The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (11 page)

The conservative metaphor shows anything but gratitude. It is the Criminal metaphor. In fleeing to America, often risking their lives to come, these refugees trespassed; they did not have documents, which is not within the law. Conservatives have therefore branded them as “criminals”—“illegals”—as if they are committing crimes every day when they are actually mowing lawns, cleaning houses, taking care of children, picking vegetables and fruits, cooking your meals, working on construction sites, and, whenever possible, using all the skills they have to their advantage and to ours. Their children are studying in schools and helping out at home.

But because they often have brown skins, are impoverished, and speak Spanish, they are discriminated against. Conservatives want to jail them and deport them. Being brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking, and poor, and not being born American, they fall low on the conservative moral hierarchy: They are seen as less moral. They are discriminated against for their color and language and blamed for their poverty.

The issue for Americans is empathy: Do we care for those fellow human beings who are functioning as our fellow citizens? Or do we treat them as lesser beings, not worthy of the freedom they are earning day by day? The issue for those who have come here to escape the brutality of oppression and poverty is freedom.

This is especially true for the tens of thousands of children who have crossed the border, sent by parents or fleeing on their own from human traffickers, gangs, and death squads in Guatemala, Honduras, and parts of Mexico who are murdering, harming, or kidnapping children. Under an executive order signed by George W. Bush before he left office, these children have to be taken care of reasonably well by the US government, processed, given a court hearing, and then either sent to live with family in the United States or deported to another country—Mexico if they are from Mexico.

It was never expected that there would be so many. Conservatives are blaming the situation on Obama, for not just immediately deporting them—though it would be illegal, as well as inhuman, for him to do so. They are not called “Bush’s refugee children,” though they could be if the issue were just pinning the problem on a conservative rather than treating them humanely—and according to law.

Meanwhile, southern conservatives living near the border are rebelling against treating these refugees humanely and not just deporting them. There are massive conservative-organized protests—people lining the roads waving American flags—shouting racist slogans. Those interviewed in the media say things like
Send them back. They’re dirty. They carry diseases. They’re criminals. Why is Obama spending our taxpayer dollars to give them clean rooms and clothes and food and medical care? Soon they’ll be in our schools. Where are their parents? How could their parents have been so irresponsible to have sent their children here alone? Don’t they love their children?

This is a major humanitarian issue, and it calls for empathy. Parents who love their children don’t want to see them maimed or murdered or kidnapped by human traffickers. Many of these children are heroic, somehow traveling over 1,000 miles to get to safety and freedom.

The issue is empathy and respect for these refugees as human beings.

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The Piketty Insight on the Accelerating Wealth Gap

S
ystemic causation applies to the economy as well as to global warming, and it has effects every bit as dramatic and crucial. There is an accelerating gap—not just widening but accelerating—between the ultra rich and everyone else. Why? What are the systemic causes and the systemic effects? And is there anything wrong with some people getting that rich and progressively richer over time?

The answers to these questions were sharpened in 2014 by an insight of economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues—an insight that has not yet become framed in public discourse.

The Piketty insight showed us that our current concept of Rich is not adequate to understand the wealth-gap phenomenon. One needs to also comprehend the notions of Wealth and Proportion of Wealth. Wealth correlates with certain forms of freedom, like the freedom to acquire goods, or to travel, or freedom of access to certain cultural events, and so on. Wealth also correlates with certain forms of power. For example, paying people to do things is a form of power. Contributing significantly to an election campaign can be a form of power, too.

Workers are profit creators, that is, they create wealth for others. They may acquire wealth for their work, but their value to their employers typically lies in the wealth they create for those employers. A natural question is: Of the wealth created by productive work, how much goes to those who do the work and how much goes to others? And by what means? What is the structure of the system that results in the distribution of wealth and the way that distribution changes?

Piketty’s
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
is a work of scholarship of the highest order: It changes, or ought to change, not just our understanding of economics, but our understanding of many things. And he has published it just as we need it most.

Here is his basic insight. He studied the history, not just of income, but of wealth. And he observed that there are two fundamentally different kinds of wealth:

•
Productive wealth.
This is wealth generated by work, by producing and selling things or services. The kind of wealth Adam Smith talked about. The prototypical case concerns individuals, for example a baker and a furniture maker. Each makes and sells things, and each needs and buys what the other sells. The baker’s income pays the furniture maker, and the furniture maker’s income pays the baker. Each works for himself, produces things, gets paid for it, and in a much oversimplified market, each produces wealth for himself and for the other. This is the kind of wealth, productive wealth, measured by the GDP. Piketty calls it “G.”

•
Reinvestment wealth.
This is wealth generated by receiving returns on investments and then reinvesting those returns over and over. This kind of wealth grows exponentially, like compound interest. The more have, the more you invest, and the more you invest, the more you have. He calls it “R.”

Here’s where the concept of proportion comes in. Piketty looks at the proportion of the kinds of wealth, that is, the ratio between R and G over a population. Then he asks, how does it change and why?

His research was done by studying tax records in many countries, dating back to the eighteenth century. What he discovered was that, up until 1913, most wealth was reinvestment wealth. Even during the period of the industrial revolution, which is usually thought of in terms of productive wealth, R was much greater than G. In other words, Piketty showed that the common wisdom is false. Even in capitalist democracies, where individual liberty and the market were supposed to allow for productive wealth through work, it turns out that reinvestment wealth was overwhelming. For instance, in France, a capitalist democracy concerned with égalité, in 1910, 70 percent of the wealth was reinvestment wealth, held by the very wealthy—not productive wealth, distributed over most of the population.

Starting in 1913, there was a major shift. Because of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, a significant portion of reinvestment wealth was destroyed. Productive wealth became greater, more G than R. Between 1913 and 1980, most of modern economic theory was developed, whether liberal or conservative. It was primarily based on productive wealth, on GDP—on G, not R.

Then in 1980, something changed—during the Reagan era in America. Reagan greatly cut taxes on the wealthy, started a major attack on unions and thereby on the wages of ordinary workers, cut regulations on business, and so on. Margaret Thatcher did the same in England. And those economic ideas spread. Around 1980, there was a historic shift. R became greater than G again. Reinvestment wealth took over the reins of the modern economies. Being exponential, reinvestment wealth grew exponentially—like compound interest.

In the United States, in 1976 the top 1 percent had 19.9 percent of the wealth. In 2010, the top 1 percent had 35.4 percent of the wealth. In 2010, the top 5 percent had 63 percent of the wealth; and the top 20 percent had 88.9 percent of the wealth. That left the bottom 80 percent with 11.1 percent of the wealth.

That is what the exponential growth of reinvestment wealth leads to. And it gets worse as one goes down the wealth scale, so that six individual members of the Walton family together have more net worth than 41 percent of the families in America (counting families with negative net worth, who are families too).

As the share of the nation’s wealth going to the wealthy rises, the share going to everyone else falls. What else falls? The freedom that wealth can buy, the quality of life that wealth can buy, the power that wealth can buy, and the electoral influence that wealth can buy. Technically, we may still have one person, one vote. But the effect of one person on elections has gone way down.

Is this trend reversible? Piketty says yes, but it takes political change.

The Systemic Effects for Politics

Piketty himself is not pessimistic about the fact that R is above G. He points out that political change can bring the runaway accumulation under control, say, via a wealth tax. He also suggests that traditional liberal measures—like raising lower- and middle-class wages, lowering corporate management wages, closing tax loopholes, increasing access to education, and so on—can help bring about such a reversal.

But there are systemic effects that act against a political solution. Greater wealth leads to many things, including:

•
Greater political leverage.
Wealthy people and corporations have great lobbying power with public officials, and it is getting greater all the time.

•
Greater control over public discourse.
Wealthy people and corporations can control public discourse in many ways—by owning media outlets, sponsoring shows, massive advertising, and so on. This control works via the brain. Language and imagery that activate conservative frames will also activate conservative morality—strict father morality in general. As conservative morality gets stronger, progressive morality gets weaker in the brains of the public. This mightily affects what people believe unconsciously as well as consciously, and therefore affects how people vote.

•
Greater control over the rights of others.
Through state control of legislatures, the wealthy can control the voting rights of poorer populations, and state control is cheaper than national control.

What is needed is government payment for elections and serious regulation of political control of the media. But given the present distribution of wealth and the present distribution of strict father morality in the population in the United States, as well as other countries, the necessary political change seems unlikely—unless there are other important changes brought on by progressives willing to build the grounding frames for systemic issues, and to keep the focus on these issues sharp and strong through continual public discourse.

The Effect on Satisfying Productive Work

One of the major systemic effects of the ascendance of reinvestment wealth concerns the nature of productive work itself. It has become less satisfying in many ways. The most obvious is that the productive economic system produces less wealth—it doesn’t pay enough for a satisfying life for many of our citizens. It also provides less work—fewer jobs. And the work it does provide is less satisfying.

Satisfying work is about pay and working conditions but also about skilled work that is useful and that people feel good about doing. This work needn’t be very high-paying or glamorous, just satisfying. Here are some professions of people I know who have found ways to have satisfying work lives: carpenter, gardener, barber, cheese salesperson, baker, mechanic, office manager, tailor, house painter, chef, tearoom server, schoolteacher, house cleaner, and so on. They are not professionals—not lawyers, doctors, computer scientists, chemists, biologists, or finance professionals, nor musicians, movie actors, or professional athletes. Just folks. They can be well-educated, functioning citizens, good parents. However, fewer and fewer people manage to have such satisfying work lives, and fewer and fewer people are managing to get a real education and function well as community members and parents because of harsher working conditions.

There is a structural reason for this. Remember that companies tend to have two kinds of employees—the assets and the resources. The assets are senior managers and necessary creative people. The resources are people who are interchangeable; who are hired at the lowest possible skill level; the lowest pay and benefit level; and minimally acceptable working conditions such as employment guarantees, pensions, medical care, a pleasant work environment, few if any sick leaves and parental leaves, little choice in work times, few if any raises or bonuses, and so on. This makes for “efficiency,” which is defined as the maximization of profit. Workers treated as resources, not assets, are subject to layoffs, buybacks as contract workers, and job loss when outsourcing is more profitable. The corporate movement against unionization not only allows such conditions to occur, but accelerates them.

Computerization and mechanization leads to more and more jobs becoming low-skill, low-pay resource jobs. At the same time, it leads to even greater wealth for corporate managers and investors, since they can either lay off workers or downgrade their skill level and pay scale or outsource to places where labor is cheap.

That tendency is driven by investors’ demand for greater and greater reinvestment returns and the drive for managers to become part of the reinvestment wealth class by increasing their wealth. Since corporate managers manage corporate wealth, they can get a greater share of that wealth. Those in a corporation who control where the corporation’s money goes can gather to themselves more and more of the corporation’s wealth, leaving less for workers who create that wealth.

Are Ordinary Liberal Economic Solutions Inadequate?

Liberals regularly propose measures set within classical liberal economic theory: raising the minimum wage, massive programs for rebuilding infrastructure, better safety nets, early childhood education and better education in general, better health care, and so on. These would help ease the pain on the nonwealthy—and that is a vitally important thing to do. But can liberal economic measures alone overcome runaway accumulation for the rich and runaway loss for the nonrich?

Even to get these easing-the-pain measures, the political climate would have to change radically. And as we have seen, just telling people the Piketty economic facts cannot help, because the Piketty facts will not have real effects without radical framing change.

What’s Wrong with Runaway Accumulation?

The major thus-far-unframed effect is that runaway exponential accumulation of wealth share tends to kill off the provision of public resources that makes a satisfying and healthy private life possible. The political effect of runaway wealth is, for example, to cut taxes on the wealthy, taking away funding for the public resources that made that wealth possible in the first place.

Take university education. There are only so many top research universities. A number of them are public. By cutting funding to such “public” universities, these public resources have to raise tuition and other costs and so move away from really being public toward being private. The same goes for education at all levels.

At the same time, real education is being lost. The point of a classic liberal education was manyfold: to develop one’s mind and critical faculties in general, to teach about the world so as to open a world of possibilities in life, to provide skills for learning whatever one needs to learn, and to create citizens who contribute to a democratic society. Because of the runaway loss of satisfying work, education has radically changed. More and more students see education as a direct route to either wealth or a satisfying work life—and are therefore getting “educated” for today’s jobs, without the intangible but vitally important personal riches of a liberal education. That is educational robbery, because a liberal education opens up possibilities for one’s entire life that an orientation toward today’s jobs does not—especially when today’s jobs may not be there in the future.

The Runaway Loss of Valuable Experiences

If those of great wealth own the beaches, it means all others are deprived of the experience of them. Access for most people is cut off. The loss is a loss of experience. This is true not only of beaches but also of many things that the ultra rich can experience but that the lower-middle class and poor cannot. Excellent schools, pleasant surroundings, summer camps, trips to lovely or interesting places, the ability to visit family, time off from work, expensive art or music events, nice clothes, great food and wine, healthy food, first-rate medical care, major athletic events, world cultures, great cities, film festivals, and on and on. Money buys experiences of personal value—what a lot of life is about. A single wealthy person can only experience so much. The runaway accumulation of wealth for the rich and the runaway loss of wealth for others mean for most people a runaway loss of experiences of personal value—the loss of a meaningful life.