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As another commenter pointed out, the title of this article is heavily editorialized. And I think that's the most interesting part of this link. There seems to be a growing appetite in this country to stoke the flames of class warfare. Perhaps it's because, despite the Great Recession and those two wars you never really hear anything about anymore, our generation truly does not have any great struggle to arm ourselves against. Poverty rates are dropping precipitously around the globe as is violent crime. We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury. Our life expectancy rates are ever increasing. I think we Millenials are, more than any generation before us, desperately in search of our great cause. As we continue to see American wealth "trickle down" to developing nations as labor is shifted overseas, it brings into starker contrast the wealth inequalities between us and our 1%, ignoring of course the irony that we Americans collectively are the one-percenters of the world.
You seem to assume that extreme inequality in society is to be fought against only if it leads to an overall degradation of material prosperity. That is nonsense. People always wanted more equality for the same reason they wanted democracy, no matter what the level of material prosperity in a country. People have a deep-seated need to be engaged and to have a say in the unfolding of their own destiny at the scale of society, to have meaningful lives. Indeed, the average person in the US, EU, Japan, Australia, etc. has food, clothes, transportation, health-care (perhaps not US), technology and so on that would make the kings of 100 years ago envious. But they also know that their influence on society through conventional democratic means has decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, as the super-wealthy amassed the material and political means to control the decision-making process. And guess what? Many people hate that. Many people will not be bribed into political submission by knick-knacks, amusement and delicious snacks. There is deep resentment brewing.
Your argument is not bad. However there is also a stability issue you missed. The fundamental reason why democracy is proposed or the american dream is proposed is pacification, just like welfare. A calm population who think there is a defined set of fair rules and a path for success don't revolt. Its vitally important for societal stability that the general public doesn't notice they have no chance for improved conditions, in fact things only get worse for them, and they have no input on leadership because they get to vote, but only for almost identical hand picked candidates. If you can't have actual fairness, or actual progress, or actual democracy, it becomes very important to make sure no one notices. The next few decades are going to be very interesting to watch. Can enough riots be prevented by reality TV shows and football games and iDevice releases, or will the cities and gated subdivisions burn from lack of distraction from the fundamental problems?
I like how you just reiterated GP's last "point of irony" there, in a roundabout way.
Because that's how much of the rest of the world feels re. USA/"the west". One-percenters... complaining about their own one-percenters...
And yes, there is deep resentment brewing indeed.
There is absolutely no irony. Extreme inequality is undesirable on any scale. This is consistency, the opposite of irony.
>We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury
But we still have a significant portion of the population that has to work 2+ jobs to survive. America is the only developed nation in the world to my knowledge where this is expected, let alone imagined (hell, in France it's illegal to have two jobs).
Americans (myself included) should be ashamed at how much of an abject failure we've been to so much of the population. Say what you will about Western Europe, but pretty much everyone will get 3 meals a day there.
> but pretty much everyone will get 3 meals a day there.
Incorrect. Whilst I am still shocked by the way America treats homeless people and those at the bottom of society, the UK is headed down the same path.
Over a million people used food banks in the UK last year. These are essentially "last resort" facilities run by charities where people can get food parcels if referred by social services or a doctor. The main reason for using them is having welfare benefits withdrawn.
>* Incorrect*
Is it ?
>Over a million people used food banks in the UK last year.
~1.6% of the UK's ~60M population, seems to fit 'most everyone' even if those FB users didn't get three squares for themselves and their family, which thanks to the work of the food banks, they do.
Apropos the parent's point, the food banks exist. Which means that you live in a society that values you so highly that it will step in to protect you even when the universal welfare system that is supposed to look after you fails to do so and you slip through the cracks.
You are therefore one of the luckiest people on the planet.
Meta : Incidentally, that 'over a million' figure is only from Trussell Trust, there are other food banks around the UK that do not operate under their umbrella, and as for 'the main reason', meh, certainly the largest single reason reported by users at a shade under 30% which means that 70% of food bank use is for other reasons (though this includes 13% 'benefit changes').
Trussell Trust's reported stats can be found here http://www.trusselltrust.org/stats
You have made his point, food banks are giving those that can't afford food, food.
France also has double digit unemployment rates.
Complete feudalism had 0% unemployment. Best system ever!
Honestly, I'm a bit tired of the "create jobs!" mantra. Jobs for job-numbers' sake has little point, in practice it's just further enslaving the population.
The government has an incentive in keeping unemployment down and cut spending, so it forces people to work shitty jobs by taking away subsidies, which in turn drives down salaries and only helps high-manpower low-skill enterprises like burger-flipping. Is that good for society as a whole?
People working two jobs (great for employment numbers!) are not bettering themselves, they're just producing more surplus for owners, often not even by choice. It doesn't really matter if you have 0% unemployment but everyone is forced to do stuff they don't like in order to survive.
(hell, in France it's illegal to have two jobs).Having two jobs is not expected, unless by two jobs you mean one job for you and one job for your partner. We had women flood into the workforce at the same time jobs were being outsourced to developing nations, so yeah, we get paid less for the same work because the labor pool has increased dramatically. The caveat is that goods are now far cheaper to manufacture than they used to be, which is passed onto us as consumers. I think we Americans work as hard as we do because we are in heavy denial that our standard of living is slowly being brought into alignment with the rest of the world.
Yeah, I am 100% ashamed to be American, but most of that stems from the (violent, brutal, inconsistent) way the US treats the rest of the world. Sure, the empire treats its own citizens poorly as the pillaged wealth is sent to the fat cats, but that's their own fault for not demanding more.
"We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury."
But it's not this fact what, precisely, make things worse?.
I mean, we live in the most prosperous age. The productivity increase of the last decades has been nothing short of stunning.
And anyway, we have to heard that "we" can't afford health care for everybody, that "we" should work longer years, that "we" have to cut the expenses of social protections because "we" have not "enough money".
Ah, the irony..
Yes. A glut of resources orbiting the pinnacles of society, and everyone else must cut back to make the numbers work for those elites, to their direct tangible detriment.
"I think we Millenials are, more than any generation before us, desperately in search of our great cause."
Look no further, there's a global crisis of climate change that must be solved. We have a cause, but unfortunately not one that is nicely contained within the borders of a country.
Indeed. We're the ones to face the grandest causes - fixing the climate, killing the death itself, spreading human life to the rest of the Solar System. And only handful of geeks care. Most of the world seems to be busy with celebrity gossip or complaining about 1% or inventing new reasons to get outraged about something.
Which is why I think it is crucial that we all understand what it is that those party-poopers are actually saying, rather than respond to the whines we're hearing.
The one core point of all of our liberal struggles -- whether "class warfare" as you call it or feminism -- isn't about being content, happy, alive etc.. It is about power[1] and its distribution. Absolute measures of wealth are very important, but so is the distribution of power. As long as the distribution of power is so grossly imbalanced, it means that few of us have a lot of control over the many, or, if you prefer, that the many aren't free[2]. If people learn only one thing about this class-warfare or feminism, it should be this.
This unfair distribution of power is a problem at any scale: within the West, the West vs. the rest of the world etc..
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)
[2]: The word free is a loaded one, and in the taxonomy of values it is an ill-defined one because it is self-contradictory, but I'm using it here very loosely.
I don't want more money; I want more democracy.
Treating our highly skewed wealth distribution strictly as a matter of material welfare is a diversion from the fact that extreme income inequality is evidence of regulatory capture and rent seeking. When war contractors and bankers whisper in the ear of the executive branch to lobby for legislation by executive order and extra judicial legal clarifications (as in the Bush-Ashcroft-Gonzales fiasco), massive anonymous campaign donations are upheld by the supreme court as "free speech", and so on, the wealthy have many times more political influence than you do.
Recall the scandals surrounding massive, secret, quid pro quo political donations by the tycoons of the first Gilded Age; now the supreme court has found that when the rich buy an election they have a legal right to do it in secret. The problem is not that I want more money; it's that our votes are counted in dollars.
This is how we ended up with a regressive tax system (20-30 percent for earned income, %15 for capital gains, %0 percent for offshore “wealth managed” assets), “Torte Reform”, “Bankruptcy Reform”, and plea bargaining, to keep you from having your day in court, privatized prisons, repeal of Glass-Steagall, and all sorts of other rules that structurally advantage people who control capital.
The state arguably sponsors consumer indebtedness: the education, health care, and housing markets are all inflated by government money, and medical and student debts are exempt from bankruptcy. Low interest rates seem to create asset bubbles, and we socialize the losses by bailing out banks but not individuals. A good life means more than just “three meals a day” eaten in prison, on parole, or as an indentured servant.
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” Anatole France
"We have an embarrassing wealth of food"
Who's this "we"? 40% of school children have free/reduced lunch due to poverty.
Sorry, I should have given the proper context in my original post, but I mean we have an embarrassing wealth of food compared to past generations. Yes, it sucks that some children have less than others, but when compared to children from past generations they're doing much better.
My mother will gladly relate to you how her family was never really poor growing up: the really poor kids came to school with Crisco sandwiches.
There was no free or reduced-price school lunch.
Right, but 100 years ago, those kids would just starve to death, rather than get state assistance.
To call America a democracy today is not accurate; the public's actions have no sway on policy relative to the sway that the moneyed elites hold. This phenomenon has been documented by a number of studies. Capitalist oligarchy is the correct term to refer to the system of government of the US. The public is disgruntled about the perceived change from democracy to this new despotic system.
Class warfare against the rich is now a concept because most of the country lost the last round of class warfare around the time the economic depression started, in which the rich got far richer while everyone else got poorer. Whether this is a great struggle for rights or not is unclear, but based off of the last Gilded Age, it will be glossed over in the history books such that people do not understand that change can be effected under certain circumstances.
We have a bevy of great causes, but for the most part, our empowerment to affect changes in service of those causes has been nullified. We are disenfranchised, and disgruntled. That we live in relative comfort is no relief; we feel excluded from the making of our own society, and it is a serious problem. This exclusion needs to change first before the other issues can be pursued. The last time there was such a disenfranchisement of public power in the US, a world war caused it to fall out of attention.
" In 1900, the wealthiest 10 percent pocketed 41 percent of the nation’s income—a number that would only be surpassed in 2010, when the top 10 percent took home 48 percent of the national income. "
Ah, so we are now officially more unequal than during the gilded age. A travesty of the highest order. Remember when people were protesting this in the streets and were hung out to dry by the media and their fellow citizens? Remember when those protesters were smashed by the cops for having the gall to ask for a better deal? That happened in the US, not China or Russia.
"The authors are only the slightest bit sympathetic to Obama. They concede that he operated under conditions not of his own making. But he “was not a transformational president.” He caved to Wall Street in bailing out the banks without demanding any meaningful reform; the Affordable Care Act may have insured millions, but countless others have been forced to pay more because its biggest beneficiaries were insurance and drug companies. And his foreign policy effectively continued to do by stealth what George W. Bush barely kept secret at all: drone strikes, secret wiretaps. Other fundamental problems that began at the start of the 20th century have re-emerged under Obama: racial segregation abetted by a criminal justice system that is the New Jim Crow; anti-immigration nativism, which has hardly been helped by an immigration policy whose only achievement is a record number of deportations. Meanwhile, as of 2012, a woman still made 81 cents for every dollar a man earned."
My sentiments as well.
>Ah, so we are now officially more unequal than during the gilded age
Unequal with whom ? You are considerably less unequal with millions of people who a decade or two ago were desperately scratching their survival out of subsistence farming.
Some people would call that a win. YMMV.
A relative win against people who aren't even in the proper frame of reference. It's the same as saying "you have a refrigerator, people in Africa don't even have that!" which isn't even a true statement to make these days. Extreme poverty is on the endangered list.
The frame of reference is in-country and between the country's peers. The worrying part of this frame is that relatively poor places like Latin America are catching up or have caught up already. We are losing ground.
What percent of the nation's income do you think the wealthiest 10% should pocket in a fair society?
10%
on a more serious note; whatever it takes to ensure that we don't end up becoming bankrupt over healthcare---despite paying for insurance, whatever it takes to ensure that even the poorest and destitute of us all shouldn't worry about their next meal, whatever it takes so that anyone with ill mental health can pursue a life of happiness, ...
there's no point in picking specific #s and making a whole argument out of them even more so with vague notions such as "fair society" which will elicit 101 opinions from 100 people.
I was all ready to rant about how the social, medical, and scientific advances of the last 100 years matter more than a few economic stats. The question actually posed by the book is more narrow/interesting than the article, "How far has our democracy come?" rather than "Has all the progress of the past 100 years come undone?"
'"But that book was written in 1908. Based on what I've seen on Downton Abbey, things were a lot different then."
Well, yes, obviously, there had just been a massive leap forward in technology and industrialization, a booming economy fueling a wealth gap, temporarily course corrected by a financial panic "precipitated" by the failure of two overspeculating brokerage houses. There were also, simultaneously, great advances in progressive causes like worker's rights and food quality, all on the background of decreasing importance of religion among educated whites in favor of science. Not physics or chemistry, but evolution. Tabloids were incomprehensibly popular, partisan media the norm. A loosening of conventional morality manifested as bored promiscuity, female bisexuality, and a flood of new porn the likes of which never existed before.
"That does sound different. And awesome. What did their Millennial kids inherit, what did they experience over their adult lives, say 1929-1945?"
I totally don't know, Boardwalk Empire only goes up to 1924 and Mad Men starts 1960.'
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown...
So, to sum up... Our wages stopped rising in the 1970s, because:
* Decreased demand for US workers — factories closing to move to other countries; technology replacing human labor; increased capitalist competition with a global economy consisting of countries finally recovered from their wars
* Increased supply of US workers — the women's liberation movement; the continued influx of immigrants
The country's rotting social justice can successfully be expressed in terms of the prosperity of its workers.
I'm not sure about the US, but the in UK you need to add to that the fact that inequality has soared, so the rich have taken more of the gains.
A major cause of this problem is the regressive tax system that has been developed by successive governments in the UK.
Sorry, that was the point I was trying to make as well:
https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/product...
The increasing gap between wages and productivity symbolizes growing exploitation — the inequality you're talking about.
Don't you think that moving to a fiat money system has contributed?
>One could argue—and not with pride, but deep unease—that global dominance was, if not the only, then an essential ingredient to reducing domestic inequality.
History keeps repeating itself. Usually any civil rights have come with the expense of either fighting in the military or funding the military. I just wondered how suspiciously easy it was for women to gain their rights, but total war seen in world wars explains it nicely.
Organizations only change when they have to. With fall of soviet union, stagnation of American civil rights progress seems inevitable. Rise of China could be a good thing for Civil rights. But in the post-Vietnam high tech weapons age, it's likely to be "how can we motivate people to pay more taxes" than the seemingly more equal "how can we motivate every man to fire a rifle".
Any suggestions?
The argument that our successful being very successful is a bad thing never ceases to be wrong. Our poor are also the richest poor in the world. Making the rich poorer would do nothing to help the poor and quite the contrary hurt them. Bill Gates and his malaria work for instance have done far more good for Africa than all the aid the government has ever provided.
Our poor and even our middle class struggle to get medical care due to the insane costs. Poor people in Europe don't have that problem. Poor people in Latin America don't have that problem. It doesn't sound like our poor are rich enough.
American exceptionalism is a cult which needs to be liquidated... there is nothing special about despotic distribution of resources.
I don't think anyone is arguing against the fact that it is good to be successful and that the more successful someone can be, the better.
In my opinion, the issue is that those who are most successful are being rewarded with far too much and creating a system that will inevitably make those who are most successful even more successful by shrinking the total number of successful people and increasing the number of unsuccessful people. Another concern is that this will lead to general stagnation of the economy and a slow-down of progress in general.
Thanks for posting.
No.
Betteridge's law of headlines to the rescue.
Progress towards what?
For the developing world to get to the basics (rights/health/edu) the developed world is used to, we need a couple more planet earths in terms of resources.
We seem to end up with what happens in nature. Randomness. In one ecosystem a couple of whales and whole lot of plankton, in another a couple lions and herds of wildebeest.
So progress towards what? It's not entirely clear. And where are the incentives to produce consensus about it or even focus on it? We can be doing a much better job creating those incentives.
>to the basics (rights/health/edu)... we need a couple more planet earths
I don't think that's true. Human rights, health services and education needn't use much resources. The ability the whole planet to drive 3 ton SUVs might be an issue but that's a different matter.
We have been trying to get the basics into the third world for a long time now. It's not cheap because its not easy.
I am not even talking about the extreme cases like Somalia and Afghanistan. Even in countries like India and China try getting a good lawyer/policeman/doctor/teacher to stay in areas where they are most needed. They have no hope of any semblance of the lifestyle their urban counterparts enjoy.
And I pulled in the couple more planet earths from sustainability calculations Craig Simmons did for the Guardian a while back. http://www.theguardian.com/greenliving/story/0,,441590,00.ht...
I saw an article that stated the 1% now own slightly more wealth than the rest of the 99% of the population, so I feel like there are untapped resources just waiting to be put to good use. I don't see the need for this continuing farce when there are infrastructure needs and the opportunity to build real and lasting wealth for all of us in the form of a more developed and inclusive society for all.