I’m finally getting around to Thomas Piketty’s “Brief History of Equality”. I’m not stopping to take notes on everything, it’s just too much. I’m hearing larger points with which I agree. An interesting one, about indices like the GDP, is that we know that one’s bad, but simply replacing it with another may not yield much value. Instead, highlighting important details might make a bigger impact on people’s thoughts.
It is the opposing narrative to Libertarians who say how much better the people in the read line have it now. Everyone has a fridge. The King of France didn’t have a fridge 300 years ago. Right, duh, there weren’t fridges. Or, Thomas Sowell, who has a whole book about how great black people had it in Harlem in the 30s and 40s, when they had their own businesses serving their own communities. He goes on to blame some kind of change in attitude within them that led to worsening conditions.
To me, and Piketty, this shows the bottom half have never had control of their lives, of culture, of their own security. They exist at the whims of the top 1%. That is, as a whole, the 1% depends on their being a lower class, but the individuals mean nothing to them. When there was a move toward equality after the rich used the poor to fight their wars, it got to be “too equal” for them, and the trend returned toward less equality.
The trend toward more equality, more security, and better overall health is real, whether it’s Steven Pinker’s data, or my Libertarian friends with the “refrigerator metric”. But what does it really mean? If enough power rests in the hands of a few, it will be possible to allow millions of people to suffer and die when the means of production are not adequate to mitigate whatever disaster nature imposes on humans or humans impose on themselves. From a scientific or business perspective, it’s poor planning.
Also notice that the chart takes the top ONE percent of the rich population. And that’s enough to show trends. If the chart used the bottom ONE percent of the poor, instead of FIFTY, it would be a straight horizontal line at the bottom.
We are in even worse shape, distribution wise, today. I think it is a lack of any planning at all. It’s a very poor outcome but nobody has figured out how to do better. Capitalism, socialism, communism, monarchy, or whateverism. Eventually, it’s the rich that rule and ruin it for everyone.
It was rhetorical, but . . .
You really want to know? Don’t get upset with me.
I’m just betting with myself, when, if ever, you’ll be able to bring yourself to type out “self-absorbed nature & self-serving actions” - as in explicitly acknowledging humanity’s unexamined Achilles heel.
In the above, it feels like a wink, as opposed to totally ignoring the point.
“Upset? You’ve never seen me upset. You wouldn’t like me when I’m upset.” Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.
Never. This is what I’ve been saying and you just explicitly acknowledged it. You want me to use the words you use, anything else is not good enough. I’ve agreed with the idea in a variety of ways, with my own additional thoughts. It’s kind of my thing. Having thoughts.
I do. There’s something about how I frame that that you don’t like. I’m not sure, but the difference I see is how I include both “tails” of the bell curve. In the middle are people who transfer culture to the next generation, golden rules, building on the shoulders, fighting for rights. On one end are those who give their lives for these efforts, literally and/or figuratively. On the other, are the ones who take advantage, free loaders, oppressors, the self-absorbed & self-serving, psychopaths.
We move forward by promoting freedom in the hopes most will self manage, and limit freedoms to keep the harmful from doing too much harm. All of these behaviors have existed together forever.
And there’s our difference. You keep saying that my view, which I say is a view of reality, is “rosy”. I say, you have to understand reality so you can know how to deal with it. Your picture, the way I understand you, is that it’s possible to fix human nature, to eliminate all greed, to evolve to have everyone know what we’re doing to the planet and everyone care about future generations.
But evolution doesn’t work that way. Nature might select the more compassionate, we might adapt to the changing climate, or other mutations might continue to make that difficult. Language has given us some control over our destiny but it hasn’t overridden all of our animal instincts. That’s why I stress messaging so much. It’s where hope lies for me.
Lausten, how often do I need to repeat: “This is about one’s relationship with the knowledge that one possess!”
There’s been a lot of talk around here about respect or lack thereof - how about mustering the respect to actually pay attention to the words I write, before rearranging everything into your world view?
Saving the world?
Seriously,
review my words,
they reflect an understanding that “our world” is beyond saving at this point. We had until about the turn of the century, to where we could have made relatively minor corrections to our blind passion for “progress no matter the cost and damages” and instead to tamp down the mentality, and economics of wasteful gluttony and “Too much is never enough.”
But that would have required taking on a sense of responsibility and duty towards other creatures and Earth’s health - instead we turned Earth and “nature,” “ecology,” into a villainous punching bag.
At this stage, I’m afraid we are in a free fall and beyond being able to intervene, what remains is to react. Given past human history, we’re sure to do what it takes to make things even worse, as the rise, and America’s infatuation with MAGA attests to.
What is left for us, is to save is ourselves (read one’s sanity & humanity) at this point.
.
I’m writing that to become whole, one needs to individually come to terms with the reality of our biological selves in contrast to our thinking self…
This leads to a deeper understanding of why you yourself are the ultimate origin of all your thoughts including the Gods that we individually choose to believe in.
I believe meeting that challenge is probably impossible, without a deep understanding of deep time and evolution - not just a flag waving understanding of evolution as change over time, but a deep understanding of what actually unfolded, and the how of our origins.
Cc: In the 1980s my curiosity was increasing faster than my scattered understanding was adding up. Then came David Attenborough with his two master pieces. In 1979 Life on Earth, followed by the equally excellent The Living Planet in 1984. These series weaved together the developing chapters of life in an awesome coherent manner, that used living species, and explaining their origins and workings - it’s the most in-depth review of evolution that’s available to us regular nonspecialists.
What’s fascinating is that although it’s nearly a half century old, with truck loads of new revelations and insights, the basic outline remains the same, today we simply have way better understanding of the details.
Sort of like climate science, I learned the basics during the first years of the '70s - in the half century since, while scientists discovered more details, including a host of unanticipated revelations and surprises discovered (quite often simply because of our lack of imagination).
Admittedly, there was much supposition in what I was taught in the 70s.
Still the fact remains that as the decades raced past us, scientists were able to firm up those logical conclusions into evidence backed understanding .
Meaning we have more detail, but nothing significant about the big picture story I learned over a half century ago, has had to be rescinded or radically revised, and today most scientists who actually worked in the field for decades are surprised and frightened at the speed of change we are witnessing.
I invite Mike The Corporate Spokesman to try to dispute that.
It makes me want to puke - talk about one time culture hero that turned into a corporate shill - show contempt toward democracy, convince yourself and all your pals that voting is a useless.
In reality George Carlin got on the bandwagon and helped paved the way for the GOP and MAGA’s rise.
Why you think he’s a cultural hero I can’t grasp - and I loved him in his day, but seems to me he turned into a bitter old man and embraced nihilism - and by the end simply wanted to burn it all down.
If only he could see us today, … , well, … he’s probably make up another comedy routine, then go home to count his money.
Oh and for the record I have never written about saving the planet.
When I say saving our world, that means our human world, society, infrastructure.
But considering how we’ve ravaged the planet and poisoned oceans, fresh water, atmosphere, landscapes and are killing off it’s wild living things - we may never be able to destroy “EARTH”.
But we sure as hell are destroying her biosphere, read our life support system.
Tell me again that: Self-absorbed thinking - self-serving actions,
doesn’t apply to the tee?
########
Write, reading though those comments again, it occurred to me it highlights the profound difference between us.
To me this awareness of Earth/Evolution/current trajectories is deep and personal, whereas I get the impress that for you (& most others) it’s simply one of the many stories we’re exposed to.
So while you’re good with Carlin’s legacy and the jokes about what we are doing to our biosphere, emotionally for me it’s akin to disrespecting and desecrating one’s mom’s grave. I’m not trying to make any issue of it, carry on and I’wont stalk, but I did want to call it out once.
Not saying you can’t laugh about it, simply explaining how it feels to me
and why that drives me to write stuff that others seem to find uncomfortable. It used to really bother me, but given the past decade and especially this past election and what we’ve done to ourselves, or allowed others to do unto us, has me overcoming that hurdle of feeling guilty for what I think and write.
There seems to be data being reworked by people with knowledge on past equality.
Looked into the issue a little bit to get thoughts on developing position on what to do about our school system.
Today’s standard facts are: According to recent data, the top 1% of American households hold around 30% of the country’s wealth, meaning a very small percentage of the “rich” population controls a significant portion of the total wealth in the United States.
History says*: AI - According to historical research, a small percentage of Early American Colonists, typically estimated around 5-10%, held the majority of the colony’s wealth, meaning that a large portion of the population lived with limited means.*
Land ownership: Wealth in colonial America was largely tied to land ownership, and a small elite class often controlled large tracts of land.
Social inequality: The gap between the wealthy elite and the majority of working-class colonists was significant.
Unequal gains: American growth and inequality since 1700.
American history suggests that inequality is not driven by some fundamental law of capitalist development, but rather by episodic shifts in five basic forces: demography, education policy, trade competition, financial regulation policy, and labor-saving technological change.
Two viewpoints on equality. The standard is that American colonial had the highest inequality by population in the world.
The new viewpoint by Angus Maddison’s (2001) claim that American income per capita did not catch up to that of Britain until the start of the twentieth century is off by at least two centuries.
Unequal gains: American growth and inequality since 1700.
American history suggests that inequality is not driven by some fundamental law of capitalist development, but rather by episodic shifts in five basic forces: demography, education policy, trade competition, financial regulation policy, and labor-saving technological change.
Going back in history to the late sixth century BC, political reforms and a formidable navy had made Athens wealthy and powerful. The city-state entered a brief, dazzling period of concentrated brilliance, churning out some of the greatest playwrights, historians, and philosophers the world would ever see—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and more. In a remarkably short span of time, the Attic dialect became the undisputed medium for sophisticated expression in the Greek-speaking world.
Viewpoint. Inequality has always been around. The greatest civilization known to man was the Egyptian. The pharaoh went up and down the Nile from temple to temple to see if the people were happy, healthy, well fed, safe, and entertained. If not. Wealth was taken from the Temples and given to the people. It was called, “Rebalancing the Earth”. The pharaoh had to take from the temples about once every twenty years or once a generation. The problem came from “greed”. We just went through a 40-year experiment of letting the Departments create laws. And like the Temples, they are full of greed. And the people are unhappy!
Ironic that you say I twist your words, but I never said anything about saving the world.
I don’t remember you saying this is about you as an individual coming to terms. Pretty sure you have referred to what “we” need to do. If you want to believe we are beyond able to intervene, fine, you be you. I don’t have a belief about the future of humanity. I once, off handedly, said we might have 200K years left, as a species, not as a civilization, but I’m not attached to that. It doesn’t change my outlook on the day.
Here’s where I get the sense that you want others to see what you’re saying in order to make some change and maybe see a future for humanity:
Isn’t it time we recognize a new difficult really is steamrolling at us? We need real ideas and ways of seeing the world around us, because tomorrow keeps coming, and staying fixated on the rearview mirror is not the way to survive. The old truths failed your future, don’t be afraid of moving on.
