The biggest progressive goal ever for a time gone insane.
“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.
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.
