Toronto Star comes out and say the obvious: “Inequality rots social foundations.” What bothers me the most is that it is actually necessary to come out and remind people of this fact on a semi-regular basis. Especially when reminding people who are on the upper end of the inequality chasm. The statistics are disturbing to say the least though:
A decade ago, Mel Lastman was astonished to discover that there were homeless people in Toronto. Today we’re inured to the sight of sleeping bags on the sidewalk and panhandlers outside stores, restaurants and subway stations.
Twenty-five years ago, community workers set up food banks as an emergency response to a brief recession. Today, despite one of the longest expansions in Canadian history, they’re permanent fixtures in almost every municipality.
A generation ago, corporate executives earned 40 times as much as their employees. Workers grumbled, but negotiated decent contracts. Today, the country’s top 100 chief executive officers earn 248 times the average wage. Most workers have no job security, few benefits and no union to protect them.
And yet, everything is going hunky-dory according to my more “conservative” friends. Our economy is supposedly growing and the “average” national income has been going up, short of the little bump from the subprime crisis and housing crisis in the states. These discussions, and the Star article reminded me of this passage from the “Old Regimes” chapter of “Anatomy of Revolution” by Crane Brinton where he describes that it seems to not be depression itself which causes revolution, but rather an increasing inequality gap caused by a minor depression after a solid period of prosperity.
… it seems clear that in some respects 1788-89 was a bad year (The year the French Revolution started off). It was, however, by no means a deep trough year, as 1932 was for this country. If businessmen had kept charts and made graphs, the lines would have mounted with gratifying consistency through most of the period preceding the French Revolution. [However] this prosperity was certainly most unevenly shared.
So, the key thing being not the loss of money itself from the economy, but rather the fact that one group is gaining far more than the rest, ie. the wealth is shared strongly unequally amongst the masses. This, commonly, is amplified when the wealthier classes refuse to pay the government the money they need to dampen the effects of such a inequality shift. Wealth, they felt, they did not need to share and wanted to keep to themselves. Well, according to Brinton, this lack of tax revenues has the effect, in 3 of 4 revolutions he studied, of destablizing the government as a whole, and increasing the drive towards revolution. Which, as we saw in France, did not help the rich people maintain their wealth whatsoever. However, in theory, if the wealthy had attempted to some degree to balance the wealth a bit more evenly among the masses, these revolutions may not have even happened.
It’s nice to be on top, but if the ground you are standing on is not stable, then it’s a very short term pleasure.
1h
Image via Wikipedia
