Ronald Reagan asked the American public in the 1980 presidential campaign “Are you better off today than you were 4 years ago?”. I remember how my high school wood shop teacher responded. He said he did not feel better off that 4 years prior and that that spelled big trouble for Jimmy Carter. At that time the country was suffering from hyperinflation and the oil crisis was fresh on people’s minds.
Reagan perhaps won the election because of the economy and his well-formed question served to remind people of their woes. The question is certainly appropriate in a presidential campaign. People’s perceptions of the economy and how they’re doing financially clearly affect their election preferences. Bill Clinton, not always as eloquent as Reagan but also a good talker, said bluntly “It’s the economy, stupid”. There’s also no doubt that Obama’s landslide victory in 2008 was aided by a faltering economy. Some even say he wouldn’t have been elected if it weren’t for the economic crisis. I’m not sure, though, if such comments came from the same folks who said he wouldn’t have been elected if it weren’t for Palin or if the weather had been better on that Tuesday afternoon.
There is one thing, though, that I would change about Reagan’s question. I’d add a zero to the four. “Are you better off than your parents were a generation ago?”, I would ask. I would have to give Paul Krugman credit for the question. In his book “The Conscience of a Liberal” he deals extensively with this question. Why has inequality risen in the US since the end of the post WWII economic boom? Why has the middle class shrunk so drastically?
I will skip the part of the debate asking whether inequality has risen in the US in the past few decades. Krugman goes to lengths about this and for me it’s so obvious. I moved to Germany twenty years ago and have seen from the outside how poverty has risen, job security has sunken and sending a kid to college has become, for many, impossible. The US society in general has become more unequal. The strong, vital middle class that expanded from the 40‘s to the 80’s has gone to pot, as the British like to say.
Total equality in a society is probably unattainable and, perhaps, undesirable. Egalitarianism in a large, modern country was propagated in Soviet-socialist states like the GDR. Officials and supporters of such a system wanted others to believe that theirs was a classless society. However, the ruling party, the SED, with all it’s members and cohorts was so large that it must clearly be seen as a class in itself.
I sense a tendency among conservatives in the US to go so far as to argue that egalitarianism is utopian and borders on totalitarianism (ie. Soviet Union, China, etc.) Therefore, they say, we don’t even need to try to make our society more equal. It’s useless, leads to totalitarianism, would be boring and, most importantly, goes against our “human nature”. The argumentation continues to point out that the government can’t dictate equality. The individual will pull herself up by her bootstraps and morph herself into a successful, middle class citizen. Government needs to stay out of our business and let each person run their lives as they please. This powerful argumentation has become mainstream thought. Luckily, though, we are entering a new age in which the conservative movement is slowly creeping into the dark corner it belongs in.
What are the personal and social ramifications of living in a society with radical differences in income levels? We can take it to a personal level and ask ourselves how we would feel if a colleague is earning twice as much as you are. He does pretty much the same work. Perhaps he was lucky enough to get assigned to a client who brings in way more revenue that your clients. He receives bonuses based on the success of his sales. This doesn’t feel too hot. You get resentful. You see that he is not supporting you much with your projects. Each employee in such a constellation looks first to make sure his sales go up. Cooperation suffers.
The primatologist Frans de Waal looks at social behavior of apes in his book “Our Inner Ape”. He tells about the time he witnessed a group of chimpanzees enjoying the olive leaves they had been fed through the cage. The leaves were a welcomed variation to their normal diet. Day after day they received their leaves and were quite content with them. The chimps even were careful to make sure that all members of the group got their fair share. One day zoo helpers gave a pair of chimps some grapes. From that day on the others, who hadn’t received grapes, refused the olive leaves. They were no longer good enough.
That apes also experience envy is rather eye-opening. What does envy cause among a group of humanoids? If one high school kid comes cruising to school with mag wheels and stainless steel hubs he will create envy among his peers. Soon you will see other boys showing up with pimped up cars. If one house on my block is twice as big as the others and the owners have a swimming pool to top it, certain social dynamics kick in. Perhaps the other neighbors will ban together and scorn the rich family. Perhaps some will do their best to become buddies with the rich guy, hoping some of his wealth will rub off on them. At any rate it does cause some disturbance in the complicated social quilt bonding a community together.
It becomes a question of justice. If everyone in a community is poor then the community comes together in their efforts to overcome their plight. If a few members become disproportionately wealthier than the rest, the “lessers” begin to question the fairness. No one likes to see some fat cats taking off with more than their fair share of the cake. The sense of community begins to break down.
Summing this up, one can say that inequality in a society leads to envy which results in an increased sense of injustice. This further leads to decreasing cooperation and increasing social turmoil. With the risk of oversimplification I conclude that it must be the goal of a society to strive toward more equality. Income disparity in America today has become purely grotesque. Why should a college kid with the, granted, cool idea of creating the social networking site Facebook be able to become a billionaire within a few years? Is he really that much smarter than me? Is he that much more productive than me? Where is the justice in this picture? I’m no fortune teller but I will predict that pretty soon enough of us apes are going to get tired of munching on olive leaves and demand some of those grapes.
No comments:
Post a Comment