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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!"
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.
I think most people argue that income inequality is bad on two accounts.
At the upper end, they argue based on a kind of labor theory of income. They ask, if a certain CEO makes 1000x the income of the average worker, is their work really 1000x as difficult, or 1000x as laborious? The answer is obviously no, but that's not the way our economy works. You could ask the same of movie stars or professional athletes. I don't think this is a useful argument. People at this income level get paid what they can negotiate.
At the other end, they argue that it isn't right for some to be so desperately poor. That's why raising the floor of income (perhaps by a Universal Basic Income) is the other part of the argument. To this I'm much more sympathetic. I live in Los Angeles and don't have to go very far in any direction to find a tent city. People are hurting and they need help.
In my opinion, it's not income inequality that is the real problem, but wealth concentration. The concentration of wealth into fewer hands is bad for the economy. If there is less wealth for most people, then there are less purchasers for an economy's output. It's a deflationary scenario where less available money means businesses have to lower prices to sell, making profits smaller and debts harder to pay off. Bill Gates is only going to buy so many TVs, cars, and houses. Doubling his wealth is not going to change his spending habits. If that amount of wealth was placed in the hands of a thousand people, then there would be a thousand new customers for TVs, cars, and houses. This more distributed kind of customer base can sustain an economy.
From this perspective, extreme income inequality is bad because it leads to catastrophic wealth concentration. The small number of very rich can only be customers to a small number of luxury businesses. Every other business relies on the existence of a much larger customer base that can actually afford their wares. If wealth is too concentrated, there's not enough money in enough hands for most businesses to operate. Businesses suffer and lay off their employees, leading to greater unemployment, leading to even fewer customers, leading to worse business, and on down the vicious cycle.
I have internet in the stix. It's the only utility that goes as far as my house (not a trailer).
No electricity (solar works well for me), water (well) or sewer (septic tank). I live in a custom semi luxury house with every amenity of someone living in San Francisco would have. I have AC (thee of them actually, two window and a heat pump), a double refigerator and a Bosch dishwasher (hot water provided by popane). I have 30A/120v AC full sinewave power. If I didn't tell you that I was not connected to the grid, you would not know it. And it was done for less than $30,000 and 7 years of work. I have no debt and if need be, I could survive very well on minimum wage, as could many around me (I live near a hippie commune).
The World Wars may have level the playing field somewhat, but the biggest leveler in Western civilization was the Black Death of the 14th century. Before the plague, labor was plentiful and cheap, and land was valuable and held by the wealthy. But with a third of the population gone, labor became much more scarce and expensive, while the value of land plummeted, and fields were left fallow for a lack of farmers to tend them. There was a huge shift of wealth from the landowning class, toward farmers and craftsmen.
Maybe, I grew up in a different USSR. What "luxury goods"? Name one private label, that existed in USSR in 1952...
They were called "collective farms" and weren't "private" at all. Though ostensibly the farm's chairman was elected, in reality the sole candidate was introduced by the Communist Party's representative for the members of the collective to rubber-stamp. Whatever they collectively farmed could only be sold to the government as well.
Neither Coca-Cola nor Pepsi owned anything — USSR-owned factories were producing the drinks under license.
Nope. Some Soviet models tried to emulate foreign cars, but Fiat didn't own any stake in the factories.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is slashdot. They have no understanding of money. They think 80k is little and minimum wage is plenty. They think life is easy for people in rural areas and think being more than ten minutes from a major city is the rural life. Slashdot is a silly place with people that live in bubbles, unaware of how others even in their own country live.
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.
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.
No. WW2 ended in 1945. In the 1950's, Germany was already the second largest economy. A decimated, war torn country with no industry doesn't give you the second largest economy in the world. Germany's rebuilding took very little time considering the impact of the war, and the drain of intellectual value foisted on them by the US and UK governments, and it didn't take decades.
Japan took that second spot in 1968. That's 23 years to rebuild everything they lost, and become the second largest economy in the world. Between 1955 and 1973, they averaged 9% growth per year. That would be phenomenal for any country, much less one recovering from the impact of the war.
This notion that US industries simply had no competition for decades is simply very wrong.
Coming out of WW2, we gave veterans the GI Bill. Hundreds of thousands of people could now go to college who would never have been able to without that assistance. In 1956 the US would start the interstate highway system, which would be critical to moving goods around. And in 1961, Kennedy would give the country a direction with a decree to go to the moon.
We had the newly educated masses, the means for transportation, and a path forward. The innovation to come from that in electronics, material science, and miniaturization is what propelled the advances that most people today take for granted, everything from telecommunications to food preservation.
Now, unfortunately, we have people who revel in their stupidity, and no longer understand that we are better as a nation, instead of a mass of stupid idiots with no rhyme or reason.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Yes, we are calling you a liar, because, as your own source points out, John Casor was of African descent. He was not a white man. You are lying.
It's amazing how people who claim their philosophy is about freedom - seem so comfortable with giving the state, and the rich, near absolute power. They say they want government small - but they don't mean "staying out of people's personal lives" (hence their comfortable alliance with social conservatives), they just mean "not charging much tax". As if that's the only measure of of a government. As if how the tax is used doesn't count at all.
They say they care about freedom - but it doesn't involve freedom from losing everything you built up in a mortgage scam by a bank. It doesn't involve the freedom from bankruptcy just because your daughter got cancer - meaning you are now both childless and pennyless. Those are freedoms they don't care about- because it affects situations they never anticipate experiencing.
The automatic consequence of freedom of association and freedom of contract - which is unionization they deplore as a "distortion of the market". But apparently pooling your resources to negotiate better deals is ONLY a "distortion" if ordinary people do it, companies can do it all they want - up to and including colluding across entire industries and building monopoly cartells - since they argue companies should have "Freedom" from antitrust laws.
They always say that "fraud" should be illegal but I have no idea what the fuck they define as "fraud" except it isn't the definition everybody else uses - since the things they don't consider "fraud" (and actively defend) includes flagrantly lying to your customers about what your product can and cannot do, deceptive practices in contracts, deliberately hiding information from consumers. I've seen libertarian journalists writing articles denouncing the lies of homeopathy and calling homeopaths 'scam-artists' yet never making the logical leap that this implies they OUGHT to be liable for prosecution for fraud. Instead they defend these businesses from such scrutiny by law.
And undermining democratically elected governments to put a business friendly dictator in place is, somehow, never morally unacceptable to them. A long history in which Brazil right now is just the latest chapter (and indeed, they've done it to that country twice before. Each time - after decades of suffering and hardship the Brazilians win back their freedom in the end, and then choose liberal leaders because they are a liberal people - and each time within a few years... these champions of 'freedom' goes full out to destroy their choice).
It seems flagrantly obvious that the one thing libertarians have NEVER given a flying fuck about is liberty. But it does sound better than saying "I want other people to pay my taxes for me and when I rob them I don't want to be punished".
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
My very first post was specifically discussing quality of life, especially arguing that making everybody equally poor doesn't make for a better society. And that is in fact what GP was arguing against, though admittedly my second post did go on a tangent, but that was because of the few points the article makes about civil equality (i.e. mention of voting rights.)
I understand what your point was, but it was refuting a strawman argument no one made. The article does not state the world is better off because wars reduced income inequality. It merely states the wars reduced income inequality. It then goes on to say it will be much harder to reduce inequality in peaceful times than it was in the middle of the last century. It does not make any claims that we are worst off because of this, only that we will need to work harder to reduce inequality without outside factors which made it easier in the past.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Article *never* does a good vs evil judgement. Never advocates anything.
Article simply states: "Inequality was only curbed by catastrophe. Even in the title, it calls all of those events *Catastrophes*!
The point of the Article is to say that constant, mild and progressive policies have seldom had any impact vs catastrophes. The article calls the chinese and soviet revolutions "bloody affairs" and "murderous mechanisms"
Makes you wonder why you're
Why would you hand pick only one school out of inequality when there are many other economists in other countries producing more investigations that we could take into consideration? Many of them have also investigated inequality as a cause and an effect of market failures, that is, failure by the market to maximize the value creation (ie: an inefficient economy).
Switzerland benefited quite a lot from the influx of foreign wealth, not produced by the swiss economy itself. During some of the catastrophes talked about in the article, a lot of the spoils were transferred to Switzerland, and it has a place in the world economy as the most famous tax haven were the beneficiaries of inequality elsewhere stored their wealth. Also, its economy is *far* from unregulated, not quite a libertarian utopia. You will be able to find many more countries with less industrial, environmental, labor and even financial regulations, why didn't you choose one of those instead?