Vox Media publishes several products. Vox promises to go beyond the headlines and publish details that underlie noteworthy stories. In an explainer, policy correspondent Abdallah Fayyad says the expanding gap between rich and poor is a dangerous trend:
Today, there’s a huge gap in incomes between rich and poor. Even though incomes across the board rose at relatively similar rates in the decades after World War Two, incomes at the very top started to grow much faster after the 1970s — a trend that’s driven, at least in part, by shrinking union membership. For instance, CEOs’ compensation has grown by 1,085 percent since 1978 while the average worker’s salary has only grown by 24 percent.
…What’s more extreme is the gap in wealth between rich and poor households.
…Class warfare, or class conflict, happens when the tension between social classes comes to a boil. That happens when the interests of different classes diverge, building resentment between them.
Someone I know says that inequality is a self-correcting problem. She thinks an event that began in 1789 shows what will happen when a majority decides they are unfairly oppressed.
Many of us have studied the French Revolution. (I recommend Mike Duncan’s Revolution Podcast, Season 3). One of the important causal factors was the troubled relationship between the elites and the unprivileged. Several political and social changes were achieved or attempted, but elites emerged unscathed and continued to exercise power over the masses. They were similarly immune from crop failures and major economic problems.
Citizens had little trust in institutions and bureaucracies. Not wanting change, ruling elites preferred society to be ordered by the least capable people — a kakistocracy.
Today, the Musk/Trump administration is destroying America’s federal competency and installing people whose only qualification is loyalty to the leaders. America’s new kakistocracy puts the entire world at risk.
Eric Anceau of Sorbonne Université sees “impoverishment of thought” growing in modern times. He wrote:
The mistrust of the elites may have a long history in France but today, in an age of extreme media coverage and immediacy, the associated defeat of intelligence is worrying. Genuine intellectual debate all too often disappears in favour of ersatz ideas dominated by the one-track thinking and the politics of offence.
With social media dominating the information landscape, substantive change may not be possible. There are many admirable and bright people in our world, but ignorant, perverse, and obdurate behaviours seem too common.
Categories: Democracy, Inequality
in-sights.ca 
Intelligent debate, that has gone out the window decades ago. Today, debate is confined to 10 second sound bytes and photo-ops, with single repetitive phrases such as “axe the tax”.
In the USA, debate has evolved to “who can tel the biggest lie.”
The once elegance in debate has devolved to shouting matches, name calling, and general ignorance.
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This is a timely post Norm, because growing wealth inequality is at the root of our social upheaval and the high cost of living. Nothing will change until governments seriously overhaul our tax system to reverse wealth inequality. Neoliberalism was ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s and ever since more and more wealth has been piling up in the bank accounts of the wealthiest 1%. The Canadians for Tax Fairness recently published a report that lays out the history behind the growth in wealth inequality as well as providing solutions. They recommend a staircased wealth tax be introduced – I agree. See link below for the report.
https://www.taxfairness.ca/en/resources/reports/canadas-affordability-divide-how-1s-rise-left-millions-behind
I would also urge your readers to subscribe to London School of Economics and Oxford graduate, Gary Stevenson’s YouTube channel. He does a great job of unpacking this whole mess. Link below to one of his better episodes.
The solution is TAX WEALTH, NOT WORK
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Agreed. According to Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the western world’s political credibility crisis began with and quickly reached critical mass as the consequences of Neoliberalism.
Let’s add to your list of recommended sites
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/neoliberalism-freedom-markets-hayek/678124/
“Freedom for the Wolves”
“Neoliberal orthodoxy holds that economic freedom is the basis of every other kind. That orthodoxy, a Nobel economist says, is not only false; it is devouring itself.”
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I’m currently reading Neil Howe’s “The Fourth Turning Is Here”, and coincidentally happened upon his discussion of inequality as Norm posted this article. I was struck by how the following four paragraphs addressed some of the ideas in the article and the comments that followed, including the Gary Stevenson clip. He writes:
“In his bestselling 2013 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, the French economist Thomas Piketty argues that modern market capitalism tends to raise inequality over time. He does concede, however, that this long-term trend was recently broken by one conspicuous exception: a forty-to fifty-year period from the 1930s to the 1970s when equality declined in most of the western world. The period is well known to economists, who refer to it as the “Great Compression.”
It’s not hard to identify causes of this decline in inequality. The era began with financial crashes, total wars, high taxation, punitive inflation, and financial repression, all of which were likely to strip wealth from the plutocrats. Later on, postwar governments enacted major labor, full-employment, and social welfare measures which tended to raise the income of the poor and working classes. In America, inequality of both income and wealth, after reaching twin peaks in 1914 and 1929, fell somewhat during the Great Depression, fell rapidly during the 1940s, and then kept falling gradually until sometime in the 1970s. Ever since, inequality has been steadily rising again. Today we sometimes refer to the Great Compression of the postwar high as the golden age of America’s middle class.
Yet is this era, as Piketty suggests, an isolated exception? Stanford economic historian Walter Scheidel thinks not. Yes, Scheidel argues in “The Great Leveler” (2017), Piketty is correct that-once you strip out decades of catastrophe, war, and reconstruction-inequality almost always rises during eras of peace and uneventful prosperity. Yet this has always been true, he explains, not just since the advent of capitalism several centuries ago but since the rise of urban civilization itself several millennia ago.
So how, according to Scheidel, does inequality ever fall? Only during violent, traumatic, and (usually) deadly upheavals and the social reconstructions that inevitably follow them. In other words, if we look at the entire panorama of civilization since its early emergence in the fifth millennium BCE, going all the way from ancient Uruk and Jericho to modern-day Paris and Shanghai, we see one general rule at work: Inequality has been (gradually) rising most of the time and (rapidly) falling only at crisis-punctuated intervals. Scheidel’s historical taxonomy of equalizers resembles the four horsemen in John’s Book of Revelation: pandemic, revolution, state failure, and total war.”
It seems that although Gary Stevenson has correctly the cause and the likelihood that things will get worse before they improve, his idea that just getting the message out will be the cure might be off the mark. I lean toward the opinion of that someone Norm knows. A revolution is in the cards. Unless a pandemic, state failure, or total war intervenes first. And for anyone paying attention, Donald Trump is putting the building blocks in place for any one of the four.
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Readers of IN-SIGHTS always appreciate thoughtful contributions by Lew Edwardson. I hope this comment is overly pessimistic, although I fear it is not.
I had been looking for a simple explanation of why inequality began rising in the 1970s. I was beginning to focus on several very wealthy citizens funding “think tanks” tasked with convincing citizens that concentrating great wealth in the hands of a few was good for everyone.
In the USA, the Heritage Foundation was created in 1973 with primary funding from the Coors family, a group the LA Times labelled “racist, sexist, union-bashing, right-wing fanatics.” (That was written before the newspaper was owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong.) Long before Heritage promoted Trump and Project 2025, it was directing Ronald Reagan’s rise to political prominence.
In the UK, a founder of the Centre for Policy Studies in 1974 was Keith Joseph, a millionaire aristocrat who once complained that poor women were producing too many children of low intelligence, and these were producing yet more substandard children and degrading Britain’s “human stock.” The CPS raised Margaret Thatcher to a high level.
In Canada, the Fraser Institute was formed in 1974 with funding from wealthy Canadian businesspeople and corporations.
The aim of these groups was not to promote justice and human equality, it was to make rich people even richer.
The UK’s Independent newspaper reported in 2019 that 48 billionaires had been bankrolling the Conservative Party, and the super-rich and big corporations received in return almost £100bn in tax breaks.
The sermons preached by these organizations usually advise the elimination of social safety nets, privatization of public services, severe cuts in education, healthcare and other government activities, and deregulation of business. They promote the idea that poverty results from bad character and deny that wealth is sustained less by skill than by privilege.
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