{"id":13681,"date":"2015-10-22T06:11:20","date_gmt":"2015-10-22T11:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13681"},"modified":"2015-10-22T06:11:20","modified_gmt":"2015-10-22T11:11:20","slug":"the-real-trouble-begins-when-rising-inequality-splinters-the-elites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13681","title":{"rendered":"The Real Trouble Begins When Rising Inequality Splinters the Elites"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oftwominds.com\/blogoct15\/disunity10-15.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Real Trouble Begins When Rising Inequality Splinters the Elites<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><i>If others in our class are still rising while we&#8217;re stagnating, we sense a great disturbance in the financial and political Force.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><b>Rising economic inequality tends to generate political instability for all the obvious reasons:<\/b>\u00a0the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the rich say\u00a0<i>let them eat brioche<\/i>\u00a0and next thing you know, the ungrateful wretches are tearing down the Bastille and a youthful army officer has to restore order with\u00a0<i>a whiff of grapeshot<\/i>. After which he launches a war of conquest that kills hundreds of thousands and bankrupts nations.<\/p>\n<p>So yes, economic inequality can generate quite a spot of bother.<\/p>\n<p>Historian Peter Turchin identified &#8220;the degree of solidarity felt between the commons and aristocracy,&#8221; the sense of purpose and identity shared by the top, middle and bottom of the wealth\/power pyramid, as a key ingredient of social unity and political stability.<\/p>\n<p>One measure of this unity of purpose and identity is the degree of inequality between commoners (the lower 90% of American households by wealth\/income), the top 10% professional\/technocrat class that owns 74% of the wealth and pays almost 80% of the federal income taxes, and the Power Elite aristocracy (the top .1%).<\/p>\n<p>Turchin discusses instability and wealth inequality in his well-researched book\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0452288193\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0452288193&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=charleshughsm-20&amp;linkId=5SB7PGXVREXQEDYI\" target=\"resource\">War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><b>History supports two narratives of rising inequality leading to social disintegration and political instability:<\/b>\u00a0one is inequality between the top classes and everyone else, and the the other is\u00a0<i>rising inequality within the top classes.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><b>When the pie starts shrinking and there aren&#8217;t enough slices to satisfy the rising expectations of the top class, the elites splinter in\u00a0<i>profound political disunity<\/i><\/b>. In other words, when the offspring of the top 10% earn MBAs from respected universities and can only find internships, their parents become extremely dissatisfied with the status quo.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Real Trouble Begins When Rising Inequality Splinters the Elites If others in our class are still rising while we&#8217;re stagnating, we sense a great disturbance in the financial and political Force. Rising economic inequality tends to generate political instability for all the obvious reasons:\u00a0the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the rich say\u00a0let [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[4863,127,10109,2384,259,425,4924,5042,1302,862],"class_list":["post-13681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-aristocracy","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-disunity","tag-elite","tag-empire","tag-inequality","tag-oftwominds","tag-peter-turchin","tag-status-quo","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13681"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13682,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13681\/revisions\/13682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}