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1% now owns 40%
By Julian Edney (about the author) Page 2 of 3 page(s)
1% owning 40% of the wealth is roughly like an airplane on which one passenger has 40% of the seats to himself. The other 99 passengers are also unequal, so that as you walk to the end of the plane the overcrowding worsens. Having most of the passengers painfully squashed and jammed into a few rows in the back, while one passenger has overflowing abundance, is a fair graphic for the shape of this society [9].
And we act like everything is jake.
It is the status quo, but whichever way you hold this situation to the light, or shake it, it doesn't look good.
The extremes of this society do not look upon each other kindly. This kind of inequality breeds tension and the opposites pull further away from each other. In the aftermath of Katrina, invectives flew across the internet when the nation discovered it had a seething underclass. Many people, especially conservatives, are disgusted, and see the poor not just as poor, but as a parasitic foe, and a real threat to the government's resources.
The poor may be poor, but they also have access to public information. It is open information that national income, which the government taxes, is more than $8 trillion a year [10]. Why can't more be spared for food? And it is public information that most American corporations don't pay taxes - meaning the average American is picking up the tab for all those corporate profits [11].
So where there are children in poverty, whole homeless families, and Americans who are hungry, there is reason for puzzlement. And if the government will not help, there is reason for despair.
And I predict nothing much is going to change. There are plenty of people articulate enough to start a noise. But we self-censor because simply stating that there is problem is a kind of heresy. It contradicts the culture of celebrity, in which we passively idolize the rich. It contradicts the ideology that anyone can freely move up. And it contradicts trickle-down theory. And we avoid talk of social classes.
A popular image is of a family which has an elephant which lives in the middle of the family room. As huge as it is, its existence is denied. Everyone carefully steps around it, and nobody is allowed to mention it. That is how denial works. Anybody outside can see our legions of homeless and our skid rows, but inside the family there is a maintained silence. This is not camouflage; it is a collective agreement that the problem does not even exist.
Among the underclass, the mood is turning darker. There grows a real fear [12].
So how can we change that? How can we transform this inequality and loss of hope among the lowest into a smoothly pulling society in which everyone is snugly bonded?
Should we enlist celebrity figures like Bill Gates or charismatics like Bill Clinton to soothe, and explain everything to the homeless? Tiger Woods? Should we get a trusted public figure like Oprah to give perspective to the people in the crammed back rows of the plane? Oops but these figures are part of the problem. And in government, who represents the very poor, who articulates their fears? half of our senators are millionaires.
Any problem of this magnitude requires change of a magnitude that requires large numbers of people to work collectively. Actually the more unequal we are, the less we identify with each other, so the less we trust each other. So the less likely are we to form any collective.
The common good is simply unlikely.
And the interior language of economists and intellectuals will not advance us. A cacophony of special jargon, intellectuals wishing to be nonjudgmental, and professors who answer questions with, well what do you think. None of that advances us, so we fall passive and perplexed again.
Nothing is going to happen. The problem will get incrementally worse. Poverty will spread and wealth will spread and society will become ever more lopsided. Turning this problem around would take a tectonic shift in public values. We would, for instance, have to become a lot less devoted to celebrities and a lot more devoted to justice. That will take endless debate.
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