I don't think calling bombings in public spaces "terrorism" is really straining the definition of the word. In fact it seems pretty on-the-nose.
And far from driving any sort of positive change, these bombings derived zero concessions from the government. Their only long-term effect was the further marginalization of the political left in the USA, as they became associated with violence. This is a legacy that is still here in the US today, where words like "socialist" are still being used as obvious pejoratives.
It's interesting that you bring up single payer health care in Canada. The first real implementation of public health care in Canada was in Saskatchewan, under premier Tommy Douglas, who was IIRC voted a few years ago as the Greatest Canada Who Ever Lived. Public health care was achieved in Saskatchewan not by hostage-taking, bombing, or shooting anyone, but by persistent demonstration and political participation. Not a shot was fired to win single payer health care in Canada.
Terrorism gave us nothing except fear, violence, and death. In every place it has shown up it has actively worked against the causes it purports to advance (see: OWS and rioting). It is in spite of violent extremists that these causes have succeeded, it should get zero credit.
I am very partial to late 19th century anarchists, but 'propaganda by the deed' included both assassinations (which could be ethically justified as part of a larger war) and a small number of random acts of violence against the general public (which I see no serious ethical justification for (x)). While such acts were a fairly small part of 'Propaganda of the Deed', they are an early example of what would be later labeled terrorism (that is, NGOs using indiscriminate violence against civil populations for political ends).
For example:
"February 12, 1894 – Émile Henry, intending to avenge Auguste Vaillant, sets off a bomb in Café Terminus (a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare train station in Paris), killing one and injuring twenty. During his trial, when asked why he wanted to harm so many innocent people, he declared, "There is no innocent bourgeois." This act is one of the rare exceptions to the rule that propaganda of the deed targets only specific powerful individuals. Henry is convicted and executed by guillotine on May 21." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed
The small number of acts of terror carried out by anarchists likely didn't give us the 40 year work week (xx), anarchists and other radicals organizing did.
x - The fact that these acts of terror were carried out in reprisal for far worse state terror is no excuse. The ends do not justify the means.
xx - The value of assassination is debatable but clearly terrorism was both counter-productive and unethically unjustifiable.
Law & order what we call punching down. Stuff like locking workers inside burning buildings, using thugs, cops, and soldiers to crack labor heads, forcibly deporting undesirables.
I'm finally starting to get the hang of this. Now I am learning.
> There was a wave of terrorism by labor radicals and anarchists.
A small observation,a little off-topic: The author need to study a little bit more about what anarchism really are, to not get confused with terrorism; or equalizing it with the destruction of the current rule order.. this is chaos, not anarchism
Anarchism has to do with individual freedom.. the natural one we all born with, and no force can take that freedom from you.. its the ultimate freedom..
The anarchism is the most advanced form of politics(by not imposing any particular policy by the use of force), but it need a very sophisticated type of human being.. (we can find nowadays but are very few proportionally speaking).. So its not feasible in the current social reality.. (so i dont think is a good idea to try to put it to work right now :))
To get a real taste of anarchism, its imperative the know the works of Bakunin, Proudhon, Thoureau, Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault (I can even dare to say Jesus Christ was one too)
Anyone that says that anarchism is the same as blow up things and mess with "the established order" (as sampled in the Fight Club movie), dont know what they are talking about
Edit: Also the people that do awful things, and call themselves as anarchists (i guess unabomber had this image of himself) are also wrong.. and are making a diservice to the real concept, the same way people misuse the concept of "hacker"..
I just fell the need to also make justice to the concept of anarchism, the same way i would do with the concept of hacker
Interesting article. I have not seen a lot of quantitative studies on society in general (that is probably personal bias, however).
Is it wrong to say that a lot of the root cause of this is from capitalism? Is socialism a better solution for more complicated societies like the ones we have today?
For such a statement to be true or not, you've got to be more precise about what you mean by capitalism.
At it's heart, capitalism is about 1) private ownership of the factors of production through limited liability and tradeable claims; and 2) a separation of management of the firm from ownership of the firm.
I don't see that being replaced anytime soon. The idea that a top-down technocratic solution (of which I would consider socialism an enlightened example) would result in greater human thriving has not been borne out empirically, and in theory has problems that the information and feedback processes driving decision making are less efficient.
My take is that it's all a continuum. more capitalist is probably better in fast growing/developing areas (note: not just countries) with a move toward more socialist as things equilibrate. The end-state of capitalism, barring major disruptions, is monopoly, which is essentially the economic equivalent of dictatorship. Also, things that didn't exist 3 decades ago might start to become more like a utility (internet), which to me indicates it should be treated more like a social good.
Socialism and free market capitalism are extremes on a scale. Most Western societies these days include significant elements of both socialism and market-shaping forces.
In terms of organising a society the extreme forms of socialism imply very strong central planning. Which run into significant problems because the central planners are never going to know the needs of the people as well as the people themselves, nor are they going to have the information available on all the industries that they're trying to oversee.
I agree with you, I think capitalism is a transitional phase and the end-game will be something that can be sustained in perpetuity and with more humanity than capitalism.
No system is perfect, because humans are not perfect, but capitalism has produced more and created a higher standard of living for more people than any other system we've tried. Socialism/communism has produced most of the worst humanitarian and economic situations that people have lived under.
It should be pretty obvious by now that capitalism is not sustainable in the long term, because it encourages, or even forces the ever growing consumption of natural resources and the increasing environmental destruction. Products have limited lifetimes and little effort is made to recycle because it is (still) cheaper to obtain most raw materials. This will not be the case for our descendants in N generations, because we will have wasted a significant amount of the accessible natural resources. (And it will require a huge increase in energy use to recycle, which will probably come from more nuclear power as it is more Capitalist - renewable solutions can't be monopolized.)
The increase in wealth over the past few centuries can be put mainly down to the discovery of natural resources, although some wealth is generated by human labour. Both of these are finite, so it's impossible to have infinite growth forever. Which brings us to the point that, for the wealth of an individual to grow in an economy with a finite amount of wealth, either more wealth must be created by increased human labour, or some people will lose wealth.
My view is that while Capitalism does improve our lifestyles, it functions by taking loans from the earth, and passing the debt to our descendants. They have improved lifestyles in some areas, but certainly not all (Increased consumption doesn't increase happiness, overuse of antibiotics does not solve the problem of bacteria, and more pollution does not improve health, etc).
It's hard to say whether socialism would work, because it hasn't been properly tried yet. Whatever system we come up with to organize people, it needs to be based around sustainability rather than "wealth creation".
Perhaps we need to redefine what wealth really is. IMO, it's not "I own more than you", but is something internal - real happiness and physical health. We'll only be truly wealthy when all of us (and our descendants) are.
Capitalism is not the root cause, because it's just an idea created by humans. The problem is us, and the solution is to change ourselves. Here's a recent keynote given by Alan Kay on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0R0tAOf7KI
The problem far predates capitalism. At various times wannabe elites in elite-saturated societies used to very often die in duels, or very stupid little wars for glory.
"The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."
This group produced colourful people like Karl Sand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ludwig_Sand , and of course an ideology which was eventually to burn Europe down at least a couple of times. Substitute engineering for theology and you have a pretty accurate description of many of the angry young men of the present-day Middle East too.
"Overeducated" =/= lawyers. Society isn't "fraying," either — it is a time of accelerated change brought on by a number of factors such as globalism, the Internet, and so on.
Distribution of wealth and the purchase of politics are serious problems, but this article doesn't seem very on the mark.
Why? High education and underutilization might be big multipliers for social unrest. I can't think of a group that might be more pissed as they realize just how large a role luck and birth can play in "success".
Look at the graph the article presents for US political violence. It's actually at or near an all time low, they just added a new "category" of terrorism to inflate recent numbers. The cycle may or may not actually exist, but if it does we're almost as far away from a spike as you can get.
In the specific case of a law degree, for most people the sole purpose of the degree is to get a job as a lawyer, so if they are not able to find such a job then they receive no utility from their level of education and so are overeducated.
In general I dislike the concept, as it's usually used to decry education that the author sees as pointless, rather than the recipient of the education.
I think it's poorly worded. It's saying that that level of education has enough people employed. Anybody continues to pursuit that career (lawyers according to the article) is therefore "overeducated".
"Increasing inequality leads not only to the growth of top fortunes; it also results in greater numbers of wealth-holders. The “1 percent” becomes “2 percent.” Or even more."
So, a larger percentage of wealthy people in society is a product of _more_ inequality? My brain has a bit of trouble with that statement.
I had trouble parsing that statement as well. I think at heart it comes down to how inequality is a very slippery if not vacuous concept, but here's the most plausible explanatory mental model I could come up with:
Let's define the elite as people who have, say, 10 times the income/wealth/power as the median person. As inequality increases, the cutoff point for people who have 10x what the median person has decreases from 99th percentile to 98th percentile (or whatever).
This is workable numerically if you think of income as falling along a Pareto distribution. I'm not sure it's workable as a definition of the elite, though: why would the 98th percentile have more access to power with more inequality? Although they outstrip the median fine, they'd be even further away from the 99th or 99.9th percentile.
Well, sure. If you think about inequality in terms of variance from the mean income, an increase in the size of the very wealthy class (an "outlier class") increases the variance in the same way that an increase in the size of the extremely poor class (another, less extreme "outlier class") does.
Keep in mind the problem aren't the elites, their success in reproduction which causes the imbalance between their numbers and the number of (suitable) positions available to them.
After all, a core tenet of The American Dream™ states one must do better - in terms of social status - than one's forebears.
And when was the last time you heard a college professor brag about having a mechanic for a son? Not that there's anything wrong with either profession when they act honestly.
I kind of dig the analysis, as it resembles Asimov's psychohistory, but it's still a bit haphazard because the analyst assumes some kind of periodicity to the phenomenon.
This kind of work lends itself to other questions, such as whether one can increase its' predictive power by analyzing social artifacts such as music, books or visual arts.
I dug into the professor's work a little deeper and he does not assume periodicity for his observations in general but goes on to say they have periodic tendencies.
Can you explain this a bit further? I'm not a fan of Mitt Romney, but I've never understood the outrage at his tax returns. It was my understanding that the low tax rate was due to 1) donations and 2) the fact that most of his income comes from capital gains. Do you think people considering running for president should go out of their way to pay more taxes?
These data refer to worldwide inequality, while the article speaks to American inequality. The former is significantly skewed by the rural-to-urban migration of India and China as they rapidly modernize.
According to your link, world inequality as a whole is down. This article is about how inequality within a political system (say the USA) affects social stability. Within this context, it matters not whether or not millions of Chinese and Indians have been lifted out of absolute poverty, because those people are not part of our political system.
It's actually a pretty interesting article, you should read it, rather than dismissing it because of your political bias.
Like others have said, this article is strictly about American inequality - as you can see, all the examples given, and all the points discussed, were purely American.
The reduction in global inequality actually relates to the rise in American inequality, as industries that previously drove the growth of the American middle class have off-shored and are now contributing to the growth of the middle class elsewhere.
Stagnant industries that used to be the bread and butter across the US are now major growth factors in China and India.
The article mentions "U.S." nine times and "world" only once in "World War II". I'm confused as to how you could have interpreted it to be about world inequality.
[+] [-] tokenizer|12 years ago|reply
> There was a wave of terrorism by labor radicals and anarchists.
Yes. Terrorism gave us the 40 hour workweek, and in my country of Canada, single payer healthcare...
[+] [-] potatolicious|12 years ago|reply
And more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing
I don't think calling bombings in public spaces "terrorism" is really straining the definition of the word. In fact it seems pretty on-the-nose.
And far from driving any sort of positive change, these bombings derived zero concessions from the government. Their only long-term effect was the further marginalization of the political left in the USA, as they became associated with violence. This is a legacy that is still here in the US today, where words like "socialist" are still being used as obvious pejoratives.
It's interesting that you bring up single payer health care in Canada. The first real implementation of public health care in Canada was in Saskatchewan, under premier Tommy Douglas, who was IIRC voted a few years ago as the Greatest Canada Who Ever Lived. Public health care was achieved in Saskatchewan not by hostage-taking, bombing, or shooting anyone, but by persistent demonstration and political participation. Not a shot was fired to win single payer health care in Canada.
Terrorism gave us nothing except fear, violence, and death. In every place it has shown up it has actively worked against the causes it purports to advance (see: OWS and rioting). It is in spite of violent extremists that these causes have succeeded, it should get zero credit.
[+] [-] EthanHeilman|12 years ago|reply
I am very partial to late 19th century anarchists, but 'propaganda by the deed' included both assassinations (which could be ethically justified as part of a larger war) and a small number of random acts of violence against the general public (which I see no serious ethical justification for (x)). While such acts were a fairly small part of 'Propaganda of the Deed', they are an early example of what would be later labeled terrorism (that is, NGOs using indiscriminate violence against civil populations for political ends).
For example: "February 12, 1894 – Émile Henry, intending to avenge Auguste Vaillant, sets off a bomb in Café Terminus (a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare train station in Paris), killing one and injuring twenty. During his trial, when asked why he wanted to harm so many innocent people, he declared, "There is no innocent bourgeois." This act is one of the rare exceptions to the rule that propaganda of the deed targets only specific powerful individuals. Henry is convicted and executed by guillotine on May 21." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed
The small number of acts of terror carried out by anarchists likely didn't give us the 40 year work week (xx), anarchists and other radicals organizing did.
x - The fact that these acts of terror were carried out in reprisal for far worse state terror is no excuse. The ends do not justify the means.
xx - The value of assassination is debatable but clearly terrorism was both counter-productive and unethically unjustifiable.
[+] [-] specialist|12 years ago|reply
Terrorism is what we call punching up.
Law & order what we call punching down. Stuff like locking workers inside burning buildings, using thugs, cops, and soldiers to crack labor heads, forcibly deporting undesirables.
I'm finally starting to get the hang of this. Now I am learning.
[+] [-] oscargrouch|12 years ago|reply
A small observation,a little off-topic: The author need to study a little bit more about what anarchism really are, to not get confused with terrorism; or equalizing it with the destruction of the current rule order.. this is chaos, not anarchism
Anarchism has to do with individual freedom.. the natural one we all born with, and no force can take that freedom from you.. its the ultimate freedom..
The anarchism is the most advanced form of politics(by not imposing any particular policy by the use of force), but it need a very sophisticated type of human being.. (we can find nowadays but are very few proportionally speaking).. So its not feasible in the current social reality.. (so i dont think is a good idea to try to put it to work right now :))
To get a real taste of anarchism, its imperative the know the works of Bakunin, Proudhon, Thoureau, Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault (I can even dare to say Jesus Christ was one too)
Anyone that says that anarchism is the same as blow up things and mess with "the established order" (as sampled in the Fight Club movie), dont know what they are talking about
Edit: Also the people that do awful things, and call themselves as anarchists (i guess unabomber had this image of himself) are also wrong.. and are making a diservice to the real concept, the same way people misuse the concept of "hacker"..
I just fell the need to also make justice to the concept of anarchism, the same way i would do with the concept of hacker
[+] [-] jboynyc|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pwnna|12 years ago|reply
Is it wrong to say that a lot of the root cause of this is from capitalism? Is socialism a better solution for more complicated societies like the ones we have today?
[+] [-] JackFr|12 years ago|reply
At it's heart, capitalism is about 1) private ownership of the factors of production through limited liability and tradeable claims; and 2) a separation of management of the firm from ownership of the firm.
I don't see that being replaced anytime soon. The idea that a top-down technocratic solution (of which I would consider socialism an enlightened example) would result in greater human thriving has not been borne out empirically, and in theory has problems that the information and feedback processes driving decision making are less efficient.
[+] [-] craigyk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6d0debc071|12 years ago|reply
In terms of organising a society the extreme forms of socialism imply very strong central planning. Which run into significant problems because the central planners are never going to know the needs of the people as well as the people themselves, nor are they going to have the information available on all the industries that they're trying to oversee.
[+] [-] minikites|12 years ago|reply
I agree with you, I think capitalism is a transitional phase and the end-game will be something that can be sustained in perpetuity and with more humanity than capitalism.
[+] [-] ams6110|12 years ago|reply
Edit: spelling
[+] [-] sparkie|12 years ago|reply
The increase in wealth over the past few centuries can be put mainly down to the discovery of natural resources, although some wealth is generated by human labour. Both of these are finite, so it's impossible to have infinite growth forever. Which brings us to the point that, for the wealth of an individual to grow in an economy with a finite amount of wealth, either more wealth must be created by increased human labour, or some people will lose wealth.
My view is that while Capitalism does improve our lifestyles, it functions by taking loans from the earth, and passing the debt to our descendants. They have improved lifestyles in some areas, but certainly not all (Increased consumption doesn't increase happiness, overuse of antibiotics does not solve the problem of bacteria, and more pollution does not improve health, etc).
It's hard to say whether socialism would work, because it hasn't been properly tried yet. Whatever system we come up with to organize people, it needs to be based around sustainability rather than "wealth creation".
Perhaps we need to redefine what wealth really is. IMO, it's not "I own more than you", but is something internal - real happiness and physical health. We'll only be truly wealthy when all of us (and our descendants) are.
Capitalism is not the root cause, because it's just an idea created by humans. The problem is us, and the solution is to change ourselves. Here's a recent keynote given by Alan Kay on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0R0tAOf7KI
[+] [-] a8da6b0c91d|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoc|12 years ago|reply
"The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."
This group produced colourful people like Karl Sand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ludwig_Sand , and of course an ideology which was eventually to burn Europe down at least a couple of times. Substitute engineering for theology and you have a pretty accurate description of many of the angry young men of the present-day Middle East too.
[+] [-] devindotcom|12 years ago|reply
Distribution of wealth and the purchase of politics are serious problems, but this article doesn't seem very on the mark.
[+] [-] craigyk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexeisadeski3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrcactu5|12 years ago|reply
So this has been going on for the past 40 years and we have stopped questioning it?
What if you were Black or a woman in the 70's? Did wages ever keep up with productivity in the first place?
[+] [-] zaguios|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bananacurve|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexeisadeski3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spada|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plorkyeran|12 years ago|reply
In general I dislike the concept, as it's usually used to decry education that the author sees as pointless, rather than the recipient of the education.
[+] [-] im3w1l|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwnna|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonSkeptic|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kokey|12 years ago|reply
So, a larger percentage of wealthy people in society is a product of _more_ inequality? My brain has a bit of trouble with that statement.
[+] [-] scarmig|12 years ago|reply
Let's define the elite as people who have, say, 10 times the income/wealth/power as the median person. As inequality increases, the cutoff point for people who have 10x what the median person has decreases from 99th percentile to 98th percentile (or whatever).
This is workable numerically if you think of income as falling along a Pareto distribution. I'm not sure it's workable as a definition of the elite, though: why would the 98th percentile have more access to power with more inequality? Although they outstrip the median fine, they'd be even further away from the 99th or 99.9th percentile.
[+] [-] delluminatus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3n|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] squozzer|12 years ago|reply
After all, a core tenet of The American Dream™ states one must do better - in terms of social status - than one's forebears.
And when was the last time you heard a college professor brag about having a mechanic for a son? Not that there's anything wrong with either profession when they act honestly.
I kind of dig the analysis, as it resembles Asimov's psychohistory, but it's still a bit haphazard because the analyst assumes some kind of periodicity to the phenomenon.
This kind of work lends itself to other questions, such as whether one can increase its' predictive power by analyzing social artifacts such as music, books or visual arts.
[+] [-] squozzer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandoncor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amerika_blog|12 years ago|reply
Just sayin'
[+] [-] SloughFeg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JabavuAdams|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alextingle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexeisadeski3|12 years ago|reply
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/11/world-inequality-is-do...
[+] [-] joshklein|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfb_1973|12 years ago|reply
It's actually a pretty interesting article, you should read it, rather than dismissing it because of your political bias.
[+] [-] WalterSear|12 years ago|reply
This article was about the US. Things aren't going in the same direction globally as in first world countries.
[+] [-] potatolicious|12 years ago|reply
The reduction in global inequality actually relates to the rise in American inequality, as industries that previously drove the growth of the American middle class have off-shored and are now contributing to the growth of the middle class elsewhere.
Stagnant industries that used to be the bread and butter across the US are now major growth factors in China and India.
[+] [-] munificent|12 years ago|reply