For the past 70 years and more, I have been struggling to understand two sorts of social and economic inequalities in America. The first is the many ways in which groups of people, identified by race, by ethnicity, by gender, and so forth are unequally treated and have unequal life chances. Women make only a fraction of what men make in jobs for which they are equally qualified. Black women are much more likely to die in childbirth than white women who are by other social and economic metrics equivalent. Gay and lesbian men and women are denied legal and social opportunities that are routinely available to straight men and women.
These inequalities have given rise to a number of “liberation
movements,” so-called – The Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, Gay
Liberation, etc. Much of the progressive energy of millions of people for the
past three quarters of a century has been devoted to these movements.
The second sort of social and economic inequality in America
with which I have been concerned for most of my life is the enormous inequality
in the distribution of income and wealth that characterizes American society.
These inequalities are persistent and growing worse, as Thomas Pickety and many
others have demonstrated.
Marx, bless his soul, thought that the development of
capitalism would progressively eliminate the first kind of social and economic inequality
while exacerbating the second in such a way as to finally trigger a
revolutionary transformation that would result in a society exhibiting neither
of the structures of inequality. But he was wrong, alas, as I tried to argue in
my paper “The Future of Socialism.”
What has been troubling me all these years is that I can
imagine the various liberation movements progressively eliminating the
differential inequalities associated with race, gender, or sexual orientation
while not at all having any serious effect on the systematic inequality in the
distribution of income and wealth. That is to say, I can imagine an America in
which women and men, black and white and Latino and Asian American and Native
American individuals, gay and straight individuals are represented at every
level in the economy in numbers strictly proportional to their presence in the
larger society and yet without altering or even slowing the progress of the
economic inequality of wealth and income in the society as a whole.
Be troubled no more, because what you are describing is the beau ideal of “parity”!
ReplyDeleteThat is, for a generation, haven’t all of our best minds [sic] been wringing their hands over “disparity”—various wealth “gaps” between discrete identity groups and whatnot—and stridently demanding instead perfect parity in the distribution of goods and bads (OK, mostly bads) in our society?
I can hardly describe the sublime thrill of going into work and being exploited not by a middle-aged white man but instead by a female (or maybe even transgender) person of color!
In fact, it doesn't even count as "exploitation", it needs to be seen as a form of penance, because by taking part one is accomplishing the lord's work.
I don’t see the inequality in the acquisition and distribution of wealth ever being eliminated, for two reasons. The mantra, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” is not a natural human tendency. Children have to be taught to share and some refuse to learn. The inequalities in the acquisition and distribution of wealth, which the mantra is intended to ameliorate, arise from the unavoidable differences in human aptitudes, talents, stamina and competitiveness, in a world of finite resources. The race is not always to the swiftest, but more often than not, it is. And the development and proliferation of AI is only going to make things worse.
ReplyDeleteThis post brings to my mind the work of Adolph Reed (e.g. in Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism which can be found here: https://files.libcom.org/files/Marx,%20Race%20and%20Neoliberalism%20-%20Adolph%20Reed.pdf), where he points out that --- from a political-economic perspective --- racism, sexism and other group-based stigmatization is ultimately just an ideological strategy for "legitimizing capitalist social relations by naturalizing them," i.e., justifying exploitation by placing certain populations "beneath the customary floor of social worth and regard."
ReplyDeleteHe goes on to make this point about how the liberation movements are being co-opted by capitalism, a point which echoes your last sentence almost to the word: "[V]ersions of racial and gender equality are now . . . incorporated into the normative and programmatic structure of “left” neoliberalism. Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity exclusively within the terms of given patterns of capitalist class relations—which is after all the ideal of racial liberalism—has been fully legitimized within the rubric of “diversity.” That ideal is realized through gaining rough parity in distribution of social goods and bads among designated population categories. As Walter Benn Michaels has argued powerfully, according to that ideal, the society would be just if 1 percent of the population controlled 90 percent of the resources, provided that blacks and other nonwhites, women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people were represented among the 1 percent in roughly similar proportion as their incidence in the general population."
Of course --- a point that can get lost in Reed's analysis if you aren't careful --- the liberation movements also achieved an enormous amount of good and immeasurably improved the contemporary human condition. Which for me leads to these two questions about their status and significance: 1) will there come a time (has there come a time) when the liberation movements have been co-opted by capitalism to such a degree that continued participation is a morally compromised activity and 2) are (what Reed calls) ideological strategies of "ascriptive difference" [strategies which ascribe natural differences to artificial groups for purposes of naturalizing and thus licensing exploitation] central enough to capitalism that, with the success of the old liberation movements, "new discourses of ascriptive difference [will] take shape to fit the folk common sense of our time and its cultural norms and sensibilities"?
Even if all Americans were Marxists, I take Marc as implying, would inequality be eliminated
ReplyDeletenot be
ReplyDeleteRE: Adolph Reed
ReplyDeleteReed has also become a touchstone for me. I just finished an older book of his- "Stirrings in the Jug"- where he doesn't explicitly make the argument in 'Marx, Race, & Neoliberalism' (MRN) but you can see that the foundation of the argument is there. He does this mainly by critically exploring the first Black Urban Regimes (i.e. municipalities led by a black political mayor and co-hort which is dependent on a black coalition of voters) in the United States after the end of Jim Crow. The results are very interesting. I very much recommend the book.
In any case, I think the answer to both of Anonymous' questions above is "Yes." For 1), I think we're already see fraying at the edges here but my guess is that it'll take a long time to unwind. Maybe it's only because I'm a Reed enthusiast that I believe that this is likely to happen first among Black Americans but that seems the most likely thing to me. Many Black Americans see that the alleged benefits of representation in government or the corporate world doesn't serve their material interests at all. Instead, it serves a Black PMC or political class or the bourgeoisie (or all three!). Right now I think this is probably manifesting in political apathy amongst the the black working class (as it as among all of the working class) but I think a way will be found to show a benefit of a broad working class coalition. Inded, I think it's the only way forward for a LEFT mass politics in the US. That doesn't mean that Black Americans, Women, and other oppressed groups don't have a case to make for some sort of redress of historical grievance but those fights will have to wait. I'm sure that'll make some people mad but I honestly don't see another way. First, the workers have to regain a foothold in American politics and that's probably going to be a struggle against capital that may need to go on for decades. That can't be lost sight of but that doesn't mean that there won't be opportunities along the way to begin redress those other historical grievances. Check out the podcast This is Revolution to hear more along these lines. Reed has been on it several times and the hosts of the show spend a lot of time talking about these issues. Plus, its often funny and entertaining.
For 2), I have less to say except that I believe this is also currently going on. Capital is adroit at finding its way through. Its basis in human avarice essentially ensures this. It will discover- without the need of conscious thought, I think- ways to sustain itself. It will- it does, I believe- rely increasingly upon the creation of categories of disadvantaged people that it can then "include" and pass around that inclusion as a symbolic benefit for the whole ascriptive group. I think this is much more prevalent in the more decadent bourgeois societies and in the bourgeois/petit-bourgeois strata of the less well off societies. I actually think this trend is potentially dangerous and *could* lead to previously unimagined new forms of authoritarianism, though I don't want to speculate on the likelihood of that. I just don't think we can rule it out as a potential outcome.
Wrt “Children have to be taught to share and some refuse to learn.“
ReplyDeleteHow did those who teach them to share themselves learn to value sharing?
Repeat this question many times until one arrives at the first behaviorally as well as biologically modern humans.
Surely it must be that sharing isn’t such a non-natural human tendency as the quoted assertion seems to imply?
PS I'm so happy to see Adolph Reed being acknowledged.
The second sort of social and economic inequality in America with which I have been concerned for most of my life is the enormous inequality in the distribution of income and wealth that characterizes American society. These inequalities are persistent and growing worse, as Thomas Pickety and many others have demonstrated.
ReplyDeleteWhile that may be true, what matters is neither income nor wealth inequality but rather consumption inequality. Selected quotes (emphasis mine):
Over the past five decades, both income and consumption inequality have risen. The level of inequality is much lower for consumption than income, and since 1980, consumption inequality has risen considerably less than income inequality. Income inequality has generally increased episodically, with concentrated spurts in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and in the last several years. And since 2006, though income inequality has been rising, consumption inequality has been falling.
The causes of these differences are somewhat unclear. Demographic changes can account for some of the changes in consumption and income inequality, particularly in the 1980s, but account for few of the changes overall. The quality of the income data at the bottom may also explain some of the differences. Changes in asset prices could play the biggest role in explaining the difference, at least in recent years.
As for inequality being the defining issue of our time, our research indicates that when looking at inequality from a more holistic perspective, and when measurement tools are thoroughly analyzed, there may be more facets to inequality than commonly considered. While there is evidence of income inequality increasing over the past five decades, the increase has only partially affected consumption inequality, which is where policy-makers should concentrate their efforts.
source: When It Comes to Inequality, Consumption Is What Matters
1) The OP doesn't advocate eliminating wealth and income inequality, which is likely an illusory goal in any kind of non-static economy, but rather reducing such inequality.
ReplyDelete2) The quotes from the (conservative) Manhattan Institute are hard to parse w/o knowing what exactly they mean by consumption inequality and how they're measuring it.
3) As Jonathan Wolff (no relation to RPW) pointed out (insightfully, imo) in Why Read Marx Today?, there are two different models of revolutionary transition that can be found in Marx. One is in those passages where Marx talks about the new mode of production developing in the womb of the old, implying that when the contradictions of capitalism and the "fetters" on the new productive forces reach a certain point, the transition to a new mode of production will occur, with the political changes following after. The second model, the "official" account as found in e.g. The Communist Manifesto, is that the political seizure of power will come first, with the economic transition following. There is some tension between the two models. I'm somewhat dubious (pace the OP) that Marx ever said that widening inequality of wealth and income will trigger revolution. He wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Program that socialist, working-class parties should not emphasize distributional issues or present socialism as being mainly about distribution, since only a change in the mode of production could lead to a change in distribution. (That's what he said in Critique of the Gotha Program at any rate; possibly he said something less categorical somewhere else.)
Cause for cheer: Reed has a new book coming out imminently called No Politics but Class Politics. Also, this seems to be the season of the beginning of the intellectual left's response to the horrors of 'woke' identity-politicking, as there have also just been published Susan Neiman's Left is not Woke and Norman Finkelstein's I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom.
ReplyDelete@Ahmed
ReplyDeleteI notice a few things conspicuously absent from the consumption study: healthcare, higher education, bank fees, interest on debt. There is a small army of people without places to live in my city and it's only getting bigger. I believe this is becoming an epidemic in America. I wonder who's handing them consumption surveys?
R McD
ReplyDelete“Surely it must be that sharing isn’t such a non-natural human tendency as the quoted assertion seems to imply?”
This is not the paradox you suggest. Of course, in order for there to be an individual who teaches children to share, there must have been an individual for whom sharing was a natural impulse, who taught this to some children, among whom were others who taught it to other children, and so on down the line. But this does not mean that “sharing” was a natural human impulse, because among the children who were being taught to share, there have been children who have rejected the teaching, and other children down through the centuries who also rejected the teaching. For them, sharing is not a natural impulse. What are the respective percentages, over the centuries, of those who taught, and who accepted the teaching, versus those who rejected the teaching? There is no way to know. Hence, for the human population as a whole, sharing is not a natural impulse. Plus, there is this - even if there are more individuals who accepted the principle of sharing, versus those who rejected it, it takes more of the individuals who have accepted the principle, working together, to ameliorate wealth differentials than is required by individuals who have rejected it to disrupt and prevent the amelioration of wealth disparity. As I have stated in a past comment, the universe favors entropy – disorganization and chaos – over the reduction of entropy and the increase of organization.
One more point I wish to make about the question of ameliorating the disparities in wealth distribution is related to the subject of the previous thread on raising the debt limit and the compromises that Biden made in order to achieve the objective, which included placing a cap on discretionary spending, the very spending which is needed to ameliorate the disparities. As I stated in the prior thread, the cost of paying the interest on the national debt keeps increasing as the national debt increases. In a report on the PBS News Hour last week, a financial analyst predicted that if the debt keeps increasing at its current rate, by 2045, it will require 50 cents on every tax dollar to pay off the interest on the national debt alone. One way to not reduce the discretionary spending which is used to ameliorate the wealth disparities that Prof. Wolff is concerned about would be to reduce the nondiscretionary spending and shift it to the discretionary spending. But the largest amount of nondiscretionary spending is on the U.S. military. In a world where Russia and China are threatening the independence of other sovereign nations, and where terrorists are seeking to disrupt societies in order to promote fundamentalist religious beliefs, can the U.S. afford to reduce its military spending in order to preserve the level of discretionary spending, if the result would be to enhance the likelihood that the forces of autocracy and terrorism will succeed, and should we be willing to take the risk? Is wealth distribution disparity the price we have to pay in order to prevent the expansion of autocratic hegemony and terrorism? (Yes, I know, there are those among us who claim it is the U.S. which is threatening the world with hegemonic ambitions, but if that is the case, under which hegemony would we prefer to live – that of Russia, China, and Iran, or the U.S. and the European Union?)
ReplyDeleteCorrection:
ReplyDeleteI was in error when I stated above that military and defense spending are part of the nondiscretionary part of the annual budget. They are part of the discretionary spending. The non-discretionary spending refers to Social Security, Medicare, and the interest on the national debt. So, with regard to the question I raised above, what is the risk of shifting funds from the military/defense budget to discretionary spending, such as education, anti-poverty programs, Medicaid, etc., and are we willing to take that risk in the face of threats posed by Russia, China, Iran, Isis, etc.?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletere: consumption inequality
ReplyDeleteWarren Buffett has a net worth of $105.2 billion. Business Insider said this about his house:
Spanning 6,570 square feet, the humble abode features 5 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms
Including our walk-out basement, our house is roughly 3,500 square feet. It has 4 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms (I have more bathrooms than Warren Buffett).
So not a big difference there. What about Jeff Bezos?
The home has 13,600 square feet of space spread out over its 10-acre lot., eight bedrooms and nine bathrooms.
Again, not a great difference in consumption inequality when it comes to housing, as one example.
** The median house size in America is roughly 2,000 square feet.
Marc,
ReplyDeleteA certain amt, indeed prob a great deal, of the roughly $800 billion per year DOD budget is driven by U.S. assumptions that it has to have a global military footprint, that its entire nuclear arsenal has to be "modernized" at vast expense, and that it needs a level of "overkill" way in excess of the requirements of deterrence. Each of these assumptions can be questioned.
The U.S., by virtue of existing commitments and the overall geopolitical situation, is going to have a large mil. budget but that doesn't mean there's no room for cuts. For instance, according to a 2021 piece (link below), the F-35 joint strike fighter, which costs about 80 million per plane, also costs about 36,000 for each hour one of the planes is in the air. It has stealth capabilities, but does the Air Force need as many as it ordered? (And now the Air Force is apparently ordering up another, even fancier version.)
Mil. budgets have to based on strategic assumptions, which shd always be open to question. The U.S. definition of its vital interests, its conception of "grand strategy," and its priorities shd be based on the kind of open debate that doesn't happen often enough. The issues get shunted off to technocrats, experts, and lobbyists for defense contractors when they shd be the subject of wider debate. So many powerful interests are invested in the current size and scale of the mil. budget that even if a more rational grand strategy indicated there cd be some retrenchment, it wd be politically hard to accomplish. The upshot is a military budget treated as sacrosanct, an absence of wide debate about the assumptions of U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy, and an electorate deprived of the chance to make the kind of fundamental decisions that shd, in a genuine democracy, be the prerogative and province of the whole society, not a small group of defense experts, technocrats, legislators, lobbyists, and generals.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/air-force-admits-f-35-fighter-jet-costs-too-much-ncna1259781
B. Posen's 2015 book Restraint (the geopolitical situation is somewhat different today, but prob not so different as to make the bk no longer relevant):
https://www.amazon.com/Restraint-Foundation-Strategy-Cornell-Security/dp/1501700723
LFC,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the information, and for the link.
This is totally off-topic, but this news item is so weird that I cannot quite wrap my heard around it. It has been reported that the woman, Tara Reade, who, in 2020, prior to the election, accused Biden of sexually harassing/molesting her, has defected to Russia. She recently appeared in Moscow, alongside former Russian spy Maria Butina, to answer questions.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/politics/tara-reade-defects-russia-biden-intl/index.html
One’s suspicions are immediately alerted to the possibility that Reade was always a Russian plant whose objective was to discredit Biden and thereby improve Trump’s – Putin’s favorite - election prospects. Reade’s explanation for defecting is that she was receiving death threats in the U.S., and became fed up because no one was listening to her claims against Biden. Arriving in Moscow, she finally felt safe. Now, I can understand feeling so unsafe in a country where one is receiving death threats, that one would prefer to live somewhere else, but why Russia? Why not Sweden, or Venezuela?
@ Marc Susselman
ReplyDeleteI'm just a lowly philosophy student, but I wondered if you could clear something up for me.
On sharing:
what is the move from premise:
1) sharing has to be taught, and some reject that teaching
to
2) therefore humans are not naturally inclined to share
and to
3) so inequality in wealth accumulation and distribution will never be eliminated
I take the point in general that some humans will always be selfish. But from one to two, might we think that the willingness to share is more like a trait with varying expression over populations, rather than the more pessimistic view that its a kind of fact of human nature.
and might we imagine this: the ability to read and write is not natural, because we have to be taught it - and it's also sometimes resisted! - so humans are not naturally inclined to read and write, so we will never get all humans to read or write. Something like that anyway.
In that case it doesn't seem so troubling, even if its not natural we can still find clever ways of promoting it, perhaps the same is true of inequality, at least so that it isnt so flagrant as it is today. Also, might the selfishness of individuals be expected in societies whose ethos is selfishness and competition? i.e. might we expect that in an unjust society, the citizens are likely to be unjust to an extent. So, selfishness might not be so deeply ingrained.
Anyway, I humbly submit this to you, apologies if this is all at much too low a level.
Max Richards,
ReplyDeleteNo apology for submitting your inquiry necessary. I appreciate people challenging my opinions, thereby offering me the opportunity to engage in rational discussion and requiring me to provide a rational justification for my views.
So, to your question. You suggest that the unwillingness to share may vary in degree among different populations, rather than being a trait of human nature. As a counter-example, you note that the ability to read, and the resistance to learning to read, may vary among populations, but it would not follow that an unwillingness to read is an inexorable characteristic of human nature which could not be ameliorated over time, thereby making every individual on Earth able to read. Why would it not be similarly possible, over time, to be able to teach all individuals on earth to be willing to share, thereby facilitating removing the disparities in wealth?
The difference, I would propose, lies in the difference between the characteristics in question. Reading is a cognitive skill. Resistance to learning to read could be caused by an unwillingness to spend the time to learn to read, or it could be due to a cognitive deficiency which prevents the individual from learning to read. But the unwillingness would not display itself when the individual is a toddler. It would only display itself at the age when children have developed the cognitive ability to read, which does not occur before the age of 3.
Sharing is entirely different. You do not have to be a parent to observe the unwillingness on the part of some children to share their toys with other children in the room. (My wife and I actually did experience this with our daughter, when she was in nursery school. She was playing with some toy or other, and a boy about her age grabbed the toy out of her hand, and pushed her hear down against the ground, which caused her to bleed and broke her nose. She was not resisting or refusing to share the toy – the boy just wanted it. She still bears the scar on her nose.) You can observe this in a room of children, without being a parent. I suspect that you, although you may not remember it occurring, also experienced this when you were a toddler. Some of your playmates may have been less willing to share their toys, or demanded to have toys which you were not resisting sharing. It is the difference in the age at which the trait expresses itself which differentiates the willingness/unwillingness to share with the willingness/unwillingness to learn to read which marks the former as a more basic human trait, than the latter, and makes changing the former trait much more difficult than changing the latter.
Post-script:
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing lowly about being a philosophy students. I was once one myself. The world would be a much better place is students were required to take an introductory Philosophy course as early ash high-school. Along with learning to play chess.
This discussion is veering well off from the OP now, but my view is that the inclination to share, as manifested e.g. in how toddlers behave, has only a very tenuous connection with the question of societal and economic inequality.
ReplyDeleteWe sometimes think about all countries that have capitalist economies as if they were in one box. But a couple of minutes reflection will suggest that there are different varieties of capitalism and significant differences in institutions and political cultures, and these must have a bearing on the degree of inequality. Even in the era of global neoliberalism, there is less economic inequality in, say, Denmark than in the U.S. Is that because Danish 2-year-olds are inherently less selfish than American 2-year-olds, or is it rather a matter of different political cultures and a different societal ethos (to borrow Max Richards' word)?
LFC,
ReplyDeleteProf. Wolff is referring to income inequality throughout the world, not just in Denmark.
Last week, as I watched the nightly news on the PBS New Hour, it was one depressing about the human condition after the other: Haitians are desperately trying to get out of Haiti because armed gangs are threatening everybody who lives, venturing out to go shopping of to school can result in your being kidnapped and held for ransom, or killed; the Southern U.S. border is being besieged by migrants seeking a safe haven from their homelands in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela; citizens of Syria suffering from the earthquake and the civil war are crowded into refugee camps in Syria and Turkey; children in Afghanistan and the Central Republic of Congo are starving; and on and on.
Watching this panorama of human suffering and misery, I thought, “How much would it take in financial contributions from every person in the developed world (the U.S. and the European Union, let’s say) would it take to raise the income levels of each of these people to a decent living standard on a daily basis, year after year – not necessarily to be equal to every human in the developed world, but a decent living standard? Could it be done with a monthly contribution from every such individual of $100 per month, for example? In the United States alone, in 2005, of the 113,146,000 households, 45.13% of the households had income exceeding $50,000/annum.: https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/h/Household_income_in_the_United_States.htm
If each of these households donated $100/month, or $1,200/yr., this would total approximately $6,127,534,800 per year. And some households earning more than $100,000 (15.73% = 178,607,800) could donate more than $100/mo. $6 billion per yr., just from the United States could relieve a lot of poverty in the world. Would it alleviate all the poverty. No, but add all of the countries in the European Union, and we have the ability to relieve most of the poverty in the world.
How many of your neighbors who earn over $50,000/yr. would be willing to contribute, i.e., share, $1,200 of their income every year in order to substantially reduce world hunger and poverty?
Marc
ReplyDeleteI don't know the answer to that question.
I myself give $12 to Oxfam every month, or $144 a year. (The IRS goes back and forth on its rules, but I usu can't take it as a charitable deduction bc I don't itemize deductions.) It's a small amt but then I have, at the moment, a relatively (everything is relative) small income.
People who can afford it shd give more, but private giving won't solve most of these problems. But that's a whole other discussion.
Rereading Prof. Wolff’s original post, I see that he did limit his concern about disparities in income and wealth distribution to the U.S. Therefore, if as LFC suggests, toddlers in Denmark are more likely to learn to share due to the socio-economic ethos of Denmark, it has no relevance to the impact of the socio-economic ethos in the U.S. has on teaching U.S. toddlers to share. In addition, applying the figures I calculated above, donating $6 Billion per year to eliminate poverty in the U.S. could achieve a lot in reducing the income and wealth disparity in this country. But how many Americans earning over $50,000/per year would be willing to “share” $1,200 of their income per year in order to ameliorate that income/wealth disparity? Well, clearly not many Republicans, without imposing a work permit requirement on the beneficiaries, and even then, probably not as much as $1,200/per year from every Republican household earning over $50,000.
ReplyDeleteWell, if humans are made extinct by AI technology, disparities in income and wealth distribution among humans will not matter. And our new AI overseers will have no use for wealth, so they will be fine. Keeping up with the Jones’s will be become extinct with human extinction.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnn.com/2023/05/30/media/artificial-intelligence-warning-reliable-sources/index.html
Well Marc, what would ascendant AI along with the extinction of humans portend for the rest of life on earth?
ReplyDeleteWould they resurge? Would some species replace humans as the standard bearer of intelligent animal life?
Could life resist AI?
And why could we not fight AI by means of computer viruses?
ReplyDeleteNot all hope is lost, to my amateur mind
Howie,
ReplyDeleteI suspect that advanced AI technology would be able to protect itself from any human invented viruses. I think the concerns of these experts needs to be taken seriously. But, given human nature to want to push the envelope of science, no efforts to prevent AI from advancing to the level at which it threatens human extinction will succeed. In Star Trek, did humans prevail against the Borg? It’s been a while since I watched the series.
When I was born FDR was president, the top marginal tax rate was 90%, finance was ~2% of the economy, wage growth tracked with productivity, and Taft-Hartley wasn't law.
ReplyDeleteThe top MR now is 37%, finance is ~8%, and we've had decades of union busting legislation and court decisions. One of our two political parties is a coalition of reactionaries, fascists, and Christian nationalists and we are in a Second Gilded Age.
Things can change. In 1932 it was inconceivable that with in five years we would have unemployment insurance, Social Security, the Wagner Act, REA, CCC, etc. so change can happen. 2009 was a missed opportunity.
"...kind of fundamental decisions that shd, in a genuine democracy, be the prerogative and province of the whole society..."
Given the cyclical Jacksonianism of a solid plurality of our population, perhaps elitist buffers aren't all that bad.
Profiteering and a right-sized military are separate issues. Jay Cooke et al did very well by doing good and Truman made his bones investigating corruption and profiteering in a necessary war. Given China's trajectory as well as the terrorist habits of its soon to be right-sized vassal state Russia, I don't see downsizing as a possibility.
https://fas.org/publication/china-is-building-a-second-nuclear-missile-silo-field/
BTW, the Four Olds are really back (interesting videos):
(Notice who wasn't invited.)
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-05-18/President-Xi-watches-performance-with-Central-Asian-leaders-1jUB5EI8RJ6/index.html
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-04-04/Live-Ceremony-pays-tribute-to-Chinese-ancestor-Yellow-Emperor-1iJ5XjluMJq/index.html
Marc, the Reade thing is "of course" but useful idiot is most likely. Steven Seagal as a neighbor - what a deal! Our far-left and right cohorts are full of them. And we never did find all the Americans.
"Could life resist AI?"
ReplyDeleteFolks, we are on computers now. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords!
I’m sorry, aaall, but your obscure reference puzzles me. What does Steven Seagal (the martial arts actor?) have to do with Tara Reade and missing Americans?? A Google search of Seagal’s name turned up an SEC investigation of him related to his being a spokesperson for a bitcoin offering, and some crazy novel he wrote involving a conspiracy of the Deep State, Mexican drug cartel, Islamist terrorist, and Barack Obama. Please explain. (Seagal is originally from Lansing, Michigan, btw.)
ReplyDeleteaaall,
ReplyDeleteOne of the experts expressing concern regarding the threat which AI poses said, "Tigers have very sharp teeth and claws. We are smarter than them, so we can put them in cages. What if tigers were smarter than us?'
Marc, may be of interest:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/31/2172426/-Tara-Reade-s-long-and-bumpy-road-to-Moscow-isn-t-a-surprise
Probably she should stay on the ground floor. Seagal is a total jerk who is a Putin fan boy and currently lives in Russia. Waste of space. Played cop on a bogus drug raid and wound up killing the family's dog.
While McCarthy and Cohn were obsessing about a Jewish dentist making O-4 there were actual Americans. Fox did a documentary about one family.
If felids were smarter then us there would be no us. Pre sapiens would have been lunch.
Another obscure reference by our master of obscurity, aaall. For those who are wondering, “Who the hell is the Jewish dentist aaall is referring to,” he is referring to Dr. Irving Peress, who was a member of the Army Dental Corps and served at Fort Kilmer, N.J. He was promoted to major in 1953. An anonymous note was sent to the Senate Government Operations Committee, headed by Sen. McCarthy, whose legal counsel was attorney Roy Cohn (a closet homosexual), claiming that Dr. Peress had been given the promotion even though he was under surveillance for alleged communist activities. Sen. McCarthy launched a Senate investigation, claiming that the special treatment given to Dr. Peress was indicative of communist infiltration of the U.S. Army. In an effort to resolve the issue, the Army issued Peress an honorable discharge, which only exacerbated the matter. Dr. Peress appeared before McCarthy’s Committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment. Sen. McCarthy referred to him as a “Fifth Amendment Communist.” After the hearings were concluded, and Dr. Peress returned to his private dental practice, he received anti-Semitic hate mail and his home was stoned, with rocks being thrown through the windows of his children’s bedroom.
ReplyDeletePeress retired in 1982. He died in 2014, at the age of 97.
I happened to pick up in hard copy the current issue of Harper's. The lead article is a critique of U.S. foreign policy, w/ specific though not exclusive reference to Ukraine. The authors are both well known in this area. I haven't properly read the whole thing yet and am not sure I am in total agreement but it's a good statement of one perspective. Neither Marc nor aaall will find it congenial.
ReplyDeletehttps://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/
LFC,
ReplyDeleteOkay, I'll read it as soon as I have the time.
Thanks, LFC, though I doubt it will find a welcome among those who focus on the event rather than the context
ReplyDeletea couple of thoughts:
ReplyDelete"It would also mean that, while Paris and Berlin won’t find Moscow’s internal arrangements to their taste, they will resume economic and trade relations with Russia and build on myriad other areas of common interest."
Wow! Let's have another swing at a Concert of Europe because the first one worked out so well. The USSR ended because building socialism didn't work out well (except for some gangsters) and the Warsaw Pact didn't end as a good will gesture; it ended because the members wanted out so they could join NATO which they insisted on doing.
"In practice, this would mean, for example, that the Baltic states and Poland would enjoy the same large, but ultimately circumscribed, degree of sovereignty as, say, Canada does."
Eh? So two imperial powers conspire to sell out some smaller states? That's a good thing?
The Chinese bases in Mexico thing is just tiresome. Any Mexican president who is thinking along those lines needs to ponder the fate of Maximilian I, and we just get more folks claiming asylum.
"It would also mean that, while Paris and Berlin won’t find Moscow’s internal arrangements to their taste, they will resume economic and trade relations with Russia and build on myriad other areas of common interest."
Again, that worked out so well the last time. Global warming and tech saved the day but... This reminds me of the scene in Goodfellas where the tavern owner makes a deal with Paulie for protection and winds up with a looted, burned out hulk. Part of wisdom is learning who you don't want to/can't deal with.
Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Federation have been bad actors since forever - leopard, spots, etc. I guess IR Realists will never get that. Pretending that Russia is to be dealt with as a responsible power because of some decaying nukes in the sense that the US/Europe/NATO and the PRC are powers is delusional. Ending a personalist dictatorship in a nation with little to no rational cultural/political capital is going to be dicy but that is the situation we face. No amount of both-siding will change that.
I'm assuming that the formation of the Federation was but the first step in the forming of a right-sized Russia. Perhaps in the end there can be only one - well, maybe two - hey, I didn't design this world or our species.
IR Realists need to step back.
"Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Federation have been bad actors since forever."
ReplyDeleteSo nothing the Russians have ever done or can ever do can ever pass muster? To me this comes across as Russophobia. We saw some of the consequences of that when the semi-realist Russophobe Brzezinski had some unfortunate influence on US foreign policy.
And since the IR Realists (of various sorts) aren't that influential anyway, what are they to step back from? From offering their views to a public that is mostly just not interested anyway. So they're really just being told to shut up? Because some find their views unpalatable? Cancel culture strikes again.