archive/so478
Wolfgang Streeck,
Immanuel Wallerstein,
Stephen Kaufmann,
Ingo Stutzle,
Anthony B. Atkinson,
Geoff Mann,
Yann Moulier-Boutang,
John Hills,
Nick Srnicek,
Alex Williams
inequalities essay
The 1968 Civil Rights Act made housing discrimination illegal, but subtler forms prevailed. Crystal and Vanetta wanted to leave the ghetto, but landords like the one on Fifteenth Street turned them away. Other landlords and property management companies--like Affordable Rents--tried to avoid discriminating by setting clear criteria and holding all applicants to the same standards. But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans. When Crystal and Vanetta heard back from Affordable Rentals, they learned their application had been rejected on account of their arrest and eviction history.
[...] The issue is not just between a lucky generation of baby-boomers now approaching retirement who got the best pension deals and benefited most from the house price boom, and a younger 'jilted generation' who have little. Many baby boomers have little wealth, and only a minority enough to see them through retirement without state pensions playing a major role. And a significant proportion of younger people stand to gain a great deal from inheritance and lifetime help from parents and grandparents. The conflict of interest is ultimately between the more affluent half of the baby-boom generation and poorer members of their own generation and younger households with the 'wrong' relatives, for whom advantage will not cascade down the generations.
the whole idea of young people being 'helped' by their parents has a lot to do with wage suppression and rising (rentier-led) inequality, which makes the idea that parents are graciously supporting their kids a bit dubious to say the least ... a little bit disappointed that he didn't go more into why the younger generation isn't doing so well, cough neoliberalism (or maybe he did and i can't remember idk)
It maybe should not be a surprise that there is a symbiotic relationship between high inequality in a society and low social mobility. In a highly unequal society, many advantaged parents will do all they can to ensure that their children do not slip down the economic ladder--they know that it goes a long way down. And if incomes and wealth are unequally distributed, they have the resources to help them. At the same time, they may realise that higher rates of social mobility, in relative terms, cannot be a one-way street. If policy helps increase the chances of someone starting in a less privileged position to go up the social scale, that must mean that someone else's chance of going down has to rise, which may include their own children, and does not then seem so attractive. While many favour increased upward mobility, few want to mention the increased downward mobility that has to go with it (in terms of relative positions, at least).
wonder how such parents would feel about dismantling the ladder entirely
[...] The institutionalized meritocratic system helps a few to gain access to positions they merit and from which they might otherwise be barred. But it allows many more to gain access to positions on the basis of ascribed status under the cover of having gained this access by achievement.
probably my fave take on meritocracy as ideology
[...] As capital and capitalist markets began to outgrow national borders, with the help of international trade agreements and assisted by new transportation and communication technologies, the power of labour, inevitably locally based, weakened, and capital was able to press for a shift to a new growth model, one that works by redistributing from the bottom to the top. This was when the march into neoliberalism began, as a rebellion of capital against Keynesianism, with the aim of enthroning the Hayekian model in its place. Thus the threat of unemployment returned, together with its reality, gradually replacing political legitimacy with economic discipline. Lower growth rates were acceptable for the new powers as long as they were compensated by higher profit rates and an increasingly inegalitarian distribution. Democracy ceased to be functional for economic growth and in fact became a threat to the performance of the new growth model; it therefore had to be decoupled from the political economy. This was when ‘post-democracy’ was born.
cites Colin Crouch's Post-Democracy
Summing up, social life and capital accumulation in the post-capitalist interregnum depend on individuals-as-consumers adhering to a culture of competitive hedonism, one that makes a virtue out of the necessity of having to struggle with adversity and uncertainty on one’s own. For capital accumulation to continue under post-capitalism, that culture must make hoping and dreaming obligatory, mobilizing hopes and dreams to sustain production and fuel consumption in spite of low growth, rising inequality and growing indebtedness. It must also provide technical assistance enabling people to keep themselves unreasonably happy, while at the same time producing a stream of incentives and satisfactions motivating them to constantly intensify their work effort regardless of stagnant or declining pay, unpaid overtime and precarious employment. Capitalism without system integration requires a labour market and labour process capable of sustaining a neo-Protestant work ethic alongside socially obligatory hedonistic consumerism. Enthusiastic hard work must be culturally defined and recognized as test and proof of individual value, corresponding to a meritocratic worldview that explains inequality with differences in effort or ability. For hedonism not to undermine productive discipline, as none less than Daniel Bell was confident would happen, the attractions of consumerism must be complemented with a fear of social descent, while non-consumerist gratifications available outside of the money economy must be discounted and discredited. All of this presupposes the presence of a broad middle class willing to seek social integration through the labour market, accepting as a matter of course expectations of employers for full identification with whatever jobs they may be assigned and taking for granted the need for social life to respect the primacy of dedicated work and the pursuit of, it is hoped, life-structuring careers.
yo
[...] What the deterioration of public finances was related to was declining overall levels of taxation (Figure 1.5) and the increasingly regressive character of tax systems, as a result of ‘reforms’ of top income and corporate tax rates (Figure 1.6). Moreover, by replacing tax revenue with debt, governments contributed further to inequality, in that they offered secure investment opportunities to those whose money they would or could no longer confiscate and had to borrow instead. Unlike taxpayers, buyers of government bonds continue to own what they pay to the state, and in fact collect interest on it, typically paid out of ever less progressive taxation; they can also pass it on to their children. Moreover, rising public debt can be and is being utilized politically to argue for cutbacks in state spending and for privatization of public services, further constraining redistributive democratic intervention in the capitalist economy.
shiet
[...] there is no indication that the long-term trend towards greater economic inequality will be broken any time soon, or indeed ever. Inequality depresses growth, for Keynesian and other reasons. But the easy money currently provided by central banks to restore growth – easy for capital but not, of course, for labour – further adds to inequality, by blowing up the financial sector and inviting speculative rather than productive investment. Redistribution to the top thus becomes oligarchic: rather than serving a collective interest in economic progress, as promised by neoclassical economics, it turns into extraction of resources from increasingly impoverished, declining societies [...]
he references plutonomy here
From this account, it is clear that the relationship between unemployment and inequality is an intricate one [...] Nonetheless, involuntary unemployment is of concern in its own right, and for this reason alone it receives considerable attention in what follows. Unemployment, and attendant job precariousness, are themselves sources of inequality. A person rejected by the labour market is suffering a form of social exclusion, and even if full income replacement were to allow his or her standard of living to be maintained during unemployment, the individual's circumstances would have worsened. Above all, it is a matter of agency and a sense of powerlessness. [...]
depends on whether there's good unemployment insurance etc
- globalisation
- technological change (information and communications technology)
- growth of financial services
- changing pay norms
- reduced role of trade unions
- scaling back of the redistributive tax-and-transfer policy
[...] we risk creating the impression that inequality is rising on account of forces outside our control. It is far from obvious that these factors are beyond our influence or that they are exogenous to the economic and social system. Globalisation is the result of decisions taken by international organisations, by national governments, by corporations, and by individuals as workers and consumers. The direction of technological change is the product of decisions by firms, researchers, and governments. The financial sector may have grown to meet the demands of an aeing population in need of financial instruments that provide for retirement, but the form it has taken and the regulation of the industry have been subject to political and economic choices.
rise in inequality due to changes in the balance of power