RE: [SPAM]Re: Economic inequality

Sat, 04 Apr 2015 11:49:36 -0700 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2015 12:31 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [SPAM]Re: Economic inequality

 

On 3/31/2015 10:56 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2015 9:26 PM
To: EveryThing
Subject: [SPAM]Re: Economic inequality

 

The SciAm article doesn't even begin to describe how great the inequality is.  
Like most statistical presentations it divides the population into quintiles.  
But that hides the fact that is not the to 20 to 1 percentile that hold the 
wealth, it is the tope 1% and even just the top 0.1%

 

And that graph describes the source of so many of our social ills; this high 
degree of income distortion -- in terms of the US being an outlier, on the 
global distribution of developed economies -- is the fundamental driver of 
pretty much everything else going wrong with this country; from crumbling 
infrastructure, to crumbling education, to crumbling living standards. 


But the GDP/person is up.  Those things are crumbling because the rich don't 
use them and so are not interested in paying for them and the rich control 
politicians thru campaign contributions.

 

Precisely; we live in a country with the best government money can buy.






Could this be what life is like in a crumbling empire, far out into imperial 
overreach, stretched thin across the globe, in the vast archipelago of bases – 
including places of true logistical nightmare, like Afghanistan (the logistical 
nightmare of nightmares…there is no feasible way to get the heavy armor out of 
Afghanistan, except through Russia, with Pakistan definitely not wanting mass 
transiting US armor.

The cost of bearing empire is breaking our backs, and with each successive 
cycle of disaster capitalism – creative destruction, right-sizing, out-sourcing 
etc. the empire is in a race to scraping bottom, as all empires do. Inside the 
bubble of power the mantra remains “we make history” (as once boasted by one 
famous neocon), but on the ground it is not all going as planned… though who is 
going to ever bring the emperor the bad news… any volunteers? Naturally we 
don’t have an emperor (yet), but we do have a powerful deeply rooted patrician 
aristocracy that has been ascendant here for the last four decades.


You seem to have overlooked the fact that what has, in the past, leveled the 
wealth is war.  Of course that's because the government raised taxes, regulated 
prices, and invested in research, development, and technology as part of the 
war effort.

 

The kind of total war efforts, WWII being the preeminent example, that worked 
in the past like gigantic Keynesian money pumps (and all the spin offs form the 
war effort) are not easily reproducible in today’s environment. The world we 
find ourselves living in today has been environmentally and resource 
impoverished – compared with the how the world was in 1939. The common 
denominator of all war is that it is the most horribly expensive activity a 
society can engage in. War made sense when one empire conquered surrounding 
weaker states and transferred their wealth to the imperial center; or even 
perhaps one could argue – as you have – when the resulting martialing of 
resources, required by the war effort, propelled a world stuck in the morass of 
global economic depression (the great depression era of the 1930s) out of that 
state of affairs.

In today’s environment, with the much tighter margins (resulting from needing 
to acquire resources from increasingly marginal sources) I don’t think that the 
outcome would be a post war era of relative global prosperity, rather I think 
it would accelerate a global course down into hard bitten poverty and 
collapsing social fabrics.

One can argue this point, of course, and present an alternate hypothesis, but I 
feel it is a salient and foundational fact of life that needs to be considered 
when assessing the probable outcomes of global war.

After WWII the Americans victors opened up the great oil fields of Saudi Arabia 
and the other gulf states. The EROI of the early wells sunk in the Ghawar super 
giant field were around 100:1… that was a payoff! Now returns on new fields are 
in the order of only 8:1 or so. 

What would the victors of the war win? Tiny disparate challenging pockets of 
resources that would require very significant capital and energetic investment 
in order to extract the increasingly marginal yields.

IMO, the world needs cooperation, if we are going to find a way out of this 
compounded mess we find ourselves in.

Chris



Brent




Will it swing back the other way, as it has in the past – such as with the New 
Deal, or earlier with Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting of Standard Oil; or is 
this just the prelude to… welcome to tomorrow?

Chris







http://www.voxeu.org/article/exploding-wealth-inequality-united-states

Brent





http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/economic-inequality-it-s-far-worse-than-you-think/

 

 

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