Climate, technology and chaos Blog

While general living standard matters, relative wealth inequality also matters.

The less wealth a person has relative to other people the more constrained their actions. The more wealth they have relative to other people, the freer they are to act, team up with others, and to shape politics to reinforce their wealth.

The more unequal the wealth distribution, the less chance of ideas which do not support the security of the wealthy getting much spread – especially given the media are corporately owned, or billionaire owned, and supported.

Many wealthy people seem safer in a pandemic than others, because they don’t have to go to work, they can do their work online, or rest, they can keep relatively isolated, they can flee to isolated islands and so on. Poor and middle class people people are forced into the danger to survive, or to keep their homes.

I suspect the wealthy also think they can move away from climate change, and set up their own enclaves in small safe countries such as New Zealand [1], [2], [3] or Tasmania, so there is nothing for them to worry about. If so, this is running away from the problems, and hoping to leave them for other people to suffer, but that is simply a suspicion. It may not be correct.

Solutions to economic problems often seem to benefit the wealth elites more than the benefit those who desperately need help. For instance my government is pursuing small people for extra unnecessary hundreds of dollars they may have got from Covid relief, while letting profitable big business, wealthy private schools or the right churches, retain hundreds of thousands to millions without question.

We learnt repeatedly how much extra wealth the billionaire class gained during the pandemic. [2] This may not be a problem, but how many of those billionaires used an extra billion or so to help protect their workers? Not that many as far as I can tell. They are the elite who set the tone after all. Not surprisingly, less wealthy people, without the monetary resilience, fell into poverty.

The problem here is that most of the English speaking West is a Plutocracy [3]. Ignoring wealth as source of power, which seems the standard approach, seems odd, and any honest economic praxeology would have to note the normality of crony capitalism and the likelihood of the wealthy teaming up to preserve their wealth and power, and to run things in a way that favours them. Fossil Fuel companies can buy Think Tanks, politicians, media presenters and even museums.

Some countries will have more plutocrats and others less. The extreme wealth elites are going to be small. And the smaller and more concentrated they are, then it seems probable that they will be more dominant. After all, wealth buys every other source of power – and the more relative wealth some groups have, the less wealth is around to counteract their propaganda and influence. The much fewer billionaires in India than in the US, does not mean they have less influence.

During the cold war, the West took the option of trying to increase the participation of ordinary people and provide a real saftey net for them, to protect against revolution. This incidentally gave people some extra freedom, as being sacked was less of a problem for survival – people could move out of intolerable working conditions, which helped improve working conditions. Governments did this partially by tax rates which look extraordinary nowadays, driving low unemployment rates, and partially by supporting union participation in government and workplaces. This was also a period of massive social mobility. You can think of the opening of public education to working classes, cheaper non-charity health services, public housing, yearly rising wages and so on.

It certainly made a huge difference to my family.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer any need to avoid revolution. Middle incomes declined relative to upper level incomes (and particularly to upper, upper level incomes, and people power seemed to diminish. No one paid any attention to the massive demonstrations against the second Iraq war, or in favour of climate action. Back to the gilded age, and the conditions and alienation which gave birth to Trump.

Plutocracy adds to the hardships of the poor and the lower middle class, because policies and ‘the rules’ are aimed at benefitting the rich, and assume that people have money, and that if they don’t they are inferior and exploitable, or should depend on the generosity of the rich, rather than be self-supporting. Hence things like Robodebt, which penalises those unemployed people who actually tried to support themselves, and the generosity of taxpayers to companies in crisis and harshness to those without money.

Tags: disorder, plutocracy, politics

This entry was posted on August 14, 2021 at 8:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.