Let us set Karl Marx to one side and try to get some sense
of the state of things as we see them here in the United States in the third
decade of the 21st century. I do not have a coherent story to tell
about this so these will be somewhat scattered remarks but perhaps they can
prompt an interesting discussion.
I am someone whose personal memories go back more than 70
years, and certain things strike me as I look around me at the United States.
The first, not surprisingly, is the very great inequality in income and the
much greater inequality in wealth. Thinking of America as a collection of
households rather than individuals, I see a country in which median household
income is something less than $70,000 a year, which means that half of all
households take in less than that. But there are a number of very wealthy
households which each year earn the equivalent of a millennium of the median.
Think about that for a moment and just try to get your mind around it. There
are households that in one year earn as much as the median household would earn
in a thousand years. Wealth of course is much more unequally distributed than
that. One could without difficulty but together a foursome for bridge whose collective
wealth was greater than the accumulated holdings of one half of all the people
in the United States.
As Thomas Piketty showed us in his very useful book, the
progressive diminution of the inequality in the distribution of wealth which
took place during the years when I was a young man was not a harbinger of
things to come but a 30 year anomaly caused in large part by the effects of a
worldwide depression followed by a world war. The structure of inequality that
existed in the late 19th century and in the very earliest decades of
the 20th century has now reasserted itself in the early years of the
21st century with no sign of doing anything but getting worse. Some critics of Piketty took him to task for
lumping together private home ownership with productive resources under the
heading of “wealth.” There is some merit in that criticism and if you drop out
private homeownership from your calculations the inequality in the distribution
of wealth is of course enormously greater.
Ownership of capital is, by and large, in private hands but
there are several extremely important exceptions that complicate the economic
picture. Think for a moment about four major spheres of activity in the United
States: education, medicine, the military, and local, state, and federal
government. Elementary and secondary education in America is almost entirely
public, not private, despite the best efforts of Betsy DeVos. Tertiary
education is a more complicated picture in America, although not in the same
way in other advanced capitalist economies, but in the years after the second
world war the public higher education sector grew much more rapidly than the
private sector and continues to dominate the university and college world
despite efforts now to undermine public control of higher education. The
military, which is an enormous institutional structure absorbing a great deal
of social resources, is also almost entirely public, once again despite the best
efforts of the brother of Betsy DeVos. Finally government is no longer, if it
ever was, merely the Executive Committee of the ruling class and has become an
extremely large part of the economy.
Despite these exceptions, it remains true that productive
capital is for the most part privately owned, so that the collective wealth of
the country cannot easily or significantly be put to uses that are collectively
decided upon.
With the perspective of more than seven decades, I find
several things about those years extremely striking. The first is the contrast
between the steady increase in the productivity of labor and the stagnation of
real wages for a large portion of the economically active part of the
population. The second is the important change in the proportion of the
population of working age. At one end, the almost sevenfold increase in the
number of people with four-year college degrees means that for at least a third of young people the age at which they enter the labor force full time has
been put off for four years or more. A corresponding change has taken place in
the proportion of the population who are beyond working years. Much of the increase in life expectancy over the past century is a result of a dramatic
reduction in infant mortality, but if you compare life expectancy at age 65 now
with what it was when I was young you will find that those reaching the end of
their work life can now on average expect to live twice as long as they could
back then. The Social Security program was instituted at the time when most
people living long enough to get Social Security benefits could expect to get
them for only a few years. Now they can expect 15 years or more of Social
Security checks.
Thus even during periods of full employment, a smaller proportion of Americans is supporting a larger proportion of the young and the
old. This fact makes the grotesque inequality of income and wealth even more of
a pressing problem. An extraordinary story in the New York Times last Sunday
summarized population data that point to a worldwide decline in fertility with profound implications for the economic organization of
21st century countries, capitalist or otherwise. The statistic that
stunned me was a projection that between now and 2100, the population of China
will in all likelihood drop from 1.4 billion to 700 million!
To bring to a conclusion these scattered observations and
reflections, let me say just a word about what the pandemic here in the United
States has taught us about labor in the 21st century. When things were
going well, before the pandemic hit, it was easy and comfortable and terribly
advanced to talk about the fact that everyone these days was in the information
business, working on a computer or cell phone, not with a shovel or harvester.
Then the pandemic hit and all of a sudden everybody was talking about “essential
workers” whom society could not afford to send home for several months to keep
themselves safe. Doctors and nurses of course were considered essential
workers, but so too were bus drivers and grocery store clerks and meatpacking
workers and farmers and long-haul truckers and everyone else who makes it possible
for all of us to survive day by day. Needless to say, the touching celebrations
of these essential workers did not actually reach so far as to increase their
wages any. But it was a helpful reminder that even in this postindustrial
information age, we really do need the labor of the men and women produce
our food, clothing, and shelter. Happily, as the pandemic comes to an end, we
can go back to pretending that those people do not exist and we can go on
paying them miserable wages so that Jeff Bezos can buy MGM.
