The boot or the face?

For some reason, “1984,” George Orwell’s book about a nightmarish society, has had a revival in the Trump era.

Maybe it’s the weather.

The New York Times reported it was top of Amazon’s list in early 2017. Around the same time, Penguin USA reported a 9,500 percent increase in sales over a few days. It’s a hot item nearly 70 years since its publication.

It’s probably a good thing that more people have been reading it. It’s probably a bad thing that people felt like they had to.

A haunting line from the book that has stuck in my mind: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Some days I think that might not be too far off — unless we act to prevent it. There are dangerous trends that, if unaddressed, point towards a disastrous future.

The top two are economic inequality and climate change.

Let’s start with inequality, which is reaching record levels and is likely to worsen, since returns from wealth grow much faster than productivity or wages. This doesn’t just impact life chances; it affects the length and quality of life itself.

Research shows that one’s relative position within society has a huge impact on health and longevity. People in higher social positions tend to live longer and be healthier than those below them — even if you control for behavioral factors such as smoking, exercise, obesity and diet.

Studies by British epidemiologist Michael Marmot suggest that the key ingredients to longevity and health are a sense of control over one’s life and the ability to fully participate in society. These diminish as we move down the ladder.

According to Marmot, “It is inequality in these that plays a big part in producing the social gradient in health.” The wider the divide, the sharper are the effects.

In “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better,” epidemiologists Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate E. Pickett expand on these themes. Using international data, they found that high degrees of inequality have negative effects not just on mental and physical health, but also on things like substance abuse and addiction, education, incarceration, obesity, social mobility, violence, social trust, teen pregnancies and child well-being.

While social problems pile up at the bottom, “The effects of inequality are not confined to the poor. A growing body of research shows that inequality damages the social fabric of the whole society.”

Harvard researcher Ichiro Kawachi has described inequality as a “social pollutant.”

The concentration of wealth makes it easier for the very wealthy to buy political influence and further stack the deck, endangering democracy. One person/one vote is turning into one dollar/one vote. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, with the state, including its means of repression, effectively being captured and controlled by economic elites.

Overheated economic systems are also prone to catastrophic recessions and depressions, which have devastating impacts on communities, as we saw during the most recent recession.

Widespread inequality increases social tensions around the world, and the frustration it causes is a fertile breeding ground for toxic political movements, hate groups, religious extremism, armed conflict, racism and scapegoating vulnerable people. Movements such as these feed on the pain but ultimately will fail to cure it.

In the worst case, authoritarian political movements can gain political power and use it to advance the interests of elites while repressing popular resistance. It’s happened before and the results weren’t pretty.

Unfortunately, the same inequality of economic and political power is also being used to block meaningful action on climate change, since those who profit from a fossil fuel economy prefer short-term profit to long-term sustainability.

The playbook is pretty obvious: use wealth and political clout to delay action on climate until it’s too late, then say it was going to happen anyway.

Meanwhile its effects include things like extreme weather events, heating oceans, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, extinctions, crop failures, health impacts, damaged habitats, invasive species, mass displacement and migration, conflict over scarce resources, water contamination, desertification, epidemics, collapsing fisheries, droughts and floods and a host of other unpleasantries that will affect everyone but hit poorer communities hardest.

And that fun is only beginning.

If this keeps up, things don’t look good for the human face. The smart money will be on the boot.

I’m not sure what it will take to keep that from happening, but it probably won’t be business as usual.

In 1933, the great German Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer pondered what a just response from people of faith would be required to deal with the evils of his time, particularly the persecution of the Jews.

He came up with three possibilities.

One was to “ask the state whether its actions are legitimate and in accordance with its character as state, i.e. it can throw the state back on its responsibilities.” That’s worth a shot, even though it hasn’t worked too well lately.

Another option was to “aid the victims of state action,” since “the church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society ...” That’s always in order, even if it doesn’t solve the problem.

The third option was a bit edgier: it was “not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.”

Just a thought.

(This appeared in today's Gazette-Mail.)

Leveling out

El Cabrero has been a bit of a blogging slacker lately, a trend that may continue over the next several days due to road trips and such. I'm not sure whether it was a question of being tired or uninspired, but I guess the two might be related.

Anyhow, here's an interesting tidbit I came across lately from the book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett:

A dramatic example of how reductions in inequality can lead to rapid improvements in health is the experience of Britain during the two world wars. Increases in life expectancy for civilians during the war decades were twice those seen throughout the rest of the twentieth century. In the decades which contain the world wars, life expectancy increased between 6 and 7 years for men and women, whereas in the decades before, between and after, life expectancy increased by between 1 and 4 years. Although the nation's nutritional status improved with rationing in the Second World War, this was not true for the First World War, and material living standards declined during both wars. However, both wartimes were characterized by full employment and considerably narrower income differences--the result of deliberate government policies to promote co-operation with the war effort. During the Second World War, for example, working-class incomes rose by 9 per cent, while incomes of the middle class fell by 7 per cent; rates of relative poverty were halved. The resulting sense of camaraderie and social cohesion not only led to better health--crime rates also fell. 

Three thoughts occur to me. One, it would be nice to get the same result minus the world war thing. Two, these days wars don't do much to reduce inequality. Instead, they only make it great in lots of areas.  Three, the Whackadoodle element would call the authors freedom haters.

NOT SO BAD. Here's economist Dean Baker on the latest jobs numbers, which are giving Whackadoodles hissy fits.

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE. Lots of people have wondered whether things have really changed since Massey Energy was bought out by Alpha Natural Resources. I've always said that whatever its flaws, Alpha is significantly less evil than Massey was back in the day. In fact, in the extremely unlikely event that I was in charge of Alpha, I'd make the company slogan be: "Alpha...we're less evil." Can you imagine former Massey CEO Don Blankenship talking like this?

A CROCODILE TEAR FOR PLUTOCRATS here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED