Another Outrageous solution to an Intractable Problem: The Wealth Gap Part 2 of 3 Problems

by Gary Berg-Cross
  

In an earlier post I proposed an outrageous solution to Climate Change. Make it a bet with $$ behind it to help the winning side.  We'll need trillions to clean up the mess if it is an accurate prediction of a similar amount to heal wealth that is taxed to solve a non-problem. Well the 1% creeping into the climate change issue and they are part of the destabilizing wealth gap issue.  It is worldwide, (see Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics) but just the trend in US is troubling with lots of downsides and destabilizing effects.  So they say.

“Since 1960, income inequality has jumped more in the U.S. than in any other major Western country, according to a November analysis from noted economics professors.” HufPo article

It’s “ Let them eat cake” and what follows are problems of neglect.  I’ve got mine and earned it (well I was born into a worthy family in a prosperous place).  But who wants the French Revolution on a global scale?

Now in finding a solution here we want to avoid class warfare. Well since one class has the weapons that wealth brings such as owning politicians and media that's not likely to work well.

To ease the problem we might dream of outlandish solutions like Scandinavia annexing the US or China buying up the Kochs, but that’s not likely.

So here’s another idea to find some transcendent force that can close the gap despite the 1% opposition.  

We can start a morality-based religion.

Something where solving the wealth gap is a moral good, espoused by Religion.  I've heard rumors that this idea is in some religions, but obviously the message isn't getting through.  It’s buried too deeply or covered up by other commandments and priorities or abstractions that are interpreted by special people who have a direct line to the supreme mover.

Indeed there is a prosperity gospel which pushes things in the other way towards the chosen 1%.

So maybe we have a good start from some earlier work in this area but we need to start over.  Earlier efforts has been captured by elites and we have wealth religions.

Let’s be a little scientific and systematic about this and get to useful ends like narrowing the wealth gap. 

Practically we need an inspired book to start.  Who can we get to Ghost write the book? Chis Hitchens’ ghost perhaps?  Wishful thinking. I tried that and got no response.

The founding fathers might be good, Jefferson and Madison could take a swing.  They might include Tom Paine.  That’s a better set of writers than most books of revelation can claim.  Unfortunately I got no response from them either.  Maybe I’m not a good conductor and need to fast in the desert a bit.

Perhaps a team of folks lead by a philosopher like A.C. Grayling might ghost the book.  His “The GoodBook" is certainly a good start with parables and quotable ideas that get at thinking, belief and lifestyle values.  Here is one example that gets at the asymmetry or wealth issue in a moral, reasoning way:

These reasonings are unconnected, though foolish people think them: 

’I am richer than you, therefore I am better’; ‘I am more eloquent than you, therefore I am better’.

The true connection is this: ‘I am richer than you, therefore my property is greater than yours’; ‘I am more eloquent than you, therefore my style is better than yours’.

From “The Good Book”

And he reuses much wisdom to put wealth and foolishness in perspective:

"Prosperity reveals vice, adversity virtue;" and 
"They are strong who conquer others, they are mighty who conquer themselves."

We just have to treat the ideas a bit more reverently. Dress it up and get some persuasive spokesman out there.  Maybe Chris Hitchens will respond from beyond in time.  Here’s an idea we'll just make it up as if he has.

Ok, so we start with a revered book and disciple who preach the message.  I guess we’ll need some institution building.  How about Humanist Libraries and academies where people come to learn and hear the word?  Well we do have a start with AHA, CFI and others (like WASH), so I guess we just need to gear up with long range and short term or conversion approaches flowing out of them.

We probably need a better conversion mechanism to get this rolling. What facilitates conversions?  If it isn't the gradual process of being raised in the culture (a long-range approach), it’s all about sudden turning points and well crisis. So we need to be prepared as they come via the wealth gap as the 99% run out of cake. Let’s be ready for the next big finanhcial bubble bust. Sudden conversions will come as a result of overwhelming anxiety and guilt from personal errors.  Why didn’t I sell all my stock or protect my retirement of sell my house or not take on that college loan?  Guilt will becomes uncomfortable, making conversion a functional solution to ease these emotions.  What actions will ease this guilt? Let’s get into those Occupy Wall Street crowds and Walmart protests and get people committed to a moral, caring society.

So Psychological understanding helps. We can leverage for example Rambo, L. R. (1993). Understanding religious conversion. New Haven: CT: Yale University Press.

We need to structure the right type of encounters and interactions as people search for a solution to problems caused by some people having it all and not contributing to solutions.  Using our Gooder Book we can lead converts to a moral society recognition and a new identity. We’ll probably need some songs and ceremonies.  We can leverage the progressive community a bit here.

We can expect some pushback for sure.  After all this would be a pretty “light” religion.  I guess we should use Religion in quotes.  So "religion." 

One without the usual God, spiritual aspect.  So we may have to get the Templeton Foundation to fund us and help clear the way with things like their evolution of "religion" efforts.  It's might be a challenge, but, hey, let's keep the faith and try.

We should have a contest for the best name for the new religion.  Something catchy like secular humanism perhaps.  Let’s give it a try and cross our fingers (is that too superstitious?) for the best. I sure hope we don’t need martyrs to make this work. 

Discussing Joseph Tainter ideas about the “Collapse of Complex Societies”

by Gary Berg-Cross

Our October meeting of the WASH MDC chapter discussed the topic of the collapse of complex societies, inspired by a book of that title by Joseph Tainter.  This wasn't quite the planned topic of "Energy and the Evolution of Culture" but anthropologist Nancie Gonzalez could not make it, so a related topic was used as a general discussion and it seemed topical with a government shutdown and a looming debt limit crisis possible.

Tainter, also an anthropologist (Head of the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University), builds on 2 key ideas reflected in the title of his book - complexity and collapse. You can see a nice summary on a youtube video. 

The idea of social complexity is generally understood to refer to such things as the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organizing these into a coherent, functioning whole. 

A society is said to have collapsed, Tainter argues, when it "displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity." This collapse then is "not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity."

Why do societies collapse?  Well in his first chapter Tainter does a swift, historical (but still academic 7 archeological) survey of 18 collapsed societies around the world, from the Harappans to the Hohokams with the Western Roman empire a more detailed example. Societies collapse, he argues, because to solve problems they invest in complexity  for such things as agriculture, government bureaucracy, militarism, monetary and market systems, infrastructure, etc.

Complexity initially provides a net benefit to society and high return on investment (ROI) means that society flourishes as shown in the diagram above. But as also shown, complex growth has problems which in turn means that ROI falls & turns negative. As returns turn negative, and problems and stresses (energy/resource limits, environmental degradation, competing societies, human competence etc.) continue or emerge, the society is no longer able to cope and eventually succumbs to a collapse - return to a "simpler" state, less differentiated and heterogeneous, and characterized by fewer specialized parts.

It's an appealing theory and the idea can be applied more and more it seems to the American situation.  There was a general sense by the discussion group that America is in a decline and that some notion of complexity breakdown could be applied. 

As was said in Chris Hayes' 'Twilight of the Elites':

Institutional failure across the board has landed us in modern America, where wages are falling, fraud and corruption in the banking industry are flourishing, jobs are lost, and everyone—correctly, cynically—believes the game is rigged against the little guy.

The problems of a wealth gap may be a harbinger of coming breakdown and some type of event in the protest- reform-rebellion-revolution axis.  Since the gap if growing and the bottom is sinking rather than rising, the problems are expanding.

Among the discussion points the group noted:

This idea of breakdown is reminiscent of Marx's view of conflict and tensions driving change, although Tainter does not focus on social groups.

America has had revolutions before, staring in the 18th century, but our civil war and one might view changes during the Depression as a form of radical governmental change. The idea of change during times of crisis such as discussed by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine was raised. In the past conservative movements have exploited these as opportunities to get policies in place that were not acceptable by normal democratic processes.

America has a range of problem-solving organisations, but we have a proliferation of problems such as the previously noted redistribution issues and the wealth gap, overpopulating, resource depletion etc. This fits the abstract Tainter model, but a wealth of details need to be added to make this a predictive model, although we clearly have difficulty managing the increased costs per capita of society, such as the basic for food, shelter, education and the like.

We have been unable to decide on and execute the difficult political choices to assign resources.  There are many reasons including the democratic challenge of citizen understanding of the many details of how things operate.  Good examples of this can be found in David Cay Johnston's The Fine Print. 

"No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge cus­tomers, shortchange workers, and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is that so little of the news ... addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward."

Competing ideas of fairness, greed and freedom were mentioned as well as rule by powerful elites. The role of greed in things like the housing crisis was debated.  Were greedy home owners at fault or was it largely the lenders who manipulated the system for their own gain and took advantage of people trying to achieve a reasonable version of the American Dream? The decline of the middle class and sucking up their wealth was pointed. Efforts to privatize their social security retirement was one example of where greedy efforts to tap others resources was beaten back.

The ability to fool a relatively ignorant, ill-attending populace was discussed - see my earlier blog on Misinformation, Lies and Ignorance. Some personal cases were discussed where knowing the details of tax law could be used by individuals and not just large organizations who bend law to their interests.

The ideas of meritocracy (rule by the best) vs oligarchy in America were discussed.  Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites was cited as a good discussion of the issues.

Our techno-society requires high energy use and we may be reaching its safe use limits or depletion with no tech solutions yet available. We seem to be declining in some tech area. According to David Cay Johnston we pay high prices for poor quality Internet speeds — speeds that are now slower than in other countries like Lithuania, Ukraine and Moldavia. 

"If you buy one of these triple-play packages that are heavily advertised — where you get Internet, telephone and cable TV together — typically you'll pay what I pay, about $160 a month including fees. The same service in France is $38 a month."

                              from Johnston's book, 
The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind.

That hurts the American Exceptionalism myth.

Social Darwinism 3.2

by Gary Berg-Cross

President Obama recently assailed the Ryan Republican budget plan as ‘social Darwinism. It makes sense that he is setting the stage for a budget values debate that is likely to define the fall election. To kickoff the debate he has appealed to the idea of Social Darwinism and he’s labeled the Republican budgets, drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), as part of a slippery and "a prescription for decline" because it would gut such essential programs as Medicare and education. A central part of this “radical vision” is

“Disguised as deficit-reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It’s nothing but thinly veiled Social Darwinism. It’s antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to work for it — a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training; research and development — it’s a prescription for decline.” 

Not everyone may understand the reference to “social Darwinism” beyond an implied argument that a society's strongest members will and should flourish and that it is a mistake to help society’s “weaker members survive and reproduce. Translated to policy, it pits the poor against the wealthy in some struggle for survival. People may vaguely know that Libertarians or Randians adhere to a form of “conservative Darwinism” stressing laissez-faire markets that allow the strongest to emerge and flourish.

We should be more literate about Social Darwinism. Like the difference between chemistry and alchemy it's one of those scientific cultural things that everybody should know a bit about. In The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby describes Social Darwinism as one of the pseudoscience encouraging an American social environment of unreason and ignorance (see my blog Critical Thinking in a Time of Political Truthiness. Since unreasonable arguments are likely to be thrown about during the Presidential campaigns it might be useful to understand the history of Social Darwinism, who has favored it and how it has been critiqued. This will allow us to be more reasoned in the debate.

The phrase "survival of the fittest" is central to the concept and was coined by Herbert Spencer, British philosopher, in 1851. (His picture is above sitting next to Paul Ryan) The original form of Social Darwinism (call it Social Darwinism I in the current vernacular of versioning) appeared pretty rapidly after the Origins publication and was recognizable by the late 1860s as suggesting broader implications of evolution. The actual term appeared later in 1877 for the idea that the struggle for survival seen in animal species also applies to humans. Fair enough, but is this a hypothesis or a scientific theory that gets refined by evidence over time.  If so one would expect that people like Evolutionary Biologists would be increasingly in the forefront of the discussions.  Instead we find politicians, clergy, fringe philosophers and lassez faire corporatists and their mouthpieces in the forefront of the efforts over time making arguments that appeal to people who know little of the science. 

The simple fact is that cooperation also applies to intelligent species. Darwin, himself felt that "social instincts" such as "sympathy" and "moral sentiments" were central to human life and may have also evolved through natural selection. Darwin speculated that social concerns actually strengthening the human cultures in which Anthropologists see them wrote about it this way in his later book Descent of Man:

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable- namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them

It's pretty clear that we can make plausible arguments for natural selection working on human tribes. Some tribal members will possessing in a high degree social sentiments we might think of as patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy. If they are socially conscious and ready to aid each another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, there is a good chance they will be victorious over most other tribes. If these social sentiments are able to be passed on they could be selected for.‎ That’s a big IF but no more than the selfish struggle or each against the other.  And such better angels sentiments aren’t what Social Darwinists were talking about. Ideas like sympathy for others is not what they see as being selected.

Unlike Darwin popularizes of Social Darwinism I ignored the complexity of human descent and inheritability issues and tuned out of the eventual surge of comparative data from Anthropology. They focused on socially deleterious traits, like "pauperism" and mental illness. Like Andrew Carnegie hey had a simple approach to fitness via competition:

"The law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, [but] it is best for the race , because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department."
Andrew Carnegie, "The Gospel of Wealth, (1889)

The simple idea is that competition produces winners - some type of success within a culture. In the class stratified England on the 19^th century you can imagine who was seen as fit – the aristocracy and noveau rich. In such society’s with big wealth gaps, material success can easily be interpreted as evolution’s considered moral and progressive judgment. Wealth success was the proxy for fitness as the dominance of the white race could be interpreted as evolutionarily superior to other races. Likewise colonial success of countries like Britain made them superior to other nations. In American the general social theory became a practiced justification for laissez faire capitalism during the Gilded Age.

This superiority included cultural-political institutions and Religion, with some special reasoning to make conclusions come out right. Christianity is championed as better than all the rest and has out competed them. Well it fought Islam to a draw, but then perhaps we can rationalize this because Islam flourishes in inferior cultures. It is intellectually interesting that an oversimplified application of an agnostic theory like Darwinian evolution should have been picked up by 19th-century Christian ministers like Henry Ward Beecher, as an attempt to reconcile Christianity with evolution, although to be fair they did not call it Social Darwinism. To Beecher and others the Science of Evolution proved God's will in making certain that 'the poor will be with you always.' Indeed, economic success is evidence of the working of God's will through some biological imperative of natural selection set up by God for this purpose. Given this double authority in the natural order, only fools attempt to ameliorate economic inequality.Thinking like this leads to a Prosperity Gospel rather than a compassionate one.

The whole Social Darwin agrument strikes some as an inhumane, weakly formed and flawed philosophy. Like Intelligent Design or Freudian Psychology it can be used elastically to justify whatever its supporters want to justify. As previously discussed it is appealing as a racial argument. To be sure it was welcomed by the ultra-rich in 19^th century America to justify their status and world view. And it justified Gilded Age comfort while removing moral responsibility for poor immigrants floundering in Dickensian poverty and misery.

Social Darwinisn II was a later version, again popular in the post WW-I Roaring 20s with its banking wealth. One impetus was a mix of the rise of the eugenics movement which grew out of the coupled with massive immigration that threaten some with a dilution of the Caucasian and Northern European races. Eugenics had roots in Social Darwinism I with its primitive notions of fitness and that biology was destiny. Interestingly, the word "eugenics" was coined in 1883 by Darwin cousin scientist Francis Galton. Galton wanted to promote the ideal of perfecting the human race by, as it is often put, weeding out "undesirables" while promoting "desirables." This may have seen simpler in Galton's day before we knew the mechanics of genetics, although there were efforts to study identical twins to see how much intelligence is inhereted. If you take an Intro Psych course today you might learn about how the early English studies actually fabricated data. We know a lot more today about the essentially interactive nature of intelligence emerging in the environment.

Which brings us to a 3^rd phase of Social Darwinism which started a while ago (so I call the current version 3.2) as part of a conservative movement that features things like trickle down economics and shrinking safety nets. This version has its dog whistle appeal points. One focuses on poor (aka inferior) people who should not be pampered - pregnant immigrants, the poor, elderly and disabled. These are trotted out like Reagan’s welfare queens as implied 'parasites.' This phase is again associated with our rising wealth inequality and a new brand of wealth elites. The current wealth gap, like that of the 1920 and 30s, is justified as due to some type of personal fitness. You can see this embedded in Mitt Romney’s messages. (See my blog on Behind the Prosperity Message of Happy Warriors.) He is obviously fit to lead because he is wealthy and a “job creator.” This ignores the fact that he didn’t create jobs or that many have become wealthy through a fitness for influencing tax laws and getting special exemptions.Ignoring facts is again one sign of a pseudo-science and in this case it is even lighter than that and is just social fiction driven by  powerful political and their media voices.

The press of arguments justifying austere budgets and programs probably will fuel a new round of discussion with some embedded Social Darwin issues - things like 'class envy' & 'class warfare,' social compassion, what is a fair and productive society and whether preventive measures as simple as vaccination are justified. When blame is being allocated for things like the national deficit these are some of the factors focused on as opposed to specific decisions taken in the Bush years that produced the large deficits we see.

The current launch area is the “smoke and mirrors” Ryan budget which by one estimate adds something like 4 trillion dollars to the deficit, but includes $4.3 trillion in tax cuts which would again benefit those fittest among us like Mitt.

The list of possible cuts in Ryan’s budget includes Medicare, Social Security, college aid, early education, the Federal Aviation Administration, and even the weather service. As Ezra Klein identified there is real hypocrisy in Ryan's arguments arguments for deficit reduction and minimal impact :

The cuts to Medicaid and other health programs for the poor are twice the size of those to Medicare. The cuts to education, to food stamps, to transportation infrastructure and to pretty much everything else besides defense are draconian. As for the tax reform component, it cuts taxes on millionaires by more than $250,000, but it doesn’t name a single loophole or tax break that Ryan and the Republicans would close.

 Even among conservatives there are debates on such draconian approaches. Former Bush speechwriter, Mike Gerson is uncomfortable the Tea Party ‘sink or swim’ attitude that seems at odds with some older aspects of conservatism (or at least compassionate conservatism):

“It is at odds with Abraham Lincoln’s inclusive tone and his conviction that government policies could empower individuals. It is inconsistent with religious teaching on government’s responsibility to seek the common good and to care for the weak. It does not reflect a Burkean suspicion of radical social change.”

This new round of Social Darwinism discussion would be improved by a healthy degree of skepticism and by a respect for data, such as cited on the Ryan budget in contrast to its claims. Wisdom on policy resides at least partly in understanding the consequences of policy action. And for all the social philosophizing one wonders if the voices of experts will be hears are and whether they will be listed to. If claims about human nature and the society are at issue, we want experts in these areas to advise us. As a culture we are, unfortunately, increasingly less interested in hearing such deep analysis and are rather captured by slogans and hot button coverage.