More than anything else, what I take from this book is that we need change.  Radical change.  We have been complacent in every part of the world for far too long.  There are leaders among us (perhaps I am one, perhaps I am not) who are literal strangers in this land.  Strangers because the way things could work, the way they play out in the minds of these people, and how things are do not match.

In America we have created an interesting system of ambivalence.  We have created a generation of dreamers who hope that the dream they make will be handed to them.  We have created a world of freedom which we use primarily to hate those who attempt to be free.  We are the paragon of democracy and support that system around the world, so long as those abroad vote who we wish and policies we demand.  We are the land of opportunity for modern indentured workers abroad.  We are the shining jewel of industrial wealth being poured into a hole we can not seem to dig fast enough.

We are potential squandered.

We are a country of two political parties that fight tooth and nail to tear down the people they represent.  And we the people sit by and watch it happen.  We complain about it, hell we complain about everything.  Apathy is as far as we get, and even that effort may become to great for those who are bringing up the rear.

All one would have to do in Stranger in a Strange Land to make it a renewed picture of our time is update some of the dialog and a few cultural references.  The almost dystopic world imagined by Heinlein is the world of today and the impending future of tomorrow.  His world certainly contains all the comforts we need.  It is not a harsh world.  And that may be the point.

We have become empty.  In the revival of fundamentalism we are even more empty.  We seek goals with no understanding. 

We seek only to sustain our comfort, when we need a sustainable society that brings hope and purpose back to humanity.

• The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Both of these bring up many of the points discussed in Nudge but do so from a much more scientific point of view.  I attribute this mostly to the fact that social scientists are, by that title, scientists and look at things from a viewpoint I find much more favorable to that of economists.

Where Nudge often misses some key elements to human behavior and actual understanding of social processes, The Paradox of Choice & Predictably Irrational go forward with great understanding and years of research experience and studies to back them up.

The conclusions of these two great books come together for some powerful thoughts.

Absolute freedom of choice does not make us happy.  In fact, having too much choice may actually hurt us much more than it helps.  We become less happy with decisions, less able to make any choices, and suffer from a great deal of regret.  This seems to indicate the extreme benefit that rational default choices for many of the complicated choices we need to make in investments, insurance, and some other areas can have.

We make lots of errors in our daily lives.  While economists tend to think of us as hyper rational, we actually exist as highly flawed machines.  This is great in that it is what makes us human, but rather bad in that we generally make decisions that have little to do with how we imagine people should make choices.

We live in an irrational paradox.  We desire unlimited choice, and suffer for it.  We pride our systems of capital and business on the fact that we consistently make well informed and rational decisions, which in reality we frequently do not make.  As a matter of point we seem to create systems based on an ideal of mankind that does not exist and them puzzle over why they fail.

In all of this, social scientists have been willing to nudge us into working systems.  It seems that the world wants to learn more about how the human mind works, but we gleefully ignore any opportunity to apply the science of psychology to anything but therapy.  The occasional I/O Psychologist will make some headway, but the MBA’s of the world keep hoping that the force of their business ideas will overcome the frailties of our body.  We are an amazing specimen of logic and intelligence, but without systems that account for our very real limitations and tendencies we are running on a treadmill and hoping to gather enough lift to fly.

We can create a world of systems that function for us rather than against us.  All we need to do is listen.

In that time I have done quite a bit of reading which has left me with a plethora of thought and ideas. 

Nudge (Thaler & Sunstein) was an interesting commentary on the power of choice architecture and the possible uses thereof in business and politics.  Certainly our government and our corporate masters could do a great deal more to encourage us to make better life choices without imposing on us any loss of freedom.  The general theory of Libertarian Paternalism they put forward is an interesting one.  In many ways Sustainable Democracy has always been about this.  How can we make better choices that reinforce democratic principles while creating better systems of management, governance, and social motivation. 

The general response I have heard from media about this book has been one that sounds much like “I don’t want no stinkin’ gov’ment official decidin’ how to run my life!”  Which is about as far from an accurate opinion as one could render…  Which should serve to remind us that the media does little more than entertain and provide an outlet for industry commercials rather than make much of a serious attempt at dispersing information.  While the authors do encourage government involvement in ways that might worry some, it mostly advises creating systems where default choices make saving, retiring, getting healthcare, etc. much more simple for those with little to no expertise while still allowing for a full freedom of choice by any who wish to exercise such.  The other major agenda they put forward would be to force industries to give customers yearend statements that summarize all costs/fees/spending/and in appropriate cases usage of services so that people are fully informed of true costs and may make better informed decisions for future choices in services acquired.

Yes, the great evil of this book is that it would provide meaningful default choices that are in the best interest of the most people and make the general population better informed consumers.  Which really is what industry fears, isn’t it?

An informed consumer causes all sorts of problems when comparisons between costs of services are made apparent.  They can suddenly decipher if what they are charged and what they receive have a proper relation.

It might go so far as to create a more sustainable society!  While no corporation wants to see society collapse, they generally think in extremely shortsighted terms that relate directly to profit rather than consumer or societal benefit.  However, it is the responsibility of government to look toward this long term growth and development of our society.  The idea of giving nudges to improve the health and wealth of our nation is an excellent idea.  When we can create choices that will, in general, create a much greater likelihood of positive outcomes without resorting to mandates (as both parties so often do) we must listen and jump at the chance.  Certainly it seems to put politicians in more parts of our lives, but they already are in all those parts.  They regulate and use heavy handed methods to move us in all sorts of directions.  Reducing what our legislators do to nudging us in better directions will be far more productive than their shoving us heedlessly in any direction.

Have you read Nudge?  Let me know what you thought and give some feedback.  Follow-up comments and articles will address valid points from any side of the argument for or against any part of nudge.

To give an idea, about 50 pages of planning documents and and additional 30-40 of content are resting on my hard drive waiting to be turned into blog ready chunks.  It should be easy to translate between the two, but my motivation has been a bit lax lately.  Hopefully, that will be corrected soon.  Actually the writing of this should be indicative of the waning of laziness, but time will tell.

Either way, there is a ton content that should soon be making it’s way over here, at the very least there will be weekly updates (no more than 3 updates a week) for examination and debate.

The new defense budget is a near $80 billion increase over last year’s spending measure. It covers things like buying new ships for the navy, pay raises for military personnel, and increasing the rolls of the Army and the Marines. It does not cover the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the funding for which is contained in a separate, “emergency” spending measure.

These two spending proposals illustrate where the American Government’s priorities lie better than a thousand policy speeches ever could. Just to break it down; congress decides that our country, which already spends a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than any developed nation in the world, needs an $80 billion bump, and no one bats an eye. Yet when someone raises the idea that we ought to be ensuring that poor children can afford to buy medicine and receive the medical care they need, a huge political fight ensues.

Is this what we have become as a nation? Do the American people really value Destroyer-class warships and advanced weaponry over caring for our children? Have we become so callous that we elect to devote more of our resources to stockpiling the tools of destruction over taking care of the most vulnerable members of our society? Do we place the ability to kill over the ability to save lives?

We may be beyond redemption if the answers to these questions are yes. Fortunately, these spending measures do not represent the true will of the American people. Instead, they represent the disconnect between Washington policies and American values. Ask most average people whether we ought to be focusing more on education, health and social welfare, or on stuffing the pockets of defense contractors, and nine out of ten would want us to invest in our people.

The problem is that most people are unaware of our wasteful, reckless policy of ever-expanding defense spending. The reason they are unaware is that it has become uncontroversial in Washington; not only are most elected representatives scared to death of voting against funding for the military, they’re afraid of even discussing it. Anyone who speaks out against buying new billion dollar submarines is suddenly soft on national security, and therefore must want the terrorists to win.

This culture of fear must be reigned in. As we pump an ever-more irresponsible amount of our tax dollars into defense, our social programs, health system, and national infrastructure are deteriorating to dangerous levels. We are witnessing a decline in the essential services provided by our government at a time when tax receipts are at a record high. This neglect must be brought to an end, or we will put our entire society at risk.

A responsible government will invest in the health and education of its citizens. Washington must re-direct their priorities to get in line with what is best for the American people, before it’s too late. Otherwise, we risk becoming a modern-day Sparta, or worse, Soviet Union; pouring our resources into our military at the expense of our citizens’ daily lives.

Columbine High School: Two shooters, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed 12 students, one teacher, wounded 23 others and then killed themselves. The whole attack lasted one hour. The shooters were or felt alienated from other students and have been reported to have been influenced in some fashion by neo-Nazi ideology. In this case the warning signs were abundant; however, no decisive action was taken for intervention prior to the shooting.

Johann Gutenberg School: Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, killed 13 teachers, two students, and one policeman. 10 others were wounded. Steinhaeuser had been expelled October of the previous year, revenge for this seems to have been the motive. The event lasted only 20 minutes. There were some possible warning signs before the shooting. Steinhaeuser killed himself after being trapped in a classroom by a teacher.

Virginia Tech: Cho Seung-Hui, killed two in a dorm, then killed 30 more 2 hours later in a classroom building, 15 others were also wounded. Cho has been cited as being very mentally unstable. He was legally required to go to counseling sessions for his sexual assault or stalking of other female students. The warning signs were numerous and action was already being taken.
Dates and general information taken from Infoplease, other information from Wikipedia and other media sources.

We have the range of revenge killing motivated by a simple expulsion to a clearly disturbed young man who was already under the watch of the mental health community. How can we deal with this range of difference in personalities with similar violent results?

How Mental Health is Relevant

The Columbine and Virginia teach cases both involve clear mental health warning signs and are the best cases for us to learn from. The German case presents the exception to clear mental health problems and shows clearly where mental health communities cannot help.

The Columbine shooting is a tragedy in every way. Not only was the outcome of the event terrible, but it demonstrates a true lack of ability by the school, parents, and community. In this case the theft of weapons, Nazi memorabilia, extreme anti-social behavior, disturbing writing, videos of intent, and verbal warnings about violence should have been noticed and reported. The blame here mostly rests on the parents for grave indifference to very clear signs of danger. The inability for a psychologist or counselor to predict or stop this event is evident in the general lack of motivation by all parties involved to take action.

Specific to mental health, the school guidance counselor should have been the frontline defense. However, with generally only one counselor available for all students we encounter a problem of resources. Even very adept professionals can fail when under such substantial case loads. In this case the very aberrant behavior should have caused enough red flags to have some action taken. However, Virginia Tech shows us why even when direct action is taken our system prevents possibly violent people from being stopped.

Cho Seung-Hui has problems with women and rejection. His lack of any social graces led to a vicious cycle of rejection due to his own violent or troubled approaches to women. After having charges brought against him he was ordered into a counseling program. So why wasn’t he stopped or put away before he could hurt anyone?

Patient rights prevent us from preventing violence in most cases. The restrictions of forcibly committing a patient are vast. The most common standard is that a patient must directly state their intent to harm themselves or others. This results in either a person being committed to a secure facility or these threats being directly reported to police (to avoid putting the professional at risk). If the patient does not make a specific threat, little can be done. A doctor can recommend in-patient treatment, but they cannot force it. This is for a good reason.

A patient must have a deep level of trust with a psychologist to disclose anything. If you knew that any statement that might worry your counselor might land you in a state hospital or a police station you would probably never say anything at all. The long history of forced committals and degrading or dangerous facilities has also been a deciding factor in this history. The problems with state treatment have mostly been solved, but the standard remains a good one.

The mental health system is not designed to catch criminals. The burden for prevention of violence should not be placed on these professionals except in the cases where they are already compelled and willing to participate as were mentioned above. Enlisting psychologists to prevent crime in their practices would be much like preventing office crime with a secretary. You may get numerous reports at first, but the real relevance to crimes committed would be very low. Over time the reports would simply stop, either because there are no patients, or they never talk about anything of real consequence because they know the result. And it still does nothing to prevent our last case.
Steinhaeuser was never on the mental health radar. He legally owned guns, stockpiled ammunition, and then took revenge. He had no history of mental illness and no outward signs of instability. He rationally made a plan, committed to it, and carried it out. His violence is no more or less reprehensible. And it likely could not have been prevented by any health professional.

Psychologists are not a valuable prevention resource like law enforcement. They should not be overlooked, though, as being one of our best sources of hindsight information. That said, we should inherently distrust any “subject expert” who offers quick explanations. The field of psychology does a tremendous job of doing detailed research to help explain violent events. They do not do a good job at predicting events which have astronomically low probabilities of occurring.

It has been said that if given 100 people and asked to predict who will commit suicide, the psychologist has only one good answer. That is to predict no suicides. Suicide is a much more common event than school shootings, but without long case histories and knowledge of a client it is almost impossible to make a prediction. And even when we do have enough knowledge to make a prediction, a good social scientist will not give a yes or no answer; they will give a percent chance. Despite this we often blame mental health for not doing more. However, at the same time we are willing to take one shot easy solutions from hired-gun professionals.

The mental health field has a great deal to offer, but we have to be careful how we use it. Patient rights and peer reviewed studies exist for reasons. Psychologists are also wonderful to help individuals overcome a variety of disorders or life problems, but they serve the individual and are not there to be watch dogs on behavior. Be a responsible knowledge consumer and learn from the history of tragedies.

The first part of this broad question is as follows: Does the media hinder our knowledge of the truth?

By most, the media is seen as a fast an accurate way to learn about events. However, events like the Columbine High School and Virginia Tech shootings call into question the media’s ability to contribute anything to our knowledge.

In these two events within minutes of media reporting conclusions were offered. There were hours of expert testimony, and detailed information given about who the offenders were and what turned them from model citizen to depraved murderers. The problem was the veracity of this information. The Columbine shooters were described as Goth, avid Marilyn Manson listeners, and obsessed with violent movies and video games. Seung-Hui Cho of Virginia Tech was also described as being obsessed with violent video games and movies. In both cases all details provided by the media were either completely false or gross exaggerations. The problem is the media rarely retracts any statements in these situations.

In the case of Seung-Hui Cho, it was his roommate who provided the contradictory details. We were lucky that in this case the interview with Seung-Hui Cho’s roommate was also on live national television. He specifically repudiated the claims that Seung-Hui Cho watched violent movies or played violent games. The roommate went so far as to say he did not remember Cho really being interested in either in any way. Despite this, many experts continued to rail against these two items as a primary cause for the tragedy. Not only did the experts continue, but show hosts actively encouraged the experts and disregarded the contradictory evidence. Why? Other entertainment scapegoats get people to watch.

This warps the ability for actual fact to come out. The media does not care what the truth is; the media cares about getting you to watch. In this line you will also rarely hear much about when the wrong suspect is caught in a case. The first arrest or theory of motive is sensational, anything that takes away from that “credible event or statement” will receive significantly less time, or none at all.

What we have come to rely on for our information has become a consumer product. 24 Hour news has caused the most damage. Not much actually happens each day that can be covered and be interesting. If they can keep one event interesting and consistently advertised to you, you will keep watching to learn what they present to you.

The people we are taught to trust for knowing our “up to the minute world” are not sustaining accurate knowledge. We need responsible media that does not cater to corporate sponsors have only profit as a requirement for success. Our ability to think depends on it.

Today’s conflict: “You don’t work hard enough” vs. “There is no golden retirement watch, get over it”

As a child, I have fond memories of riding in the doughnut truck with my dad at 4am while he made deliveries. In those days, he would work 10-12 hour days and still not keep pace with his father, who enjoyed to complain, “if only I could find someone to work as hard as me, this business would really take off!…” My father, my stepfather, and every significant Baby Boomer Male that I have known has lived in the shadow of his own father’s work ethic. It seems the self-esteem of the males of the Baby Boomer generation sustains itself directly from, firstly, his “work ethic” and secondly, the size of the souped-up engine in his car of teenage yore.

This is not quite so of Generation X, who, in large part, derive their work ethic from, firstly, their best video game coup-de-grace, and secondly, the size of the souped-up processor in his computer today (!flame! You will burn in the after-flame of my overclocking, byeatch!) Generation X does work, in consideration they have legitimized video gaming as a competitive sport, complete with cash prizes.
Video gaming is work, especially to really buckle down and beat Halo 3 on Legendary level over the weekend.

There is a difference of approach between the generations. Baby Boomers seem to be hurrying about constantly while Generation X is more, well, sedentary. More significantly, there is a difference of concern. Generation X is certainly not as concerned about making money.

The goal of a Good American man, I have learned through example, is to work as hard as he can to make as much money as he can. But what do you do with all that money you make, papa? Well, er, you save it, and you occasionally buy things, but truth be told, you make more money so you can afford bigger monthly payments (bigger house, bigger car, fancier department store) and more of them!
A Good American measures his success in the quantity and quality of items owned and on display.

While Generation X is not as concerned about working all the time to make money so they can buy more stuff, they ARE still getting things. Better yet, Generation X does not have to work so hard to buy them. How so? There is the most obvious reason – credit cards! Consider, my mother requested I not mention to my step-father that I was accepted for an American Express card at 18 when he had only recently earned his own. “Such a privilege wasted on such youth!” he would have said.

There are other influences which ignite a Molotov Cocktail of doom for American democracy. First, more stuff is made more cheaply today, so while we all are behind inflation in annual raises, we are now able to buy more for $20 at the Super Wal-Mart. Secondly, Generation X is the third generation of spoiled brats in American history, and we can all point our fingers of suspicion towards the Depression Survivors for starting it all. So grateful were they for surviving the Depression, they fatefully decided their own children shouldn’t suffer the same fate, and bought their kids lots of stuff and worked really hard to pay for it all.

There is strong likelihood that a Depression today could wipe out an entire generation. If the credit card industry was destroyed, Generation X would be rendered unable to purchase necessary living expenses; none writes checks, and only druggies carry cash! Today, we are so dependent upon credit cards to pay for our lifestyles, we have lost sight of America as a democracy; instead, we live in America as the world’s greatest shopping mall.

The guaranteed rights of the Constitution do not seem to protect the right buy whatever we want, however much we want. Our country serves poorly as an example of democracy when we show off our ability to buy things. American democracy should shine with efficiency and balance of people who work to live, instead of working to pay the company store debt. People who live in insurmountable debt have lost more than a paycheck – they have lost their souls!

By Richard D. Lamm and Dottie V. Lamm

reprinted with authors’ permission

“It wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

- Founding father John Adams

We believe that a new, profoundly disturbing question has arisen in American public policy: Is our political system structured to be able to solve the problems the nation faces? Can we do politically what we must do economically, ecologically and socially to leave our children a workable and decent society?

Before you discard these questions as heresy, remember many of our most famous Greek philosophers felt that democracy was not a sustainable form of government. We pray we prove them wrong, but can we ever stop the slide toward national insolvency, which will collapse the dollar and undercut the economy?

While different studies produce different figures, most of the experts and organizations that worry about the national budget agree that we are passing on to our children debts higher than the total worth of the public and private wealth of the country. The Concord Coalition puts the national debt plus the unfunded liabilities at more than $70 trillion, substantially more than the nation’s total assets. We are clearly the most fiscally irresponsible generation in American society, and neither political party can take even modest steps to balance the budget.

Every dime of the war in Iraq, the recovery from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, every dime of the new avian flu program and a thousand other federal programs we callously sloughed off to our children and grandchildren to pay. Some of these programs may indeed be worthy, but when we cut taxes without cutting spending, we pass the burden along to our children. To our mind, the only honest political platform is: “We are going to cut your benefits and increase your taxes.”

Before you smile at our naiveté, let us suggest that is the only solution that will save our great nation from bankruptcy. We have made promises far beyond our ability to deliver and left the political consequences to our children.

One basic problem we refuse to recognize is that the New Deal is demographically obsolete. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are the most politically popular programs in America, and none of them are sustainable without major, political career-destroying amendments. We are living too long and not having enough children to sustain these programs, yet we are paralyzed to act. By 2030, there will be twice as many elderly and only 18 percent more children, and these three programs alone will crowd out all the rest of federal spending.

The programs bankrupting America are programs for the elderly paid for by today’s workers. These programs slowly but steadily put new impossible burdens on these workers’ kids, our kids and everybody’s grandkids. We are seeing workers paying 15.3 percent of their wages into programs that benefit seniors who make more in retirement than most people do working full-time.

We, the elderly, are the real “welfare queens” of American public policy because we are 13 percent of the population but get 60 percent of federal social spending, much of it subsidizing the well-off elderly. A new social policy should transfer money from the affluent to the poor, not from the young to the old, but try to tell that to the AARP. Consequently, day by day, decision by decision, budget by budget we consign our nation’s children and grandchildren to economic chaos.

The second democracy-defying question eclipses the first: How do we leave our children a sustainable ecosystem? Our whole economy incorporates the assumption of infinite resources and endless growth. We are now surrounded with evidence that increasingly shows that something is fundamentally wrong with the growth paradigm.

Our globe is warming, our forests are shrinking, our icecaps are melting, our coral is dying, our fisheries are depleting, our deserts are encroaching, our finite water supplies are under more and more demand. We suspect these to be the early warning signs of an Earth approaching its carrying capacity. We cannot merely call upon human ingenuity, science and technology to develop new solutions to these new challenges. Technical know-how is not wisdom. It is important, but it is not enough. We must be more than technically proficient; we must instead change our economy, our consumption culture and, most important, our mental map of the world.

We doubt that there is any way the rest of the world can live at anything close to the American standard of living; indeed, we doubt that 300 million Americans can. Our hubris notwithstanding, we ultimately must live and prosper within a limited and increasingly overstressed and fragile ecosystem. We cannot meet all the world’s needs and aspirations within our ecosystem. It is true that economy and development have been indispensable to human welfare. But the profound truth is that ultimately our ecosystem trumps our economics. Starkly put, our current patterns of wealth creation and consumption are outdated, outmoded and destructive.

It is no great feat to sustain a democracy when we are distributing the riches of a virgin, resource-rich continent. With notable exceptions during wars and depressions, our political system gave voters more and more benefits every decade. When we couldn’t pay for those benefits, we started to put them on our children’s credit card. No big deal if we add debt temporarily for a short-term crisis, but debt is “economic cocaine,” and we have become addicted to debt. We are haunted by the fact that every generation of Americans until ours has left their children a better America. Our generation however, is leaving gargantuan problems to the future. Our worst nightmare is that these problems might be beyond the ability of democracy to solve.

The role of wealth in strengthening or subverting democratic systems has been of interest to scholars since Aristotle first broached the subject in the fourth century BCE. In today’s post-everything society, human beings have and continue to be subject to a historical process that is draining wealth from the many and reapportioning it in the hands of the few. A few facts shall confirm the existence of this process and give us context within which to consider its many implications:

• In 1774, the richest 1% of the populace owned 15% of all wealth. By 2001 the top 1% had consolidated control of more than 40% of all wealth (1).

• If we extend our consideration to the richest 20% of U.S. households, we find that in 2001, on the heels of a Skull v. Bones election for the Presidency and unprecedented political campaign spending nationwide, this demographic was in possession of 84.4% of all wealth (2).

• While living standards in the U.S. have improved since World War II, the “rising tide that lifts all boats” has carried a few boats quite far, and left the rest to float out to sea. 80% of Americans have had real wages stagnate or decline since 1973. An average worker earning $308.03 a week in 1973 earned $260.37 in constant dollars in 1991.

• At the same time the American middle class was experiencing declining real wages and the rising costs of inflation and exploding per-capita consumption, their government was helping them relieve the top 1% of its tax burden. Between 1977 and 1992, the effective federal tax rate for the richest one-percenters fell from 35.5% to 29.3% (1) The Bush II tax cuts have further exacerbated this gap while compassionately and conservatively driving the national debt into record territory.

• The federal government has spent $4.5 trillion on “Defense” since WWII, far more than accompanying investments in the kind of infrastructure relevant to the average worker. This spending has been primarily to the benefit of hi-tech and elite-dominated industries that employ only a minority of the populace and are demonstrably poor at re-circulating wealth.

The Role of Wealth in Democratic Political Theory

Aristotle, our first great democratic theorist, argued that a society with a large “middle” class would be well disposed to guard against the tyranny of the few and the potentially destabilizing demands of a large impoverished class. A large middle class would moderate and extend discourse, more efficiently use resources to translate mass interest into political action, and exist independent of coercion resulting from the concentration of wealth by elites. A powerful middle class would increase the likelihood that the laws and structures of government would favor the equal distribution of society’s riches; a goal enshrined in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The solidarity and common experience of this demographic would also service the social bonds of cohesion, security and trust needed for a free and healthy society.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in 18^th century France, joined in Aristotle’s conclusion that economic conditions could impact the viability of democracy. His assertion that human beings must first be economically independent, and equal in both their degree of independence and their ability to translate resources into political action, concurs with Benjamin Franklin’s less repentant view that “no man ought to own more property than needed for his livelihood; the rest, by right, belonged to the state.” Ben Franklin was no utopianist or Communist, and neither was John Adams when he described the European experience: “economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.” Recognizing that not all poverty, and certainly not all wealth, resulted from the labors or failures of the individual, Thomas Paine suggested that a tax on inherited wealth could fund a social-security like program for those without the benefits of fortune.

The Political Economy of Inequality

Adam Smith provided us with an economic model where the narrow self-interest of producers and consumers could be harnessed for the benefit of society. He rightfully cautioned us that producers might rather collude than compete, and that their collusion would constitute a threat to the openness and equal playing field of the system. Collusion between producers would negate the presumed efficiency of Capitalism, and drive prices as high as could be gotten away with. Even worse, the “effective demand” of rational, monopolistic interests will subsume that of less powerful individuals, provided that the system does its job and goes where the money is. This analogy is relevant to our discussion of democracy. Government-market comparisons seem all the rage in this Era of Globalization, with government touted as the producer and the citizen the consumer. If an aggregate of interests in society can wield greater effective purchasing power in that society, say by copiously funding the campaigns of the highest officials, mobilizing groups in civil society and using their tremendous resources to “educate” the public, we should not be surprised when government responds with a product that reflects this. It is only when our concern for responsiveness and the needs of the many enters this equation that trouble arises. With this fundamental tenet of democratic governance in mind, we find that societies with a high degree of inequality are massively inefficient in their allocation of resources.

Caveats and Other Concerns

Concentrated centers of power in society, as symbolized by the modern corporation, have far greater resources with which to influence the product of government than those with less effective “purchasing” power, i.e. the citizen who must suffer the outcomes of this process. The modern corporation has refined the techniques of psychological manipulation to a degree unprecedented in human history. We call this the advertising industry, and the increasing reliance on its instruments to support campaigns from congressional elections to the Bush administration’s run-up to the invasion of Iraq should warrant great concern. No social contract can be said to exist without the free and independently considered consent of the governed, and that consideration must be free from manipulation in any form. So-called psy-ops, if legitimate at all, should be constrained to the realm of war and not imposed on domestic populations by any agent.

Additionally, the dilemma of state complicity in facilitating this imbalance in the distribution of wealth is serviced by a number of other factors:

• Low voter turnout, wedge or diversion issues (abortion, hollow anti-government rhetoric and the “three G’s” – god, guns and gays), disillusionment with corruption, and the phenomenon of “anti-politics” make this process far easier

• The nature of government in the modern era – remote, technocratic and just plain big, means that most citizens will be unable to engage and understand the full breadth of its activities

• A two-party system dominated by elites increases the chance that, whether the electorate favors the rhetoric of business or of populism in a particular election, policies will likely reflect the interests of those elites chosen for office

• The concentration of power in government and business readily facilitates the generation of additional wealth; we face a self-perpetuating dilemma

In the words of Jared Diamond, the renowned biogeographer and best-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:

“…some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people. Scientists term such behavior “rational” precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible. The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behavior, especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn’t effectively enforced. They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals. That gives the losers little motivation to go to the hassle of fighting back, because each loser loses only a little and would receive only small, uncertain, distant profits even from successfully undoing the minority’s grab (3).”

Conclusion

Clearly, this work only addresses the most superficial dimensions of the wealth-democracy dilemma. Readers interested in learning more are encouraged to pick up a copy of Keven Phillips’ Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich.

Citations

(1) http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/dward/classes/powpart/silentdepression.html

(2) http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/Courses/so11/stratification/income&wealth.htm

Joel Dyar is a Senior Political Science Major at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colorado. His scholarly interests include True Cost Economics, social justice in governance and globalization, corporatization, world politics and normative Buddhist political thought.