Osler's Razor

Last week, I wrote about the Occupy Wall Street movement, expressing some confusion about what they are after (much as I didn't understand the Tea Party movement back when they actually did some things in public). I got many interesting responses via email, and the best of the lot was this fascinating and informative essay by UST student Phil Steger:

The obvious thing that everyone should be clear that the protesters are upset about is economic inequality in this country. This is plain from the "99% vs. 1%" message that people can spend a lot of time picking apart but miss the main point of. The fact is that over the last 30-40 years, the United States - and the world at large - has experienced an alarmingly unequal distribution of wealth. While the annual incomes and total wealth of the richest 1% and 1/10 of 1% have increased sharply and keep increasing, the annual wages of the bottom 99% have remained stagnant, barely keeping up with and in many cases falling behind inflation. Quibble over where the lines should be drawn - at 1/10 of 1%, 1% or 10% - as you may, the overwhelming fact for the overwhelming majority is that their wages are not keeping up with expenses - healthcare, food, education, housing - and the loans they've taken out for school and homes and consumer products (which the best and brightest and the richest relentlessly pressured them to take out by appeals both to personal self-interest and the interests of national economic growth) means they are always trying to build wealth out of holes. Part of what galls many of us is the fact that the Wall Streeters (meant inclusively to refer to actual Wall St investment bankers, but also lobbyists and congressmembers, big bankers and others who've been aggressively pushing neoliberalism) who pushed and pressured us to borrow in the 90s and 00s, and who paid huge sums to lobby the mostly wealthy congressmembers to bring down the barriers between conventional and investment banks and to remove debt-to-asset rations, and who made 100s of millions of dollars from leveraging our debt and even from betting against it, now have the chutzpah to wag their fingers at our irresponsible borrowing and bad gambles on buying homes and getting the wrong college degrees.

So, there's huge economic inequality. And only the very naive would believe that economic equality doesn't translate into political inequality as the very wealthy consider political contributions and lobbying expenses to be rational investments in creating more favorable business environments for their various interests. This would be true under any system. Under a political system with enormously expensive elections, this is even more so.

So now, we not only see an economy producing enormously rich "winners" (and not all "winners" are equal...few OWSers begrudge Steve Jobs his wealth and fortune because we can see how genius and drive and hard work and interest in people led him to create products many of us love and feel make our lives better...but please explain how hedge fund managers contribute in the same way to our lives) while piling up more and more "losers" of which we see not only ourselves, but our parents, siblings, cousins, neighbors, classmates, and friends. We also see those economic winners cozying up with the policymakers to create rules that tip the balance of factors in favor of the winners, again and again. And this. Drives. Us. Crazy.

This is not just an issue for liberals who tend to value equality over pure liberty, at least in economic matters. It ought to be an issue of extreme concern to conservatives, who, at least until the Republican and Reagan radicalism of the last 30 years, placed stability, security and the preservation of hard-won civil and communal traditions and institutions somewhat ahead of both equality and liberty. Want the division of child against parent? Make the parent rich and the child poor. Make the price for the parent's comfort in old age be the child's opportunity to find a job and raise a family. Want to erode trust in a society's hard-won institutions and rule of law? Make it clear to young people that their votes don't count; only money counts. Deride them as hippies and lazy people, even better, as idiots who were too stupid to see that the world was much more ruthless than their parents taught them it was and that they were morons for not seeing, when they were adolescents, how their future was being mortgaged to pay for babyboomer excesses.

Think of what we're seeing in OWS as a reaction to the radical rewriting of the social contract that's taken place in just one generation. For our grandparents, the social contract was this: everybody pays in, everyone takes out. The better-off and more successful pay in more and take out less in direct services, but nevertheless are in a position to benefit the most from the overall health, strength, growth and stability of the political economy. The harder-luck pay in less and take out more in direct services but are less well-positioned to take advantage of the larger goods. Fair deal. The whole country prospers and we become the most powerful, secure, wealthy nation in the world. Our parents' generation's social contract was this. Why pay in more when you're rich? That's robbery. The rich should pay in less, the poor should take out less. The next generation should learn the value of hard work by being on their own from the get-go. Meanwhile, the rich and middle-age can suck up the benefits of the last generation's investments, earnings and savings with the next generation having no store to draw from. And our country stagnates, falls from its supreme intern national standing to one where, in measures like infant and child mortality, child and adult imprisonment, poverty and disease, it resembles Third World dictatorships.

So, this generation wonders, out loud, in public, in a variety of colorful and off-color ways: WTF?! I know one of your readers was scandalized that one person in the protest saw OWS as an amazing opportunity for random, anonymous sex. Surprise, surprise. Want to erode the value of stable, monogamous relationship and sexual discipline? Create a lot, I mean, a lot, of unemployed young people in the middle of a consumer culture that uses sex to sell everything. Give them nothing productive to do and little future to aspire toward and then hiss "shame, shame" when they decide immediate gratification is the way to go.

Everyone who's been paying attention by now should understand that although the official unemployment rate is a high 9%, that's not the real unemployment rate, in that it doesn't include people who've given up on finding a job, stopped looking, are unemployable. We should also know that the highest unemployment is suffered by the young, the ones to whom the most promises have been made. Some figures place this rate as high as 20%. Moreover, anyone paying attention should realize that we not only have a youth bubble, we have a youth bubble that is MUCH more diverse than our adult bubble. The very people that conservatives have been vilifying and blaming and using to divide the country for the last thirty years - gay people, African-Americans, Latinos - are now larger and larger percentages of the population. In Minnesota alone, 1 in 22 people over 65 is a person of color, but among children under 18, 1 in 3 are of color. Today's youth not only reject the scapegoating of minority populations, they are members of or best friends with those populations. And for members of these populations, the unemployment rates are again much higher, not just for the youth, but for their parents, too.

Want to know why young people are complaining about student loans? Back to social contract. A generation ago, a college degree was a distinct advantage in an economy that had a lot of great, blue collar jobs. It was a way out of hard, physical work, but was by no means the only route by which to attain the middle class. Then, globalization started up. There was a chance for the richest to make more money by sending manufacturing overseas where the labor was a fraction of the price. We were told, alternatively, that globalization was a) a force of human nature that could not be stopped and b) a good thing that would make us all richer. We were offered this promise: Let us create free trade zones all over the world, letting manufacturing jobs drain away to other shores, and we'll educate and train you to be at the top of the globalized economic food chain. Either way, we were told that the key thing for us was to get a college education. In the knowledge economy, thinkers would be rewarded. Meanwhile, globalization made competition for top teaching and research talent more expensive, so tuition had to go up. Moreover, the well-funded republican movement succeeded in selling the mantra of "no new taxes" and "cuts, cuts, cuts" using deficit scares and bullying to accomplish both cuts in financial aid and halts in the growth of education spending and, at the same time, tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, many of whom had already taken full advantage of globalization to offshore their wealth and avoid paying taxes on their income and wealth. So the deal was: get your education and prosper in the globalized economy; globalization is good, for everyone. But it's not. It might be inevitable (a moot point now, since we've thrown everything open and there's no unthrowing it), but it is plainly, manifestly, painfully not good for everyone. It is very, very, very, very good for a very few. Good for a few more. And very, very, very disruptive, unsettling and disadvantaging to the very many. Want to erode loyalty to the nation and a sense of patriotism? Have an economy where the best off view the nation as a resource pool to draw from and haul away to fantastically rich tax havens, far away from national law and national responsibility.

If globalization is inevitable, as it probably now is, then it is manageable as a country, SO LONG AS we feel we're all in it together. But we don't. The plainest message of all over the last 20 years is that we are not all in it together. You're on your own. If you're not successful, it's your own fault. Don't bother me. Rot there. By yourself.

You want a country that's going to make it through the next decade as a national union, a unity, a whole? You don't want a permanent underclass of disaffected youth preventing you from seeing plays on Broadway or visiting Times Square or whatever? You don't want America to fall further into class division and resentment, too poor, undereducated, unprepared for the demands of global competition? Then you better be about the business of genuinely understanding what young people are feeling and figuring out what to do about it. Hold your nose if you don't like the smell of hippies.