long command the allegiance of its people. Harold Meyerson ☀
Tuesday 21 February 2012
The “new woman” was not an invention of second-wave feminism either. Betty did not start the “woman movement”; Christians did. Motivated by the belief that men and women were made in God’s image to “rule the earth” together, these pro-woman, pro-justice believers sought to right wrongs for those who had less social power. Women’s History: Give Credit Where It’s Due ☀
Monday 20 February 2012
Why Patriarchal Men Are Utterly Petrified of Birth Control -- And Why We'll Still Be Fighting About it 100 Years From Now ☀
If you’re a woman of childbearing age in the US, you’ve had access to effective contraception your entire fertile life; and odds are good that your mother and grandmother did, too. If you’re a heterosexual man of almost any age, odds are good that you also enjoy a lifetime of opportunities for sexual openness and variety that your grandfathers probably couldn’t have imagined — also thanks entirely to good contraception. From our individual personal perspectives, it feels like we’ve had this right, and this technology, forever. We take it so completely for granted that we simply cannot imagine that it could ever go away. It leads to a sweet complacency: birth control is something that’s always been there for us, and we’re rather stunned that anybody could possibly find it controversial enough to pick a fight over.
But if we’re wise, we’ll keep our eyes on the long game, because you can bet that those angry men are, too. The hard fact is this: We’re only 50 years into a revolution that may ultimately take two or three centuries to completely work its way through the world’s many cultures and religions. (To put this in perspective: it was 300 years from Gutenberg’s printing press to the scientific and intellectual re-alignments of the Enlightenment, and to the French and American revolutions that that liberating technology ultimately made possible. These things can take a loooong time to work all the way out.) Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will, in all likelihood, still be working out the details of these new gender agreements a century from now; and it may be a century after that before their grandkids can truly start taking any of this for granted.
That sounds daunting, though I don’t mean it to be. What I do want is for those of us, male and female, whose lives have been transformed for the better in this new post-Pill order to think in longer terms. Male privilege has been with us for — how long? Ten thousand years? A hundred thousand? Contraception, in the mere blink of an eye in historical terms, toppled the core rationale that justified that entire system. And now, every aspect of human society is frantically racing to catch up with that stunning fact. Everything will have to change in response to this — families, business, religion, politics, economics…everything.
We’re in this catch-up process for the long haul. In the meantime, we shouldn’t be surprised to be confronted by large groups of well-organized men (and their female flunkies, who are legion) marshaling their vast resources to get every last one of Pandora’s frolicking contraception-fueled demons back into the box. And we need to accept and prepare for the likelihood that much of the history of this century, when it’s finally written, will be the story of our children’s ongoing struggles against the organized powers that intend to seize back the means of our liberation, and turn back the clock to the way things used to be.
America’s failed promise of equal opportunity ☀
So, minimally, expanding the social power of most Americans means investing in programs like universal health care, which secure citizens from the vicissitudes of nature and the market. But it also means going beyond the politics of social welfare in order to ensure that workers have control over their own activities.
Employees must not only be able to provide for their basic necessities, but also to shape the terms of their work. This latter — equally fundamental — goal is a major reason why “the primary economic objective of the Democratic Party” for decades was once the commitment to full employment. The purpose behind guaranteeing everyone a job was not simply to provide Americans economic security; it was to elevate the overall bargaining power of employees. In an America wherever everyone could find work, employees would have infinitely more control over the structure and rules of the workplace. The shadow of this idea still lingers in proposals like the Employee Free Choice Act and public works programs.
Ultimately, if the market is doing such a bad job at supplying employment in which most Americans can enjoy real economic independence, then it may well be time to look elsewhere. Progressives have a responsibility to think again and more expansively about ideas like workers’ cooperatives and how to promote broader democratic control over investment (for instance, by restructuring corporate governance). Experimentalism should be the order of the day, not cautious reaffirmation of tired nostrums.
But instead, the consensus, bipartisan framework of social mobility primarily offers a language of elite advancement, rather than a vision for widespread independence and social power. This means that what makes equal opportunity such a mirage is more than just a failure to institute the right policies or to live up to society’s basic principles. We are facing a failure of principle itself. Recent events give us at least some hope that this failure can also become an opportunity to reimagine what equal freedom means in America.
Sunday 19 February 2012
The Internet is a Major Driver of the Growth of Cognitive Inequality ☀
Moral of the story: the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. If you don’t know how to use it, or don’t have the background to ask the right questions, you’ll end up with a head full of nonsense. But if you do know how to use it, it’s an endless wealth of information. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Caveat emptor.
Friday 10 February 2012
The effect of this consolidation of economic power is that the two most effective routes out of the crisis have been closed. First, consumer demand – the oxygen that makes economies work – has been choked off. Rich economies have lost billions of pounds of spending power. Secondly, the slump in demand might be less damaging if the winners from the process of upward redistribution – big business and the top 1% – were playing a more productive role in helping recovery. They are not. Why economic inequality leads to collapse ☀
The basis of a democratic and a republican form of government is a fundamental law favoring an equal or rather a general distribution of property. It is not necessary nor possible that every citizen should have exactly an equal portion of land and goods, but the laws of such a state should require an equal distribution of intestate estates, and bar all perpetuities. Noah Webster ☀
Thursday 6 October 2011
Given the facts of the income distribution, the trends in real middle-class incomes and poverty, the failure of policy to do much to change these trends, the government bailouts of the only class that’s benefited from the recovery so far, the absence of clear punishment/accountability for the financial and political institutions that helped inflate the debt bubble that continues to squeeze economies across the globe, and the dysfunctionality of the current political system (they’re arguing more about whether they can keep the lights on than whether they can help solve the economic problems), the more interesting question is what took so long for such protests to show up? Jared Bernstein ☀
Monday 25 July 2011
Against this background of economic stagnation and decay and widespread financial insolvency one sector is experiencing a boom time: Silicon Valley is booming again, and tech start-up IPOs are doing well. Social networking and mobile computing are hot, and some are expecting them to power the global economy out of the doldrums. Others contend that this industry segment is, and will remain, far too small to pick up the slack for the rest of the resource-strapped global economy. What neither side seems to grasp is this: as the virtualized realm of cyberreality and social networking takes over daily life, the actual physical economy will matter less and less (to those who are still alive and have an internet connection). What these new gadgets offer is, simply put, escapism. In a world of dwindling resources, where each person’s share of the physical realm decreases over time, it is no wonder that physical reality fails to satisfy. But thanks to the new, intimate, glowing handheld mobile computing devices, the unsatisfactory real world can be blotted out, and replaced with a cleansed, bouncy, shiny version of society in which little avatars utter terse little messages. In the cyber-realm there are no sweaty bodies, no cacophony of voices to suffer through—just a smooth, polished, expertly branded user experience. Dead Souls ☀
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