[[ MY MESSAGE: NEOLIBERAL SYSTEM IS NOT FOR YOU..
WE HAVE TO PUT IT DOWN! ]] Note
from Hugo Adan.
This chart 5
depicts the remarkable (and recent) concentration of wealth in the hands of the
few, who now garner the vast majority of gains in the nation’s household income
Unfortunately we couldn’t copy
chart 5, is blocked. Go to the website above
How much
longer until the pitchforks come
out?
[ Here only
extracts: go to the original version above ]
Social
movements arise to solve problems of inequality, injustice, exploitation and
oppression. In other words, they
are solutions to society-wide problems plaguing the many but not the few (i.e.
the elites at the top of the wealth-power pyramid).
The basic assumption of social
movements is that Utopia is without reach, if only the sources of the
problems can’t be identified and remedied.
Since inequality, injustice, exploitation and
oppression arise from the asymmetry of power between the few (the
financial and political elites) and the many, the solution is a
reduction of the asymmetry; [-REV -] that is a tectonic realignment of the social structure that
shifts some power—economic and/or political—from the few to the many.
In some instances, the
power asymmetry is between ethnic or gender classes, or economic classes (for
example, labor and the owners of capital).
Two
dynamics assist a social, political and economic resolution [-rev-] that
transfers power from those with too much power to those with too little power:
1) the
engines of the economy have shifted productive capacity definitively in favor
of those demanding their fair share of power, and
2) the
elites recognize that their resistance to power-sharing invites a less
predictable and thus far more dangerous open conflict with forces that have
much less to lose and much more to gain.
In other words, ceding 40% of their
wealth-power still conserves 60%, while stubborn resistance might trigger a
revolution that takes 100% of their wealth-power. History provides
numerous examples of these dynamics.
The
Expanding Pie Fueled Expanding Entitlements
Writer Ugo Bardi recently drew another distinction between
Left and Right social movements: “Traditionally, the Left has emphasized rights while the Right
has emphasized duties.”
As
rights manifested as economic entitlements rather than political (civil
liberty) entitlements, rights accrue economic costs.
I would argue that the cost was also
paid by higher productivity enabled by the technological, financial and social
innovations of the Third Industrial Revolution, roughly speaking the interconnected advances of the second half of
the 20th century.
These advances can be characterized
as expanding the economic pie; that is, generating more energy,
credit, technological tools, opportunities, security and capital (which
includes financial, infrastructural, intellectual and social capital) for all to share in a socio-political-financial
allocation broad enough to make everyone feel like they were making some
forward progress.
This long-term, secular expansion of the pie naturally
generated more demands for additional entitlements and rights, as the economy could clearly support the extra
costs of allocating additional wealth and resources to the many.
But in the 21st century,
the expansion of the pie stagnated, and for many, it reversed. Adjusted for real-world inflation many households
have seen their net incomes and wealth decline in the past decade. .. Despite the endless media rah-rah about
“growth” and “recovery,” it is self-evident to anyone
who bothers to look beneath the surface of this facile PR that the pie is
now shrinking. This dynamic is increasing inequality rather than reducing
it.
THE
SHRINKING PIE AND STAGNANT PRODUCTIVITY
It is a truism of economics that widespread increases in productivity are
required to generate equally widespread increases in income and capital, i.e. productive
wealth. To the consternation of many, productivity
has stagnated since 2010; no wonder household income for all but the
upper crust has gone nowhere.
If we glance at a chart of productivity, we see a strong
correlation with speculative investment bubbles (the dot-com and housing
bubbles 1995-2005) and speculative spikes fueled by
central bank monetary stimulus (2009-10). With bubbles and
monumental excesses of central bank stimulus, productivity quickly sinks to its
secular trend line: DOWNWARDS.
[ see chart below ]
This next chart depicts the
long-term trend line of productivity through all four industrial revolutions.
Note the decline concurrent with the 4th Industrial Revolution
(mobile telephony, the Internet, AI, robotics, peer-to-peer networks, etc.) and
the depletion of cheap-to-access-and-refine oil:
The unwelcome reality is that the economy is changing in
fundamental ways that cannot be reversed with
policy tweaks, protests or wishful thinking.
Consider the percentage of
the gross domestic product (GDP) that goes to employee compensation (wages and
salaried). Labor’s share of the GDP has been in a downtrend
since 1970, which not coincidentally was the peak of secular productivity:
In this below chart of the distribution of wealth in the
U.S., we find the same correlation to the downtrends in productivity and
labor’s share of the economy. The income growth
of the bottom 90% of households (the many) topped out in the early 1980s and
has declined precipitously since, while the wealth of the top 0.1% (the few)
has more than tripled since the late 1970s:
This next chart depicts the
remarkable (and recent) concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, who
now garner the vast majority of gains in the nation’s household income:
See chart 5: Distribution of Wealth
in the US since 1917 in the source of this Art:
…
OR GO TO THE ORIGINAL SOURCE:
----
----
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario