More Books, Less Noise: How Reading Helps Me Make Sense of Our Fractured World

I am reading (or listening to) more books these days. This is how I’m coping with the moment we are living through. I’ll share some of what I’m learning here. If you’d like to read along with me, I’d be thrilled to hear your thoughts.

If you decide to read the book too, drop a comment in and we can have kind of a virtual book group. Or you can join my Thinking About Capitalism Book Club on Fable (this is a free book club app).

Most recently I read Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is tearing America Apart–Again by Robert Kagan.  

I loved this book because it teases apart two very different things that I’ve too often muddled in my head–a government that respects human rights and a government that is committed to shared prosperity. So of course I have to create a 2x2 (see the header image).

Here are some of the things this book made me think about, and some other books I’ve read in the past couple of years that are relevant.

Despite the commitment to rights espoused by neoliberal consensus (both Democrats and pre-Trump Republicans), money has been drained from the bottom 50% and from the middle class, into the pockets of the top 1%. If you look at the US economy the top 0.1% control 13.5% of the wealth in the US (up from 7% in 1980) and the bottom 50% control just 2.5%. 

If you’re poor and getting poorer, it’s not surprising that talk of your rights is not your top concern. Putting food on the table and keeping a roof over your head is your main worry. As Martin Luther King said, "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?"

I am NOT saying that rights don’t matter. They do. Treating people respectfully matters enormously–I wrote a whole book about that :) What I will confess, though, is that when I finished writing Radical Respect, I realized that I had not spent nearly enough time on one of the biggest power problems that emerge at many companies today: the giant gulf between the highest paid person and the least paid person.

What are the forces that have caused redistribution of wealth when income inequality gets so great? Revolution, economic cataclysm (the Great Depression), or war. The wealthy rarely have said, “Oh, I have too much, let me share with the poor.”

Sure, the wealthy are very philanthropic, but not much of the money they give away goes to the poor or to the middle class in the United States. Indeed, a number of billionaires have given tremendous support to non profits and think tanks that have built a case against the government.

(For more on this, read  Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Oreskes Naomi , Kochland by Christopher Leonard, Dark Money by Jane Mayer. And of course Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty.)  

Sometimes, as we saw in this election, the wealthy tend to divide the population and create scapegoats in order to conquer it and keep their stuff to themselves. There is nothing new in this. In 1689 Maryland John Coode and Josias Fendall led European indentured servants and Africans (a mix of indentured, enslaved, and Free Blacks) in a rebellion against the colonial upper class.

The landed gentry responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide Black and White Americans. It led to the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705. What is new is the way that the Trump campaign pitted men against women as a way to roll back the rights that women have successfully demanded in the past decades.

Until we have a political party in the U.S. that has the will to reinstate the policies of the New Deal Consensus, we will be vulnerable to a slide away from rights and toward authoritarianism.

(Two great books on the policies that promote the shared prosperity that is necessary for economic growth are by Daron Acemoglu: Power and Progress, and Why Nations Fail. Also, The Lords of Easy Money by Christopher Leonard, The Man Who Broke Capitalism by David Gelles, and American Kleptocracy by Casey Michel.)

Here are the policies that produced the Golden Age of Capitalism.

• Mixed Economy: A balance between free-market capitalism and government regulation, a la New Deal policies and Keynesian economic theories.
• Strong federal government involvement in economic stabilization, social programs, and labor protections.
• Policies like Social Security, unemployment insurance, and public works programs. 

• Shared Prosperity: Unions need to be powerful enough that productivity gains translate into higher wages for workers, not a few people worth hundreds of billions.
• Progressive Taxation: High marginal tax rates on the wealthy (it was up to 91% after the New Deal) to reduce inequality.
• Regulated Financial Sector: Banking and financial markets need to be again tightly regulated; maybe we need a new Glass-Steagall Act to prevent instability.

People I respect tell me it’s not realistic to revert to these policies that have been proven to work. If that is the case we are then stuck with leaders who will make the tried and true methods of income redistribution: revolution, economic cataclysm, and/or war.

I am an optimist, though. I think we can do better. We must do better. Join my Thinking About Capitalism Book Club and let's discuss!