Home » Posts tagged 'inequality' (Page 8)
Tag Archives: inequality
If We’re Going To Borrow Against The Future, Let’s Borrow To Invest
If We’re Going To Borrow Against The Future, Let’s Borrow To Invest
We are at an important juncture as a global society: either we immediately prioritize a new trajectory focused on creating a positive, functional future or — by continuing the consumptive, extractive, exploitative status quo — we will default into a nasty nightmare.
What will determine which future path we take is our collective narrative. It’s the story we tell ourselves — who we are, what we value.
The Power Of Narrative
Under the old narrative, the one currently operating and taking us towards disaster, powerful people and interests simply perpetuate a regime of More of the same.
And I do mean ‘More.’ The old narrative rests upon an ideology of endless growth. It wants and requires moreof everything. More cars sold, more houses built, more jobs created, and more goods and services of every description sold next year than last.
Everything flows from that want for more. The defenders of the old ideology are therefore defenders of our astonishingly-wide wealth gap, rapid energy depletion, emptying aquifers, disappearing pollinators, ruined soils, and dying oceans.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
A subtext of the old narrative is that humans are destroyers: we wreck natural systems. Put humans somewhere and first the large animals go extinct. Then the waters become polluted. Next, the soils are stripped.
Less well known, possibly because it shines a bitter light on our common practices, is that humans can be incredible forces of positive change, using their big brains to build natural abundance at rates far faster than nature by itself is able.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Naomi Klein Calls for System Change to Address Climate and Inequality
Naomi Klein Calls for System Change to Address Climate and Inequality
A radically new economic and social system is urgently needed to tackle climate change and address intersecting social justice issues, the internationally bestselling author Naomi Klein told activists meeting in London today.
“It’s not too late to get off the road, to grab the wheel of history and swerve,” the author of This Changes Everything told an audience of more than 1,000 attending a one-day interactive conference on climate change and social justice inspired by her book.
“It is possible to lower our emissions in line with what science is telling us,” she said via Skype. “But to do that means we need to change everything about our system.”
Klein argued that individual actions alone aren’t going to bring the level of emission reductions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. Instead, “we need to look at large scale policies that make good decisions easier.”
The all-day event held at Friends Meeting House in Euston, London, included breakout workshops and tactic sessions – while also giving a platform speakers from across the environment and social justice movement.
Among those to join the debate were Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, Channel 4 economics editor Paul Mason, and John Broderick, a research fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. There was a consensus among all speakers that bold and broad social change is required to meet the climate challenge.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
SOLVING CRIME AND INEQUALITY, WITH A SEED
SOLVING CRIME AND INEQUALITY, WITH A SEED
A sense of community itself goes a long way towards building the kind of trust and equality necessary for safer and more just communities. [1] Indeed, many of today’s social improvement programs, from arts to sports, to jobs, housing and political forums, are choosing to base their efforts on community cultivation, as strong communities are often springboards for social and economic well being. [2]
But what if this kind of trust and community could be built while simultaneously undertaking another type of cultivation, the kind where individuals work gently and carefully together to cultivate the land. What would the benefits be?
Is it possible for a humble seed and a patch of soil to be the catalysts for stronger, healthier, more equal urban communities?
Countless studies have shown — and frankly if they didn’t, then common sense should show — that through cultivating a relationship with the land, individuals and communities learn how to be better connected to each other, and more appreciative of life at a basic level. [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
— Mahatma K. Ghandi
In the years we have spent producing the Final Straw film, Suhee and I have seen repeatedly, that in the community garden in general — and the natural farm mentality specifically — there is an understanding of self paired with anappreciation for all life which can not be learned anyplace else. As an active participant in this learning where we create harmonious relationships and nurture other living things, individuals are also, sometimes unknowingly, creating the building blocks for a society which has far less crime and conflict.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Income, Education and Inequality in the “Recovery”: Prepare to be Surprised
Income, Education and Inequality in the “Recovery”: Prepare to be Surprised
Note to the higher education industry: issuing diplomas doesn’t magically create new jobs in the real world.
By virtually any standard, wealth inequality has soared to historic levels in the six years of “recovery” since the Great Recession of 2008-09. Economist Emmanuel Saez, who has long collaborated with Thomas Piketty, described the recent extremes of wealth inequality in a recent paper Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States, which provides an in-depth look at the widening gulf between the top 1% and the bottom 90% from 2009 to 2012.
Here is a chart of the top 10% share of income, based on their research (the note in red marking the beginning of financialization in 1982 is my own):
As author David Cay Johnston noted in an insightful review of Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Trickle-Up economics: “The top 1 percent of Americans raked in 95 cents out of every dollar of increased income from 2009, when the Great Recession officially ended, through 2012. Almost a third of the entire national increase went to just 16,000 households, the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, Piketty and Saez’s analysis of IRS data
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Paul Tudor Jones Warns This “Disastrous Market Mania” Will End “By Revolution, Taxes, Or War”
Paul Tudor Jones Warns This “Disastrous Market Mania” Will End “By Revolution, Taxes, Or War”
“This gap between the 1% and the rest of America, and between the US and the rest of the world, cannot and will not persist,” warns renowned trader Paul Tudor Jones during his recent TED Talks speech, as he addressed the question – can capital be just? Hoping to expand the “narrow definitions of capitalism,” that threaten the underpinnings of society, Tudor Jones exclaims, “we’re in the middle of a disastrous market mania,” adding “one of worst of my life.” Perhaps most ominously, he concludes, historically this ends “by revolution, higher taxes or wars. None are on my bucket list.”
Can capital be just? As a firm believer in capitalism and the free market, Paul Tudor Jones II believes that it can be. Tudor is the founder of the Tudor Investment Corporation and the Tudor Group, which trade in the fixed-income, equity, currency and commodity markets. He thinks it is time to expand the “narrow definitions of capitalism” that threaten the underpinnings of our society and develop a new model for corporate profit that includes justness and responsibility.
It’s a good time for companies: in the US, corporate revenues are at their highest point in 40 years. The problem, Tudor points out, is that as profit margins grow, so does income inequality. And income inequality is closely linked to lower life expectancy, literacy and math proficiency, infant mortality, homicides, imprisonment, teenage births, trust among ourselves, obesity, and, finally, social mobility. In these measures, the US is off the charts.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Global Economy’s “Impeccable Logic”
The Global Economy’s “Impeccable Logic”
Ever since the Occupy movement coined the terms “the 1%” and “the 99%” to point out disparities of wealth and power, the gap between rich and poor has received a lot of attention. In his highly-regarded 2014 book,Capital in the Twenty-first Century, for example, Thomas Piketty’s central thesis is that wealth inequality is bound to increase in modern capitalist economies. This was underscored by a recent Oxfam report, which tells us that the world’s 85 richest people now have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion; that the richest 1 percent will own more than half the world’s wealth by next year; and that in the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of income growth since 2009, leaving the bottom 90 percent even poorer. (1) There’s more, but you get the idea.
Statistics like these have led to widespread questioning of the moral underpinnings of the global economy. But does morality have any place in conventional economic thinking? While the overseers of the global economy are beginning to see problems with the wealth gap, it’s for reasons that are neither moral nor ethical, but purely practical: extreme inequality, they fear, might threaten the continuance of the system itself. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the IMF, worries that “excessive inequality is not good for sustainable growth [sic]”(2), while billionaire and self-described plutocrat Nick Hanauer is even more concerned: “if we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us.” (3)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
We Live In An Era Of Dangerous Imbalances
We Live In An Era Of Dangerous Imbalances
The intervention by the world’s central banks has resulted in today’s bizarro financial markets, where “bad news is good” because it may lead to more (sorry, moar) thin-air stimulus to goose asset prices even higher.
The result is a world addicted to debt and the phony stimulus now essential to sustaining it. In the process, a tremendous wealth gap has been created, one still expanding at an exponential rate.
History is very clear what happens with dangerous imbalances like this. They correct painfully. Through class warfare. Through currency crises. Through wealth destruction.
Is that really the path we want? Because we’re for sure headed for it.
…click on the above link to see the video…
What Thomas Piketty and Larry Summers Don’t Tell You About Income Inequality
In a paper for the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Working Group on the Political Economy of Distribution, economist Lance Taylor and his colleagues examine income inequality using new tools and models that give us a more nuanced — and frightening —picture than we’ve had before. Their simulation models show how so-called reasonable modifications like modest tax increases on the wealthy and boosting low wages are not going to be enough to stem the disproportionate tide of income rushing toward the rich. Taylor’s research challenges the approaches of American policy makers, the assumptions of traditional economists and some of the conclusions drawn by Thomas Piketty and Larry Summers. Bottom line: We’re not yet talking about the kinds of major changes needed to keep us from becoming a Downton Abbey society.
Lynn Parramore: In America, the top 1 percent has steadily increased its income share while the rest are either treading water or sinking. Let’s talk first about how you’re measuring the problem of inequality.
Lance Taylor: I think we need some detail to really understand what’s going on. So I look at inequality across low, middle and top groups. How does the share of income of the richest group compare to the others? Where do these groups get their income and what do they do with it? Is the middle getting squeezed? What’s driving income toward the rich?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What does $200 trillion of debt really mean for the global economy?’
What does $200 trillion of debt really mean for the global economy?
A few years ago, in the depths of the recession caused by the financial crisis, I began an investigation into the consequences of several economic trends that I thought were bound to put a permanent end to the boom times that my generation, the post-war ‘baby boomers’, had grown up in. These trends included the threat to jobs caused by fierce global competition, helped by the rise of digital technology; the financialization of the economy and the relative decline of real industry; the resulting rise in inequality, and also the excessive build-up of debt, which was of course the main cause of the crash.
But the crash didn’t put an end to the build-up of debt – the credit bubble just deflated slightly, as $20 trillion or so vanished off the face of the earth. This wealth never really existed of course – it consisted only of numbers in bank accounts or over-optimistic valuations of shares or property – but even so, a lot of people saw their pension funds and other investments reduced in value.
Despite all the concerns over debt since the crisis, the credit bubble has been growing again and is now bigger than ever, both globally and in some (though not all) ‘advanced’ nations, notably Japan and the UK, two of the most indebted economies. We don’t appear to have learnt much from the crash.
What does it mean when total world debt amounts to something in the region of $200 trillion, or roughly three times annual world output?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“An injury to all”: the class struggle is back in Italy | ROAR Magazine
“An injury to all”: the class struggle is back in Italy | ROAR Magazine.
As Renzi’s center-left government intensifies the project of neoliberal restructuring, a wave of self-organized class struggle takes off across Italy.
Back in 2006, Warren Buffet, the notorious billionaire speculator, confessedduring an interview that: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Since then, that class warfare has been ever tougher in Italy. Since 2000, real wages have been decreasing, registering an even sharper downturn since the beginning of the crisis in 2007-’08. In real terms, wages nowadays are as high as in 1990.
At the same time, unemployment has skyrocketed. The number of unemployed people was registered at 3.23 million in September 2014. Italy’s jobless rate increased to 12.6 percent in the same month, while its youth unemployment rate (aged 15-24) was 42.9 percent. In September 1983, the two rates were respectively 7.5 and 25.9 percent, respectively. The Gini coefficient, the most common measure of economic inequality, has gone back to the same levels of the 1970s. In 2012 it averaged out at 34.9 per cent, a level as high as in 1979.
But probably, since the beginning of the last economic crisis (2007-08), the most evident indicator of the ongoing class war in Italy has been the increasing disposal income of the bourgeoisie and the steadily decreasing income of the working class, which shows to what extent the crisis has been an opportunity for the rich to privatize profits and socialize losses.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Central Banker Admits Central Bank Policy Leads To Wealth Inequality | Zero Hedge
Central Banker Admits Central Bank Policy Leads To Wealth Inequality | Zero Hedge.
Six years after QE started, and just about the time when we for the first time said that the primary consequence of QE would be unprecedented wealth and class inequality (in addition to fiat collapse, even if that particular bridge has not yet been crossed), even the central banks themselves – the very institutions that unleashed QE – are now admitting that the record wealth disparity in the world – surpassing that of the Great Depression and even pre-French revolution France – is caused by “monetary policy”, i.e., QE.
Case in point, during the Keynote speech by Yves Mersch, ECB executive board member, in Zurich on 17 October 2014 titled “Monetary policy and economic inequality” he said:
More generally, inequality is of interest to central banking discussions because monetary policy itself has distributional consequences which in turn influence the monetary transmission mechanism. For example, the impact of changes in interest rates on the consumer spending of an individual household depend crucially on that household’s overall financial position – whether it is a net debtor or a net creditor; and whether the interest rates on its assets and liabilities are fixed or variable.
Such differences have macroeconomic implications, as the economy’s overall response to policy changes will depend on the distribution of assets, debt and income across households – especially in times of crisis, when economic shocks are large and unevenly distributed. For example, by boosting – first – aggregate demand and – second – employment, monetary easing could reduce economic disparities; at the same time, if low interest rates boost the prices of financial assets while punishing savings deposits, they could lead to widening inequality.
…click on the link above to read the rest of the article…
The Age of Vulnerability by Joseph E. Stiglitz – Project Syndicate
The Age of Vulnerability by Joseph E. Stiglitz – Project Syndicate.
NEW YORK – Two new studies show, once again, the magnitude of the inequality problem plaguing the United States. The first, the US Census Bureau’s annual income and poverty report, shows that, despite the economy’s supposed recovery from the Great Recession, ordinary Americans’ incomes continue to stagnate. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, remains below its level a quarter-century ago.
It used to be thought that America’s greatest strength was not its military power, but an economic system that was the envy of the world. But why would others seek to emulate an economic model by which a large proportion – even a majority – of the population has seen their income stagnate while incomes at the top have soared?
A second study, the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report 2014, corroborates these findings. Every year, the UNDP publishes a ranking of countries by their Human Development Index (HDI), which incorporates other dimensions of wellbeing besides income, including health and education.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-failure-individual-insecurity-by-joseph-e–stiglitz-2014-10#qtjXzquHerihJ4ZK.99
Wealth Inequality Is Not A Problem, It’s A Symptom – The Automatic Earth
Wealth Inequality Is Not A Problem, It’s A Symptom – The Automatic Earth.
NPC Dedication, George Washington Masonic Memorial, Alexandria, VA Nov 1 1923
The article in question is Charles Hugh Smith’s Why Nations (and organizations) Fail: Self-Serving Elites, and the book he references is Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.
Charles starts off by saying:
The book neatly summarizes why nations fail in a few lines:
(A nation) is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that has organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. Political power has been narrowly concentrated, and has been used to create great wealth for those who possess it.
…click on the link above for the rest of the article…
