At least Seattle is building a massive amount of housing, to the point where rent increases are finally starting to slow down. Which isn’t surprising at all to anyone who understands how supply/demand works, but might be a shocking idea to someone in the Silicon Valley bubble.
I’m struck by a great idea: why don’t we just ship them all to the ghost cities in China?
Shit, run fiber and institute some special economic zones for whatever stupid Japanese bullshit is hot these days, and the millenials might stop whining about whatever it is they have such beef with!
I’m on Stanford’s email list for their free online courses, and the latest list includes one that’s starting up this fall is about income inequality and poverty. It’s just started, and I’ve only watched the very first bits, but so far it seems like it’s going to be informative and interesting. The intro says they’re attempting to talk about the data and avoid coloring the presentation with their own values, which is exactly what I’d like, although of course it’s impossible to do that perfectly. Anyhow, thought I’d mention it here in case anyone else is interested in checking it out…signup is free, and the videos made by the instructors are too. You can also buy a book for extended reading, though that’s not a requirement.
Arise!
This fivethirtyeight article gives more new data: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/inequality-is-killing-the-american-dream/
That’s a good link.
I think the reason inequality is increasing though on the most meta level possible is that society has frayed. There were and have been mega wealthy before, but they thought it part of their responsibility to give back to their community. Today the mega wealthy fly at 100,000 feet and don’t want the ordinary people to even recognize their existence.
Look at the Gates foundation main charities - the largest two are for 1,000 scholarships a year to make more US technocrats, the majority goes overseas to help disadvantaged there. By no means am I saying this is in anyway bad, but it shows that even someone that’s doing the right thing on a vast scale is still only thinking in terms mostly of “think of the poor children overseas” and education is the solution.
It’s increasingly looking like Western society is splitting between the city and then hill dwellers, those plugged into and thinking in terms of globalization, and those that are not. And the globalizers really seem to think in global terms and are more concerned for some disadvantaged person 5,000 miles away then they are to a disadvantaged person next door.
Nope, we’ve been here before. Inequality is nothing new to America. Compared to plantation owners ↔ slaves, this is small potatoes. I could point you to plenty of examples of rail barons or other early industrialists to demonstrate that the rich exploiting the working class (and believing they were doing them a favor) is nothing new at all in the USA.
It’s the nature of our system, or really any free market system, that a rich class will gain economic power and attempt to hold it unless prevented by other institutions.
Well… Inequality in America after WWII was at the lowest levels ever, being at one point the less unequal society ever on record (yeah, yeah, communist societies maybe offered more equality -and we don’t have real data on this, I think-, but also lower standards and less freedom).
The problem is that that is now over and we are back to pre great-depression levels.
This is according to Picketty’s data, which to my knowledge has not really been put seriously into question.
I mean that’s all true but the thing here is that much of this wealth is “paper”; I’m not getting to say it doesn’t matter but it’s much more invisible today because unlike in the past this wealth isn’t directly tied to land, labor or the “means of production”. Warren Buffet’s holding company has something like 20 people working for it in Omaha, NB yet is “worth” over 400b US dollars. And that’s an outlying example only because they at least own underlying companies that have employees. But the ‘decoupling’ of wealth and employment since the 80s because of financiazation and post-industrialization has surely had a huge impact in skewing this statistic into the realm of the postmodern and unreal.
That it is I think telling the story of wealth, inequality, globalization, ‘securitization’ and the decoupling of labor and capital are all intertwined into complex web of unexpected outcomes. This is very different than the ‘guilded ages’ when land or industrial capita accumulated into a relatively handful of persons. Today you can be a kazillionaire, have a skeleton crew of Western staff, and then outsource the industrial side of things overseas.
[quote=“Enidigm, post:609, topic:58577, full:true”] But the ‘decoupling’ of wealth and employment since the 80s because of financiazation and post-industrialization has surely had a huge impact in skewing this statistic into the realm of the postmodern and unreal.
[/quote]
This is not true. I mean, yes, we are seeing a return to wealth not being labor based, but even while it has scaled a lot since the eighties, it’s still at a lower level than pre-WWI. the situation we are going towards is not postmodern, but classical.
Of course the US is doing way better than Europe in this measure (percentage wealth related to income), but his is because the income inequality has spiked.
So in a way, income in the US is extremely related to wealth, but there’s a huge income inequality, so the source of wealth inequality is mostly labor-income based (with a significant part being management and executive positions). In Europe the income inequality is far lower, but wealth is more concentrated and less related to income, so the source of unequality is inherited wealth (with less overall inequality except at the extremes, when its worse than the US). Both situations are less than ideal, of course.
But yeah, what it looks like is that we are moving back to the old times baseline.
Interesting read here. I’d never really thought about there being a link between inequality and lack of upheaval.
[quote]Calls to make America great again hark back to a time when income inequality receded even as the economy boomed and the middle class expanded. Yet it is all too easy to forget just how deeply this newfound equality was rooted in the cataclysm of the world wars.
The pressures of total war became a uniquely powerful catalyst of equalizing reform, spurring unionization, extensions of voting rights, and the creation of the welfare state. During and after wartime, aggressive government intervention in the private sector and disruptions to capital holdings wiped out upper-class wealth and funneled resources to workers; even in countries that escaped physical devastation and crippling inflation, marginal tax rates surged upward. Concentrated for the most part between 1914 and 1945, this “Great Compression” (as economists call it) of inequality took several more decades to fully run its course across the developed world until the 1970s and 1980s, when it stalled and began to go into reverse.
This equalizing was a rare outcome in modern times but by no means unique over the long run of history. Inequality has been written into the DNA of civilization ever since humans first settled down to farm the land. Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk.[/quote]
Inequality separate a society from a meritocracy. It make so the successful people is the one with money, not the one that is smart and hard working and talented. Ignoring the ethical aspect, the aesthetic aspect is making society bland, boring, mediocre. The bright and talented people that can spark brightness is ignored and ineffective. In a unfair society more people have a worse life than in a fair society. Theres more suffering in the world in a world with unfairness.
There’s another wrinkle to this that the NYT story didn’t get into: although the two wages are equal after “adjusting for inflation” that’s for the overall aggregate rate of inflation. However, inflation in the US has not been symmetrical. Over the 35 year time span discussed by the article (1982 to 2017) inflation in consumer goods and other “short term goods” has been quite low while inflation in health care, housing and higher education (what I consider the “long term goods”) has been stratospheric. So in terms of being able to improve longevity, personal and family health, access to home equity, and access to future opportunity, the 2017 janitor is way worse off than the 1982 janitor. It is true that the 2017 janitor can more easily buy big TVs and smart phones, but that’s a trade off of short term vs long term and in the long run, most Americans are worse off in terms of large scale life prospects. That’s one of the aspects of recent decades that hasn’t been paid enough attention to: all inflation is not created equal.