what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label inequality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inequality. Show all posts

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Our catastrophic elites


In 1987 a book and a film appeared in America which seemed to signal a questioning of the greed culture which had received the imprint of approval from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The book was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities which ended with the come-uppance of one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the universe”. The film was Wall Street; Money never sleeps - starring Michael Dougals as Gordon Gekko whose signature line was "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good".
Alas, the reflective mood was momentary – indeed the broader effect seemed to have been to persuade other professions to get into the act. A decade later, a distinguished historian, Harold Perkin, published The Third Revolution - Professional Elites in the Modern World(1996). In previous books Perkin had studied the rise of professional society. In this one he looked at Twentieth Century elites in the USA, England, France, Germany, Russia and Japan - and finds their behaviour equally deficient and morally irresponsible -
What all six countries, except Germany, are found to have in common are greed and corruption, from the wholesale fraud, embezzlement, and bribery practised by Soviet apparatchiks , through the systematic bribery of Japanese politicians by the big corporations, and the apparently general corruption in French local government contracts, to the more 'legitimate' but dubiously ethical machinations of junk bond merchants in the U. S. or take-over conmen in Britain. This is attributed to the professional elites who are 'good servants but bad masters', and when they have power are liable to abuse it, exploit the masses, and line their own pockets. At this point one cannot help concluding that there is nothing new under the sun, that ruling elites or cliques have always been tempted to enrich themselves, and that corruption, even blatant and very large- scale corruption, is not an invention of professional society.
It is a book which should be given to each individual when (s)he makes it into their country's "Who's Who" and becomes part of the "system".
A few years earlier, a powerful but different critique of our elites had been launched by Christopher Lasch - The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. The book's title is a take-off on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a reactionary work published in 1930 that ascribed the crisis of Western culture to the "political domination of the masses." Ortega believed that the rise of the masses threatened democracy by undermining the ideals of civic virtue that characterized the old ruling elites. But in late twentieth-century America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch -
The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called "symbolic analysts" — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. "They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them," Lasch writes. "In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life."
The privileged classes, which, according to Lasch's "expansive" definition, now make up roughly a fifth of the population, are heavily invested in the notion of social mobility. The new meritocracy has made professional advancement and the freedom to make money "the overriding goal of social policy." "The reign of specialized expertise," he writes, "is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the 'last, best hope of earth'". Citizenship is grounded not in equal access to economic competition but in shared participation in a common life and a common political dialogue. The aim is not to hold out the promise of escape from the "labouring classes," Lasch contends, but to ground the values and institutions of democracy in the inventiveness, industry, self-reliance, and self-respect of working people.
The decline of democratic discourse has come about largely at the hands of the elites, or "talking classes," as Lasch refers to them. Intelligent debate about common concerns has been almost entirely supplanted by ideological quarrels, sour dogma, and name-calling. The growing insularity of what passes for public discourse today has been exacerbated, he says, by the loss of "third places" — beyond the home and workplace — which foster the sort of free-wheeling and spontaneous conversation among citizens on which democracy thrives. Without the civic institutions — ranging from political parties to public parks and informal meeting places — that "promote general conversation across class lines," social classes increasingly "speak to themselves in a dialect of their own, inaccessible to outsiders.
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Lasch proposes something else: a recovery of what he calls the “populist tradition,” and a fresh understanding of democracy, not as a set of procedural or institutional arrangements but as an ethos, one that the new elites have been doing their best to undermine.

It has to be said that neither book made much impact – perhaps they were just seen as “moralizing”. Contrast that with the impact made in 1958 by JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Has any recent book, I wonder, made the same impact? Perhaps the Spirit Level – why equality is better for everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) comes closest. I would therefore have to nominate them for the Social Europe award mentioned recently - although I personally think that Danny Dorling's 2010 Injustice - why social inequality persists is a more powerful book since it doesn't just itemise the inequalities but identifies and explodes the various rationalisations which sustain them.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Things fall apart?


When I walked to the Matache market on Tuesday, I was amazed to fiind the right hand (Gara de Nord) side almost stripped of all buildings (everything between the hotel and the white highrise in the photo). The Turkish kebab service and antique shops had vanished – exposing both a decrepit tenement I had seen a family enter a few weeks back - and a very new villa.
Symbol of a wider picture? A Zeitgeist seems to be building up (I think that can happen to spirits!) – that a very historic blow has been dealt the financial and economic system which has developed in my lifetime and which we have learned to hate in the past decade. My amazingly regular and prolific marxist blogger has posted some interesting stuff and my friends and namesakes at Scottish Review have also sober comment on the Irish crisis.
It's all appropriate mood music for my reading of Daniel Dorling's Injustice - why social inquality persists the power of whose moral critique is reminding me of RH Tawney's Equality written (I think) in the 1940s which played a very powerful role in the development of the mid-20th century UK Labour Party - but which (typically) it is difficult to find on Google. Instead, I offer some Yeat's lines -

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

water shortages


Yesterday was my birthday – celebrated with (a) a couple of hours pleasant browsing in the downtown Carturesti bookshop I’ve blogged about before (where I picked up some CDs and volume 7 of the collected works of my favourite central European poet – Marin Sorescu) and (b) having a late lunch with Daniela at a new place just round the corner from the flat.
The heat on the plains and overdeveloped seasides here in Romania and Bulgaria got me thinking about water scarcity and policy (35 is forecast for today). I come across a reference to Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers run dry and know that there is currently a debate in Scotland about the privatisation of water. Scotland has so far steadfastly resisted this policy to which England (and much of central Europe) fell prey in the 1990s. In the late 1980s I was fortunate enough to be part of a small European network led by Riccardo Petrella – then an EC official but who has since become an anti-globalisation activist. I remember him raising the subject of water with me 20 years ago – and in 2006 he apparently published a book about the dangers of the commodification of water. If ever there was an example of a resource which must remain a public utility, this is it. Instead, bodies like the World Bank and WTB have bypassed national parliaments and conspired to force countries to privatise water – with devastating results.
An interesting resource on this subject can be found on a website I found immediately I used google search on water privatisation (as distinct from yahoo whose early pages are very poor on the subject. The site is an impressive personal endeavour on a range of issues - global issues
The Scottish Government should not just be issuing reassuring noises about keeping the resource in public hands – but leading a global campaign for a change to WTB rules and the removal of water from global commercial companies. On a more personal note, the local municipality at last installed a water meter in the mountain house a month ago and have built an additional pump facility in the village - it will be interesting to see how that affects the water supply which was reduced to a trickle last summer because of the scale of building nearby (but not in our village). One of my other reads at the Black Sea was Garton Ash's latest collection of essays - one of which rang bells with me. One of the pieces was on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. He disputed the common perception (about class influences on the slow reaction time) - and argued instead that its main lesson was how quickly our veneer of civilisation slips when basic facilities are removed.

One of the appalling things for me in my visit to Beijing was the massive scale of the construction which was continuing there and in cities generally - and the evil way municipal officials were dispossessing people of their property to join in the rush to richness (collective and personal). Der Spiegel carries today stories both about this - and a warning that the bubble in the Chinese property market is about to burst (in Beijing people are borrowing 20 times their income to buy)

An interesting discussion is also underway in Britain about inequality . I'll come back to that soon.