Equity, Equity, Equity
Sharon November 3rd, 2008
The day before the election, I suppose I should write a post about who I think you should vote for for president. Yawn. The thing is, is it really going to shock anyone that a New York leftist prefers Obama? Did you really need me to say it? I’ll probably actually vote for a third party candidate, since my vote here in New York is worth jack, but if I voted where my vote counted, I’d vote Obama.
Now that we’ve dispensed with that, let’s get down to the real issues, the real questions that are going to face our country. We haven’t been able to do that, since this election has been taking over the public discourse since G-d gave the Torah to Moses, but it is time to get over that. The single biggest issue facing the next president – and he’s going to have to deal with it one way or another – is going to be the question of Equity. That’s a subject that hasn’t made it to the national table in a very, very long time.
Why equity? Well, first of all, we’re entering a major Depression, not a little tiny economic downturn, but a crisis. And what happens in major economic crises is that people get very poor, often hungry, cold and scared, and they get angry. And there’s a lot to be angry about. Over the last thirty years, real wages have fallen and wealth has concentrated – and it is being rapidly concentrated further by the massive reallocation of what remains of our wealth into already wealthy hands. One of the reasons I think that McCain/Palin’s “Obama will share the wealth” narrative has failed to put them in the lead is simply this – more and more Americans are suddenly realizing that they may soon have more in common with the people who need to be shared with than with the ones who lose.
Now I should take this moment to demand government action – to begin programs and tax relief that allocates wealth around. And such may happen. But I’ll tell you a secret – I think it would be great if the government led the way on this subject – it would alleviate a lot of suffering. But in the end, I think the result will be the same whether they lead or whether they follow. Because if they wait for Americans to take up pitchforks and torches, the shifts will be even more radical – and that’s not a bad thing either. As historian Sheldon Wolin observes, almost all the major shifts to greater sharing of wealth and power have come in response to the anger of the people. Howard Zinn argues that FDR’s Great Society came about simply because people, acting in response to the exigencies of the Depression discovered their remarkable power – and the government responded to ensure that no one noticed that the ruling class might not be needed at all. One way or another, hard times mean that equity issues are coming to the table.
The truth is that most research about hard times shows that most people are willing to do what is necessary to deal with a situation – but their primary concern is equity – justice and fairness. That is, people will make do with rationing, with great burdens and difficult times - they will even find coping mechanisms and what historian Timothy Breen calls “rituals of non-consumption” that compensate them for the consumption they used to engage in. What they won’t tolerate is injustice and unfairness. This is the conclusion of a recent book about Britain during and after WWII, reviewed here:
“Two fundamental, timeless lessons emerge from the whole experience. First, that most people will broadly accept straitened times if they are genuinely convinced of their necessity and that there is no alternative. Second, that social cohesiveness during such an unwelcome turn of events will rest to a large degree on the extent to which the pain is administered on an equitable, transparent basis. Even so, should the economic downturn prove severe, it is still likely to be a psychic shock for anyone under, say, the age of 40, for whom the austerity years are not even a folk memory. The process will be a huge challenge to the legitimacy of our democratic political system, though not inconceivably may do wonders to strengthen and reaffirm that rather frayed legitimacy.”
I found the same thing when I researched the question of whether some kind of rationing system could ever be brought to the general public – in fact, historically people have even liked rationing, when they felt its primary role was to make sure that pretty much everyone labored under the same constraints – and their fury knew no bounds when those constraints were violated.
But there are other reasons equity is going to have to come to the table. The first is climate change. Over the last year, most of the major nations of the Global South that contribute most to global warming have simply declined to make major cuts in their emissions. Why? Because without equity, they are being asked to impoverish their citizens while we are being asked to turn the thermostat down – unless the question of a fair share comes to the table. The truth is that we will not address climate change until we address the question of equity at an international level. Nearly everyone would rather not discuss this – but it will come to the table, sooner or later, simply because we have no choice. I hope it will be sooner not later, but climate change will push itself onto the world agenda – and into our daily lives. And at the root of climate change is the recognition we cannot go on as we are.
Then there’s the food issue – Aaron Newton and I have just completed editing a book about the question of whether and how the world and this country can feed themselves in a warming world, in the face of rising energy costs. And what we’ve concluded is simply this – the issue comes down to equity. In the end, the central question of our times is going to be food allocation – as I put it the other day “Is there dinner? Do I get any?” And the only way to address the food crisis - a crisis that is only going to get bigger as time goes on – is this. To make sure we deal with the question of what constitutes a fair share – that we divide the work and the food more justly than we have, not in the perfection of human nature, not in an ideal world, but in this one. And this problem isn’t just going to play out on the world level – although it will do that too as very angry people who recognize that the deaths of their kids and their lives of poverty were created, in part, by the actions of those who fed food to their cars and were willing to see them die so they could keep on the road.
One of the remarkable things we’ve found in our research into food systems is this – in any place that has had to or wanted to radically reduce its use of petrochemicals in agriculture, what is really rapidly discovered is that you can do that – but not on a massive scale. In Cuba, in the Soviet Union, in shifts to organic production in the US and UK, generally speaking what shows pretty clearly in the research is this – you can farm with few or no chemical inputs, whether you do it because you want to or because you have to (and we suspect many of us will have to) – but not rapidly on massive farms of thousands of acres – period. Huge scale agriculture is simply not amenable to rapid shifts away from fossil fuels – so if we are to deal with our current crises, and keep food coming in, we’re going to have to make sure that land is in the hands of people who can grow food on it on a reasonable scale. That means one of the great questions of the coming decade is this – how will the people get access to land to grow food on. And that, fundamentally, is an equity question too – particularly as foreclosure pushes more and more people out of the pieces of land they could be growing on.
The word socialist has been thrown around a lot during this campaign, mostly because people really do think that the only choices in figuring out how to live are capitalist and communist/socialist. I think that’s a fundamentally false way of thinking about this – first of all, we all know that all economic systems are hybrids (lord knows, I’m not sure you can even call our economic system capitalism anymore) – there is no pure socialism, no pure capitalism in practical reality. Those nuances we ignore matter. For example, greater equity could be achieved by removing some of the private from private hands, or it could be achieved through a capitalist distributist model, in which who gets to hold the private is limited.
But in some ways, I think that the capitalist/socialist discussion misses the point. In the interview we did with her for our book, Helena Norberg-Hodge, author of _Ancient Futures_ and _Bringing the Food Economy Home_ made what I think is the essential point - that scale matters as much as economic system:
“…I think it’s very important that we realize that communism or capitalism or even socialism are all large-scale, centralized systems and therefore I prefer not to talk about the problem as being capitalism. The reason why I don’t is that it in many minds conjures up the notion that socialism or communism are better and I personally believe that the intentions behind communism and socialism are broader and in a certain way more noble, but I don’t think it’s just that the centralized power they entail, in both socialism and communism, was the problem socially, but I also see them as fundamentally anti-ecological, because they were top-down, centralized systems that also then foisted monoculture in terms of agricultural production, but when we talk about agricultural production, we’re basically talking about all the activities from which we derive our basic needs: forestry, for building, fiber, building materials.”
Norberg-Hodge’s argument, which I entirely agree with, is that the whole discussion finally misses the point. What is needed will be a hybrid again of private and public resources, of things we call “socialist” and those we call “capitalist” but the salient point is this – that power, and autonomy and what really matters have to be more widely distributed, the scale of management radically reduced and that equity, in the end, is more about the right to self-governance than whether we reduce taxes or reallocate wealth that way. The central problem will be how to get the tools of self-sufficiency – the ability to feed and clothe and care for yourself into ordinary people’s hands again.
And that provides a measure of an answer to the problem of how we will deal with equity on a world scale as well – because in the end, I think the truth is that there’s no real way to deal with the question of equity without changing the typical American lifestyle. The good news is that a lot of us are vaguely (or more than vaguely) uneasy about the changes that our lifestyle has wrought in our lives anyway – it is an oversimplification to say they haven’t made us happier, because it is more than that – they not only haven’t made us happier, they haven’t made us better. And that may be the really salient point – that one of the things that would make us happier is the sense that we’re living a more ethical, more just, more natural life, and that we have more power of over our own destinies. And that’s not possible without dealing with the equity question.
The really good news is that dealing with equity isn’t a one directional loss – it isn’t that if Americans start living a more equitable life they simply lower their standard of living. They raise our access to power, to self-sufficiency and the confidence in engenders. Greater equity gives us institutions on a scale we can comprehend and a richness in connection to the world around us. It is truly a little bit about using less – but even more about being richer.
I hope, personally, that Obama wins the election. But even if you don’t share my hope, the thing that I’m really hopeful about is this – that in some senses, it doesn’t matter who wins, because we’re going to require whoever “leads” to follow our lead, to address the equity issue. Presidents come, and thankfully, this president is going. But presidents are only presidents – the people, well, that’s something else.
Sharon
- politics
- Comments(60)
Sharon and Vegan – thanks for your comments. You see, from a European perspective some aspects of American political life are just so… strange! Very hard to understand.
And yet, what’s happening in the USA has so much impact on the rest of us. Scary, sometimes, at least when it comes to people like GWB and the like.
Growing up in Scandinavia meant having the Soviet Union and the other communist countries next door. It could be frightening, sometimes. But we also learned that they are human beings just like you and me. Almost nobody wanted to live in a centralized socialist state like the SU. But we saw that socialism was not entirely bad and that *democratic* socialism could actually be a good thing sometimes. It’s not all black and white!
I would have liked to invite you to Sweden to see how things work here, but I suppose you would have to travel with a sailing ship or something
Transatlantic flights must mean a horrible lot of carbon emissions!
Christina in Sweden
who will follow the election with great interest!
Greenpa, from my studies of history I think that most traditional cities were a collection of small neighborhoods, each like a town or a village that functioned in much the same way. Also, the fraternal organizations did a lot of the work of building community and helping widows and children until the early 20th century.
Amen and amen.
We be fraked. I have no real worries for myself and mine. The rest can suffer the consequences of their vote. Extreme sarcasm here. I just love how educated people are. Anyone ever care to read Obamas web site in totality? Hmmmm lets see his increase in taxes on the wealthy, according to his website, will be letting the bush tax cuts expire for theose making over 250k a year. His website even states he is going to cut what the federal government receives in taxes compared to earlier years. His website wants to expand social programs and “the military”. His actual website has the extra social progams, the decrease in the tax revenues, the increase in the military, and even goes to say they will pay down the deficit. Any one that is dumb enough to believe that…….. Cut tax revenue, increase spending, and pay down the deficit?????
The clueless get what they deserve. I hope starving in their homes gives them warm comfort for how they voted. Change change change? Did they even read his website entirely? No. This country will get what it deserves and I will stand by and watch as the hordes suffer their own bad choices. I hope this does not come to pass. I hope every day as such. But as I say plan for the worst and hope for the best and reality is normally somewhere in between. Welcome to the downfall of the USA. You get what you deserve and vote for…. I hope I am proven wrong and time will tell. No worries here. To the rest…….. enjoy your uneducated vote….. Relish in it for now and experience it later. Gloabl issues dont give a damn about what you think you deserve. It pains me our society has fallen to this level. My concern is when a real crisis hits how many freedoms the people will give up to have the government take care of them. May the wise procreate and the stupid starve while chanting “Change we can believe in.” Again I hope I am wrong. I am not waiting to find out. Enjoy your vote and what it brings you. Clueless.
My impression, from over 20 years of reading survivalist literature, is that most people who rant about how their fellow Americans (aka “hordes”) are imminently doomed by the crise du jour to “starve” are really people who have a deep hostility toward anyone not in their own very narrow (sociocultural, religious, and/or racial) ingroup, and who are finding an acceptable way to express their desire to see the rest of us (e.g., city folks with college degrees) die.
You are probably right that Obama’s plan cannot balance the budget – though Bill Clinton managed it – but an unbalanced budget need not lead to us “stupid” people who disagree with you “starving.” If it did, there would be widespread famine after the last several years of Gee Dubya’s blowout spending. Also, if you are a good right-winger, you are supposed to accept the Laffer Curve as an article of faith, are you not? This foundation of voodoo economics says that cutting tax rates actually increases tax revenues – which might be true or might not, depending in part upon what the starting and ending rates are. The GOP has long offered this as an excuse for cutting taxes for the rich. Why are you so sure that it will not operate likewise when taxes are cut for the middle class?
Thomas Eicher: Thanks a lot for the mention.
Brad K.: I’m extremely skeptical about the economies of scale argument. IMO thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Ralph Borsodi have demonstrated pretty conclusively that the development of small-scale electrically powered machinery has enabled small factories serving local markets, or even the household and informal economy, to obtain most of the necessary economies of scale in production. And even when unit costs of production are modestly above those of large-scale manufacturers, this is more than offset by the drastically reduced distribution costs that come with producing close to the point of consumption.
One of the problems with the kind of Sloanist production that Chandler and Galbraith celebrated is that it requires overbuilt industry to run at full capacity to minimize unit costs, and that it requires long-term planning to guarantee a market for goods when the whole production cycle requires enormous commitment of capital and years of planning. This means producing to maximize capacity utilization rather than in response to autonomous demand, push-distribution, and planned obsolescence. And even then consumers won’t absorb the full output, which means massive state intervention to absorb surplus output and surplus capital (the permanent war economy, the Interstate and other subsidies to the car culture, etc.).
A couple of chapters I’ve written deal with problems in the orthodox econ of scale position, and describe the decentralist alternative:
Chapter One. A Critical Survey of Orthodox Views on Economy of Scale
Chapter Fourteen. Decentralized Production Technology
I am a child from six generations of farming family. Third generation in America. I know a thing or two about farming. The first being that it is far more work than 99% of the population wants to do on any scale. Our planet is a tremendously large place, however, there is not enough arable land on the planet for each adult to have 10 acres to farm; there is not enough land mass that is arable for each group of 10 adults to have one acre to farm together.
And just for kicks, let’s say that there was enough land for everyone to have ten acres to farm – just what percentage of the world population do you really think wants to do the hard work that is farming? Furthermore, if you want to remove modern farm equipment from the equation – you could probably stand the number of Americans willing to work that hard shoulder-to-shoulder on one-quarter section of land.
The real problem in America is not “equity” related at all. It is self-responsibility related. People want someone else to do it all for them. Corporations are a good example of that. I listen to people go off about how bad corporations behave all the time and it makes me laugh. Corporations have stockholders. If the corporation is publically traded, the stockholders have a large say in how a corporation is run, and in what executives get paid. Every year in the USA, hundreds of thousands of letters go out to stockholders containing proxy ballots – and most shareholders never even bother to look at them. As long as the corporation is doing well, and the stockholder’s investment is consistently increasing at an unrealistic rate – they, frankly, do not care what the corporation does. “Just give me my thirty percent return on investment.” This is not just rich folks; this is teachers, government workers, healthcare workers, and autoworkers, anyone who has a 401K, IRA, CalPers, Keogh, or other retirement fund. You want to see corporate behavior change –change has to take place with the stockholders.
The gap between the haves and the have-nots in America is a function of the push for people to attend college and to learn to use technology. Today in America 30% of adults have a bachelors degree. When you add to that that most people with college degrees live in metropolitan areas you have a very high percentage of people who earn a very high income, and a smaller percentage of people who have either a high school diploma or are high school drop-outs in service sector jobs. Given that picture, or course there will be a huge disparity between the “rich” and the “Poor.”
There are three things, in the USA, we know for sure about poverty:
1. People who graduate from high school make far more money than people who do not.
2. People who can communicate clearly in written and spoken English make far more money than people who cannot.
3. We have long since left the agrarian age, and labor unions have priced us out of competitiveness in the industrial age, and we have entered the technology age and anyone who is clueless about technology is going to be left behind financially.
What to do about it:
1. Abolish the US income tax code and institute a flat tax of 15% for everyone who works – no deductions, no write-offs. This will result in billions more in Income Tax revenue – and it also makes it so that everyone’s dollar is worth the same amount of money.
2. Eliminate the Federal Minimum Wage. Require all states to set minimum wage laws based on cost of living – county to county. This will cause businesses to move and decentralize spreading employment opportunity all over America, and allow business to locate in places where the labor cost is not so prohibitive that they cannot compete in the global market.
3. Issue a national benefits card to all Americans. This card will have a magnetic strip on the back that will contain your educational achievement levels, your SS# and benefit information and your eligibility for various federal programs.
4. Set up federally funded daycare centers all over cities with a population of 50,000 or more. These daycare centers will provide day care from FREE to low cost on a sliding scale depending on the information on your national benefits card.
5. Require all Americans who do not have a high-school diploma to attend classes so they can sit for and pass the GED exam.
6. Require all Americans to learn to communicate clearly in both written and spoken English. I know that many people have an issue with this – but English is the international language of business and that is not going to change in the next 50 years. It is ironic that in China, India, and Japan all students learn their native language and English as a matter of course.
7. Send all adults that did not attend college for aptitude testing and send them to vocational educational schools. There is a HUGE shortage in electricians, plumbers, automobile mechanics, nurses, crane operators, construction workers, road crews, in fact – in most blue-collar occupations. These are good jobs that pay well. However, fewer and fewer people want to do them because they are not glamorous.
8. Return to building 3 bedroom, 1 bath, 1200 sq ft homes – when I grew up this was the normal sized home for a two parent family with 4 kids. A great many people are priced out of the housing market because no one wants to build high-quality single-family homes of a modest size anymore. When did a 4 bedroom, three baths, 2100 sq. ft. home become the norm for 2 adults and 1.6 children?
9. Reward people for saving. It is time for people to stop living beyond their means. Non-mortgage consumer debt in the USA has topped $2.4 trillion dollars. That is nearly $20K in non-essential consumer debt for every man, woman, and child in the country. This one thing alone will close a good portion of the ‘equity” gap. This total lack of savings is what caused the liquidity problem for the banks. Lots of loans going out, no deposits coming in.
Well, that is my nickel on the subject. Thanks.
Casaubon’s Book about equity it is relating ambiguous future.their commitment about OBAMA really enamorous.their assumption about equity really good.
obama has done a great job, i dont think voting to third party is a good idea.
Hello There. I found your blog using msn. This is an extremely well written article. I will make sure to bookmark it and come back to read more of your useful information. Thanks for the post. I will certainly return.