David A. Jedeikin

Tag: inequality

Meritocracy is the New Aristocracy

Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

For those of you following my stories through the years, you have an idea where I come from.

I’m WEIRD.

By that I don’t just mean strange or peculiar (though I’ve been called that as well); I mean the phenomenon that’s been noticed among psychologists looking at who participates in their studies. An overwhelming number of them hail from the same background: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies.

Basically, the most fertile breeding grounds for—and the biggest practitioners of—that thing known as meritocracy.

Meritocracy: a good thing, right?

The concept of rewarding people based on merit isn’t exactly new; it’s basically seen as a synonym for the modern era, at least in the West. Spurred on by the Enlightenment, and the idea that human life and human beings are improvable, leaders such as Napoleon put forward the notion of careers open to talent early in the 19th century. Nowadays, we take it so for granted that the idea of going back to a world of inherited privilege seems unfair and absurd.

Plus, we need look no further than the enormous advances of the last two centuries as proof that meritocracy works, as the world moved from subsistence-level agriculture to jet planes and the internet. Obviously that’s because we adopted this new and better way of rewarding people, right?

Turns out the answer’s not that simple.

I’ve been following for some time the writing of one of meritocracy’s own whose become one of its harshest critics, Yale professor Daniel Markovits. I finally took the plunge and read his book on the subject—and it’s a sobering, all-too-accurate portrait of our crazy, fraught, competitive world.

Markovits reminds us that the originator of the term, in the book that first described meritocracy’s rise, actually meant it satirically and critically. Only in later years did meritocracy’s proponents claim the term as a good thing.

But how can something that seems on the surface to promote fairness and encourage people to excel…be bad? I’d break out Markovits’s argument into two parts: the unfairness meritocracy ultimately creates, and the not-really-better world of jobs meritocracy builds.

Meritocracy creates a new kind of unfairness

This one’s a both obvious and controversial claim for anyone who’s been alive over the past half-century. Basically, Markovits claims that meritocracy, and the rise in inequality in America over the past five decades, are one and the same phenomenon.

On the surface, the probably seems ridiculous. If meritocracy is supposed to distribute opportunity more fairly than a society of oligarchs or aristocrats, then how can it possibly lead to more unfairness?

The answer is proved by history. As meritocrats rose in status, they helped tilt the game more and more in favor of themselves. Sure, the daughter of a CEO is expected to work hard in school and in the jobs she lands afterward. But even with parents who try not to inundate her with advantages, the privilege is there: chances are, even if she goes to public school, it’ll be a better-run, better-funded public school than those of her poorer counterparts; even if her parents don’t openly cheat to get her into college, she’ll still benefit from better coaching, tutoring, and other preparatory steps to get her into the highest-status schools. Her better jobs will ensure better-quality, subsidized health care for her and her own descendants. Throughout her life, she’ll exist in a bubble with other people of superordinate status, and will imbibe and benefit from their elite standing and practices.

Sounds a lot like aristocracy, right?

For those who vehemently disagree, and claim that harder and more productive work should be better rewarded, I present Markovits’s second point.

Meritocracy warps the very concept of “work” itself

Proponents of meritocracy, and even of meritocracy’s excesses, always make this point: in meritocracies, people are rewarded for the value they create. We dare not go back to a Soviet Communist world, where doctors were paid the same as janitors, and nobody had the urge to work hard or innovate. Go that route, and we’ll end up collapsing the way the Soviet Union did in 1991.

A further case for this was made when the mid-century American corporate world structure was dismantled in the “greed is good” 1980s. In fact, that speech, given by character Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street is on that very subject: in it, he describes the sclerotic layers of middle management one of the companies he’s trying to wreck consists of. Dozens of vice presidents shuffling memos to each other. Overpaid, mid-skilled employees leaching profitability from shareholders. Just get rid of all that bureaucracy, and let true meritocrats reign.

It’s an alluring, seductive notion, and it’s captivated us for decades: if we can replace 33 vice presidents each earning $200,000 a year (the figures Gekko cites in the film) with one high-achieving CEO who earns $2 million a year in salary—plus many tens of millions in stock appreciation earned by slashing company payrolls—well, on balance, that may seem like a good deal. At least, for the meritocrats, it does: a small number of their superordinates drives the company to profitability.

But never mind the dozens of mid-level execs—and the thousands of mid-level workers—who are thrown out of work. For many of them, the only option will be to find new work in what Markovits calls “gloomy” jobs: low-skill, low-paid work in retail and services.

Meritocracy’s tale of two suburbs

To further exemplify his case, Markovits compares two American suburbs, Saint Clair Shores, Michigan, and Palo Alto, California. In the mid-twentieth century both were respectable middle-class towns, housing workers in automotive and electronics industries. Fast forward half a century to find one of these places—you can guess which—drastically weakened by the destruction of its middle class base, while another is super-concentrated by elite meritocrats in “glossy” jobs, who snap up its once-midrange homes for millions of dollars.

But there’s more to the destruction of the middle class than jobs simply bifurcating into “gloomy” and “glossy.” What happens is the actual jobs themselves change in character. Mid-skilled bank loan officers become low-wage data-entry clerks; meanwhile, investment bankers, who securitize and sell the mortgage-backed securities that are what home loans ultimately become, require ever-greater skill, training, expertise—and compensation—to do what they do. Every year, the derby to get into elite colleges to land this elite training to land these elite jobs gets keener and keener; every year, fewer and fewer people make more and more money, while an ever-greater share of the population languishes in economic obscurity.

The results of this are obvious on the bottom rungs of society: for the first time in generations, life expectancy is going down in America (even pre-Covid). Addiction to opioids rises as whole swaths of society find themselves increasingly irrelevant. Meanwhile, on the upper tier, things aren’t much better: as competition heats up to land in or stay in the elite, superordinate workers endure insane work hours, and growing pressure to be ever more productive, to add ever more value to the enterprise in order to retain their earnings, standing, and status.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

What is to be done?

Markovits ends with only rough outlines of solutions, and I can see why: nobody’s really figured out a path forward out of this mess. His suggestion that jobs themselves get redistributed is a toughie, likely involving German-style vocational schooling, and possibly even moves toward universal basic income.

Why aren’t moves like these already being made, or at least tried? Well, the history of inequality itself, paints a gloomy portrait: the only way societies have ever really pushed reset on inequality is through massive upheaval. To wit: world wars and bloody revolutions. It’s a bleak picture of humanity, yet one many meritocrats cling to. “Nobody cedes their privilege,” says one of the characters in The White Lotus, a recent HBO series about the well-to-do vacationing at an elite Hawaii resort. For the sake of humanity’s future, I hope we figure out a sane way to do so.

One way to think more constructively is to recast some of what drives meritocracy. Where wealth of a different age prided itself on its idleness, today’s meritocrats cite their hard work as a defining virtue. I think a lot of this comes from the so-called Protestant work ethic, which holds labor and industry itself as virtues.

Now, I do agree there’s some merit to that. If nobody did any work, we’d have long since died out as a species. And even fictional, egalitarian, post-scarcity societies such as those in Star Trek (a favorite go-to of mine) see folks laboring mightily to build starships, explore the galaxy, and excel in their achievements. I don’t think the spirit of accomplishment itself needs to die out. I don’t even think the notion of healthy reward for initiative and creativity is entirely misplaced.

What is misplaced is the notion that we need to be always on, always all cylinders firing, all the time. “Only the paranoid survive” was the title of a book by one of Intel’s founders. But must we be so paranoid to invent iPhones? Once there was a notion that we as a species actually, on aggregate, would work a lot less, once we figured out how to meet all our basic needs—food, housing, economic security—through the technical advances we were making. With these taken care of, we’d be even freer to innovate, to use our merit to build things we wanted, and continue our processes of societal improvement.

Even in such a world, there will always be those who labor mightier, whose talents are indeed greater, and will no doubt enjoy rewards and prestige for doing so. But I think they, and everyone else, would do even better work in a world where there wasn’t a proverbial gun to our head to do so—a gun that in this age is largely one of our own making.

August 29, 2021
Escape From Bougiestan

Almost five years ago, my then-domestic partner/now-husband, our two pets, and I, packed our things and moved away from San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. The little condo had been my home for over five years, and as is often the case with homes freighted with emotional memory, I wandered the empty space we were about to leave forever, and teared up a bit.

I was lamenting for more than just reasons of nostalgia, though.

My tears were because we were leaving Bougiestan.

That’s my name for it, portmanteau of bourgeois and -stan, the Persian suffix for land or place (hence Pakistan, Turkmenistan, etc).

Every city’s got these places, well-manicured, upscale neighborhoods of charming older homes, or sparkling new McMansions. I’m not talking just about areas of huge affluence, the Billionaire’s Rows sprouting in a few global cities. No, Bougiestan’s bigger than that: it includes places like Shaker Heights, Ohio; Overland Park, Kansas; The Woodlands, outside of Houston; Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs; Chicago’s North Side and North Shore suburbs; Palo Alto, California. Pretty much every economically-significant metro area’s got a Bougiestan, the primary nesting grounds of the upper-middle class.

How My Family Got There

Nobody alive today knows exactly how my forebears gained admittance to this realm. Sometime in the early 20th Century, one of my grandfather’s brothers moved to South Africa from Eastern Europe, and hit it big there. His wealth spread to other members of that extended family as they leveraged those connections to establish themselves all over the globe. After the Second World War, my grandparents moved to Canada. Although they lost most of their prior wealth in the decade that followed, they nonetheless held on to just enough to remain in Bougiestan. My father, availing himself of the rising postwar economy, kept the party going as a corporate attorney right through my childhood. Only in the stagflation 1970s did my family’s socio-economic situation come under threat, an anxiety that hung over our household for all my teens and beyond.

For me, however, the die had been cast: the notion of not living in Bougiestan seemed unthinkable. Even in my early years as a wannabe screenwriter and office temp, I always lived in or near upscale neighborhoods—even if only in a studio apartment. While I was fiscally careful about it, for others in my sphere it often meant repeating my parents’ mistakes, overextending themselves to live the lifestyle of their well-to-do cohorts. As offspring came into the picture, the urgency of Bougiestan becomes doubly significant: after all, good neighborhoods have good schools and good amenities…so not living in those places must be tantamount to child neglect and abuse.

Trouble in Paradise

But is it? My own memories of bullying and social ostracism—driven partly by the fact that my parents struggled to get by in our little Bougiestan—suggests that life in there isn’t always better. When Tom Hanks’ character in the 1993 film Philadelphia, brings his Latino boyfriend, played by Antonio Banderas, to the Bougiestan he grew up in, Banderas scoffs. He can’t imagine the place being anything less than idyllic. Hanks replies: “those can be some pretty mean streets. Don’t let appearances fool you.”

While there’s obviously nothing wrong per se with aspiring to live in such places, Bougiestan carries with it much of our current conversation about inequality and the vanishing middle class. It’s also a physical manifestation, in America at least, of the country’s tortured racist past, something I myself wasn’t cognizant of when I first came here two decades ago.

A History of Nice Neighborhoods

Even the most illiberal of people now agree Southern-style segregation was wrong. Jim Crow is practically shorthand for racial injustice, to say nothing of South African Apartheid or Nazi-era Nuremberg Laws.

But the reality in America is more nuanced than that: from the 1930s right through the 1960s, banks in America engaged in the practice of redlining, of literally drawing red lines around economically disadvantaged, mostly minority districts, and refusing to lend there. Conversely, many interwar suburbs, Bougiestans both back then and continuing to today, enacted racial covenants prohibiting people of color from residing there.

While this obviously doesn’t mean that every resident of Bougiestan today is racist, it does mean their lives and lifestyles are built upon that legacy. It means that the property appreciation those people enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, was not shared by all. If there’s one thing our move to a onetime non-Bougiestan neighborhood—rapidly becoming part of Bougiestan thanks to San Francisco’s real-estate market—taught me, it’s that turning a place into a Bougiestan costs money. Big money. All those lovely landscaped yards and gut-rehabbed interiors involve huge expenditures of skilled labor and cash—something that’s in short supply to nearly all of the population.

My own crocodile tears upon leaving Bougiestan, though, pale compared to how many others see it. It’s perhaps best expressed by a character in an episode of the HBO TV series Big Little Lies, itself set in a Northern California Bougiestan community near Monterey. Laura Dern’s character, wife of a financier, learns her husband’s been convicted of Bernie Madoff-like financial crimes. Her family’s economic standing in jeopardy, she freaks out, and shouts at him:

“I will not not be rich!”

If Not Bougiestan, Then Where?

Dramatics aside, Bougiestan is really just a manifestation of our era of rising inequality, of hyperinflation in critical domains such as education, health care, housing, and retirement. Bougiestan’s residents, in a way, only exacerbate the problem, hoarding the opportunities available to them. In many ways, this isn’t their fault, at least not entirely: while the upper-middle class have undoubtedly benefited from the last four decades of “greed is good” capitalism, its biggest winners and instigators are the truly rich, the rentiers, the financially independent whose income is passive and not primarily earned through wages.

While there are many standouts among this class who’ve rejected the status quo and look to fix it—Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Marc Benioff stand out—too many follow the path of Roger Ailes, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the Koch brothers, for whom inequality is not a problem to be remedied but an inescapable, unchanging reality of the human condition. There will always be poor people, said one young conservative to me at a job at a Midwestern bank years back, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

I reject this notion, and believe that more than just social policy can fix it (though I support that as well). For all our technological innovations over the past few decades, we in fact live in an era of declining productivity and growth. Most innovation these days is focused on small-ball communications technology (do we really need another social sharing app?) or finance of the type that nearly wrecked the world economy a decade ago.

Fixing the Real Problems

This has been good in Bougiestan, for those talented, lucky, and assertive enough to remain in it, but it’s likewise left many millions behind. Compare these last fifty years with the century before it—between 1870 and 1970—when the world catapulted itself from a largely impoverished rural or early-industrial existence to a cornucopia of airplanes, moon rockets, labor-saving, affordable appliances, mass transit and automobiles—and even the foundation of our more incremental-improving times, the microprocessor.

Technology isn’t the absolute savior, but as rapper Macklemore put it about another social cause, it’s a damn good place to start. Bougiestan and the housing crisis are in fact the same issue, for as long as housing is rare and expensive, even the most basic, Levittown-style living will be unattainable to most.

But what if we could leverage technology and automation to build housing at one-tenth the cost it is now? Construction is an industry that’s hardly changed at all in centuries. Look around at your home: every cut piece of timber, every brick laid, every drywall panel in every building ever built was applied by hand, with human toil and sweat—just as was done in the time of the Romans. Sure, we have power tools instead of slaves, but little else has evolved. There have been moves in prefabrication here and there, but nothing that’s moved the needle in any big way.

To that end, the biggest thing that’ll make Bougiestan, or at least more of its trappings, available to everyone, will be the will to make it happen. As World Wars, moonshots, and disease-eradication projects of the past have proved, humankind possesses immense potential to reshape the world. But it’ll take earnest commitment, concerted initiatives—and maybe a little sacrifice—from everyone, in Bougiestan and beyond, to make it happen.

March 8, 2020
Ending Inequality As We Know It

The biggest progressive goal ever for a time gone insane.

c/o Wikimedia Commons

“My Daddy makes four thousand dollars a week!”

There it was. My earliest introduction to income inequality, sitting on the dock of a bay at summer camp with a group of fellow ten-year-old boys, back in the heart of the Reagan era.

Never mind the appropriateness of a kid that age being privy to that knowledge (yet another wrinkle of that crazy time). While we can all imagine — resent? admire? — the lifestyle of that kid’s family on that income in that era, this was, perhaps, the first time Young Me began to innocently ask the $107 trillion question (the total GDP of the world, by one reckoning):

Why does economic inequality exist?

Such a childlike question, huh? I think, whenever I asked it, the more conservative dads of the time fulminated about the perils of Communism — this was the Cold War era, after all — and economic redistribution and such (if you’re wondering why this offended them so much, this might be the answer). Which got me thinking about the basic societal notion we’ve all bought into: you know, the one that says certain people are entitled to greater rewards in exchange for greater contributions to society.

Trouble is, the degree of “greater rewards” and “greater contribution” remains contested…and has been, on and off, throughout human history. These days, talk of inequality has fueled many movements, from the Tea Party to Occupy to would-be populists the world over. Meanwhile, all that economic talk about consensual market activities and willing participants and rational choice has begun to feel wrong to many of us.

It wasn’t always that way. I think, for a time, many of us held out hope — heck, I did, naively, in the early dot-com era, where, in America, inequality was briefly shrinking in the 1990s even as tech companies were handing out stock options like candy. Hope that this would all work itself out, you know, like the way the Great Compression did for the white middle class in the 1950s and 1960s, except maybe for everybody this time.

Only it didn’t happen.

Where it all went wrong

“Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth. Just one rich family, the six heirs of the brothers Sam and James Walton, founders of Walmart, are worth more than the bottom 40 per cent of the American population combined ($115 billion in 2012).” Peter Turchin, University of Connecticut

The nineties and beyond instead continued the trend of the decade or two prior, leading us, in America and the West, to the most unequal age in over a century.

But let’s look deeper than just the last fifty or a hundred years. Let’s go back to where inequality started. And I mean way back, to before history itself.

We have, in our minds, this notion of basically egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies… then flash-forward a few millennia and humans are building pyramids to the dead bodies of the Pharaohs. But where do we get that idea?

Turns out we’re largely beholden to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who back in the 1700s literally wrote the book on the idea of an egalitarian prehistory. Closer to our time, UCLA professor Jared Diamond went so far as to call the development of agriculture the worst mistake humans have ever made — and by that, channelling Rousseau, he meant it spelled the end of equality — and fairness — for humankind.

Some evolutionary biologists take a different view: you know, all that stuff about survival of the fittest and warring tribes of chimps. But guess what? Lots of that was actually pseudo-science. Darwin himself never said the words “survival of the fittest.” Capitalists of the time popularized it. Science is great, but it’s easy to misrepresent or oversimplify; just ask any climate-change-denier on a cold day.

Breaking the wheel

So where does this leave us, those who aren’t happy with the way things are? Most neoclassical economic consensus concludes that capitalism, the free market, and any inequalities therein are logical manifestations of the productive capacity of some humans over others. Going back to a slightly Younger Me again, one fellow at a Chicago finance company I worked at a decade or so back laid it out this way: you’re paid based on how much value you add to a company’s bottom line. Period.

I’m going to take the position of many of my fellow progressives and call bullshit on this whole scheme. Fiat money, indeed the entire financial system, consensual or otherwise, are ideas we humans made up. Most of us went along with these with little understanding of how they worked, or how they greatly privilege some over others. And sure, reforms and revolutions past didn’t always work out as intended (though often not for reasons we think— see Western intervention in the Russian Civil War as one example). But if there’s anything the crazy events of the past year have taught us, it’s that now’s not the time to give up or stop trying.

So what all do we do? For a start, keep on exposing elites. I give early credit to filmmaker Jamie Johnson, whose HBO documentaries in the mid-2000s were among the first to shine a light on the doings of the One Percent. We also need to continue to foreground the real will of the people: most Americans, particularly younger Americans, are actually unhappy with the socio-economic status quo. Comedian Chris Rock, himself no slouch in the success department, put it best: “If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots.”

Conservatives usually point to socialism’s failures as a stern warning of what happens when you try to fix things. But let’s face it: socialism was something of a 1.0 product, a 19th century solution filled with pitfalls and bugs. Yes, Bernie did a killer job rehabilitating the brand, and some northern European countries get many things right. But the time has passed for mealy-mouthed third-way triangulation. It’s time for progressives to swing for the fences again. To think big, in 21st century fashion, about where we want our world to go so, and start working to get it there.

How big a change are we talking? I’ve seen this articulated more and less in various spots, so let me lay it on the line:

To feed, clothe and medically care for every human being on the planet to at least a present-day Western middle-income standard of living, and do so in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

Crazy, right? How the heck are we going to do that?

A utopian shopping list

Believe it or not, there’s a growing consensus that we’re getting to the point where this is now feasible — if only we allocated the efforts and resources of our civilization more wisely. As author William Gibson put it, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Some proposals to get there are bold — like transitioning our entire financial system to post-scarcity economics; in this scenario, nobody gives anything up, but the old rules of money and demand are, over time, engineered away (you’ve actually seen this before on TV, and it’s awesome).

Less radical, but still pretty ambitious, is the call to replace the various forms of social welfare with a flat basic minimum income paid to everyone. Thomas Piketty’s notion of a global wealth tax has also been called out as a means to diminish yawning chasms of inequality, and help with things like infrastructure and basic services. Overall, tidying up our consumer culture of throwaway obsolescence and fixing climate change with carbon-neutral forms of energy production would also need to come about.

Awesome! Where do I sign up?

Unfortunately, there’s one critical, final step that needs to happen before any of this can start. In olden times they called it noblesse oblige, the whole Spider-Man great-power/great-responsibility idea, that the rich and the powerful owe a certain degree of generosity and nobility to the rest of us. I think we’ll take that in the form of a few score more Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts, thank you very much. More than just money, I think visionary leaders need to stand up, and get enough of us to get onboard.

I know conservatives and establishmentarians of all stripes will try and fight this. Their worldview of tax cuts and government-can’t-do-anything-right and efficient markets and wealth creation leads many of them to believe inequality is part of a just-world hypothesis — even though there’s plenty of evidence that many at the top haven’t necessarily earned the right to be there.

By Eugène Delacroix — Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives via artsy.net, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27539198

There’s also the dark shadow of history, which reminds us how past ages of inequality got settled: wars, plagues, revolutions. It’s scary. By that reckoning, Brexit, Trump and Le Pen could be heralds of what’s to come, as people’s rage is diverted into reactionary politics and xenophobia. If for no other reason, this is the best one of all to do something big. Because while we all recognize that some extra reward for extra initiative is fair, the world’s economic system as constituted isn’t. And it’s only a matter of time before enough of us get fed up and flip over the chessboard altogether. So why not make the game fair again instead?

That’s something that makes sense to everyone, from the innumerable people suffering greatly the world over…all the way to future incarnations of Young Me, wondering why the petty unequal-ness they see all around them is the way it is.

May 6, 2017
Separate and Unequal

With the seemingly unending debate about the debt ceiling raging, I wanted to highlight a side issue that’s been burbling up in the United States over the past several decades: that of income inequality.

If we follow this way, way back, the widely-accepted story is this: before the agricultural revolution took hold, bands of foragers had little to differentiate each other. There was no concept of “income,” and while no doubt certain leaders may have commanded respect, provisions were divided more or less equally.

We see the rise of inequality with the dawn of agricultural civilizations, where food surpluses enabled delineation and differentiation between people (interestingly enough, it’s also now considered to be the time when what we consider traditional mores — marriage, monogamy, sexual conservatism — took root). With tribal chiefs commanding armies and other forces of social coercion, it was only a matter of time before rulers became monarchs and descendants of great military heroes became kings and nobility. This was the Faustian bargain we humans created for ourselves at the dawn of civilization: in exchange for predictable patterns of settlement and food production, most of us would enjoy fairly meager fruits of the society’s benefits; most of the reward would go to the rulership. In its most extreme form, the lowest elements of society — or those captured from other societies in massive wars — would become property themselves, forced to work with no reward at all. We call this concept slavery.

The division between rulers and commercial interests also began early; while kings and emperors may have held sovereign political power, there still needed to be a fungible medium of exchange by which services and goods could be traded. We have a name for this concept: money. While there had long been merchants and trader classes, it was really only in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when Europe, emerging from centuries of stagnation and capitalizing on advances from other places, took the lead and began (for better or worse) to explore and colonize the world. This was, in a sense, the first widespread philosophical uprising against concepts such as the divine right of kings, and held that the mercantile class was entitled to share in societies riches as well. With industrialization hyper-accelerating the ability for capital to be deployed and engaged (whereas before much was tied to land and agriculture, which were held largely by monarchs and the nobility), we entered the modern age with a new term: Capitalism.

Born in the Enlightenment, capitalism’s tenets seem on the surface to be quite noble: the de-emphasis of peerage and inherited titles as a delineator of wealth and influence; the notion of “careers open to talent,” where one’s ability determined one’s standing. When the West’s newest nation in the late-1700s, founded largely by former subjects of one of Europe’s most mercantile-friendly powers, outlined their raison d’etre in the country’s founding document, they more or less distilled these notions into a single, catchy phrase:

“All men are created equal.”

I’m sure that was heady stuff for 1776. So heady, in fact, that its underlying meme of “equality” caught fire around the world. The delineation was eventually expanded to include women, provide redress for the persecution of minorities, and birth entire philosophical concepts regarding the equality of peoples. But what its underlying “free market” system didn’t do is make the world less unequal. Where once we had emperors, now we had captains of industry; where once kings ruled nations, now robber barons commanded corporate trusts. Beginning in the early-to-mid 1800s in Britain, and culminating with the Gilded Age in ascendent America at the turn of the 20th century, writers and social activists from Dickens to Twain to (yes) Marx and Engels pointed out the alarming trend: under classical economics, a small number of smart, greedy, fortunate folks ended up in much the same place as kings of old… with the remaining populace forced to forage for the remaining scraps. Not literally, of course, but in a more figurative, modern sense: working with a system that was rigged against them, workers endured horrific conditions and low pay with little redress or recourse. The legal system was bought and paid for by the rich. A new aristocracy was born.

Of course, the huddled masses fought back, and over the middle decades of the twentieth century, until well into the 1970s, unprecedented new rights and benefits emerged. Between labor unions, old-age pension plans such as Social Security, grants and loans to attend college, and (in America) the prosperity of being the sole Western nation standing after World War Two and a net petroleum producer, the 1950s and 1960s were, in a sense, a Golden Age of socio-economic equality. As I wrote in my last piece, right-wing nostalgia for the 1950s obscures the fact that this was the most “socialist” era in the nation’s history. The income divide was the narrowest it had ever been, and tax rates on the wealthy were much, much higher than today.

Then, of course, everything changed. The reasons for this are many, but from what I’ve been able to piece together, a lot of it rests with Ronald Reagan. Although earlier in his movie career he was actually something of a liberal — head of the Screen Actors Guild, he was pro-union — his work as spokesperson for General Electric and its cadre of old-line pro-business conservative executives slowly changed his mind. He spent his years riding trains across the country and honing his speech on the evils of government regulation… so much so that the breakthrough speech he gave at the 1964 Republican National Convention was a near-clone of that which he’d given during his years at GE. This galvanized a movement and utterly changed the trajectory of young activism: whereas sixties radicals promoted free love and equality, by the 1980s the vanguard of the young politico was arguably fictional character Alex P. Keaton on the sitcom Family Ties (played, ironically, by a rather liberal Canadian, Michael J. Fox). I came of age in that era and between the cultural zeitgeist, a life lived in a corrupt, overtaxed and inefficient Canadian province; and some decidedly neo-conservative parents, I’d come to accept that the old liberal warhorses of unionization and social welfare were bunk. The future lay in the past.

What I think none of us could have anticipated (though in retrospect we should have) is the unintended consequences of that shift. With deindustrialization, de-unionization, rising health-care costs, and the build-up of the financial industry, the income divide in America is now the greatest it’s been since the Gilded Age of a century ago — and it’s as great in America as it is in Third World nations such as Ghana and Uganda.

But the nagging question this begs is: so what? Is there anything inherently “wrong” with a great income divide, if that’s the way the market works things out? In the free-market fundamentalism espoused by the conservative set, this is just the way of things. Some go even further, as a fellow I knew used to state, by claiming that “poor people create their own drama.” Another claimed “there will always be this divide; there’s nothing we can do about it” — a worldview I’d seen echoed by commentators such as George Will. These people point — rightly sometimes — to the hypocrisy, inefficiency and corruption of government programs, and claim this is the best we can do. To the poor, to paraphrase that New York Daily News article about a then-bankrupt New York, these people say: drop dead.

I’ve long rejected that worldview, which I guess in the American sphere tars me as a “liberal.” For one thing, I simply refuse to accept that what we’ve got is “as good as it gets,” and any attempts to improve our collective lot are doomed to failure. For another, there’s a deep-seated emotional notion I have about inequality that has long guided me — and many others, I suspect, in their life philosophies.

I keenly remember, as a boy growing up in a competitive, nouveau-riche suburb, the materialist one-upsmanship that marked my community. One school I went to imposed a uniform dress code — not out of some vague notions of Dead Poets Society tradition but rather to prevent a materialistic fashion show from transpiring among pre-teens. Sitting on a lakeside dock one summer with four other boys, all of us age ten, I was treated to each kid bragging unashamedly about their fathers’ weekly earnings.

But is that all that disdain of income inequality is — childhood jealousy? I would argue that it’s the very roots of this jealousy and resentment that are worth examining. While misapplied resentment can lead to a host of ills, the feeling probably has root in an adaptive mechanism to regulate how we treat each other. While many primate societies possess hierarchical structures — baboons are the prime example — there are others that do not, such as bonobos. “Might makes right” is not an absolute, and I feel that these deep-seated feelings of disapproval and resentment at great wealth have their roots in our deep-seated desire for a world more like the one we’ve long abandoned — the forager world of bands of equals.

While I’m not suggesting we return to the African savannah, I believe that our post-industrial civilization offers the opportunity to reclaim what the past millennia have denied us: a more equal world. The income divide is an arbitrary measure we have chosen to impose upon ourselves, and while I fully support rewarding those who work harder and take the incentive, I feel our reward mechanism has, in America at least, gotten seriously out of kilter. It’s for that reason that the battle between liberal and conservative in America has gotten so pitched — it’s really a fundamental fight between two very different philosophies. It’s difficult, I admit, in a country founded on raw capitalism, for the progressives to be heard as much as they should. But in my view, this is a fight worth having. I know which side I’m on.

July 30, 2011