Ignorance of Income Inequality is Damaging to our Society

Three years ago the Occupy Wall Street movement got America’s attention with the cry of “We are the 99%.” Income inequality was put under a spotlight for a time. But how far did the understanding penetrate? Unfortunately, not very far.  

First, in a recent poll the average American thought CEOs made 30 times the wage of their employees, which hasn’t been true for 50 years. Today the figure is ten times as much—over 300 times.

Second, most people are completely unaware of the extent of wealth inequality, which is much worse than income inequality.  The wealthiest 20% in the U.S. own about 84% of the wealth. Think about that for a moment: only 16% of wealth is left for over three-quarters of the population. When you get to the bottom half of the population, those 155 million people own only about 2% of the total wealth.

To see an illustration of the income and wealth inequality in the United States, watch this episode of a TV show I did with Arthur Hancock in 2010.

The chart above, created by Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at Bard College, vividly shows one of the contributors to the rise of income inequality in the last few decades. The graph portrays the distribution of national income growth during economic expansions since WWII. The blue represents the bottom 90%, the red the top 10%. In the last thirty years all the gains have gone to the wealthy, in fact, in the latest expansion most Americans have been losers—the truth is most of us don’t even realize we’re in an expansion, the Great Recession hasn’t ended for us yet.

In a recent column, “Invisible Rich,” Paul Krugman asks:

So how can people be unaware of this development [massive income inequality], or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have. We may notice, and feel aggrieved about, college kids driving luxury cars; but we don’t see private equity managers commuting by helicopter to their immense mansions in the Hamptons. The commanding heights of our economy are invisible because they’re lost in the clouds…

Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is. And defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate…

Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

And the wealthy, in control of the media and the government, have a vested interest in keeping us ignorant.

Greed is a Killer

Recently I watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story of three men prospecting for gold in the mountains of Mexico. It’s a tale of greed; how the lust for money corrupts the human heart. All of the men are affected to some degree, and the character played by Humphrey Bogart is driven insane by the power of his greed. In the end it kills him.

I related this to a friend of mine who is a devotee of a guru in India. She said, “My guru tells a story of greed too!”

A yogi went into the woods to find a cave to live in. At the same time, a group of four thieves were walking through the woods on their way to find something to rob. The yogi went into a cave, and just as the thieves passed by came running out, yelling “There’s a killer in there!” The thieves were intrigued and entered the cave. There they found a pile of treasure. Each of the four immediately started plotting how to get all the treasure for himself. The two senior members sent the younger ones off for a cart to haul the loot, and then lay in ambush and killed them on their return…

My friend couldn’t remember all the details, but the end result was all four of the thieves lay dead. The treasure was indeed a killer.

The Importance of Hard Copies

Recently I watched the film “V for Vendetta.” The movie is set in an authoritarian future, and dangerous books and artwork have long ago been eliminated from people’s lives. But V, the hero who is resisting the authoritarians, has an underground home filled with books and art that he has “rescued” from the censors’ vaults. Seeing the books piled high in one of the rooms, I was reminded of the importance of hard copies.

When information is digital, access to it can be taken away very easily. For example, if you own an e-reader, you don’t really own the books on it. The Kindle Store user agreement makes that very clear: “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.” Amazon can remove a book from your device at any time.

Ironically, the premier example of this so far are some George Orwell books. The person who uploaded them for sale on Amazon did not own the copyright. When Amazon realized the error in 2009, those books just disappeared from the Kindles of the people who thought they’d purchased the books. And there was no notice or explanation from Amazon.

Maybe this seems insignificant now, but if at some future point we have an authoritarian government, any books that that government disliked could be disappeared at the stroke of a button. It’s not so easy to collect and burn every book.

I like reading on my Kindle; I like the convenience of looking up words and making notes onscreen. It’s nice being able to pack just one small device that holds multiple books when I travel. It’s nice not having to dust more books on my bookshelves. Yet understanding the importance of hard copies makes me resolve to keep buying physical books.

This Mark Fiore cartoon illustrates the importance of another object that is being made obsolete by our new devices: printed maps. Who needs to worry about carrying maps when you can just use your GPS or pull up the map on your phone? But devices and Internet connections fail, and if you’re out in the wilderness that failure can be fatal. 

Nickel and Dimed - On Not Getting By in America

Mike Lukovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This cartoon really impacted me because I saw it just after finishing Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

This book was inspired by the welfare-to-work reform of the 1990s; it attempts to answer the question: can a person live on minimum wage? Ms. Ehrenreich courageously endeavored to find out by actually living the life of a low-wage worker (she was in her 50s which makes her willingness to undergo the humiliations and physical strain even more admirable). She spent a month in three different cities, working as a chain restaurant waitress, maid, and Wal-Mart associate. She lived in housing and ate the food that was affordable at her wages. She lived in horrible places—a tiny trailer, a squalid motel, and ate fast food because of a lack of kitchen facilities. Working one job full-time, she could barely afford to cover her most basic expenses, and she had a lot of advantages: no children, and because this was a short-term experiment, she didn’t have to worry about medical expenses or things like clothing (other than what she had to purchase for the job).

This experiment was done in 1999 and 2000, before the bursting of the dot-com bubble, when the country was experiencing prosperity and jobs were easy to get. This was also before corporations learned that they could save money by not hiring people as full-time workers. Ms. Ehrenreich tried to work two jobs so she could afford a better apartment; she just didn’t have the stamina required to pull off cleaning hotel rooms in the morning and waiting tables in the evening.

She also discusses the psychological effect of low-income work, that it encourages submissiveness and lack of initiative. At the same time, she makes clear that these are hard-working people, doing their best with the pitiful resources at their disposal.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, things are much worse, which after reading her account, is hard to imagine. Certainly, jobs are much harder to get. Ms. Ehrenreich was able to get a job almost instantly in 1999; today she might have spent her entire 30-day allotment just finding a job (if she was lucky).

The U.S.: A Split-Personality Superpower

Mark Fiore is one of my favorite editorial cartoonists, creating short animated videos every week. This week's cartoon suggests the US is "a split-personality superpower, condemned to wander the earth for all eternity fighting our other selves."

A couple of Fiore’s examples: When ISIS overran the Iraqi military positions a month or so ago, the Iraq soldiers ran away and abandoned their equipment, including tanks. You can see the ISIS militants having some fun with their new toys in the VICE documentary on ISIS. Now when we bomb ISIS we're bombing our own military equipment.

In the last couple of weeks Egypt and the UAE have bombed Libya a few times, and even though they're our "allies" and their troops were trained by the U.S. and use our military equipment, they denied to the Obama Administration that they'd done it.

A lot of good money to be made by supplying the armies of the world with the tools of their trade...

The split personality metaphor works in another way: most Americans believe our country is a positive force for good in the world. We vastly overestimate the amount of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid. We complain about having to be the world's policeman. Yet we're blind to the fact that we are the world's biggest exporter of weapons which means a substantial portion of our economy depends upon continuing war and violence in the world. The U.S. is badly in need of therapy to face some hard truths about its personality.

Are Animals Conscious?

Are animals conscious? Consciousness has been called the “hard problem” of philosophy; scientists still don’t have any idea what human consciousness is. But it seems that for most people, consciousness is still on that ever-shrinking list of things that separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom; only humans have consciousness. But is that true, or is it just more evidence of human arrogance?

Lately I have seen a number of things that have made me question the presumption that animals aren’t conscious. The first is my sweet cat, KittyCat. Sometime about six months ago she and I got in the habit of brushing her every evening about 7:00. I am regularly amazed at how she turns up in the living room every day about that hour. It’s usually the time we are finishing dinner, so you could say she’s using the clue of the sounds of dishes being washed, but there are many times when we haven’t eaten and she still shows up. We joke about her Mickey-Mouse wristwatch, but truly it amazes me how she is so aware.

The Three Meanings of Present

Many Eastern spiritual traditions teach the wisdom of being present in every moment of now. This principle was brought to the attention of Westerners in the 1960s through Ram Dass’s classic Be Here Now, and more recently with Eckhart Tolle’s bestseller The Power of Now.

Recently I was contemplating the meaning of "present," and I realized it has three meanings: "here" (when the teacher calls your name you reply, "present!"), "now" (an event occurs in the present), and "gift" (“here’s your birthday present!”).

What I like about this trinity of meanings is that being present means more than “being here now”; being present also means embracing what is as a gift.

When I was in high school I used to make a calendar in the last few months of school and took delight in crossing off every day until the last day of school. One day I realized how crazy this attitude was—I’m celebrating getting a day over with? As if a day is something to endure? What is life except the collection of innumerable days just like this one, filled with a mixture of positives and negatives?

A beloved cat, Fluffles, helped me learn this lesson. At one point in my life she and I would wake up every morning in bed together. Every day the first thing I would become aware of was the sound of her purring, and it communicated to me, “I’m happy that we have another day to live and to love each other.” Yes I finally realized, that’s the way to live. Not seeing life as an endurance test but as a gift!

The gift of presence has another meaning also. Werner Erhard (founder of est) once said, "The greatest gift you can give another is just to be with them."

As I have learned to be more present, I have seen how true Mr. Erhard’s insight is: when you are present with another, they often open up like a flower. Presence is like a calming wave flowing through you, and other people can relax in its wake.