What I Read – Edge.org Annual Question manuscript.

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Abbas Raza, America, democracy, edge.org, Inequality, Piketty, wealth distribution

I don’t remember anymore how I got on the Edge.org website – the world smartest web site – but I am glad I did. Whatever is there, is interesting, but I like the Annual Question the most. This year’s question is: What do you consider the most interesting recent [scientific] news? What makes it important? You can find a collection of answers to that question written by many of today’s acclaimed scientists here. I wanted to share one of such answers with you, written by S. Abbas Raza, founding editor of 3QuarksDaily.com:

“r > g: Increasing Inequality Of Wealth And Income Is A Runaway Process

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One of the biggest challenges facing us is the increasing disparity in wealth and income which has become so obviously apparent in American society in the last four decades or so with all its pernicious effects on societal health. Thomas Piketty’s extensively data-backed tour de force Capital in the Twenty-First Century gave us two big and alarming pieces of news about this trend: 1) Inequality is actually worse than we thought it is, and 2) It will continue to get worse because of structural reasons inherent in our form of capitalism itself, unless we do something.

The top 0.1 percent of families in America went from having 7 percent of national wealth in the late 1970s, to having about 25 percent now. Over the same period, the income share of the top 1 percent of families has gone from less than 10 percent to more than 20 percent now. And lest we think that even if wealth and income are more concentrated now, America is still the land of opportunity and even those born with very little at least have a good chance to move up in economic class, there is a depressing number of studies which show that, contrary to this optimistic notion, according to standard measures of intergenerational mobility, the United States ranks among the least economically mobile among developed nations.

Piketty shows that there is an internal feature of capitalism which increases inequality: as long as the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g), wealth will tend to concentrate in a minority, and that the inequality r > g always holds over the long-term. And he is not some lone wolf academic with an eccentric theory of inequality. Scores of well-respected economists have given ringing endorsements to the central thesis of his book, including economics Nobel winners Robert Solow, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman, who has written that:

Piketty doesn’t just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame.

The only solution to this growing problem, it seems, is the redistribution of the wealth concentrating within a tiny elite using instruments such as aggressive progressive taxation (such as exists in some European countries which show a much better distribution of wealth), but the difficulty in that is the obvious one that political policy-making is itself greatly affected by the level of inequality. This creates a vicious positive feedback loop which is making things even worse. It is clearly the case now in the United States that the rich are not only able to hugely influence government policy directly, but that elite forces are able to shape public opinion and affect election outcomes through large-scale propaganda efforts through media they own or can control. This double-edged sword is being used effectively to attack and shred democracy itself.

The political dysfunction resulting from the current severe levels of inequality makes it extremely difficult to address our most pressing problems, for example, lack of opportunity in education, lack of availability of quality healthcare for all, man-made climate change, and not least, as I pointed out above, the indecent injustice of inequality itself. I am not sure if there is any way to stop the growth in inequality that we have seen in the last four or five decades anytime soon but I do believe it is one of the very important things we have learned more about just in the last couple of years. Unfortunately the news is not good.”

Enough said.

Dissatisfied

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democracy, dissatisfaction, Russia, shack at the sea, South Africa

I am just an observer and user of the world today and whatever comes to my mind when I reflect on whatever is going on today does not belong to optimistic side of the coin. I am dissatisfied with humans all together and would like to move to a little shack at the sea. Away from it all.

Away from South Africa, which I recently visited – where I could witness growing problems, despite optimistic propaganda. If you wanted to visit that country, do it now, because shortly there may be nothing to visit – it will disappear under its own shit like Venice under water. I wrote about this once – democracy (at least that funny kind of democracy they have there) sometimes can be a curse word. For anyone who was never there or did not live there, what I am implying sounds like a blasphemy. Maybe it does – but whoever lives there (and happens to be white), will use much heavier words than me.

I want to be as far as possible from Russia, their rockets and Putin. Ah, of course as far away as possible from their kind of democracy. I also want to be as far away as possible from fat German Merkel with her policy of preserving whatever Germans happen to have in exchange for closing her eyes to obvious events coming from the big bear country. Whole Europe would rather not say (or do, since they do talk a lot) much in order to preserve status quo. Business takes precedence over dead bodies. I wonder how long – possibly until someone will drive a tank through their pretty picture windows.

 

 

How Can We Stop Hypocrisy?

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democracy, Russia, William Browder

An article in Austrian profil magazine (the article can be found on page 80 in December issue, here are some English videos related to it) made me think. How far are we, as human race, are willing to go in accepting torture, murder and thievery, in return for good business as usual? I am sure that the case described and highly publicised by Mr. Browder is not exceptional in Russia. The whole country is being ripped apart and used as private money-making machine for current establishment and all those tragical facts are effectively being ignored by the so-called civilised west. I know that most of modern governments are not squeaky clean, but they look like virgins in comparison to Russian government.

 

Democracy Again

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democracy, SA, secrecy bill, South Africa, Zimbabwe

Remember my post from the 21st of October (here)? Life, as usual, is busy writing and adding new chapters to already thick book of nonsense. Time magazine and most of the international news agencies reported new secrecy bill which South African ANC pushes hard to introduce. “Time” explained very well all the issues behind it and the apparent reason for introduction of such a law, I just wanted to add something to it: if Desmond Tutu in his famous self describes current “democratic” South African government as “worse than the apartheid government”, then definitely we can presume that South African “democracy” failed or is failing rapidly. I wonder though where international community is now? Why no one screams at ANC? Why was it justifiable to stick international nose under South African tent during apartheid and now it is not so good? Or maybe it is not considered to be cool to criticise such a young black democracy (it is not racism, it is a fact – SA has black democracy).

South Africa, from once great nation and economy, is on the downward spiral to the same place where Zimbabwe already is (accidentally, great chunk of millions of illegal immigrants fleeing to South Africa, adding to its problems, are coming from Zimbabwe). History is providing lessons only to those who want to learn, if you ignore them, you remain stupid.

So what can we do about it?

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change democracy, democracy, elections, ideas for change, politics, saving the world

My last post is not optimistic, it wasn’t meant to be. I tried to use few examples to find one of the possible explanations for current events happening around the world. Democracy dies under repeated blows from greedy, corrupt, power-hungry and arrogant people convinced of their own greatness.

What can be done to change this? How to restore power to the people and make sure that the right people are at the top for the right time and right reasons?

I have a couple of ideas to start the discussion off:

One – change the one person one vote schema and cure voting system.

Each citizen would get one vote by being born in the country, by being a citizen. Another vote for finishing basic school. Yet another for finishing middle (or high) school. Fourth for college. Fifth for additional science (or any other) degree. Person finishing two colleges gets a vote for each, the same as for two additional degrees. College graduate would have 4 votes, but each could be used only for one traditional vote. In addition, anyone having more than 1 vote would be obliged to vote by law. Failure to do so would mean financial penalty equal to monthly salary for each vote wasted (of course documented excuses would be accepted). Each presence would be awarded by tax break of 500 EUR per vote.

To complete the system, whoever would be convinced of any crime would be punished by stripping all votes from him and having the right to be voted on removed.

Votes would be registered by bio-technological devices collecting our DNA samples. Alternatively, we could use two biological properties: retina scan and fingerprints – all this to limit to absolute minimum any possibility of abuse.

What would that change? It would force us to vote in the first place; therefore the results would be closer to true will of the people. Secondly, educated people tend to make educated choices and are not so easily drawn by populism. What this system does not change is who to vote on.

Two – who to vote on would be really chosen by the people.

Every voting process would now be done in stages. Each city would define small communities from which one candidate would be chosen by people who would intimately know him or her. The communities can be block houses, villages, neighbourhoods, or even taxi drivers. Those chosen people would create new municipal government and they would determine what is being done in the city or a region for two years. After that, from them only, new representatives to country seats would be chosen. Of course then not parties, but personal community engagement would be more important. In addition, clear information as per who voted for what in municipal or regional governments would be available to all. Everyone could then ask for reasons of decisions over email or social media. The same practice would be then transferred to country government.

It is also clear that each government would be bigger and reach size of small parliaments. But why not? Especially if a time limit would be introduced on any decision (as in by when decision needs to be made, not how long it can be deliberated).

Those two changes would then work together to change the current status quo. Of course small details would need to be ironed out, but that I will leave to smarter than me.

Naïve? Maybe. But someone better come up with something soon or we all are going to end up in anarchy or dictatorship.