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The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe (theatlantic.com)
ColdWetDog writes: The Atlantic has an interesting article on how societies have decreased economic equality. From the report: "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."
Slashdot reader ColdWetDog notes: "Yep, the intro is a bit of a swipe at Trump. But this should get the preppers and paranoids in the group all wound up. Grab your foil! Run for the hills!"
Slashdot reader ColdWetDog notes: "Yep, the intro is a bit of a swipe at Trump. But this should get the preppers and paranoids in the group all wound up. Grab your foil! Run for the hills!"
I imagine you might think that if you didn't read the article.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Socialist shitholes are the role models of the Left: Cuba, Venezuela, etc. Meanwhile, almost everyone in Good Old America is better off than almost everyone in those countries despite the inequality.
Any socialist country that's not a total degenerate disaster survives only because they are next to a proper capitalist country. For example, Canada siphons from the US, Sweden from Germany, etc. A bunch of turds..
You know what else we had coming out of the world wars? Incredible advancements in technology. Yes, technology levels the playing field. That's the /. nerd slant.
So I'm very familiar with two countries, Vietnam and Thailand.
Vietnam, as you all know, went through a difficult occupation by the French, then the Americans, before having their country divided in two and then suffering a devastating civil war which killed millions of people (4 million?) before unification. The result? Everyone, more or less, started out very poor (during the late 70s and early 80s starvation was a real fear). So everyone was equal. Now though, inequality is climbing (fast) as the winners have "capitalized" (ironic comment intended on the supposedly communist country) on their ability to extract a greater and greater portion of the country's rising wealth. Still, for a time, society was remarkably fluid and anyone could be anyone (for example the ex-prime minister came from humble beginnings).
Thailand has not been conquered by a foreign power (ever?), certainly not by the westerners who did so to every other country in S.E. Asia. (That was due to the astuteness of their past king(s) who played the foreigners off against each other). So the power structures in Thailand have remained static for hundreds of years. In the last century, because of the great increase in wealth coming from modernization and technology, much of it was captured by the ruling class. Thus you have an urban elite that was (until recently) running the show from Bangkok (the "Hi So" or High Society) and getting richer and richer in the process. A populist (yet corrupt) billionaire politician used this great divide to sweep himself into power (sound familiar) only to be ultimately blocked by the military (acting on behest of the existing power structures).
Attempting to analyze the causes and effects of war on Economies would require a rhetorical eloquence no less than those that authored the Federalist Papers, and, at the very least, the same volume of words. Fudging it all down to something as small as your typical The Atlantic commentary read is proportionally equal to asking a five year old to draft their own theories of government.
But, let's at least have a little fun with this, and perhaps attempt at sharing something of insight. Here goes:
A brief study of the history of the United States economy would generally yield a result looking no different in approximation than an increasing sine wave, generally increasing at an exponential rate. While there are upward trends and downward trends, of more-or-less of equal duration of time, the economy has been trending upwards since its inception. As for why it's continually trending upwards, no matter how complex the argument, it generally boils down to one simple word:
Balance.
Our country maintains a relative balance between free market and regulation; between public and private sector; between state and federal governments; between taxable income and disposable income...and so on and so forth.
Naturally, given the general liberties our citizens possess, we from time to time will express our displeasure with the existing status quo. Displeasure among a proportion of the populace is inevitable. We all come from different walks of life and form opinions and biases preferring a bias against the balance in the direction of some extremism. As passionate citizens, we may attempt to swing the pendulum hard in a particular direction, as others naturally try to swing it in the opposite. We exercise this through electing representatives who share our views, posting our views online, speaking out at public meetings, attending rallies, drafting petitions, etc, etc. While these motions are a natural result of the state of government that presently exists, they generally do not threaten the state of government itself.
But, occasionally, it does. And it does, because factions within our society generate enough power among the citizens to disrupt the balance in favor of their zealous points of view. Thankfully, the founding fathers created a system of government that generally impedes factions. (To see a much more thorough and more eloquent analysis of this argument, please see Federalist Papers 9 & 10.)
I'm concerned that we may be living in one of those times. Our country is very unbalanced in its political view right now, and the inflammatory rhetoric from a zealous self-righteous minority faction is pouring fuel onto the fire. To make matters worse, one of those zealots is none other than our president. But, I digress.
When it comes to tax policies, balance is key. The United States economy fared very well following both wars, because both wars were funded by high income taxes. The United States economy also fared very well in the 20's, in the 90's, and before 2008, because income tax rates were very low, freeing up vast amounts of investment capital. And then the economies after all these booms crashed hard, much in part due to deregulation and poor investing. My point being this: Creating economic policies that directly reflect the present conditions with the intention of returning to a balanced economy are the keys to success. A zealous application of a tax policy for the sake of the tax policy alone will not contribute to economic success.
> I care about me and my family and we're not doing so hot.
I'm very sorry to hear that. I've been there - I lived in a vacant lot under a tarp for a while, then moved into a dilapidated mobile home I shared with a roommate (rent $125/month). A few years later I was evicted from a house when I couldn't pay the rent. That was about 15 years ago.
> the gains since 2008 have all gone to the upper class, of which I am not.
Several years ago I learned that there are a few specific things that rich people do to get amd stay rich. I was surprised to learn that over 80% of millionaires never made more than $100,000 / year. I've tried to apply some of those principles and while I've not been very good at applying them consistently, I rarely very have to *worry* about money anymore. Now I'm concerned mostly about making less progress than planned toward becoming a millionaire so I can retire comfortably.
Actually I found out there are two distinct groups of "rich people" - roughly those who are financially comfortable and those who have more than $100 million dollars. The mega rich almost always give up everything else in their life to obsessively pursue money. Screw that, I don't want to do that. The people who have a few million get there by much more reasonable steps such as using a written budget with automatic saving as the first item. I can do that.
> My kid just hit college and she'll not only spend her life making somebody else rich but the first 10 years paying them for the privilege.
Ouch! You say she just started college. My college career was interrupted 25 years ago, so I'm just about to graduate now. At WGU (a state school) tuition and fees is $6,000/year. I get student loans of $3,000/year. The other $3,000/year is covered by the tax credit, my employer's tuition reimbursement, and me paying a bit of cash each year from working. I'll graduate with total student loans of $12,000. Well, I would have, but when I got some extra money (outside of my normal paycheck) I paid off $6,000, so I'll graduate with $6,000 in debt. With the degree I chose, that's about 2 1/2 weeks of income. You *could* talk to your daughter about debt and double check if the plan she has is something she's going to be happy about five or ten years from now. She doesn't *have* to have significant debt to get a college education. Of course she can go into major debt if she wants to.
Another thing you had was a huge body of men who'd been through a massive, life-changing experience together. One that took immense risk and sacrifice but ultimately ended in victory (at least for us Americans).
If you believe that people are capable at all of learning from experience, they must have brought something away from that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I am not sure, what your background is, but you are confusing things. "Kolhoz" was ostensibly collectively-owned ("kol" for "Kolletive"), although in reality the government exercised full control. The bona-fide government farming enterprises were named "sovhoz" ("sov" for "Soviet"). There was nothing else...
"Cooperative" was a way to obtain an apartment — for lots of money and additional labor — it had nothing to do with means of production.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There is another factor from which America gained huge benefit: German and Japanese industry had been decimated. Without funding from the US they likely could not have recovered at all - but for many decades US manufacturing had effectively no competition. Toyota and BMW were slowly rebuilding from nothing - a process that took decades. It's easy for your factories to get rich, and pay people well, when the only competition is from other companies in your own country with the exact same legal and economic situation as you have.
Then in the 1970s... something very bad happened. With a lot of help from the CIA one of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century came to power - his name was Pinochet. Pinochet was heavily influenced by the likes of Milton Friedman and Friederich Hayek who sold him on their (entirely devoid of evidence theory - that actually rejects the idea that theories need evidence) of how to create a successful economy.
And he followed their advice. It was a dark time - tens of thousands of people were brutally murdered, and twice that many starved to death as he implemented Milton's "shock therapy".
By 1978 though - the economy had gotten over the worst of the harm (if only because the poor people were mostly dead now) and suddenly the so-called Pinochet miracle happened. The economy grew at an astounding rate, for a while it had the highest GDP in the world ! Pinochet actually considered decoupling his currency from the dollar (something he had originally done to try and forceably destroy inflation) just because it was clearly worth so much more.
And while these figure were coming from Chile - that's when Friendman and Hayek started seeing western heads of state - at the height of the Chile boom in 1980 they sold their ideas very successfully to Thatcher and Reagan.
Neither implemented them fully - Thatcher told Hayek why: because it's not possible in a free country. The greatest libertarian economic experiment of all time - took a dictator to do, because it's impossible to get it all done WITHOUT one. Libertarians don't like to talk about that - but they know it's true. That's the real reason Peter Thiel funded Trump: he wanted America to get a dictator who would do what Pinochet did.
That was the beginning of the world we live in now - of the gradual destruction of wages and the working class, the ever growing gap - not just in wealth but in POWER between a small elite and the rest of society - and a world where nobody gets to raise their family with a modicum of financial security anymore.
And the worst part: the Chilean miracle was a lie. It never happened. Chile's amazing GDP ? It consisted ENTIRELY of currency trading, there was no actual productivity on the ground driving it. It was mathematical fiction which made a few Chilean elites very rich but had nothing real to back it up... by 1982 the lie was exposed, the Chilean economy collapsed entirely. Friedman and Hayek's disastrous grand experiment - having already killed tens of thousands of people, came to it's final, crashing failure.
But it was too - late the conservative politicians of the west had picked up the ball and started running with it, and they were not going to change course. They still haven't changed course - even after these same policies caused the biggest global recession since the great depression itself. Among the very first things they started doing when they got back into power last november was to dismantle the (meager) protections that was put in place after the crash in order to prevent another one. Because preventing such crashes doesn't suit them - not when the means to prevent them means bankers TODAY make ever so slightly less obscene profits.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I agree and I'd like to add another historical perspective that explains why only disaster ever fixed anything.
What made early Roman society great was its strong plebs and the farmer / craftsman who fought for his country. But as the Roman state expanded and turned into an empire, the labour market was flooded by slave labour, the foundation of the societal pyramid lost its value and eventually all land and wealth passed into the hands of the by now proverbial one percent. Populist politicians, i.e. people who were trying to fix the situation, got murdered because wealth is power and the section of society that could afford to pay for murder and get away with it unsurprisingly didn't consider society as something needing to be fixed. Eventually this set the stage for a seemingly endless series of civil wars, which the rich won. A lot has been written about this, but in my opinion they won in large part because they were rich, which is depressing because that doesn't bide well for our future. A lot of the later civil wars, which severely weakened the Roman state, were essentially about the rich versus the poor, albeit not always about wealth redistribution per se. For example one of the bigger ones was about issues like the poor wanting safety from viking-like raids versus the rich wanting imperial control.
There are plenty of examples in history, where only independence wars or complete collapse of society (eventually) fixes the problem.
So in my view, the reason that only disaster ever fixes anything, is because so far every time people tried to fix it in another way, they were thwarted by the very powerful rich elite.
That is technically correct, but not really the right way to look at it. The driving issue was that the US had huge amounts of surplus industrial capacity after the war. They simply produced more stuff than most economists thought the population could consume (this may not have been true, but I guess nobody imagined how crazy consumerism was going to get). The government's options were to let many of the factories shut down and hope that new businesses would sprout up to absorb the unemployed workers, or engage in a rather sneaky trick that would kill two birds with one stone. This trick involved selling the Germans and Japanese US products on credit. This kept the US factories busy, while also supplying war torn countries with the capital goods they needed to accelerate their recovery. By making it appear as altruism, they could sell this to the US public, when the reality was they just wanted to keep idle hands busy out of fear of another Great Depression.
In a more rational world, surplus industry capacity should just mean that everyone can work less and enjoy a more prosperous life. However, capitalism does not seem able to produce this as a stable outcome, so for now Neo-Mercantilism persists.
Yes, thankfully, it will not — not in the US today. But that's what the communists/socialists would like to be happening. And to farther this goal, they'll claim, that in the current situation we do not have "equality" — without specifying, which of the two very different equalities they mean.
TFA, clearly, talks about Equality of Results — catastrophes wipe everything out, making everyone equally poor. When ArmoredDragon questioned, whether this is at all desirable, s.petry replied, that "equality is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence" — and therefore must be desirable. The most delicious part was him, who just substituted one term for another, accusing others of "false equivalence"!..
The equalities of Opportunity and Results are completely different — like black and white. Worse, while black and white are merely colors, the two equalities aren't a matter of taste — one is a must for a just egalitarian society, the other is highly oppressive.
And yet, various demagogues routinely use the trick of equivocation to confuse the audience by referring to the two interchangeably. It is this dishonest demagoguery, that my post was aimed to counter — the aim, which gives it value.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.