Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Paine’
“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”*…
Brian Klaas on the state of the American Dream…
Intergenerational poverty—in which those who are born poor stay poor throughout their lives—is an obvious blight on society. Its persistence also flies in the face of many meritocratic myths about poverty being purely a reflection of limited talents and poor choices rather than structural and social factors.
But how persistent is intergenerational poverty? And which countries are best—and worst—at tackling it?
Recently published research in Nature set out to answer that exact question, with a comparison between the United States, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Denmark. This design allowed the researchers to examine differential rates of intergenerational poverty among five rich democracies that are ostensibly peer nations.
The findings are brutal reading for the United States. As the researchers explain:
We found that the United States has a much stronger intergenerational poverty than the four other high-income countries examined. Spending all of one’s childhood in poverty in the United States is associated with a 42 percentage point increase in the mean poverty rate during early adulthood. This is more than four times stronger than in Denmark and more than twice as strong as in Australia or the United Kingdom.
Crucially, though, through a series of clever research methods, they were able to identify the key drivers of the variation between these countries. And, as they point out, the biggest factor that makes the United States an outlier is tied to government policy around taxes and the social safety net. Using sophisticated modelling, they were able to demonstrate that “if the United States were to adopt the tax and transfer insurance effects of its peer countries, its intergenerational poverty persistence could decrease by more than one-third.”
This is the kind of social research that deserves more attention; it’s solid evidence that the persistence of intergenerational poverty is, to a large extent, a policy choice. That’s depressing, of course, but it’s also a call to action: these are the stakes of politics.
The governance choices we make have enormous impacts on the life chances of millions of people, and it’s why the pushback against bad policy is essential—and why depressed complacency about the currently dystopian state of the world, while understandable, is self-defeating and counterproductive.
There are solutions—and the ripple effects of our actions taken now can get us closer to implementing them, even (or especially) when it seems most hopeless…
Bracing– but painfully timely– reading: “The American Outlier of Intergenerational Poverty,” from @brianklaas.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
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As we take the necessary steps, we might recall that it was on this date in 1775 that Thomas Paine published African Slavery in America – the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.
The full text is here.
“There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”*…
Trevor Jackson on Martin Wolf‘s new book, The Crisis in Democratic Capitalism, and a fundamental question it raises: if globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?…
Something has gone terribly wrong. In his 2004 book Why Globalization Works, the economics journalist Martin Wolf wrote that “liberal democracy is the only political and economic system capable of generating sustained prosperity and political stability.” He was articulating the elite consensus of the time, a belief that liberal democratic capitalism was not only a coherent form of social organization but in fact the best one, as demonstrated by the West’s victory in the cold war. He went on to argue that critics who “complain that markets encourage immorality and have socially immoral consequences, not least gross inequality,” were “largely mistaken,” and he concluded that a market economy was the only means for “giving individual human beings the opportunity to seek what they desire in life.”
Wolf wrote those words midway through a four-decade global expansion of markets. Throughout the 1980s in Britain, the United States, and France, governments led by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and François Mitterrand set about privatizing public assets and services, cutting welfare state provisions, and deregulating markets. At the same time, a set of ten policies known as the “Washington Consensus” (because they were shared by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury) brought privatization, liberalization, and globalization to Latin America following a series of sovereign debt crises. In the 1990s a similar set of policies, then known as “shock therapy,” suddenly converted the formerly Communist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to free markets. Around the Global South, and especially in the rapidly industrializing countries of East Asia after the 1997 financial crisis, “structural adjustment” policies that were conditions for IMF bailouts again brought liberalization, privatization, and fiscal discipline. The same policies were enforced on the European periphery after 2009, in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, again, either as conditions for bailouts or through EU fiscal restrictions and restrictive European Central Bank policy. Today there are far more markets in far more aspects of human life than ever before.
But the sustained prosperity and political stability that these policies were meant to create have proved elusive. The global economy since the 1980s has been riven by repeated financial crises. Latin America endured a “lost decade” of economic growth. The 1990s in Russia were worse than the Great Depression had been in Germany and the United States. The austerity and high-interest-rate policies after the 1997 East Asia crisis restored financial stability but at the cost of domestic recessions, and contributed to political instability and the repudiation of incumbent parties in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, as they did again across Europe after 2009–2010. Global economic growth rates in the era of globalization have been about half what they were in the less globalized postwar decades. Around the world, violent racist demagogues keep winning elections, and although they all seem very happy with the idea of private property, they are openly hostile to the rule of law, political liberalism, individual freedom, and other ostensible preconditions and cultural accompaniments to market economies. Both democracy and globalization seem to be in retreat in practice as well as in ideological popularity. Or, as Wolf writes in his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism:
Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa. We are no longer able to combine the operations of the market economy with stable liberal democracy. A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites.
What happened?
Martin Wolf is probably the most influential economics commentator in the English-speaking world. He has been chief editorial writer for the Financial Times since 1987 and their lead economics analyst since 1996. Before that he trained in economics at Oxford and worked at the World Bank starting in 1971, including three years as senior economist and a year spent working on the first World Development Report in 1978. This is his fifth book since moving to the Financial Times. The blurbs and acknowledgments are stuffed with central bankers, financiers, Nobel laureates, and celebrity academics. The bibliography contains ninety-six references to the author himself.
Wolf’s diagnosis is impossible to dispute: “Neither politics nor the economy will function without a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” But, he observes, those values have run into crisis all over the world, and, especially since about 2008,
…people feel even more than before that the country is not being governed for them, but for a narrow segment of well-connected insiders who reap most of the gains and, when things go wrong, are not just shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else…
He describes in detail the mistaken policies of austerity in the US and Europe, the rise of a wasteful and extractive financial sector, the atomization and immiseration of formerly unionized workers, the pervasiveness of tax avoidance and evasion, and the general accumulation of decades of elite failure…
Read on for Wolf’s proposed remedies and Jacksons critiques: “Never Too Much,” from @nybooks.com.
And for an interview with Jackson that elaborates on his thoughts and their historical context, see here.
* Warren Buffett
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As we assess systems, we might send provocative birthday grretings to Founding Father Thomas Paine; he was born on this date in 1736 (O.S.; on February 9, 1737 per N.S., which accrued in Britain and its colonies in 1752). He is best known for Common Sense and The American Crisis, two influential pamphlets that helped to inspire colonial era American patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain.
But relevantly to the article above, in 1797 (after witnessing the birth and early years of the U.S. and spending time in France) he wrote Agrarian Justice, in which he proposed remedies for several of the (then nascent) ills discussed by Wolf and Jackson…
In response to the private sale of royal (or common) lands, Paine proposed a detailed plan to tax land owners [the “capitalists” of their day] once per generation to pay for the needs of those who have no land. Some consider this a precursor to the modern idea of citizen’s dividend or basic income. The money would be raised by taxing all direct inheritances at 10%, and “indirect” inheritances, those not going to close relations, at a somewhat higher rate. He estimated that to raise around £5,700,000 per year.
Around two-thirds of the fund would be spent on pension payments of £10 per year to every person over the age of 50, which Paine had taken as his average adult life expectancy.
Most of the remainder would be used to make fixed payments of £15 to every man and woman on reaching the age of 21, then the age of legal majority.
The small remainder of the money raised that was still unused would be used for paying pensions to “the lame and blind.”
For context, the average weekly wage of an agricultural labourer was around 9 shillings, which would mean an annual income of about £23 for an able-bodied man working throughout the year.
Paine’s proposal presaged the social safety net of later eras and governments, proposing seven entitlements to protect the poorest citizens from the ravages of market capitalism:
- Grants to subsidize schooling of 4 pounds per annum
- One-time payments to adults on reaching maturity
- One-time payments to newly married couples and new parents
- Eliminate taxes on working poor
- Back-to-work schemes
- Pensions for seniors
- Burial benefits to surviving spouses
and also provided a scheme of how to pay for them.
– source
“The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly”*…
The idea of a guaranteed flow of funds to allow anyone and everyone to meet basic needs– as we’re currently discussing it, a universal basic income– has been getting significant attention in recent decades. But as Karl Widerquist explains (in an excerpt from his recent book, Universal Basic Income). “UBI” dates back as a concept– and as a practice– many centuries…
Support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) has grown so rapidly over the past few years that people might think the idea appeared out of nowhere. In fact, the idea has roots going back hundreds or even thousands of years, and activists have been floating similar ideas with gradually increasing frequency for more than a century.
Since 1900, the concept of a basic income guarantee (BIG) has experienced three distinct waves of support, each larger than the last. The first, from 1910 to 1940, was followed by a down period in the 1940s and 1950s. A second and larger wave of support happened in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by another lull in most countries through about 2010. BIG’s third, most international, and by far largest wave of support began to take off in the early 2010s, and it has increased every year since then.
[But] We could trace the beginnings of UBI into prehistory, because many have observed that “prehistoric” (in the sense of nonliterate) societies had two ways of doing things that might be considered forms of unconditional income…
From pre-historic nomads, through ancient Athens, to Thomas Paine and then Henry George, Widerquist unspools the history of UBI, then walks through the “three waves” that began in the early 20th century, concluding with the current state of the debate: “The Deep and Enduring History of Universal Basic Income,” from @KarlWiderquist and @mitpress.
For more on the recent history of the UBI debate, see Widerquist’s essay, “Three Waves of Basic Income Support.”
And for a peak at the results of (small, incomplete, but encouraging) experiments in this direction, see: “Places across the U.S. are testing no-strings cash as part of the social safety net,” from @NPR.
* Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As we ponder poverty, we might send thoughtful birthday greeting to James Tobin; he was born on this date in 1918. An economist who contributed to the development of key ideas in the Keynesian economics of his generation, he made pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy, and financial markets– for which he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981.
Outside academia, Tobin is probably best known for his suggestion of a tax on foreign exchange transactions, now known as the “Tobin tax,” designed to reduce speculation in the international currency markets, which he saw as dangerous and unproductive.
And relevantly to the piece above, Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document in 1968 calling for the U. S. Congress to introduce that year a system of income guarantees and supplements– a UBI.
“Education is the key to unlock a golden door of freedom”*…
Historian (and author) Ada Palmer on what she convincingly argues is an unappreciated aspect of American cultural and political history…
Many shocking, new ideas shaped the American Experiment and related 18th century democratic ventures; as an historian of the period, I often notice that one of the most fundamental of them, and most shocking to a world which had so long assumed the opposite, often goes unmentioned — indeed sometimes denied — in today’s discussions of democracy: the belief that all people are educable. I think it’s urgent that we bring that principle back into the spotlight if we want to defend democracy from one of its common failure modes: pseudo-populist oligarchy.
Within “all men are created equal” lies the sub-principle that all people, or specifically all enfranchised citizens of a state (which often at the time meant white male adults, though some made it broader, or narrower) that all such people are, if given appropriate educational resources, capable of learning, exercising sound judgment, and acting on said judgment, thus that they all people are equally rational and capable of competent self-governance. This thesis does not assume that all people when adults are equally prepared to participate in government, but that all people when born have the capacity to absorb education if given access to it. Rare intellectual disabilities might make the education process challenging for certain individuals, but (the thesis argues) even then the right support and resources make education possible, and such situations are not the default human state. This is the thesis that all people are fundamentally educable.
Many in the 18th c. who thought democracy was absurd rejected it because they disagreed with this thesis, believing that the majority of people (even of white men) were not educable, i.e. that even with educational resources most people were born incapable of being guided by Reason and making sound political judgments. Those who believed this predicted that government by the people would collapse into absurdity, since it would be led by a parliament of fools…
[Palmer runs through pre-modern and Enlightenment thinking on the subject– most of which dismissed democracy as impractical on grounds that went to the incapacity of the many to understand and make intelligent decisions…]
It took a lot to get even a small radical fringe by 1750 to entertain the notion that all people–or even just all men–were created equally educable. A long survey of the causes would get unwieldy, but they include (among other things) contact with indigenous cultures in the Americas and other regions which had functional governments without European-style systems, revolutions in medicine and the understanding of the sense organs which undermined old hierarchy-enforcing ideas about how cognition and sensation functioned, second-order consequences of the rags-to-riches path opened by Renaissance courts employing scholars from any background so long as they had good Latin, and Protestantism’s second-order implication that, if people didn’t need priests as intermediaries between their prayers and God, perhaps they didn’t need aristocrats as intermediaries between them and power. But by 1750 that fringe existed, and had enough momentum to implement its experiment in the new United States, which most people who were considered sensible at the time thought would quickly degenerate into chaos, because they didn’t think most people were capable of understanding the world enough to vote sensibly, draft legislation, or serve in a congress, and that the tiny wise minority would be drowned out by the majority wanting to vote for dining on the king’s tab and killing all the lawyers…
Democracy can function, says Thomas Paine (to pick a spokesman for the US founders), because human beings are fundamentally educable, and if given a good teacher, a good reading list, and some newspapers, all human beings, or at least the overwhelming majority of them, will become capable of wise judgment and self-rule. One’s civic duty is not to identify the wise minority and put them in power, but to disseminate the tools of education so the majority can become wise. This thesis is opposed to aristocracy, to oligarchy, to timocracy, even to most forms of meritocracy, since education isn’t supposed to prepare people to be sorted out by the exam but to demonstrate that human beings are so excellent that everyone can pass it…
… Today’s America has seen decades of the intentional conservative-led starving and squeezing of public education, efforts to increase the disparity in education quality between public education and private or charter school education, conservative-led homeschool movements which aim to expose people to a narrow range of ideology, and also the devastation of newspapers, journalism, and a vast misinformation campaign. All this adds up to preventing many who are educable from becoming educated. Thomas Paine, and those I’m using him to represent, would recognize this as a sabotage of their system, one they would say might indeed enable Cade-style populism, which (as in Henry VI) is easy for ambitious elites to then harness to their own ends. Thus, Paine would say: of course the democracy isn’t working well if such an essential precondition is being sabotaged.
In sum, we need to talk more about the vital tie between democracy and the conviction that all people are created educable. It helps make clear how strategic the strangulation of educational resources is, and that one of the less loud but most dangerous threats to our confidence in democracy is the project to make it seem like most people can’t make sensible political judgments, reducing people’s confidence in democracy as a system by seeming to prove true conservative principle that there will always be a few who should rule and many who can’t. When I see conservative thinking start to show up in acquaintances (or Silicon Valley leaders) who consider themselves progressive but also consider themselves smart, it often begins with them feeling that most people are stupid and the world would be better off if the smart were in charge. One can often get such people to pause and reflect by bringing up the question of whether they think all people are fundamentally educable, and whether the solution isn’t to put the reins of power into genius hands but to put the Encyclopedia in everyone else’s. Information is key. Those peasants who shared commons maintained them sustainably for centuries because (as we now recognize) they were educated in the ways that mattered, they learned from families and communities to understand what they were doing, using local knowledge of commons, grazing etc. as they made choices. If one’s democratic state is the commons, people will likewise maintain it well, but not if they’re intentionally deprived of access to basic knowledge of how it works and what can harm or heal it, and drowned instead in deliberate falsehoods.
We all know we need to support education & good journalism, and combat misinformation, but revisiting the principle that all people are created educable is a good way to remember that these are not merely invaluable social goods, like sanitation or public parks. They were conceived from the start as essential components of modern democracy, in direct opposition to the many-centuries-old conservative principle that some are best to rule and others to be ruled. Enlightenment-style democracy cannot function without the conviction that all people are created educable. If we forget that, if we doubt it, if we let it shake our confidence in the experiment which didn’t turn into Jack Cade for more than two centuries (bets were not on America surviving for so long in 1776!), we risk opening the gates to the old failure mode of oligarchy rising when democracy wavers…
In support of the engine of the American Experiment: “All People Are Created Educable, a Vital Oft-Forgotten Tenet of Modern Democracy,” from @Ada_Palmer.
* George Washington Carver
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As we enable education, we might recall that it was on this date in 1818 (15 years after the Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase) that the “Convention respecting fisheries, boundary and the restoration of slaves” (also known as the London Convention, Anglo-American Convention of 1818, Convention of 1818, or most widely and most simply as the Treaty of 1818) was signed by The U.S. and the United Kingdom.
Primarily aimed at settling border disputes, the treaty set the Canada–United States border on the 49th parallel for most of its length. The British ceded all of Rupert’s Land south of the 49th parallel and east of the Continental Divide, including all of the Red River Colony south of that latitude, while the United States ceded the northernmost edge of the Missouri Territory north of the 49th parallel.
The treaty also allowed for joint occupation and settlement of the Oregon Country, known to the British and in Canadian history as the Columbia District of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and including the southern portion of its sister district New Caledonia.
“There is always something new out of Africa”*…
Afrofuturism is a fun and interesting subgenre of science fiction and philosophy:, but I kind of chuckle every time I see the word, because all futurism is actually Afrofuturism. Africa is literally the future of the entire world. Here is one of the two or three most important charts you will ever see:
Notice that this is the projection for total population. It has Africa just about equal to Asia by the end of the century, but if we were to look at only young population, Africa would have a clear majority here.
“Wait,” you may be about to ask. “Are these 80-year-ahead projections really reliable? What if African fertility falls?”
And the answer is: It’s going to fall! It’s already falling fast. As countries get richer their fertility rates drop; as Lyman Stone shows, Africa’s fertility rates are dropping faster, relative to their income level, than any other region except India…
A recent paper in The Lancet attempts to model how African population will change as women’s education and access to contraception (the two biggest things other than GDP that we know affect fertility) increase. They predict a population for Sub-Saharan Africa of about 3.4 billion by century’s end — only 0.8 billion lower than the UN median projection. That’s still an absolutely enormous fraction of humanity, and an even larger chunk of the young population.
Thus, the future of Africa is the future of humanity, despite the fact that Africa will experience a normal fertility transition and its population will eventually stabilize rather than explode. I don’t think people in the U.S. (or, probably, other regions) have come to grips with the full import of this.
But what happens to Africa is even more important, relative to the rest of the world, than these population numbers suggest! This is because Africa is still a mostly poor region. Economics teaches us that marginal utility — i.e. the amount life gets better when you get a little richer — is much higher for poor people. And with China and (to some degree) India industrializing successfully and seeing population growth slow, soon most of the extremely poor people in the world will probably reside in Africa.
So the future welfare of humanity depends crucially on whether Africa can make big strides against poverty — in other words, whether African countries can achieve substantial economic growth…
The fate of humanity in the 21st century and beyond hinges on whether African countries can figure out the riddle of industrialization.
Can Africa industrialize? Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) believes that it can: “All futurism is Afrofuturism.” The full argument (and more supporting charts and data) in the complete post.
* Pliny the Elder
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As we look to the future, we might recall that it was on this date in 1775 that an anonymous writer, now widely thought to be Thomas Paine, published “African Slavery in America,” the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.
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