Pope Francis is correct about the failures of market capitalism. But there's a small problem ...

The current Pope's economic critiques make a great deal of sense. So much so that even as an atheist, it means I'm tempted to make common cause with the Church. The problem is the Pope's theological obligations, which tend to take away what the Holy Father's economic platform giveth. We pagans tend to be burned first. 

But I'll give Francis major props for daring to tackle the prevailing neoliberal dogma, even while being sure I'll hear about it, probably from the economists first.

Pope Francis Laments Failures Of Market Capitalism In Blueprint For Post-COVID World, by Sylvia Poggioli (NPR)

Pope Francis has presented his blueprint for a post-COVID-19 world, covering a vast number of issues from fraternity and income inequality to immigration and social injustice.

The document, released Sunday, is his third encyclical — the most authoritative form of papal teaching.

Its title is Fratelli Tutti, and it is a scathing description of laissez faire capitalism and a meditation on the coronavirus pandemic that has swept across the globe.

Count me in, emphatically: "Like it or not, a second Age of Revolution is dawning."

I endorse the following remarks.

Covid-19 has changed everything. Now we need a revolution for a born-again world, by Simon Tisdall (The Guardian)

As global demands for justice and equality gather force, only a truly radical agenda can make it happen

... Many countries have seen small-scale Covid-related protests. Yet by and large, insurrection has not gone viral – yet.

That’s despite a consensus among business leaders, scientists and pundits that the world will never be the same again. A watershed has been reached, they say. Mostly older people are suffering now, but millions among the younger generations may have their lives forcibly upended for years to come. Like it or not, a second Age of Revolution is dawning.

So the real question is not whether but what manner of revolution is coming ...

A tale of two ladders, the "right" one and the broken one.

The books being reviewed:

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton (Princeton University Press)

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (Knopf)

The key point to me is this single sentence: "They can’t get beyond wanting to get people on the good ladder, and not dismantle the system of two ladders."

To Be Studied, or Pitied? Two books try to understand the other America, 
and stumble along the way, by Chris Arnade (The American Prospect)

It is easy to get lost in the frustration of navigating a demanding career as a well-educated professional. The absurd cost of college, the low-paying internships and adjunct positions that have to be navigated, and the out-of-reach real estate prices in the few neighborhoods close to those jobs can erase any thoughts of privilege.

For much of America these problems are luxuries, because they come with expectations of something better, and a feeling that someone will listen to you. You might be on the lowest rung of a ladder, but you are on the “right” ladder, and with enough hard work and enough complaining, you can move higher or change things.

Go outside the handful of neighborhoods where professionals cluster, and their problems will immediately seem small. Go to Gary, Indiana, and see street after street of boarded-up homes, abandoned after factories closed. Those who couldn’t leave, almost all black, now live in perpetual decline. Go to Wheeling, West Virginia, and see empty lots of discarded needles, thrown away by people numbing their pain.

In these communities, people are not on the right ladder. Hard work isn’t going to move them higher. Their complaints won’t be published in a New York Times op-ed, and won’t generate thoughtful discussion. Instead they will often be dismissed as the lazy, dumb, racist, or angry ramblings of someone who doesn’t know their place.

snip

While a good job is essential and a more robust health care and social safety net helpful, large parts of America have lost a sense of stability and purpose. The ladder they are on has one rung. That rung is shaky, and they know it. Their parents used to climb that ladder, moving from part-time jobs in high school to a factory job that enabled them to buy a home, marry their sweetheart, build a family, go to church, join a softball league, and then watch their children and grandchildren do the same thing. That ladder didn’t require college. It didn’t require getting into a résumé arms race with your neighbor, and certainly not a bunch of people 8,000 miles away.

Now that ladder is broken, and the people who left town, who went off to Princeton or Yale, climb a ladder that goes into the stratosphere. Many of them look down at the people they left behind and sneer, or laugh, or express pity, if they bother to look down at all. It is humiliating and strips people of their dignity.

A windfall of targeted programs and expanded empowerment zones and a greater social safety net, while helpful, won’t solve this problem. The two ladders are the problem. People who are on the “bad” ladder are not there only because they didn’t have the right opportunities. Many of them didn’t want to go to college. It’s not their thing, it isn’t what they value. They have different priorities, ones that put a premium on faith, place, and family.

Understanding that is hard when you are in academia.

snip

Despite this hard work and genuine empathy, the authors can’t break out of their worldview. They can’t get beyond wanting to get people on the good ladder, and not dismantle the system of two ladders. They don’t emphasize devaluing the meritocracy, as Case and Deaton do, but rather take on the easier feel-good task of figuring out how to get talented young people on their preferred path. Or to use their metaphor, have access to the escalator, so they can escape.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW BONUS THANKSGIVING WORDS: America is an oligarchy, with decorative flourishes of plutocracy. Democracy? What's that?

(I'm on vacation, and this is a repeat from November 23, 2017)

Before partaking of today's holidazed extravaganza, wherein engorged American agribusiness output and brain-damaging sportsball games divert our collective attention span, let's consider a very important distinction.

It's the difference between oligarchy and plutocracy.

What is Oligarchy?

As mentioned above, an Oligarchy is a type of political system or government. It is defined as a form of government controlled or ruled by a small and elite group of people. Thus, this small group of people has control of the government and, of course, the entire state. A nation that has this form of government or political system is also called an Oligarchy. The sovereign power of the state is vested in this small group of people comprising of landowners, wealthy people, royalty, noblemen, high-ranking military officers, renowned academics, or philosophers.

What is Plutocracy?

The term Plutocracy derives from the Greek word ‘Ploutokratia.’ ‘Ploutos’ means “wealth” while ‘kratia’ means “rule or power.” Thus, the full translation of this word is the rule or command by the wealthy. Plutocracy is, therefore, defined as a state, society or government controlled and ruled by the wealthy or a wealthy class.

People that exercise control:

• In Oligarchy, the group that controls the system is not limited to wealthy people alone but includes other privileged individuals or groups of people such as royalty, noblemen, landowners, academics or philosophers, and military officers.

• In Plutocracy, the group exercising control derives their authority or power from their wealth.

Oligarchy and plutocracy are not interchangeable, and yet there might come a point when every last oligarch is wealthy. Then what?

As it stands, while wealth is the chief culprit, there may be a handful of fundamentalist preachers who actually aren't rich, and as such, oligarchy remains the best choice to describe our United States of Capital Accumulation.

Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

This is not news, you say.

Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.

Although "Pitchforks for Plutocrats" has an engaging tone to my ears.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Moving ahead (or in this instance, to a post earlier this year): "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Save this one for your leftover turkey sandwiches. How's that upward mobility working for you?

Myths of the 1 Percent: What Puts People at the Top, by Jonathan Rothwell (New York Times)

Dispelling misconceptions about what’s driving income inequality in the U.S.

 ... The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians; executives, managers, sales supervisors, and analysts working in the financial sectors; and professional and legal service industry executives, managers, lawyers, consultants and sales representatives.

Without changes in these largely domestic services industries — finance, health care, the law — the United States would look like Canada or Germany in terms of its top income shares.

The United States also stands out in terms of how much money its elite professionals earn relative to the median worker. Workers at the 90th percentile of the income distribution for professionals make 3.5 times the earnings of the typical (median) worker in all occupations in the United States. Only Mexico and Israel, which have very high inequality, compensate professionals so disproportionately. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark, the ratio is about 2 to 1.

This ratio, the elite professions premium, is very highly correlated with income inequality across countries.

Finally, for my younger readers.

Wealth check: The rich get richer, and millennials miss out (The Economist)

More than half of global wealth is owned by the top 1%

The report underlines the sharp divide between the wealthy and the rest. If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.

Feeling better? I hope so.

Enjoy your pumpkin pie, folks.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's pet cause is to terminate gerrymandering, and he's getting traction.

Photo credit.

You can count me in.

Voters draw the line against gerrymandering, by John Diaz (San Francisco Chronicle)

 ... Here’s why it matters:

The system is rigged. At the moment, Republicans have the edge in statehouses where redistricting is performed, and they have been ruthless in creatively drawing districts where Democrats have not a prayer. It is not by happenstance that the GOP won less than half of all votes for Congress in 2016 yet came away with a 33-vote advantage. Republican gerrymandering also appears to have suppressed the impact of the 2018 blue wave: About two-thirds of the House seats that flipped Democratic were in districts drawn by independent commissions.

(Arnold) Schwarzenegger reminded that Americans should not think of honest redistricting in terms of potential partisan advantage.

“I don’t concern myself in that whole Democratic-Republican kind of thing,” he said. “I look at it like this has been a problem for 200 years. In the last 200 years, we have seen the Democratic Party abuse the system, and we have seen the Republicans abuse the system.”

He is absolutely right.

In 1980, the task of redrawing California’s House boundaries was taken over by Rep. Phil Burton, the late San Francisco Democrat who was unapologetic about customizing districts to serve specific incumbents. One district was so bizarrely shaped — four segments, two connected only by water and two by railroad yards — that he called it “my contribution to modern art.”

I certainly recall the complaints from Democrats when Schwarzenegger championed redistrict reform when their party controlled both houses of the Legislature and the governor’s office. If Texas and other red states don’t play fair, they argued, then why should we?

It turns out that honest redistricting was a great benefit to the California Democrats by assuring that demographic shifts, rather than short-term political considerations, guided the boundaries. Not so long ago it would have been inconceivable that a Democrat could win a House seat in Orange County. Now, with Democratic gains in the midterms, the county is on the brink of having not a single GOP representative in Congress.

So one lesson of California redistricting is that democracy sets its own course.

“I’m a big believer in competition,” Schwarzenegger said. “When you have a system like this redistricting with the gerrymandering, it locks people in and they have job security. No one should have job security. The job security should be performance, especially in politics. When you have competition, that is what creates performance.”

Competition? Absolutely. Then there's this:

Schwarzenegger may have just returned from filming Terminator 6 in Budapest, but he made plain that gerrymandering remains his No. 1 villain in real life.

“I’m an action guy,” he said. “I don’t want to complain about the Republicans and complain about the Democrats and what they do wrong and vice versa. I want to move the agenda forward, I want to get off my chair and do something about it.”

Maybe inequality causes suicide, drug abuse and mental illness. Maybe it's the "American Dream." Maybe both.

A magisterial paragraph by Frank Rich at The New Yorker.

In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream

That loose civic concept known as the American Dream — initially popularized during the Great Depression by the historian James Truslow Adams in his Epic of America — has been shattered. No longer is lip service paid to the credo, however sentimental, that a vast country, for all its racial and sectarian divides, might somewhere in its DNA have a shared core of values that could pull it out of any mess. Dead and buried as well is the companion assumption that over the long term a rising economic tide would lift all Americans in equal measure. When that tide pulled back in 2008 to reveal the ruins underneath, the country got an indelible picture of just how much inequality had been banked by the top one percent over decades, how many false promises to the other 99 percent had been broken, and how many central American institutions, whether governmental, financial, or corporate, had betrayed the trust the public had placed in them. And when we went down, we took much of the West with us. The American Kool-Aid we’d exported since the Marshall Plan, that limitless faith in progress and profits, had been exposed as a cruel illusion.

Meanwhile at The Economist, the reviewer isn't sure this book's argument holds. For me, even if inequality cannot be proven to cause societal illness and disarray, it's sure not helping the situation, is it?

Play it again, Frank.

 ... just how much inequality had been banked by the top one percent over decades, how many false promises to the other 99 percent had been broken ...

Best follow the money.

The crack-up: Does inequality cause suicide, drug abuse and mental illness?

In “The Inner Level”, the authors of “The Spirit Level” argue that it does

 ... In a paper published in 2010, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson found that about one in ten people in Japan and Germany suffered some form of mental illness in the year they studied, compared with one in five Britons and Australians and one in four Americans. If economic ups and downs are the source of such troubles, they seem to have torn at the minds of citizens in some societies more than others.

The key to the puzzle, Ms Pickett and Mr Wilkinson argue in their new book, “The Inner Level”, is inequality. When the distribution of income spreads apart, a society begins to malfunction, affecting the mental health of everyone living within it.

Curse of the social animal

The pair have addressed the subject before. In “The Spirit Level”, a bestseller released in 2009, they sought to demonstrate a link between high levels of inequality and all manner of social ills, from poor health and obesity, to crime and violence, to educational failure and low social mobility. The more unequal a society, they wrote, the worse it was likely to perform on such measures. Indeed, the social damage wrought by inequality might be severe enough that the rich in less equal societies would benefit from efforts to even things up. The book attracted its share of criticism, as theories of everything tend to, in particular for confusing correlations with causality. Nonetheless, it helped to inspire a burgeoning debate about the costs of widening inequality.

“The Inner Level” seeks to push that debate forward, by linking inequality to a crisis of mental health. This time the authors’ argument focuses on status anxiety: stress related to fears about individuals’ places in social hierarchies. Anxiety declines as incomes rise, they show, but is higher at all levels in more unequal countries—to the extent that the richest 10% of people in high-inequality countries are more socially anxious than all but the bottom 10% in low-inequality countries. Anxiety contributes to a variety of mental-health problems, including depression, narcissism and schizophrenia—rates of which are alarming in the West, the authors say, and rise with inequality.

Manifestations of mental illness, such as self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse and problem gambling, all seem to get worse with income dispersion, too. Such relationships seem to apply within countries as well as between them. Damaging drug use is higher in more unequal neighbourhoods of New York City, in more unequal American states and in more unequal countries. The authors emphasise that it is a person’s relative position rather than absolute income that matters most ...

Long read, necessary read: "Systemic, collaborative localization is ultimately the most effective antidote to authoritarianism."

James Dean Bradfield sings Nicky Wire's lyrics in the opening track of Resistance is Futile, the Manics' new album: "There is no theory of everything," or in other words, no comprehensive equation to describe the entire universe.

(I've just now realized The Theory of Everything is the title of a Stephen Hawking biopic; as noted previously, I'm good for a handful of movies a year at best.)

I think Nicky's just being poetic. For my money, this article is about as close as we'll get to a theory of everything as it pertains to globalization. It's long, it's deadly, and we mustn't forget to follow the money.

Localization: A Strategic Alternative to Globalized Authoritarianism, by Helena Norberg-Hodge (Transnational Institute via Common Dreams)

In order to see how corporate deregulation has led to a breakdown of democracy, to increasing fundamentalism and violence, and to the rise of far-right political leaders, it is vitally important that we see the broader connections that mainstream analyses generally ignore.

For those who care about peace, equality and the future of the planet, the global political swing to the right over the past few years is deeply worrying. It has us asking ourselves, how did this happen? How did populism turn into such a divisive and destructive force? How did authoritarianism take over the political scene once again?

From my 40 years of experience working in both industrialized and land-based cultures, I believe the primary reason is globalization. When I say globalization, I mean the global economic system in which most of us now live – a system driven by continual corporate deregulation and shaped by neoliberal, capitalist ideologies. But globalization goes deeper than politics and the economy. It has profoundly personal impacts.

Under globalization, competition has increased dramatically, job security has become a thing of the past, and most people find it increasingly difficult to earn a livable wage. At the same time, identity is under threat as cultural diversity is replaced by a consumer monoculture worldwide. Under these conditions it’s not surprising that people become increasingly insecure. As advertisers know from nearly a century of experience, insecurity leaves people easier to exploit. But people today are targeted by more than just marketing campaigns for deodorants and tooth polish: insecurity leaves them highly vulnerable to propaganda that encourages them to blame the cultural “other” for their plight ...

Two horses with the same owner: Taibbi asks, "Is the Two-Party System Doomed?"

The sooner, the better. Let's follow the money, shall we?

Is the Two-Party System Doomed?, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

A new study shows us what observation should already have made clear: a messy restructuring of America's political parties is coming

Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose 2013 bestseller Capital in the 21st Century awoke upscale Americans to the shocking news that their economic system was not working for everyone, has written a new paper exposing more uncomfortable truths.

Piketty's new essay, called Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right, studied electoral trends in three Western countries – France, Britain and the U.S. – dating back to the 1940s.

SNIP

America, like pretty much everyplace else in the neoliberal world, is becoming a society split up into unequal camps. We have an extremely small group of very rich people, and a much larger group of everyone else, who may or may not be educated, but increasingly have either zero net worth, or close to it.

The numbers are getting harder to ignore.

American politicians for decades have done an outstanding job of keeping low-income voters from seeing their shared economic dilemmas. The Republicans dating back to Goldwater and Nixon have kept voters transfixed with race hatred and fears about things like gun control, while Democrats have emphasized the Republican threat on social issues like reproductive rights and Social Security.

But having two parties sponsored by the same donors simply can't work in the long-term. The situation ends up being what a Colombian politician once deemed "two horses with the same owner."

From Mitt Romney's idiotic tirade against "the 47%" to Hillary Clinton's recent remarks about how she won all the "dynamic" parts of America, our political leaders have consistently showed that they don't see or understand the levels of resentment out there.

Papers like Piketty's are a warning that if the intellectuals in both parties don't come up with a real plan for dealing with the income disparity problem before someone smarter than Donald Trump takes it on, they're screwed. Forget nativists vs. globalists. Think poor vs. rich. Think 99 to 1. While Washington waits with bated breath for the results of the Mueller probe, it's the other mystery – how do we fix this seemingly unfixable economic system – that is keeping the rest of the country awake at night.

The roots of inequality: “The CEO of Goldman Sachs said ‘Why are you attacking us? We are Democrats’.”

And when the mayor of New Albany and fellow Democrats propose demolishing 500 units of affordable housing without a credible plan to house those displaced, that's something we need to talk about, too, because an undemocratic fixation with "quality of life" only as it pertains to luxury developments is a problem, isn't it?

Bernie Sanders: Russia and Stormy Daniels distract us from real problem of inequality, by Amana Fontanella-Khan and Lauren Gambino (The Guardian)

More than a million viewers watch online as Sanders joins likes of Michael Moore and Elizabeth Warren to talk poverty

Enough about Russia and Stormy Daniels, the leaders of the progressive movement want to talk about growing income inequality in the US.

At a live-streamed town hall event on Monday night, Senator Bernie Sanders once again circumvented cable news to host a 90-minute panel discussion on poverty, the decline of the middle class and the consolidation of corporate power.

He was joined in Washington by Senator Elizabeth Warren, director Michael Moore and economist Darrick Hamilton while roughly 1.7 million viewers tuned in to watch online, according to Sanders’ office.

Speaking to the Guardian before the event, Sanders said: “We have to fight Trump every day. But we have to not lose our vision as to where we want to go as a country. We can talk about the disastrous role Russia has played in trying to undermine American democracy. That is enormously important. But we also have to talk about the fact that we have the highest rate of child poverty in any major economy of the world.”

The morning Constitutional: "It is capitalism that must be overcome to solve its inherent inequality problem."

Certain lessons therein.

I'm old, and the memory gets hazy.

Can someone refer me to to section of the Constitution where it stipulates capitalism?

On a daily basis since kindergarten, someone always is hovering near, insisting I must worship something, whether god, flag or economic system.

I still feel the same as I always have. For so long as they're tolerable, okay -- but stay off my porch, please. Indoctrination never has been confined to a particular system of thought. Sorry, but I'd rather drink myself to death.

Following are three articles about capitalism -- directly as well as indirectly.

---

Capitalism as Obstacle to Equality and Democracy: the US Story, by Richard D. Wolff (CounterPunch)

The conclusion to be drawn from the US story is not that efforts to reverse deepening inequality are foredoomed to failure. It is to face the fact that mere reforms such as tax law changes are inadequate to the task. To make reforms stick – to overcome temporariness across so many histories – requires going further to basic system change. Because capitalism tends toward deepening inequality and can defeat reversals by keeping them temporary, it is capitalism that must be overcome to solve its inherent inequality problem.

---

When Capitalists Go on Strike, by Kevin Young, Michael Schwartz and Tarun Banerjee (Jacobin)

... Capitalists routinely exert leverage over governments by withholding the resources — jobs, credit, goods, and services — upon which society depends. The “capital strike” might take the form of layoffs, offshoring jobs and money, denying loans, or just a credible threat to do those things, along with a promise to relent once government delivers the desired policy changes.

Government officials know this power well, and invest great energy and public resources in staving off fits by malcontent capitalists. The profoundly rotten campaign finance system is just one manifestation of business’s domination over government policy. The real power resides in the corporate world’s monopoly over the flow of capital.

---

Buddhist Economics: How to Start Prioritizing People Over Products and Creativity Over Consumption, by Maria Popova (Brain Pickings)

Much has been said about the difference between money and wealth and how we, as individuals, can make more of the latter, but the divergence between the two is arguably even more important the larger scale of nations and the global economy. What does it really mean to create wealth for people — for humanity — as opposed to money for governments and corporations?

That’s precisely what the influential German-born British economist, statistician, Rhodes Scholar, and economic theorist E. F. Schumacher explores in his seminal 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered — a magnificent collection of essays at the intersection of economics, ethics, and environmental awareness.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW BONUS THANKSGIVING WORDS: America is an oligarchy, with decorative flourishes of plutocracy. Democracy? What's that?

Before partaking of today's holidazed extravaganza, wherein engorged American agribusiness output and brain-damaging sportsball games divert our collective attention span, let's consider a very important distinction.

It's the difference between oligarchy and plutocracy.

What is Oligarchy?

As mentioned above, an Oligarchy is a type of political system or government. It is defined as a form of government controlled or ruled by a small and elite group of people. Thus, this small group of people has control of the government and, of course, the entire state. A nation that has this form of government or political system is also called an Oligarchy. The sovereign power of the state is vested in this small group of people comprising of landowners, wealthy people, royalty, noblemen, high-ranking military officers, renowned academics, or philosophers.

What is Plutocracy?

The term Plutocracy derives from the Greek word ‘Ploutokratia.’ ‘Ploutos’ means “wealth” while ‘kratia’ means “rule or power.” Thus, the full translation of this word is the rule or command by the wealthy. Plutocracy is, therefore, defined as a state, society or government controlled and ruled by the wealthy or a wealthy class.

People that exercise control:

• In Oligarchy, the group that controls the system is not limited to wealthy people alone but includes other privileged individuals or groups of people such as royalty, noblemen, landowners, academics or philosophers, and military officers.

• In Plutocracy, the group exercising control derives their authority or power from their wealth.

Oligarchy and plutocracy are not interchangeable, and yet there might come a point when every last oligarch is wealthy. Then what?

As it stands, while wealth is the chief culprit, there may be a handful of fundamentalist preachers who actually aren't rich, and as such, oligarchy remains the best choice to describe our United States of Capital Accumulation.

Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

This is not news, you say.

Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.

Although "Pitchforks for Plutocrats" has an engaging tone to my ears.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Moving ahead (or in this instance, to a post earlier this year): "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Save this one for your leftover turkey sandwiches. How's that upward mobility working for you?

Myths of the 1 Percent: What Puts People at the Top, by Jonathan Rothwell (New York Times)

Dispelling misconceptions about what’s driving income inequality in the U.S.

 ... The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians; executives, managers, sales supervisors, and analysts working in the financial sectors; and professional and legal service industry executives, managers, lawyers, consultants and sales representatives.

Without changes in these largely domestic services industries — finance, health care, the law — the United States would look like Canada or Germany in terms of its top income shares.

The United States also stands out in terms of how much money its elite professionals earn relative to the median worker. Workers at the 90th percentile of the income distribution for professionals make 3.5 times the earnings of the typical (median) worker in all occupations in the United States. Only Mexico and Israel, which have very high inequality, compensate professionals so disproportionately. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark, the ratio is about 2 to 1.

This ratio, the elite professions premium, is very highly correlated with income inequality across countries.

Finally, for my younger readers.

Wealth check: The rich get richer, and millennials miss out (The Economist)

More than half of global wealth is owned by the top 1%

The report underlines the sharp divide between the wealthy and the rest. If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.

Feeling better? I hope so.

Enjoy your pumpkin pie, folks.

Book: "The happy few: Why the 20%, and not the 1% are the real problem."

The book is called, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It. by Richard Reeves.

I haven't read it, at least yet. Thomas Piketty surely exhausted my patience for hardcore economics in one calendar years.

There'll come a time ...

The happy few: Why the 20%, and not the 1% are the real problem (The Economist)

It’s the upper middle class who are the main beneficiaries—and the principal cause—of inequality in America

WHICH of America’s social fault lines is most dangerous? Race remains as wide a rift as ever. Supporters of Bernie Sanders seethe at the richest 1%. Donald Trump won office exploiting the cultural chasm between an urban, cosmopolitan America and the rest. But if America’s woes are rooted in the inaccessibility of the American dream, the increasingly impenetrable barrier around those who manage to achieve it is the place to probe.

That is where Richard Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, aims his fire in “Dream Hoarders”: at America’s richest fifth, its upper middle class. Having grabbed their piece of prosperity, the upper middle class are fighting like hell to keep it. They—which is to say you, in all probability—are the problem.

Mr Reeves, who is British and recently emigrated to America, is perhaps better positioned than most to recognise class barriers for what they are. Whereas worry over inequality commonly focuses on eye-popping growth in incomes among the very rich, he notes that it is this top 20% as a whole which has pulled away. Between 1979 and 2013, average incomes for the bottom 80% of American households rose by 42% (adjusted for price changes). By contrast, those of the next richest 19% rose by 70%, and of the top 1% by 192%. This upper middle class stands apart from the rest of America in a number of ways: in terms of wealth and incomes, in educational attainment—perhaps the most salient of status markers—and broader health ...

A return to Piketty: "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Seven days in April ...

7 Days of Piketty: Thursday, or "Squeezing the rich ... if the world introduces a Piketty Tax."

7 Days of Piketty: Wednesday, or "Piketty's Three Big Mistakes."

7 Days of Piketty: Tuesday, or "Egalitarianism’s Latest Foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century."

7 Days of Piketty: Monday, or "The Geography of Populist Discontent."

7 Days of Piketty: Sunday, or "Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic."

7 Days of Piketty: Saturday, or "All men are created unequal."

7 Days of Piketty: Friday, or "Capital in the Twenty-first Century' explained."

 ... but I forgot this one, from way back in 2014.

Reaganomics killed America’s middle class, by Thom Hartmann (Alternet via Slate)

This country's fate was sealed when our government slashed taxes on the rich back in 1980

There’s nothing “normal” about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it’s a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation’s middle class.

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, “middle” class of professionals and mercantilists – doctor, lawyers, shop-owners – who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people – typically over 90 percent of the population – who make up the working poor. They have no wealth – in fact they’re typically in debt most of their lives – and can barely survive on what little money they make.

So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in “normal” capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.

You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today’s dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical “raw capitalism,” what we call “Reaganomics,” or “supply side economics,” our nation’s largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.

This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed – this huge change was done in less than 35 years.

The only ways a working-class “middle class” can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval – a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century – or by heavily taxing the rich.

French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century ...

Mint juleps aside, "What Will Kill Neoliberalism?"

It brings me considerable joy to post a link like this one at roughly the same time as those horses run in that race.

But give me a little credit. This year I refrained from taunting you with tales of horse pimps, drugs, decadence and depravity. In fact, it rained so much on your parade/races/parties that I felt a twinge of ... well, something.

Maybe I'm getting soft in my dotage.

Neoliberalism is a societal hangover, so if thought provocation seems a bit much this evening, come back on Sunday morning with a banjo on your old Kentucky (and Indiana) home.

It's important, though not as vital as Star Wars Day.

What Will Kill Neoliberalism? by Joelle Gamble, Paul Mason, Bryce Covert, William Darity Jr. and Peter Barnes (The Nation)

A roundtable on its fate.

Massive global inequality underlies our era of economic and political unrest. The rise of nationalist, populist movements, and the faltering influence of the Davos class of free-trade advocates, have rendered neoliberalism an ideology without committed ideologues. So what will bring about the end of neoliberalism—the left? the right? the incompetence of the professional political class?—and, when it’s gone, what will replace it? We asked five of our favorite minds for their views on the direction we urgently need to go next.

7 Days of Piketty: Thursday, or "Squeezing the rich ... if the world introduces a Piketty Tax."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Piketty has been criticized for having no "solution" to inequality apart from a global wealth tax, deemed impractical by most observers.

Today it's back to The Economist for an examination of the prospects and effects of such a tax. This brings me to the conclusion of the "7 Days of Piketty," and let me tell you -- I'm ready for a nice novel.

Squeezing the rich ... if the world introduces a "Piketty Tax" (The Economist)

Thomas Piketty, a superstar economist, favours the introduction of a global wealth tax. Its impact might be surprisingly small

IN A speech in 2013 Barack Obama labelled inequality “the defining challenge of our time”. A few months later a book on the subject by Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, became an unlikely bestseller. It walked readers through centuries of data and a theory of inequality before leaving them with a bold policy recommendation: to prevent a dangerous rise in the concentration of wealth, the world’s governments ought to co-operate to enact a global wealth tax.

Egalitarian themes remain popular on campaign trails, but the wealth-tax idea has so far failed to gain ground. Yet in the right circumstances, might a “Piketty tax” emerge from the messy world of democratic politics?

7 Days of Piketty: Wednesday, or "Piketty's Three Big Mistakes."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century.

Today, another critic.

Piketty's Three Big Mistakes, by Noah Smith (Bloomberg View)

 ... Rognlie has three observations that cast doubt on Piketty’s big thesis.

The first is that Piketty doesn’t take depreciation into account. As capitalists accumulate more and more machines, buildings and other hard assets they have to pay more and more to maintain that physical capital. Trucks need new tires. Offices need renovation. What Rognlie notices is that this upkeep cost has been increasing over time.

Nowadays, more than in the past capital goods are often in the form of computers, software and other high-tech products that go obsolete very quickly. That means that capitalists have to spend more money replacing these things. A lot of what looks like more money going into owners’ pockets is really just an increased cost of doing business.

Rognlie isn't the first to make this point -- it has been made by James Hamilton of the University of California-San Diego and by Benjamin Bridgman of the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

But Rognlie adds two other important points ...

7 Days of Piketty: Tuesday, or "Egalitarianism’s Latest Foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Prior to reading the book, my friend Brandon warned me that it wouldn't improve my mood.

It didn't, and reading the book evidently did nothing for Yanis Varoufakis' mood, either. Varoufakis gives a leftist economist's reply to Piketty here. Just know that the fundamental point is the difference between wealth and capital, and the truths flowing from this difference. Pour a stiff drink first. It took me a while to get through it.

I'm still interested in pitchfork acquisition.

Egalitarianism’s Latest Foe: a critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Yanis Varoufakis (Paecon)

The commercial and discursive triumph of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century symbolises this turning point in the public’s mood both in the United States and in Europe. Capitalism is, suddenly, portrayed as the purveyor of intolerable inequality which destabilises liberal democracy and, in the limit, begets chaos. Dissident economists, who spent long years arguing in isolation against the trickle-down fantasy, are naturally tempted to welcome Professor Piketty’s publishing phenomenon.

The sudden resurgence of the fundamental truth that the best predictor of socio-economic success is the success of one’s parents, in contrast to the inanities of human capital models, is undoubtedly uplifting. Similarly with the air of disillusionment with mainstream economics’ toleration of increasing inequality evident throughout Professor Piketty’s book. And yet, despite the soothing effect of Professor Piketty’s anti-inequality narrative, this paper will be arguing that Capital in the 21st Century constitutes a disservice to the cause of pragmatic egalitarianism ...

7 Days of Piketty: Monday, or "The Geography of Populist Discontent."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Prior to reading the book, my friend Brandon warned me that it wouldn't improve my mood.

He was right.

Pitchforks, anyone?

We continue with a consideration of inequality's contribution to populist discontent.

The Geography of Populist Discontent, by Richard Florida (CityLab)

“There are times when rational, well-educated societies lose a sense of perspective,” says urban scholar Josef Konvitz. The global populist backlash represents one of those times.

 ... The current discussion focuses primarily on stagnant or declining real incomes, and hence on widening disparities between most people and the top 1 percent or 5 percent by income. Productivity is increasing at a lower rate. And, as Robert Gordon argues, we seem to be living off innovations that are decades old. Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century and Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape, both published in 2013, emphasized a long historical perspective, the importance of cultural values, and the impact of meta-events, usually overwhelming catastrophes, that separate one phase, often lasting decades, from another. These studies, however, look at large social categories and the unit of the nation-state, ignoring spatial variations within countries or in the distribution of social and cultural groups.

The decline of the middle class and the broken escalator of social mobility are no fiction. Before the 2016 U.S. election, Le Monde published maps about the geography of disparities in the U.S. Did you know that the size of the middle class shrank by more than 7 percent between 2000 and 2013 in New England, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona? Some of these were red states, others blue. But the trend shaped the political narrative.

Another map showed that the chances of a child born into a family at the lowest level of poverty ever reaching the upper level of income were under 6 percent in virtually all parts of the South, as well as much of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.

The spatial perspective comes into sharper focus when we look at indirect measurements such as the higher cost of rental housing, declining real incomes, the burden of debt for home ownership, the cost of commuting by car, pressure on infrastructure capacity—things that matter in daily life and for which people have no elasticity, meaning that they cannot find better or less expensive ways of doing things. Pressures build up. These indirect indicators highlight how the organization of housing and work in particular places can generate problems that accumulate. As Jane Jacobs famously said, when this happens, problem solving has broken down.

7 Days of Piketty: Sunday, or "Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Piketty generally has been praised for the sheer depth of his research, and criticized for failing to offer a solution to the problem of inequality apart from a global tax on wealth, which strikes most observers as unlikely.

Pitchforks, anyone?

We continue with a consideration of another book, this one about inequality's potential threat to our system of government.

It’s Not Just Unfair: Inequality Is a Threat to Our Governance, by Angus Deaton (New York Times)

THE CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTITUTION
Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic
By Ganesh Sitaraman
423 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.

President Obama labeled income inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” But why exactly? And why “our time” especially? In part because we now know just how much goes to the very top of the income distribution, and beyond that, we know that recent economic growth, which has been anemic in any case, has accrued mostly to those who were already well-heeled, leaving stagnation or worse for many Americans. But why is this a problem?

Why am I hurt if Mark Zuckerberg develops Facebook, and gets rich on the proceeds? Some care about the unfairness of income inequality itself, some care about the loss of upward mobility and declining opportunities for our kids and some care about how people get rich — hard work and innovation are O.K., but theft, legal or otherwise, is not. Yet there is one threat of inequality that is widely feared, and that has been debated for thousands of years, which is that inequality can undermine governance. In his fine book, both history and call to arms, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that the contemporary explosion of inequality will destroy the American Constitution, which is and was premised on the existence of a large and thriving middle class. He has done us all a great service, taking an issue of overwhelming public importance, delving into its history, helping understand how our forebears handled it and building a platform to think about it today.

As recognized since ancient times, the coexistence of very rich and very poor leads to two possibilities, neither a happy one. The rich can rule alone, disenfranchising or even enslaving the poor, or the poor can rise up and confiscate the wealth of the rich. The rich tend to see themselves as better than the poor, a proclivity that is enhanced and even socially sanctioned in modern meritocracies. The poor, with little prospect of economic improvement and no access to political power, “might turn to a demagogue who would overthrow the government — only to become a tyrant. Oligarchy or tyranny, economic inequality meant the end of the republic.”

7 Days of Piketty: Saturday, or "All men are created unequal."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Piketty generally has been praised for the sheer depth of his research, and criticized for failing to offer a solution to the problem of inequality apart from a global tax on wealth, which strikes most observers as unlikely.

Pitchforks, anyone?

We continue with The Economist, circa 2014: "Revisiting an old argument about the impact of capitalism."

All men are created unequal (The Economist)

INEQUALITY is one of the most controversial attributes of capitalism. Early in the industrial revolution stagnant wages and concentrated wealth led David Ricardo and Karl Marx to question capitalism’s sustainability. Twentieth-century economists lost interest in distributional issues amid the “Great Compression” that followed the second world war. But a modern surge in inequality has new economists wondering, as Marx and Ricardo did, which forces may be stopping the fruits of capitalism from being more widely distributed.

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, is an authoritative guide to the question. Mr Piketty’s book, which was published in French in 2013 and will be released in English in March 2014, self-consciously builds on the work of 19th-century thinkers; his title is an allusion to Marx’s magnum opus. But he possesses an advantage they lacked: two centuries’ worth of hard data.