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.
>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.
"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".
"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.
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..
[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.
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
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."
>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.
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.'
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.
>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".
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] marknutter|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danghica|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RobertoG|10 years ago|reply
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..
[+] [-] msvalkon|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pron|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elipsey|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
Who's this "we"? 40% of school children have free/reduced lunch due to poverty.
[+] [-] cryoshon|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cryoshon|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stevetrewick|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tzs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheriot|10 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393239527/
[+] [-] flubert|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] Hytosys|10 years ago|reply
* 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.
[+] [-] randomsearch|10 years ago|reply
A major cause of this problem is the regressive tax system that has been developed by successive governments in the UK.
[+] [-] collyw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vlehto|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] donatj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryoshon|10 years ago|reply
American exceptionalism is a cult which needs to be liquidated... there is nothing special about despotic distribution of resources.
[+] [-] cmiles74|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aaronmhatch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasmarriott|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moootPoint|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sven7|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tim333|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wavefunction|10 years ago|reply