Bourgeois Concerns 2

When I was in college and in rebellion against the social class I grew up in, I believed the only important thing was to think big thoughts and that such trifling concerns as those discussed in my previous post were insufferably bourgeois.   But given the current state of income inequality in the US, affiliation with the middle class has come to seem something of a badge of honor.  The rich like to imagine they are the engine of the economy but they’re not, the middle class is.  A large and thriving middle class is the one social stratum an advanced industrial economy cannot do without, because without it, there would be no market, no demand for the goods such an economy produces.  The poor and the rich don’t consume at a high enough rate.  The larger the middle class is, the more stable the society is, and the more equitably the wealth is distributed.  The middle class is the glue that holds modern societies together, it’s the most law-abiding class.  The more polarized a society becomes, the more split into rich and poor, the more unstable it becomes, and the more likely it is that centrifugal forces will pull it apart.  Ideally, nearly everyone would be middle class, with just enough poor and rich to keep things interesting, enough for a soupçon of instability, if you will. 

But since the Reagan years the extremes have been expanding at the expense of the middle.  This phenomenon has become known as the Great Divergence.  While the number of poor has increased, the rich have gotten a whole lot richer.  Since 1979 the income of the top 1% has gained over 275%.  The United States now has one of the highest levels of income inequality of any of the high income nations.  At the same time the share of total income going to the middle class has declined from 62% in 1970 to 45% in 2010, while the share of the rich has gone from 29% to 46%.  The middle class has shrunk; its median income and median net worth have both fallen over the past decade.  Too many rich or, as in our case, a few too rich, is a drag on the economy, sucking the blood of demand from it, making it anemic. Extremes like this are a social distortion that cannot be sustained. 

The Republicans do not want to reverse this trend, far from it.  To raise taxes on the middle class in order to give the rich yet another tax cut, when the latter’s tax rates are already at historic lows, as Romney proposes to do, would be economic suicide.  Romney may actually believe in such voodoo economics (after all, he believes in all sorts of other nonsense), despite its having been proven decisively wrong over the past 40 years, but I think it’s actually more of a class loyalty thing.  He just wants to make himself and his rich cronies even richer, and to hell with the rest of us. 

It’s been said that Romney wants to return to the Gilded Age, the era over a century ago when super-rich industrialists and financiers rode roughshod across the economic landscape and lowly workers were grateful for any crumbs tossed their way. (Besides the abysmal business ethics, this was also an era of rampant political corruption.)  Ryan, his sidekick, gets his economic notions from sophomoric fantasy novels and wants to wind the clock back 2 centuries and reinstate the gold standard (which, btw, is a terrible idea).  But to me it seems that the Republicans really, in their heart of hearts, would like to turn back the clock 500 years to an era before the middle class even arose, an era when women were chattel and did as they were told, an era before science when religion and an hereditary aristocracy held sway and were supported by the sweat of a vast peasantry who didn’t ask troublesome questions of their betters because they knew their place as inferior beings.  That is the lost paradise the Republicans long to reinstate, with themselves as the aristocrats, of course.  They would like nothing better than to do away with modernity and all its trappings, and replace it with a new feudalism, a capitalistic feudalism.  They want to get rid of the state because the state is like the king in those old days, a check on their oligarchic power, which they wish to be as absolute as possible, and beyond the reach of the masses and their annoying vote.     

But surely, you say, they could never imagine this is a viable program.  Well of course, not if they were sane.  The trouble is, while their grip on reality wasn’t sure before, after a Black man was elected president the Republicans well and truly lost their minds.  The party was hijacked by its lunatic fringe and has now become the party of ignorance and superstition, the anti-science party.  Composed of people who imagine facts can be whatever they wish them to be, it has become utterly disconnected from reality.  Republicans have abandoned facts, evidence, and pragmatism, in favor of ideology, blind beliefs, and wild assertions.  Also, Romney and his cronies are contemptuous of anyone who’s not rich and convinced that such people are easily duped.  And, unfortunately, if the polls are accurate, they’ve managed to dupe a whole lot of them already. 

For the rich the Romney/Ryan ticket represents over-reach.  The rich have done exceedingly well over the past 4 decades, far better than everyone else.  But that’s not enough for them, of course.  Greed is their defining characteristic.  If, through a combination of misdirection, lies, voter suppression, fraud, and dirty tricks, they accomplish their coup of the few, and then proceed to carry out their program to push income inequality ever further, to unprecedented levels, the result won’t be good for anyone who values economic or political stability. 

Mother's Day

On Mother’s Day R2 took us and our dogs to visit some friends in Woodside, a small town on the peninsula just west of Palo Alto.  Appropriately, the topic of overpopulation came up again (see Freedom, Dec. 2010).  Actually, the husband of this pair brings it up every time we visit.  He’s on the faculty at Stanford in Earth Sciences and is convinced that the carrying capacity of the planet has already been exceeded; the human population needs to be reduced by at least 30%.  (Like us, they have no children, only dogs.)  He said: “It’s all well and good to honor your parents and the sacrifices they made, but as a culture we need to stop holding parenthood up as an ideal, something everyone ought to aspire to, because excessive breeding is destroying the human future.”  This is why imagined futures have been dystopian for decades now.  Unless we can stop population growth, there’s little hope of things going well for us.  It’s the root cause of all our ecological issues.  We are rapidly depleting natural resources, especially fossil fuels, but also water and minerals.  8,000,000 hectares of forest are being lost every year, resulting in increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and diminished levels of O.  The amount of arable land is dwindling while deserts are spreading.  Other species are being exterminated as we gobble up their habitats; perhaps as many as 100,000/year.  The world is filling up with our trash.  We may be fast approaching a tipping point with regard to climate change that will take us down a rabbit hole from which there will be no return or escape.  We’re headed for environmental catastrophe unless we can kick the compulsion to breed.  Choosing not to have children is the single most efficacious step an individual can take to try to avert disaster. 

Religious and ideological opposition to birth control is a big part of the problem.  Worldwide, 40% of pregnancies are unintended (50% in the US).  That’s 80 million unwanted children every year.  Bush’s AIDS program (PEPFAR) in Africa (the foremost continental driver of world population growth) intentionally withheld birth control information from women, focusing instead, as the Republican brand of sex education tends to do domestically, on abstinence.  Studies have shown that when women take control, birth rates go down, especially when they have other options in their lives.  Republicans and the Church in their campaign against contraception represent the old patriarchy in a rear guard action against empowering women and the new, more gender balanced, multivalent, panpotent culture that is struggling to be born.  They do all in their power to further the obsolete belief that women who choose not to have children are defective, because in their view the whole point of women is to be baby-factories.  Our friend said: “We should hold a non-mother’s day to celebrate women who have foregone motherhood.” 

Of course, in democratic countries a 1-child policy can’t simply be imposed by proscription as it has been in China, but having children can be made less alluring through tax policy and by means of moral suasion, because the decision to have children has now taken on profound ethical dimensions.  It’s not just a choice about the quality of your life and your children’s lives, but about the quality of everyone’s lives, the quality of life of everyone who will ever live.  The choice to have children has moral weight; it may well be the most fraught ethical decision of most peoples’ lives.  Prospective parents need to think long and hard about what they’re about to do.  What’s needed is a media campaign to put the brakes on breeding.  If only some civic-minded billionaire would get behind it, a sea-change in awareness could be effected, whereupon the askance glance of others would discourage reckless breeding.  At least, if Franzen’s view that it is merely the freedom to breed that is ruining the planet were true, but it may be something else, something more insidious and more difficult to combat.  In the US, at least, children have become sacraments in an informal religious cult conceived to transport the faithful beyond the individual limits of sex and death.  This persuasion may be the most difficult obstacle to overcome on the road toward Zero Population Growth. 

Econ 101

John Maynard Keynes

When I took my undergraduate degree in Economics (at a very conservative, private, Midwestern college, let it be said), John Maynard Keynes held a place in the economic canon comparable to the place held in physics by Einstein. His General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money ruled political policymaking after WWII and provided 3 decades of prosperity until the late 70s, when something called stagflation came along, a period of high unemployment combined with inflation.  This was a situation Keynes had not addressed in his masterwork, so it was decided that he was not perfectly omniscient after all, and therefore must be passé and irrelevant.  We would have to go back to Adam Smith and the perfectly self-correcting free market.  There had always been a group of people who longed to do this, because it is so much more comforting to believe that the economy is self-correcting and you don’t need to do anything at all.  Besides, lurking within the General Theory was the troublesome element of uncertainty, and it was such a relief to do away with that.  Thus was the mantle of economic deity handed to Milton Friedman, who provided an explanation of stagflation.  I can recall having a job interview in the early 90s wherein I was asked how it felt to have the Keynesian economics I learned in school invalidated.  I laughed and replied that tales of Keynes demise were highly exaggerated.   I didn’t get the job. 

In the wake of the global financial meltdown of 2007-09, Bush, Obama, Sarkozy, and Brown abruptly decided that maybe markets weren’t perfectly self-correcting after all, and perhaps we shouldn’t just let events take their natural course and see what happened.  Keynes might still have some shred of relevance.  Tax-relief and spending initiatives were launched to stimulate growth.  They weren’t really adequate (less that 2% of GDP a year for 3 years), but they did pull the economy out of a nosedive.  Yet, much as happened in 1931, these measures led to a panic about deficits that produced calls for debt reduction and austerity.  In 1931 Keynes warned that these spending cuts would turn the economy downward again, and, indeed, the depression deepened.  Yet here we are 80 years later making the same mistake all over again.  A couple of months ago Rick Perry said that “Keynesian theory is now done.”  That’s like Rick Perry announcing the end of General Relativity.  I suspect his knowledge of the one is equivalent to his knowledge of the other.

Keynes mission during the Great Depression was to save capitalism from itself, and it requires his services again.  Events of the past 5 years have demonstrated yet again the accuracy of his models, and discredited free market theories.  One has to suspect that even congressional Republicans see this, and are only determined to block Obama’s attempt at a second stimulus because they see it as in their political interest to insure that the economy is as bad as possible for the 2012 election.  Whether they are doing it out of ignorance, stupidity, or selfish political motives, if they are successful in blocking any stimulus, the United States will be condemned to a decade of stagnation, joblessness, and declining living standards.  And the Republicans will have performed a great service for all those who wish our country ill.   

Midterms

Not long after I returned from Italy the mid-term elections took place and I have to say I was a bit flabbergasted by the results.  Of course California bucked the trend, but what the hell is going on with the hinterlanders?  They had some sort of conniption.  Now, I get the anger over the Wall Street bailout.  The too-big-to-fail banks should have been bankrupted and broken up.  Their shareholders’ should have been hosed and their executives fired with no severance.  The Obama team was entirely too cozy with Wall Street and gave them too sweet a deal.  But does that justify a wholesale insurrection?  And do the voters actually believe the Repubs are less cozy with Wall Street?  To vote them in is like saying you’ve decided you don’t like rodents so you’re going to replace your gerbil with a rat. 

If, as some say, this debacle was engineered by blue-collar Democrats trying to “send a message,” I’m not sure what that message was.  Were they upset that Obama and the Dems hadn’t fixed the recession fast enough?  Or were they upset about the deficit?  You can be one or the other with consistency, but not both.  To be both is to complain that it’s too hot and too cold at the same time, because to get unemployment down would have required more spending, not less. 

Anyway, they may think they’ve sent some sort of message, but all they’ve really accomplished is to insure that the federal government will be relatively paralyzed for the next two years or, possibly worse, if the Hooverites they’ve voted in have their way and significant spending reductions are put in place, that the recession will take a second dip and unemployment will increase (and therefore revenue will decrease and deficit reduction will be minimal).   

One thing that’s clear is that this vote was not a carefully reasoned one, but an emotional outburst of pure pique.  Meanwhile, as we spin our wheels in backbiting and recrimination, China will continue to seize the future with steady, strategic, well-reasoned steps.  While the Tea Partiers frolic in their free-market fantasies, the Chinese brand of authoritarian state capitalism is laying the groundwork for its domination of the next century, or two, or three.  These wayward voters of ours may wake up one day to discover that the message they have actually sent is that democracy is not going to be the prevailing political paradigm of the future, because in its emotional turbulence it cannot compete with the sheer juggernaut efficiency of authoritarian capitalism.   

Freedom

At JFK, on the way back from Italy, eager for something to fill a six-hour plane ride across the country (I had already endured seven hours crossing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic without any reading material), I picked up Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom.  I had been meaning to read The Corrections for a long time but just hadn’t gotten around to it. However, that title wasn’t in stock at Hudson News in Terminal 8 so the new novel was a stand-in.  I slowly warmed to it and appreciated that one of the primary characters in this utterly mainstream novel was obsessed with the issue of population control.  Way back in college I wrote a paper on how India needed to get its population growth under control in order to start the development engine, because to develop, you need to create a surplus.  You first have to get a toehold beyond subsistence.  Back in the late 60s and early 70s there was plenty of talk about zero population growth (ZPG) even though there were only about 2.5 billion people on the planet then and we weren't facing the environmental depredations we are now, but around the end of the 70s the subject went silent.  People’s eyes started to glaze over if you brought it up, and they hurriedly changed the subject.  It seemed to have become a taboo concept, maybe because people of my generation were then into their child-bearing and child-rearing years and consequently their brains were being overridden by a combination of their instincts and hormones, plus social expectations. They were too busy doing what they were programmed to do by nature and the social order.  Now world population is up to 7.5 billion, three times what it was back then, and we are facing some pretty serious consequences. 

Just before the trip I’d remarked to a couple of people about how this issue had been swept under the rug, no one talked about it in public anymore, which is bizarre considering that it’s the root of all our environmental problems.  I mean, so long as the human population continues to expand at the current rate (thirteen million a month of net gain, according to Franzen), any green efforts amount to little more than pissing into the wind.  Conversely if we could stabilize or, better yet, reduce it, those efforts would lose some of their urgency.  And yet, there has been so little public discussion of this issue. 

Franzen has a theory as to why: capitalism cannot contemplate the stabilization of population because its ideology relies on the assumption of infinite growth, first of capital, and to support that, markets, and therefore, ultimately,  population.  But you don’t have to think about this very much to see that it’s an untenable proposition.  You can’t have infinite growth in a finite world.  This is a piece of the old, outdated notion about the inexhaustibility of nature. 

Because of its implacable and impractical opposition to birth control as a way to get a handle on population growth, the Catholic Church has made itself the villain of this story.  

An issue related to this which Franzen does not raise is Free Death.  The Catholic Church plays an evil role here too, in its opposition to suicide.  When will the individual finally gain rights and control over his or her own life?  When will that happen?  I get exasperated whenever the issue of suicide barriers for the Golden Gate Bridge is brought up.  What gives some people the idea that they should have the ultimate say over whether someone else gets to die or not?  Each person’s life should belong to him or her alone, not to the state, or the society, or the church, or the family, or the neighbors; and each individual should be able to die whenever they choose.  We may not agree with their choice, we may try to talk them out of it, but ultimately it’s not our decision to make.  We don’t know how it feels, being them.  Both as a mercy for every individual and for the sake of humanity as a whole, suicide should be made easier, not more difficult.  But although the mainstream may be coming back to ZPG, I guess it hasn’t come around to this, yet.