democracy

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Milanovic Gets Feisty

How can you construct a theory of economic activity that excludes the power embedded in relationships between the various actors on the stage you are directing?  More to the point why would you?  To ignore power is to ignore reality.

I think, perhaps we need to reverse those two questions.  You see, power matters even in the construction of economic theories.

The reason you ignore power is because the powerful want you to.

It’s that simple.

I have just finished reading the excellent new book by Branko Milanovic.  It’s called “Visions of Inequality” and is a tour through the history of economics since the days of Quesnay.  More specifically it takes a look at how a handful of prominent economists have treated the topic of inequality.  Most of you will have covered this territory before, but examining how people such as Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Pareto and Kuznets discussed the problem of distribution is not only an excellent refresher on their individual thought, but is also a tour through the evolution of economics itself.

We have known all along, have we not, that economics is contingent.  Ideas are created to explain problems that pose themselves in the era under study be individual economists.  Their solutions are designed to explain something they see before them.  It is only more recently that the arrogance of universality has crept in to infect the thinking.  At the beginning, economists appear to have been somewhat more modest.  They were problem solving.  They were trying to influence public policy.  They were engaged with the real world.  No one, of course, is more emblematic off this than Ricardo whose entire major treatise was meant to do just that. 

As industrialization took hold and as trade steadily became more important the problems needing study evolved.  So too, therefore, did economics.  But it wasn’t simply the economic context that pushed theory along its evolutionary path.  Politics played a significant role as well.  None so more than in the case of Kuznets, whom Milanovic clearly holds in high regard.  The famous “Kuznets Curve” was developed in a very specific context.  Inequality, the model said, would rise as technology and industrialization proceed, and then decline naturally as countervailing forces emerge later in the cycle of development.  This rosy view appeared to match the circumstances of post-war America.  Inequality was, indeed, falling.  It looked as if the problem was solved.

If, that is, your regard distribution as a problem at all.

Kuznets was writing during a time of American hubris.  It was a time of triumph for capitalism.  It was a time of ideological conflict with the threat of communism as represented by the Soviet Union.  That conflict colored the conversation and theory making.  It was, therefore, particularly helpful to those so disposed that Kuznets could allay fears that capitalism was inextricably tied with ever rising inequality.  No fear, was the implication, the arc of development was such that  no one need worry.  The distributional problem would take care of itself.  Economists could move on to bigger and more important topics.

Which they did with gusto.

Unfortunately for the real world this is precisely the point at which economics departed it. .  

This same contextual pressures that made Kuznets’ theory so comfortable were providing the impetus for that departure.  Economics was slowly being refashioned and stripped of all elements of power.  This had, naturally, started before, but now it gathered apace.  One victim of the economics that emerged from those decades was the study of distribution.  After all, as an example, there is no scope for the discussion of inequality in a world populated by a representative agent.  With whom would such a person be unequal?  So by definition economics expunged one of the most observable features of a real economy.  Not everyone has the same endowments of resources.  

This is highly convenient if you are a wealthy person.  You naturally are drawn to theories that eliminate the possible discussion of your unequal status.  

At this point Milanovic gets feisty.

Very feisty.

In his very long seventh chapter, where he lays bare the lean years for the study of distribution, he goes on offense.  He prefers to call the economics developed during those mid to late twentieth century decades “Cold War” economics because it was ideologically tainted by the preferences of the American ruling class.  It also suffered a catastrophic breakdown of method.  The two go hand in hand.  In order to eliminate power — and thus by definition things such as class — economics reduced its boundaries and focused only on matters that did not disturb its patrons.  In the words of Milanovic:

“With its main, or even sole, focus on price formation, it [neoclassical economics] leaves out class structure and the endowments of capital or skills with which individuals come to the market.  Wealth acquisition takes place offstage … Thus, the mathematically complex models of general equilibrium were only very distant relations of real-world phenomena.”

A page for two later he lacerates Alan Blinder whose book “Towards an Economic Theory of Income Distribution” he says is “full of rather meaningless equations where everybody was an agent optimizing over an infinite time horizon with full knowledge of what the future would bring, including their own income”.  He even uses the word ‘vacuity’ later in his critique.

Blinder is finally obliterated thus:

“To avoid this error [the absence of power structures], inequality work must situate the theoretical and empirical analysis in its historical context.  This is not something, however, that Blinder even tries to do: his world is an alien, abstract world that relates to life on Earth about as much as the theories that astro-biologists have developed about life on Mars.”

None of this ought surprise any of us.

We know full well that neoclassical theory has no relevance to life on earth. As I have said repeatedly: most economists study economics, not economies.  Re-connecting with real-life implies such a radical reworking of the discipline that it is unlikely to take place unless topics such as inequality play a central part in the theorizing.  Power matters.

What is more remarkable than even this outburst is the way in which Milanovic accuses the neoclassical economists of doing the bidding of the wealthy.  I am not sure I ever seen such an open or specific accusation.

He devotes a page or so, in his discussion of why the study of inequality disappeared from view after mid-century, to the influence of the wealthy themselves.  Again in his words:

“Another reason for the dissolution [of inequality studies] can be found in the implicit and sometimes outright political pressures that made the topic of inequality ‘undesirable’ — and unhelpful to authors hoping to climb normal ladders in their academic careers or to have social or political influence.”

That’s pretty blunt.  The trajectory of economics, he is asserting, did not follow a dispassionate course.  It followed a course heavily biased by the influx of money and support from business interests and the wealthy.  The changing of the guard at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s is a good illustration of the influence he is citing.  This is tantamount to arguing that the neoclassical enterprise was corrupt at its inception.  It wasn’t academic it was polemic.  I will leave it to you to decide whether you agree with that accusation.  It does, however, have significant explanatory power.  How else can we explain not just the lunacy of its assumptions but it willful disregard of the real world?

So we observe, according to Milanovic, that inequality produces sufficient influence to dampen, if not eradicate, the study of that same inequality.  Thinking is suppressed or channeled into benign and more comfortable topics.  Intellectual hegemony is a critical element that the wealthy employ to preserve their privilege.  Economics has obliged by avoiding some very sensitive subjects.

The book ends on a slightly more optimistic note: studies of inequality have burst back onto the scene.  Distribution is a genuine and worthy topic for research.  The likes of Piketty have given it a gloss of respectability.

Milanovic, I think, wants us to be encouraged.  Power matters.  The study of inequality allows us to reconnect economics with reality.  There is a path forward.

Go read the book.

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Andreesen At Bay

The machine makers are restless!

There’s quite a debate going on about something called “techno-optimism” which roughly translates as anything technological is good and will, inevitably, make us all much better off.  That it makes fortunes for its owners is of secondary importance.

The debate has emerged as a result of the publication of Marc Andreesen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’, a strange and rather long paean to the many virtues of technology and the much more abundant vices of the dullards like you and me who do not innovate or break things on a regular basis.  We are, apparently, a bunch of softies incapable of moving civilization forward and we thus rely on the virility of our superiors like Andreesen and Peter Thiel who have, collectively, saved us from the endless drudgery implied by life in a low-tech world.

Andreesen we might recall was the inventor of Netscape.  More recently he has become a financier.  So he no longer innovates — he simply pays for other people to do the inventing.  That this might move him out of the virile crowd and in amongst us softies appears lost on him.

We don’t need to spend much time on what Andreesen actually says.  None of it is novel.  It is a mash-up of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and other heroes of the far right.  The point being that those of us with a slightly more cautious attitude to the onslaught of technology have become a blockage against the march of humanity towards a technology mediated utopia.  What is striking is how right wing economics with its single-minded reliance on markets, facilitates and enables the extremism of people like Andreesen.  Indeed, the two lines of thought, technology as inevitably good, and markets as inevitably correct and efficient, share the same fatal flaws of deliberate naivety and an obdurate unwillingness to engage society as a whole.

To a modern ear the manifesto sounds distinctly dated.  Nowhere is there a mention of the many downsides of technology that we currently struggle to overcome.  Indeed, the manifesto sweeps gloriously and rapidly past such problems.  They are, apparently, signs of weakness and exist only in the minds of “stagnationists” or de-growth advocates.  Anyone who wants to slow the heady advances of technology are all swept into one big bucket of inconsequential naysayers.

I am aware of the oddity of suggesting that Andreesen, who regards himself as cutting edge, might sound rather dated.  He seems not to have lived through the transition of the Internet from those early days into its present version dominated by rent-seeking behemoths like Google and Meta who, far from being the plucky market price takers posited by Andreesen, give their primary products away in order to create advertising opportunities from which they profit mightily.  He seems not to be aware of the downsides of social media.  He ignores the abundance of nonsense, lies, and general chaos that permeates platforms like Facebook.  And he steadfastly scorns anyone mentioning climate change.

He might think he is educated in market theory, but like many of his ilk, he has a difficulty grasping what an actual, real-world, market looks like.  The simplicity of his vision sits well, I am sure, with right wing economists who equally blindly dwell back in the days of personal exchange between bakers, brewers, and farmers in quaint village life.  Models of society built upon such simple lives all ignore the triumph that they applaud:  the relentless march of technology has made the world, and hence the economy, vastly more complex with interconnections too many to compute, and interdependencies too many to enumerate.  In other words the very success Andreesen wants to maintain into the future has rendered obsolete his worldview.  This contradiction also appears lost on him.

It is ironic, is it not?  The most ardent advocates of technological progress and the wonderful future it will bestow upon us all, live firmly in the past when they rely upon models of the economy that don’t recognize the consequences of the layers of complexity accumulated  since the modern technological age burst on to the scene.  We all know that economics as a profession suffers from this same irony.  It too sought to simplify as the world became more complex.  The result is the same in both contexts.  A disconnect from reality that borders on a pathologically deliberate denial of the world as it is in order to ponder the quaintness of a past as if it were the present.

As an aside: this inability to keep pace with the complexities of modern economies was what produced the embarrassment called “total factor productivity”— aptly called a measure of ignorance — in economics.  Rather than engage complexity by revising the core of their theories economists swept onward, accepted their ignorance, and, worse, started to write scholarly papers describing in graphic detail this ignorance as if it were knowledge.

But back to the machines, none of this is a denial of the obvious benefits of technology.  We all live in a world that would be impossible to envisage or maintain without the technology that surrounds us.

Because of this I too am a techno-optimist.  I believe there are still things to be discovered and developed that will add to humanity’s welfare, pleasure, and comfort.  But I am also an advocate of care.  Society has to be more involved into the trajectory of technology.  This is especially true now as artificial intelligence is ever more deployed throughout society.

In this context, the odd behavior of the AI community many of whom are raising the alarm, is truly bizarre.  These are the same people who are rushing headlong to reap the profits from what they are, simultaneously, describing as extremely dangerous.  The moral equivocation in this stance is stunning.  They are offloading the moral decision making onto the shoulders of society whilst at theme time resisting the urge to slow down.  

This is a perfect example of the gap opened up between moral judgment and consequent behavior or accountability enabled by purist market thinking.  Once we accept the marketplace as the ultimate arbiter of progress, as extremists such as Andreesen advocate and as far too many economists teach, we remove other sources of judgement and we forgo our capacity to progress along a more morally certain route.  Instead, we are forever backfilling and correcting the past mistakes of innovators who sought to profit rather than proceed more carefully. 

This can scarcely be called efficient in any true and rich sense of that word, although it might satisfy the cramped and narrow definition economists prefer. 

In any case, Andreesen has done us a service by illustrating in detail how threadbare the underlying philosophy of Silicon Valley is.  Further, he has shown us how naive and ignorant he and his ilk are. This knowledge ought shake us sufficiently to consider re-arranging our relationship with the so-called innovators who constantly impose their decisions upon us.  “Move fast and break things” or it is “better to seek forgiveness than permission” probably sound great in an old college dorm or in a bar in Silicon Valley, but they are destructive childish vanities rather than socially acceptable behavior when they become the underpinning of business behavior.  These people need to grow up and to stop living in the past.  Perhaps then they can help lead us into the future.

The machinery question marches on …

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Connect The Disconnected

There has been a great deal of hair-tearing this morning in the media.  Why, some are asking, did the Democrats not save poor Kevin McCarthy yesterday?  Why did they not step in and do the “institutionally” correct thing and nail him out?  After all, institution this and institution that … 

Nonsense.  McCarthy is a hardline conservative who cares not a jot for a single policy that might overlap, even by a scintilla, anything the Democrats might also advocate.  McCarthy is a product of modern American Republican politics.  He is not a serious negotiator nor is he a reliable coalition partner.  When, in recent weeks, he has managed to work with Democrats — on keeping the government running — he has immediately vented in public about how awful those Democrats are and how hey are “ruining” America.  

Let’s get aside the childishness of the notion that keeping a modern government functioning is an active of brave policy — it surely is a minimal entry requirement of anyone seeking office as part of that government.  And let’s do away with the stupidity of bi-partisan dreamers who imagine a world where there exists some “center” in Congress capable of doing the political bidding of the majority of American voters.  No such center exists.  We will get to that shortly.

But, first, let’s just focus on the disconnection that dominates American politics.

There is a remarkable disconnect between the voice of the people and the distribution of power on Congress.  This is well known.  The American political system distributes power according to the dictates of a grand compromise reached over two hundred years ago between warring factions within the “founding” generation of the American elite.  No one in that elite can remotely be thought of as favoring democracy.  It was anathema to all of them.  The voice of the majority was dismissed as being one small step away from base mob rule.  It was to be avoided at all costs.  Hence the byzantine arrangement they foisted on the nascent nation.

That arrangement gave immense power to various minority factions.  It protected slave owners against the attacks of abolitionists.  It protected small population states against being outweighed by more populist states.  It gave excessive control to rural areas.  And it made it difficult to establish anything resembling a “national” government.  It is hardly any wonder, therefore, that a couple of hundred years later we are unable to produce a popular government.  

More to the point, the systemic incentives within American politics tend to produce extremists.  Because a minority can control power against the wishes of the majority there is little to no incentive for an extremist to adjust his or her views in order to attract majority support.  On the contrary, there is an incentive to become sufficiently extreme to motivate a minority just large enough to defeat the popular view.  But no more than that.  

American history is short, so making generalizations is dangerous, but this anti-popular bias in American politics has played out on a number of occasions.  We are living through one such now.

There is a bias in democracy, once it is established, to continue to expand rather than contract its benefits throughout society.  The beginning is always the establishment of a basic franchise that includes a portion of society — historically that beginning has been giving the vote to male property owners.  Then, through a series of steps, other segments of society are brought into the fold.  Various “rights” are extended further and deeper into the many layers of society until most, if not all, have equal status in the array of those rights that society deems most important.  Democracy has, therefore, a logic of increasing inclusion.

America, because of its slave-riddled origins, has had great difficulty going down this road of inclusion.  Its current politics are a legacy of those origins.  Not only is its system an echo of the power of slave owners attending those founding moments, but its recent tactical politics have reflected the cynical embrace by its major right-of-center politicians of the residue of racial animosity of the old slave owning states of the Confederacy.  The so-called “southern strategy” of the Republican party was designed to exploit the dissatisfaction within the old Democratic Party strongholds of those states with the civil rights movement and legislation of the late 1960s.  The re-alignment of politics that took place subsequently was thus based on this exploitation of latent — and often explicit — racism.  Racism, in other words, sits full square in the modern distribution of power in Congress.  And the modern Republican Party exists as it does because of embrace of such sentiment.

It is hardly a shock, therefore, when demographic and cultural shifts move the nation towards a more inclusive arrangement of power and status that a minority rises up in resistance.  Such inclusion offends its deeply regarded legacy and reduces its power.  

In a normally functioning democracy — one where majority of votes produces control of policy — this resistance could not disrupt the steady expansion of rights.  It would be an irritant not a roadblock.  In America, however, this is not the case.  With power disconnected from the majority a stubborn minority can prevent and even reverse progress.  It can impose its will and indulge in a nihilistic denial of such progress.  

We are often told that America is “polarized”.  This is not correct.

The majority of American voters fall into a moderately narrow band of political views that stretches from the center-right to the center-left with a tilt towards the latter on economic policies and towards the former on social policies.  The further left is, perhaps, too provocative in its advocacy of ever more progress towards total inclusion and equality of status, but it is not  destructively nihilistic in that advocacy.  It accepts, for instance, election results, even if it finds those results distasteful.  The majority shows steady support for any number of policies that have been controversial in the past.  There is strong support for increased social spending, for more equality, and for litmus test cultural policies such as those favoring access to abortion.  There is fertile ground for compromise throughout this array of policies.

But such compromise cannot be achieved because of the determined opposition of a vocal minority expressed through a political system that disconnects popularity and power.  Democracy is not, therefore, under threat.  That is the wrong interpretation of our current state of affairs.   It is not under threat because it was never fully established in the first place.  

And it is acceptance of this fact that is the starting point from which we must begin.  Our goal is not to protect democracy.  It is to establish democracy.  And to do that we must rebuild, or create anew, the institutions that disconnect the will of the people from the expression of that will in policy.  We must shift our attention from the details of particular political demands towards the much more difficult and larger objective of creating a system capable of adapting to demographic and cultural reality.  

It is often said that we ought govern from the center because that’s where the majority support exists.  If, however, the majority is disconnected from power by a system bent on giving priority to minority voices, there is no practical center from which to govern.  We should expect, therefore, the logic of politics to gravitate towards the extremism of the minority that does, in fact, control power.  

Our centrist friends need to heed this.  They should not to establish “third parties” in an attempt arrive at a politics of compromise and majority support.  Our minority driven system will inevitably frustrate such an effort.  They need to establish a political system that connects majority support with the control of power.  Once that connection is made, power will gravitate towards the middle where a spirit of compromise can flourish in just the manner the centrists long for.

Connecting the disconnected to achieve that end should be our overarching goal.

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Democracy in America?

Levitsky and Ziblatt ask:  “Imagine an American born in 1980 who first voted in 1998 or 2000.  The Democrats would have won the popular vote in every six-year cycle in the U.S. Senate and all but one presidential election in her lifetime.  And yet she would have lived most of her adult life under Republican presidents, a Republican controlled Senate, and a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.  How much faith should she have in our democracy?” 

None, I would say.  That history suggests America is not a democracy.  So asking whether someone has faith in something that clearly does not exist is, perhaps, a false or misleading question to ask.  The more appropriate question being: when will America a become a democracy?

But we cannot get to that more pertinent question until enough ordinary people rebel against the current system.

We are not helped by the extraordinary effort that goes into educating Americans about the myth, rather than the reality, of their system of governance.  No one wants to tell the truth.   As Levitsky and Ziblatt clearly illustrate, American politics is a murky mix of cross currents some of which can be considered democratic in our modern sense — the majority can express its voice and get its way, but others of which are designed to defeat that majority.

This, we are told, is a good thing.  We are taught to suspect majorities.  They might turn ugly.  They might oppress or simply ignore minorities.  And the arc of human rights suggests that protecting minorities is an urgent requirement of modern civilization.  So societies throughout the world have built bulwarks against such majoritarian oppression.  They have sought to weaken democracy.

The problem, as is obvious, then becomes the inverse.  How do we prevent the minority taking advantage of their protections and becoming a dominant, oppressive, force themselves?  How do we avoid the minority frustrating the majority permanently?

In the American context the people who designed its basic law — the Constitution — were so concerned about the preservation of minority rights that they created a system easily perverted and exploited by aggressive minorities.  Which is how that person born in 1980 can live her life under permanent minority rule. 

No wonder people are increasingly expressing a deep aversion to American institutions.  They no longer channel majority views.  It is a broken system — if you believe that democracy is preferable to authoritarian rule.

There is no way out of this box.

The protections of minorities are so fundamental within the system that no improvement appears possible without a crisis of such severity that there would be no predictably improved outcome.   The result might just as easily be a greater descent into authoritarian rule as it might be the establishment of real democracy.

This is the dilemma America faces.

Its foundation needs urgent repair.  Cultural, demographic, and economic realities are out of alignment with the way in which the system brings opinions into the public arena and thus shapes policy.   The polarization and gridlock that so upsets us all is not an outcome of an even split in public opinion.  There is no such even split.  There are clear majorities in support of most major policy options.  And those majorities are expressed regularly at the ballot box.  Yet the anti-majority bias within the system defeats those majorities and perpetuates minority rule.  By so doing it undermines its own democratic legitimacy and creates the very polarization that causes public consternation.

So a downward spiral is set in motion.  The public gets more frustrated that the system appears not to work for the majority.  They turn away from, and increasingly distrust, our core institutions.  They search for ever more extreme ways of breaking free, and they are criticized as being uneducated or populist when they abandon — or appear to abandon — the system.   All the while they are behaving both rationally and democratically.  

The predicament that America finds itself is compounded by the root cause of some of the compromises made back during the writing of the Constitution — they were explicitly designed to protect slavery.  That they also protected minorities was a convenient veil thrown over this ugly truth.  The moral argument to rid ourselves of them is compelling.  Yet they persist.  Modern American politics is built on that heritage of racist based compromise.   The iniquitous so-called Southern strategy of the modern Republican Party is simply an exploitation, and encouragement, of that dark side of American culture.  

We cannot, nor ought we, re-write history.  Its lessons serve to guide us away from repetition of errors.  But that’s the point: we need to learn not to perpetuate those errors.  The current American political system does exactly that.  It continues to impose upon us the errors made at the outset.  Silent and hidden from view the history of slavery echoes on within the edifice.  It is time to eliminate it and establish modern democracy.

But is that possible?

Not when we take another more modern phenomenon into account.

In recent decades the American system of government has been captured by the influence of an elite class determined to protect its own privileges against dilution by democratic consideration.  Our elite has prospered during its indifference to the erosion of democracy and the rise of minority rule.  It has lost empathy with its fellow citizens.  Perpetual minority rule became a useful tool as the elite sought to avoid the pressures of democratic resistance to its veer greater rent-seeking and self-indulgence.

This capture was an organized reaction to the democratic changes induced by the Great Depression and expressed in the New Deal package of legislation.  That democratic turn was resented by those who were called upon to share their wealth and privilege in order to provide a platform for the emergence of the prosperous postwar middle class.   The ease with which this takeover was executed and subsequently maintained illustrates the weakness of the system Levitsky and Ziblatt discuss.  They focus more on the Republican party’s steady decline in its commitment to democracy.  Their identification of the Southern strategy and the rise of White Christian nationalism are the center point of their analysis.  The overlay of our elite power grab adds support to their call for reform.

Whether either the elite nor the Republican Party can ever be motivated to tolerate democracy is, unfortunately, an open question.  I doubt it.

It is, nonetheless, something that needs urgent attention.  It is time for reform.  Levitsky and Ziblatt give us a useful start.  It is up to us to summon the courage to rebel against the minority and to establish democracy.

Democracy in America.  Now that’s a thought!

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Notes for the Beginning of: What to Do?

This is how I explain what has happened to myself.

Nobody should begin without warning.  So we ought jot down some initial observations that provide a starting point for what follows.  Some will become highly relevant.  Others will fade as we dig deeper into our subject and discover that they were not germane to the main theme.  They are in no particular order, since imposing order suggests a level of understanding unjustified by experience.  We simply do not know what we do not know and therefore ought make no pretense otherwise. [My economist friends please note!]

Here goes [borrowing along the way from DeLong, Gerstle, and one or two others]:

  1. The spate of growth experienced in industrialized nations accelerated radically sometime around 1870
  2. The trajectory of that growth appears vertiginous and is, therefore, unlikely to be maintained.  But, we have grown accustomed to it and find it hard to face a future without it.  We make the assumption that the present is not an anomaly, but is a new normal
  3. This rapid growth — usually expressed in the terms economists use, and based entirely upon technological innovation — is the foundation upon which all modernity now rests.  Everything we enjoy, better health, longer lives, greater opportunities, broader cultural exposure, and better day-to-day security of existence, in sum our better wellbeing, are all due to the surge in economic growth since 1870.  Everything sits on an economic foundation — economics needs a better explanation of why/how this all happened
  4. This moment in history then, as many have observed, ought to be propelling us towards a future very different from the abject nature of all previous human history — we have broken free [temporarily?] from what has become known as the Malthusian trap and the fabled Utopia ought be within our grasp
  5. In particular this growth has allowed us to reshape our societies in ways that the constraints of the past disallowed.  We have created what we call democracies that include even the least privileged people — albeit haltingly —  in the political decision making framework
  6. It was the degrees of freedom created by rapid economic growth that gave traditional elites — aristocratic, monarchic, religious, military, and landed — both an incentive and the space to share their privileges.  Including the masses became both necessary, [as motivation], and wise, [as reward], in order to maintain elite benefits from growth.  The alternative, per the period 1789 through 1917, was revolution and destruction of traditional elite power
  7. Rapid growth also compressed history insofar as change occurred not across generations but within them.  Eras that used to be timed in terms of centuries are now timed in decades.  Couple this with the existence of multiple generations simultaneously and the traditional cohesion of memory and experience has been overturned.  We live with multiple histories and cultures competing for pre-eminence within each society all at once.  This complicates politics — inter-generational conflicts muddle class conflicts
  8. The political sharing of elite power and the greater speed of change initiated/was initiated by a vastly increased political conflict over the distribution of wealth.  Whereas traditional societies had set patterns of distribution based upon time honored social structures, modernity had to invent its own distributional values.  The battles to reach a so-called fair distribution has ebbed and flowed largely swept along by shifts in technology and ownership/use of that technology
  9. Distributional conflict led to a period of intense ideological creativity and argument: Fascism, Communism, and classic liberalism all emerged to compete as frameworks to establish and divide power, wealth, and status.   This argument appeared to end sometime in the late 1980s.  After which one ideology dominated for a while.  Some argued that history had ended, whereas it was only in abeyance
  10. Because things started to go wrong.  The pace of innovation slowed which, in turn, slowed the pace of productivity improvement; the degrees of freedom for elite power sharing were thus reduced; tension mounted; pre-modern social structures began to re-emerge; distribution consequently began to revert to traditional arrangements; ideological conflicts re-arose; politics soured.  The re-mergence of radical inequality — both vertical and horizontal [per Elizabeth Anderson] — undermined, if not destroyed, democracy. 
  11. The march towards utopia [per DeLong] — despite our evident historic prosperity — stalled.  Why?
  12. Because we went back in time — society congealed into more noticeable classes once more, only this time the elite was populated not by monarchs, aristocrats, the landed gentry, or military and religious leaders.  It was comprised of an upper echelon business class and its technocratic supporters or adherents [including academic economists per Diane Coyle].  This class accumulated a disproportionate share of the national wealth which it used as a resource to entrench itself by capturing government, dominating the framing of public and intellectual discourse, purchasing influence within the media and judiciary, and by upending the institutions meant to maintain balance in society 
  13. The chokehold of this new elite class is the primary cause of our malaise.   As this class syphoned off wealth from everyone else — as elites have usually done in the past — it ignored the ongoing structural transformation of the economy.  It benefitted from the globalization of capital and so could maintain its own upward trajectory, and, at the same time, overlook the long term consequences of climate change, demographic mix and aging, and the implications of the transition into a service rather than industrial economy 
  14. To these issues our elite has no answers — it has too narrow and self-serving a perspective to create novel responses to potential crises.  The intellectual bankruptcy of the ruling class became particularly evident in the lead up to, and in the aftermath of, the Great Recession.  Its obvious self-justification and rent-seeking have been on full display ever since.  It is a corrupting and negative influence that has to be eliminated if we are to return to our prior path of shared prosperity and relative political harmony.  We have collectively sacrificed any meaningful definition of liberty and justice at the altar of shareholder profit.  To restore any semblance of democratic dignity we need to rebel.  How?
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