Why rich people are freaked out by inequality.
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Peer2Politics
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on peer-to-peer dynamics in politics, the economy and organizations
Curated by
jean lievens
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The episode, along with the controversy over Google limo-buses using San Francisco bus stops to pick up workers, illustrates an emerging problem among the tech community: elitism. Many outwardly friendly men and women who work in tech firms are starting to believe they're a cut above others. There is plenty of reinforcement for this view, too, not least from a media (myself included) that allows claims of social 'missions' to pass by without a sufficiently rigorous challenge. 
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ll across the world companies have in recent years been hoarding cash, nowhere more so than in the US. For at least a decade and a half, cash has progressively increased its share of the American corporate balance sheet, to the point where US quoted companies have turned into the Scrooges of the global economy. According to research by Juan Sánchez and Emircan Yurdagul of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, their cash hoard had reached almost $5tn by the end of 2011.
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In the struggle for social justice it’s not how much empathy we feel that makes the difference, but what we do with it in concrete situations. This is the third in our series of articles about empathy and transformation.
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From
aeon
From the Roman Empire to our own Gilded Age, inequality moves in cycles. Our future looks like a rough ride
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As the Arab Spring revolts and protests in Chile, Brazil, Israel, Turkey, and India have shown, social tensions stemming from inequality are mounting around the globe.
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After you heard President Obama’s call for a hike in the minimum wage, you probably wondered the same thing I did: Was Obama sent from the future by Skynet to prepare humanity for its ultimate dominion by robots?
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Grim recent studies reveal the shocking increase in inequality globally, both between and within countries. Anti-poverty economic policies since World War II have done little, except for their notable success in China. Worldwide, the share of nations’ productivity increases going to employees is shrinking – while the share to capital owners, financial firms, corporations and their top executives has mushroomed, as reported in the Economist, Nov. 2, 2013.
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They find that changes in the occupation structure do not affect the wage structure, so if technology causes a shift from manufacturing to retail, this doesn’t necessarily entail a shift in the wage structure. They find that inequality is increasing within occupations, not between occupations as the SBTC narrative would predict. The SBTC narrative relies on the idea of an “education premium,” i.e., people with higher education reap the benefits of technological progress. But Mishel et al. find that wage inequality has grown strongly since the mid-’90s while the education wage premium grew little. Wages for college graduates have flattened over the last 10 years, even among science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and business occupations.
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The devastation in the Philippines has revived the debate over how to address the disproportionate effects of climate change on poorer countries, an issue that has gained momentum but faces daunting challenges.
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The gap between the oligarchic class and everyone else seems increasingly permanent. A critical component of assuring class mobility, California’s once widely admired public schools were recently ranked near the absolute bottom in the country. Think about this: despite the state’s huge tech sector, California eighth graders scored 47th out of the 51 states in science testing. No wonder Mark Zuckerberg and other oligarchs are so anxious to import “techno coolies” from abroad. As in medieval times, land ownership, particularly along the coast, has become increasingly difficult for those not in the upper class. In 2012, four California markets—San Jose, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles—ranked as the most unaffordable relative to income in the nation. The impact of these prices falls particularly on the poor.
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The so-called “sharing economy” mediated by sites and apps like Lyft, TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, Postmates, Mechanical Turk, etc etc etc., replaces “consistent work for a single employer” with “an agglomeration of short-term/one-time gigs.” That doesn’t really map to the old-economy assumptions at all. And even relatively high-skill professions are now being nibbled at by shared-economy software; consider Disrupt winner YourMechanic.
I say “so-called” because, let’s face it, “sharing economy” is mostly spin. It mostly consists of people who have excess disposable income hiring those who do not; it’s pretty rare to vacillate across that divide. Far more accurate to call it the “servant economy.”
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Having previously defined a good society as a sustainable society with a high level of development, significant provision of meaningful jobs, and low levels of inequality and social ills, Toward a Good Society in the Twenty-first Century provides a wide range of principles and policies that would be necessary if we are to achieve a good society.
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If you've been in the media slipstream today you know the outrage and mockery directed at Tom Perkins, one of the world's wealthiest and most successful Silicon Valley venture capitalists, for an oped he wrote in the Wall Street Journal comparing the rising critique of income inequality and "the 1%" to Kristallnacht. Just so we're all on the same page, Kristallnacht ("the night of shattered glass") was essentially the opening act of Hitler's Final Solution. It took place on November 9th and 10th, 1938. This claim manages simultaneously to be so logically ridiculous and morally hideous that Perkins deserves every bit of abuse he's already receiving.
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Warren Buffett once remarked that we were in the midst of a new class war. “There is class warfare, all right,” he said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
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What kind of economics could facilitate the liberation of all human beings? A new middle path can transform our relationship to individual and collective suffering. The second in our series of articles on empathy and transformation.
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Meanwhile, US income inequality today is the highest that it’s been since 1928 — which matters especially because “the decline in middle-class incomes owes as much to rising inequality as it does to the depressed state of the economy.” The NYT recentlyhighlighted a Brooklyn neighborhood where
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Tax-avoiding, consumer-exploiting big business leaders are largely responsible for these abuses. Congress just lets it happen. Corporate heads and members of Congress seem incapable of relating to the people that are being victimized, and the mainstream media seems to have lost the ability to express the views of lower-income Americans.
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Ownership of Bitcoin appears to be highly lopsided.
This has long been a source of consternation in the Bitcoin community, and people like the FT's Izabella Kaminska have written extensively
jean lievens's insight:
not very P2P from that point of view :)
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Getting anything done generally requires the collaboration of people who do different kinds of work, and whose various kinds of work has shaped various kinds of thinking. It calls for some kind of translation or code switching.
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Trust has declined as the gap between the nation's rich and poor gapes ever wider, Uslaner says, and more and more Americans feel shut out. They've lost their sense of a shared fate. Tellingly, trust rises with wealth.
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In the first major work he has authored alone as pontiff, Francis called for an overhaul of the financial system in Western economies, which promotes 'inordinate consumption' and 'unbridled consumerism'.
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In this interview for my new movie, Charles Eisenstein talks about our true longing and he explains how our money system works and why it leads to separation...
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Technology plays two critical roles in the distribution of wealth, cutting jobs and income from below, while concentrating profits for investors from above.
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An online repository of sustainable designs suitable for developing countries is going from strength to strength.
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