Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal With Inequality?

[lpetrich]

Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal With Inequality? - The New York Times

Discusses Thomas Piketty's recent presentation Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right He is the author of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". To quote him,

In the 1950s-60s, the vote for left-wing (socialist) parties in France and the Democratic Party in the US used to be associated with lower education & lower income voters. It (the left) has gradually become associated since 1970s-80s with higher education voters, giving rise to a multiple-elite party system: high-education elites vote for the left, while high-income/high-wealth elites for the right, i.e., intellectual elite (Brahmin left) vs business elite (merchant right).

From the article,

Changes in the structure of the electorate emerged in force during a period of unprecedented upheaval in the 1960s, when a combination of liberation movements — committed to civil rights, women’s rights, sexual freedom, the student left, decolonization and opposition to the Vietnam War — swept across Europe and the United States.

There was a major split between the Democratic old guard and the New Left. It ended up hurting the Democratic Party badly, because the old guard included labor unions, and labor-union leaders like George Meany felt less than cherished. “They've got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO people on that delegation!” he said about the New York delegation of 1972. So they supported Richard Nixon in 1972, despite George McGovern's good record on labor issues.

Quoting from "Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics" by Byron Shafer, before the tumult and reforms of the late 1960's and early 1970's,

there was an American party system in which one party, the Republicans, was primarily responsive to white collar constituencies, and in which the other, the Democrats, was primarily responsive to blue collar constituencies.

Afterwards,

there were two parties each responsive to quite different white collar constituencies, while the old blue collar majority within the Democratic Party was forced to try to squeeze back into the party once identified predominately with its needs.

In 1952 and 1956, 29% and 31% of college-educated voters voted for Adlai Stevenson. In 2012, 53% of them voted for Barack Obama.

Five years ago, Adam Bonica and some other researchers noted:

First, growing bipartisan acceptance of the tenets of free market capitalism. Second, immigration and low turnout among the poor resulting in an increasingly affluent median voter. Third, “rising real income and wealth has made a larger fraction of the population less attracted to turning to government for social insurance.” Fourth, the rich escalated their use of money to influence policy through campaign contributions, lobbying and other mechanisms. And finally, the political process has been distorted by polarization and gerrymandering in ways that “reduce the accountability of elected officials to the majority.”

From 1980 to 2012, the top 0.01% wealth share went up from 3% to 11%, while over 1980 to 2016, their campaign-funding share went up from 16% to 40%. I recall a news article about some millionaire Republican donors grumbling that they were grossly outspent by the party's biggest donors.

Daron Acemoglu is somewhat skeptical. He claims that racial hostility, globalization, and decline in social mobility could explain much of those results. Thus when white blue-collar workers get put out of work, they start blaming racial and ethnic minorities.

Dean Baker:

I see Piketty is missing the way in which markets have been restructured to redistribute income upward and to take away options for reversing inequality and promoting growth in ways that benefit low and middle income workers.

He proposes much broader policy changes, and he notes

The friends you keep matter. The speeches that folks like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama give at Wall Street firms are not a good look. The banks don’t hand you huge honorariums if they think you are going to take their money and put them in prison.

Donald Trump made a very big issue out of Hillary Clinton's Wall-Street connections, but he went on to hire Wall Streeters as White House staffers.

Thomas Piketty concludes:

Globalisation (domestic vs external inequality) and educational expansion (education vs property inequality) have created new multi-dimensional conflicts about inequality and redistribution
• Why didn’t democracy reduce inequality?
• Because multi-dimensional coalitions are complicated
• Without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it’s difficult to have the low-education, low-income voters from all origins vote for the same party. Racism/nativism = powerful
force dividing the poor if there’s no strong uniting platform.
• Politics has never been a simple poor vs rich conflict; one needs to look more carefully at the content of political cleavages
• Social sciences can help

A common criticism of democracy in past centuries is that it enables the poor to come after the rich. But in recent centuries, rich people have discovered that they can buy the favor of elected leaders. Getting around that problem will be very difficult, it seems to me.

 

[untermensche]

You have it backwards.

Inequality has a problem with democracy and has destroyed it in the US.

 

[LordKiran]

Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal With Inequality? - The New York Times

Discusses Thomas Piketty's recent presentation Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right He is the author of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". To quote him,


From the article,

There was a major split between the Democratic old guard and the New Left. It ended up hurting the Democratic Party badly, because the old guard included labor unions, and labor-union leaders like George Meany felt less than cherished. “They've got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO people on that delegation!” he said about the New York delegation of 1972. So they supported Richard Nixon in 1972, despite George McGovern's good record on labor issues.

Quoting from "Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics" by Byron Shafer, before the tumult and reforms of the late 1960's and early 1970's,

there was an American party system in which one party, the Republicans, was primarily responsive to white collar constituencies, and in which the other, the Democrats, was primarily responsive to blue collar constituencies.

Afterwards,

there were two parties each responsive to quite different white collar constituencies, while the old blue collar majority within the Democratic Party was forced to try to squeeze back into the party once identified predominately with its needs.

In 1952 and 1956, 29% and 31% of college-educated voters voted for Adlai Stevenson. In 2012, 53% of them voted for Barack Obama.

Five years ago, Adam Bonica and some other researchers noted:

First, growing bipartisan acceptance of the tenets of free market capitalism. Second, immigration and low turnout among the poor resulting in an increasingly affluent median voter. Third, “rising real income and wealth has made a larger fraction of the population less attracted to turning to government for social insurance.” Fourth, the rich escalated their use of money to influence policy through campaign contributions, lobbying and other mechanisms. And finally, the political process has been distorted by polarization and gerrymandering in ways that “reduce the accountability of elected officials to the majority.”

From 1980 to 2012, the top 0.01% wealth share went up from 3% to 11%, while over 1980 to 2016, their campaign-funding share went up from 16% to 40%. I recall a news article about some millionaire Republican donors grumbling that they were grossly outspent by the party's biggest donors.

Daron Acemoglu is somewhat skeptical. He claims that racial hostility, globalization, and decline in social mobility could explain much of those results. Thus when white blue-collar workers get put out of work, they start blaming racial and ethnic minorities.

Dean Baker:

I see Piketty is missing the way in which markets have been restructured to redistribute income upward and to take away options for reversing inequality and promoting growth in ways that benefit low and middle income workers.

He proposes much broader policy changes, and he notes

The friends you keep matter. The speeches that folks like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama give at Wall Street firms are not a good look. The banks don’t hand you huge honorariums if they think you are going to take their money and put them in prison.

Donald Trump made a very big issue out of Hillary Clinton's Wall-Street connections, but he went on to hire Wall Streeters as White House staffers.

Thomas Piketty concludes:

Globalisation (domestic vs external inequality) and educational expansion (education vs property inequality) have created new multi-dimensional conflicts about inequality and redistribution
• Why didn’t democracy reduce inequality?
• Because multi-dimensional coalitions are complicated
• Without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it’s difficult to have the low-education, low-income voters from all origins vote for the same party. Racism/nativism = powerful
force dividing the poor if there’s no strong uniting platform.
• Politics has never been a simple poor vs rich conflict; one needs to look more carefully at the content of political cleavages
• Social sciences can help

A common criticism of democracy in past centuries is that it enables the poor to come after the rich. But in recent centuries, rich people have discovered that they can buy the favor of elected leaders. Getting around that problem will be very difficult, it seems to me.

Balancing collective interests versus individual interests means that those individual interests have some means of recourse which makes moving against them a much harder and longer process.

 

[rousseau]

As far as I can tell an unequal society is the default state. This would be a result of phenotypic variation and the supply/demand of various skills. Added to these maxims is another that it takes power to accumulate power.

So governments can work to reduce inequality, but it's always going to exist in some form, and there will always be tension between it's reduction/expansion.

 

[bilby]

As far as I can tell an unequal society is the default state. This would be a result of phenotypic variation and the supply/demand of various skills. Added to these maxims is another that it takes power to accumulate power.

So governments can work to reduce inequality, but it's always going to exist in some form, and there will always be tension between it's reduction/expansion.

I would go further, and say that it is the purpose of government, in a democracy, to reduce inequality, lest it lead to civil unrest and bloody revolution of the poor against the rich.

A government that does not actively work to reduce inequality is unfit for purpose; Governments that act to increase inequality are worse than useless.

Capitalism will inevitably lead to increases in inequality, absent government action to prevent this from occurring. Capitalism is very useful as a tool for avoiding shortages and surpluses, and for rewarding innovation; Unfortunately, people often oversimplify their toolkits, and assume that that particular hammer is all you need, and that everything looks like a nail.

 

[untermensche]

As far as I can tell an unequal society is the default state. This would be a result of phenotypic variation and the supply/demand of various skills. Added to these maxims is another that it takes power to accumulate power.

So governments can work to reduce inequality, but it's always going to exist in some form, and there will always be tension between it's reduction/expansion.

Sure, there is a tiny bit of human genetic variation.

But a huge variation in experience and exposure.

Young Donald Trump was taught the real estate business by a very successful developer early in life.

So he gets very rich as a result.

A very ordinary man with exposure that leads to a becoming a very rich man.

What society needs to do is reduce the variation that is just due to exposure.

If a level playing field is the desire.

 

[RVonse]

A government that does not actively work to reduce inequality is unfit for purpose; Governments that act to increase inequality are worse than useless.

+1 This

And its really obvious right now that the US government is less than just useless. But we all knew that anyway.

 

[RVonse]

What society needs to do is reduce the variation that is just due to exposure.

If a level playing field is the desire.

All the government really needs to do is get the hell out of the way and fix wealth inequality with tax policy and enforcement of anti-trust ledgislation.

And government could and would do it if it really served the public instead of big money.

 

[DBT]

The very rich are in a position to strongly influence government to act in their favour. A significant percentage of those in government are themselves quite wealthy, so offer little resistance to passing laws and regulations that favour the rich, tax breaks, anti strike laws for workers, low minimum age rates, etc. Human nature and self interest at work.

 

[untermensche]

What society needs to do is reduce the variation that is just due to exposure.

If a level playing field is the desire.

All the government really needs to do is get the hell out of the way and fix wealth inequality with tax policy and enforcement of anti-trust ledgislation.

And government could and would do it if it really served the public instead of big money.

How the hell is having a tax policy getting out of the way?

Humans vary very little.

These huge variations in wealth have nothing to do with genetic differences. It is all about variation in experience.

And they are harmful.

One way you deal with inequality of wealth is through the elimination of top-down despotic power structures that are harmful to equality.

 

[RVonse]

What society needs to do is reduce the variation that is just due to exposure.

If a level playing field is the desire.

All the government really needs to do is get the hell out of the way and fix wealth inequality with tax policy and enforcement of anti-trust ledgislation.

And government could and would do it if it really served the public instead of big money.

How the hell is having a tax policy getting out of the way?

You simply allow free market capitalism unfettered but tax obscene wealth for infrastructure and other necessary functions needed for society. It may not be a perfect solution but at least cure extreme wealth disparity.

 

[RVonse]

These huge variations in wealth have nothing to do with genetic differences. It is all about variation in experience.

And they are harmful.

.

But life isnt fair. It never has been and it will be a LONG time before it ever is. We are all born different. Some of us are born normal and some of us are born with autism. Nothing will be fair until the robots are all waiting on all of us hand and foot. And even then life aint going to be fair. Because even then, some of us are going to get to fuck the prom girl. While the rest of us will be at home dreaming about fucking the prom girl.

Life just isnt fair. And government cant make everything fair. All it can hope to do is give us an equal opportunity.

 

[Harry Bosch]

What society needs to do is reduce the variation that is just due to exposure.

If a level playing field is the desire.

All the government really needs to do is get the hell out of the way and fix wealth inequality with tax policy and enforcement of anti-trust ledgislation.

And government could and would do it if it really served the public instead of big money.

How the hell is having a tax policy getting out of the way?

Humans vary very little.

These huge variations in wealth have nothing to do with genetic differences. It is all about variation in experience.

And they are harmful.

One way you deal with inequality of wealth is through the elimination of top-down despotic power structures that are harmful to equality.

I agree with RV. There are dramatic differences between people. People vary in their people skills, ability to retain, work ethic, charisma, tolerance, learnability, and etc. I differ than some in that I don't care about inequality. It's going to happen. It's not going to keep me up at night. I have no problem with people who have far more than I. I don't want to work more than 40 hours a week anymore. If someone wants to work more and not enjoy life, fine with me. But I think that government should do a better job of boosting people up who want it. They should help with creating opportunities. They should increase the safety net.

 

[untermensche]

I agree with RV. There are dramatic differences between people. People vary in their people skills, ability to retain, work ethic, charisma, tolerance, learnability, and etc.

They vary this much because opportunity varies so much.

They vary this much because the experience of being poor is so different from the experience of being rich.

Human do not vary much at all genetically.

What varies is experience.

 

[untermensche]

These huge variations in wealth have nothing to do with genetic differences. It is all about variation in experience.

And they are harmful.

.

But life isnt fair. It never has been and it will be a LONG time before it ever is. We are all born different. Some of us are born normal and some of us are born with autism. Nothing will be fair until the robots are all waiting on all of us hand and foot. And even then life aint going to be fair. Because even then, some of us are going to get to fuck the prom girl. While the rest of us will be at home dreaming about fucking the prom girl.

Life just isnt fair. And government cant make everything fair. All it can hope to do is give us an equal opportunity.

Life is not just but we can strive to make it so.

One thing that is actually destroying the ability to have life is the inequality in power that exists between a single human being and a multi-national corporation.

When society is governed by a tiny few with inordinate power the things that create inequality are fostered.

- - - Updated - - -

How the hell is having a tax policy getting out of the way?

You simply allow free market capitalism unfettered but tax obscene wealth for infrastructure and other necessary functions needed for society. It may not be a perfect solution but at least cure extreme wealth disparity.

Unfettered capitalism is an unjust dictatorial system that creates artificial inequality.

It is the problem.

No solution.

 

[Harry Bosch]

I agree with RV. There are dramatic differences between people. People vary in their people skills, ability to retain, work ethic, charisma, tolerance, learnability, and etc.

They vary this much because opportunity varies so much.

They vary this much because the experience of being poor is so different from the experience of being rich.

Human do not vary much at all genetically.

What varies is experience.

Well, this is the old "nature vs nurture" debate. You assert that the determining factor is 100% nurture. I like debating you. But you are very similar to Trumpsters (sorry for the insult!) in that you make grandiose statements with no supporting data.

According to this article, it's roughly 51-49. About 51% of behavior is determined by your environment; 49% is genetic. I'm sure that there will be a study in a month that will state that 51% is genetic, 49% nuture.

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/have-researchers-settled-nature-vs-nurture-debate/

Anyway, my larger point is that I would ease the burden of the environment by increasing opportunity and increasing the safety net through progressive taxation. Here's the difference: I would tax to help others, not tax in order to punish.

 

[SimpleDon]

As far as I can tell an unequal society is the default state. This would be a result of phenotypic variation and the supply/demand of various skills. Added to these maxims is another that it takes power to accumulate power.

So governments can work to reduce inequality, but it's always going to exist in some form, and there will always be tension between it's reduction/expansion.

I would go further, and say that it is the purpose of government, in a democracy, to reduce inequality, lest it lead to civil unrest and bloody revolution of the poor against the rich.

A government that does not actively work to reduce inequality is unfit for purpose; Governments that act to increase inequality are worse than useless.

Capitalism will inevitably lead to increases in inequality, absent government action to prevent this from occurring. Capitalism is very useful as a tool for avoiding shortages and surpluses, and for rewarding innovation; Unfortunately, people often oversimplify their toolkits, and assume that that particular hammer is all you need, and that everything looks like a nail.

Read Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, he explains this dynamic of inequality growing until people revolt, then the people are satisfied and grow happy and don't notice the inequality growing again.

The transformation of the title is the industrial revolution. He basically describes how the industrial revolution changed economics and the economy, the same thing that Keynes did. But Polanyi approached it from a historical perspective, not from an economist's point of view. He explains why the self-regulating free market can't exist in an industrial economy, that in fact, the self-regulating free market had never existed, that it was the attempt by the classical liberals of the 1830's in England who tried to implement the self-regulating free market of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Edmund Burke that caused so much pain inflicted on the residents of capitalistic countries that continues even to today.

That this attempt to impose the fantasy of the self-regulating free market and free trade was responsible for the deaths of a million Irishmen, colonialism, the gilded age with its decades of financial deflation, the world wars and the great depression, in varying degrees.

The link I provided is to a older version that is out of copyright. There is a newer edition that is still under copyright protection that has a decent introduction by Fred Block, a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, and a forward by Joseph Stiglitz. Both are worthwhile. In the forward Stiglitz, a proud neoclassical synthesis economist who tilted the Clinton administration to neoliberalism as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, admits that no economist believes that the market left on its own would self-regulate. Remember, he wrote this in 2001, well before the Great Recession,

It is hard, and probably wrong even to attempt to summarize a book of such complexity and subtlety in a few lines. While there are aspects of the language and economics of a book written a half century ago that may make it less accessible today, the issues and perspectives Polanyi raises have not lost their salience. Among his central theses are the ideas that self-regulating markets never work; their deficiencies, not only in their internal workings but also in their consequences (e.g., for the poor), are so great that government intervention becomes necessary; and that the pace of change is of central importance in determining these consequences. Polanyi's analysis makes it clear that popular doctrines of trickle-down economics—that all, including the poor, benefit from growth—have little historical support. He also clarifies the interplay between ideologies and particular interests: how free market ideology was the handmaiden for new industrial interests, and how those interests used that ideology selectively, calling upon government intervention when needed to pursue their own interests. Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation before modern economists clarified the limitations of self-regulating markets. Today, there is no respectable intellectual support for the proposition that markets, by themselves, lead to efficient, let alone equitable outcomes.

My bolding.

It wasn't just the government that the neoliberals attacked in support of the very rich. They attacked the academic economics of 1948, which was heavily Keynesian. They wanted their pro-rich neoliberalism to supplant the Keynesian economics that was being taught in the universities. They were wildly successful in doing this, over a period of decades, because it is the very rich who fund the economic research in the universities and it is the very rich who hire the graduates of the universities.

 

[SimpleDon]

Life is not just but we can strive to make it so.

One thing that is actually destroying the ability to have life is the inequality in power that exists between a single human being and a multi-national corporation.

When society is governed by a tiny few with inordinate power the things that create inequality are fostered.

- - - Updated - - -

How the hell is having a tax policy getting out of the way?

You simply allow free market capitalism unfettered but tax obscene wealth for infrastructure and other necessary functions needed for society. It may not be a perfect solution but at least cure extreme wealth disparity.

Unfettered capitalism is an unjust dictatorial system that creates artificial inequality.

It is the problem.

No solution.

It is unfettered capitalism that is the problem. The solution is to regulate capitalism. The solution is to redistribute the income from the wealthy. The solution is Social Democracy. The solution is higher wages and lower profits. The solution is to give the workers more equal footing in wage negotiations with the corporations. The solution is to stop chasing fantasies of how the economy should be and to face how it is. The solution is to put the workers as at least equal in importance to the corporation as the shareholders. The solution is to control the rentiers of the financial sector and to limit the percentage of the economy that they claim. The solution is to recognize that way that the economy is today is the result of how government defines it and how they control it, the idea that it is an organic creation is absurd. The solution is to establish that the purpose of the economy is to distribute the rewards from the economy to the greatest part of society and not just to the 0.1% of the wealthiest.

You are correct that the inequality is the enemy of democracy. The solution is to constantly push back against the forces that subvert democracy, the money that subverts democracy, the fake news that subverts democracy, the pillorying of the government that subverts democracy.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Or there is a different answer to the OP. They are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill in terms of the problem. The problem isn't really a problem. What matters is the wealth the person has access to, not what they have. And the US has a lot of wealth in that regard. And last, for the most part, the people have the access to what the wealth do, just some level of quality changes, but not important enough distinction.

Regarding the government. Our government never really was a democracy and they didn't want it. And the government was never meant to solve most problems. And with the size and diversity of our country, having a government that does that is a problem.

 

[SimpleDon]

Or there is a different answer to the OP. They are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill in terms of the problem. The problem isn't really a problem. What matters is the wealth the person has access to, not what they have. And the US has a lot of wealth in that regard. And last, for the most part, the people have the access to what the wealth do, just some level of quality changes, but not important enough distinction.

Regarding the government. Our government never really was a democracy and they didn't want it. And the government was never meant to solve most problems. And with the size and diversity of our country, having a government that does that is a problem.

I don't understand what exactly you are trying to say in the first paragraph. I guess that you are trying to say that the income inequality isn't very important because "What matters is the wealth the person has access to, not what they have." If this is the case please liquidate your wealth and send it to me. You will still have access to it, I promise.

The government wasn't formed as a perfect democracy, but that is no reason for us to stop moving it further toward the goal of one, as we did in the removal of the requirement to own property, the 13th and the 14th amendments, universal suffrage, the direct election of Senators, one man one vote, etc. It is terrifying that you consider this to be a valid point in this discussion. I suppose this is the attitude that allows societies to move in the other direction toward authoritarianism.

Of course, it is the government's role to solve problems. The government's role in defining and regulating the economy is no different than its role in defining and regulating behavior in the society as a whole. The government says that we can't rob, rape and murder. Do you believe that any of these are not the government's proper role? What if I told you that the government didn't need to regulate these behaviors because of a fantasy that I have that there is an all powerful entity who will doom us to an eternity of damnation in hell if we do any of these. Would this be considered to be sufficient in your mind for government to stop trying to regulate our behavior in society? As you believe that your fantasy of a self-regulating free market means that the government shouldn't try to regulate the economy. Is there any difference in the two fantasies?