10 ms·

A new history asks: Has all the progress of the past 100 years come undone?

66 points by samclemens 11y ago

cheriot 11y ago
I was all ready to rant about how the social, medical, and scientific advances of the last 100 years matter more than a few economic stats. The question actually posed by the book is more narrow/interesting than the article, "How far has our democracy come?" rather than "Has all the progress of the past 100 years come undone?" http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393239527/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393239527/
aaronmhatch 11y ago
Thanks for posting.
flubert 11y ago
'"But that book was written in 1908. Based on what I've seen on Downton Abbey, things were a lot different then." Well, yes, obviously, there had just been a massive leap forward in technology and industrialization, a booming economy fueling a wealth gap, temporarily course corrected by a financial panic "precipitated" by the failure of two overspeculating brokerage houses. There were also, simultaneously, great advances in progressive causes like worker's rights and food quality, all on the background of decreasing importance of religion among educated whites in favor of science. Not physics or chemistry, but evolution. Tabloids were incomprehensibly popular, partisan media the norm. A loosening of conventional morality manifested as bored promiscuity, female bisexuality, and a flood of new porn the likes of which never existed before. "That does sound different. And awesome. What did their Millennial kids inherit, what did they experience over their adult lives, say 1929-1945?" I totally don't know, Boardwalk Empire only goes up to 1924 and Mad Men starts 1960.' http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown_relate_t.html http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown...
marknutter 11y ago
As another commenter pointed out, the title of this article is heavily editorialized. And I think that's the most interesting part of this link. There seems to be a growing appetite in this country to stoke the flames of class warfare. Perhaps it's because, despite the Great Recession and those two wars you never really hear anything about anymore, our generation truly does not have any great struggle to arm ourselves against. Poverty rates are dropping precipitously around the globe as is violent crime. We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury. Our life expectancy rates are ever increasing. I think we Millenials are, more than any generation before us, desperately in search of our great cause. As we continue to see American wealth "trickle down" to developing nations as labor is shifted overseas, it brings into starker contrast the wealth inequalities between us and our 1%, ignoring of course the irony that we Americans collectively are the one-percenters of the world.
- msvalkon 11y ago
  "I think we Millenials are, more than any generation before us, desperately in search of our great cause." Look no further, there's a global crisis of climate change that must be solved. We have a cause, but unfortunately not one that is nicely contained within the borders of a country.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Indeed. We're the ones to face the grandest causes - fixing the climate, killing the death itself, spreading human life to the rest of the Solar System. And only handful of geeks care. Most of the world seems to be busy with celebrity gossip or complaining about 1% or inventing new reasons to get outraged about something.
    - duncanawoods 11y ago
      >> celebrity gossip or complaining about 1% One is entertainment, the other ends in violent revolution. I suspect we can't fix the climate until we fix inequality because its the 1% that profits from climate destruction yet holds the power of regulation.
- danghica 11y ago
  You seem to assume that extreme inequality in society is to be fought against only if it leads to an overall degradation of material prosperity. That is nonsense. People always wanted more equality for the same reason they wanted democracy, no matter what the level of material prosperity in a country. People have a deep-seated need to be engaged and to have a say in the unfolding of their own destiny at the scale of society, to have meaningful lives. Indeed, the average person in the US, EU, Japan, Australia, etc. has food, clothes, transportation, health-care (perhaps not US), technology and so on that would make the kings of 100 years ago envious. But they also know that their influence on society through conventional democratic means has decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, as the super-wealthy amassed the material and political means to control the decision-making process. And guess what? Many people hate that. Many people will not be bribed into political submission by knick-knacks, amusement and delicious snacks. There is deep resentment brewing.
Hytosys 11y ago
So, to sum up... Our wages stopped rising in the 1970s, because: * Decreased demand for US workers — factories closing to move to other countries; technology replacing human labor; increased capitalist competition with a global economy consisting of countries finally recovered from their wars * Increased supply of US workers — the women's liberation movement; the continued influx of immigrants The country's rotting social justice can successfully be expressed in terms of the prosperity of its workers.
- randomsearch 11y ago
  I'm not sure about the US, but the in UK you need to add to that the fact that inequality has soared, so the rich have taken more of the gains. A major cause of this problem is the regressive tax system that has been developed by successive governments in the UK.
  - Hytosys 11y ago
    Sorry, that was the point I was trying to make as well: https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/productivity-and-real-wages.jpg https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/product... The increasing gap between wages and productivity symbolizes growing exploitation — the inequality you're talking about.
- collyw 11y ago
  Don't you think that moving to a fiat money system has contributed?
Sven7 11y ago
Progress towards what? For the developing world to get to the basics (rights/health/edu) the developed world is used to, we need a couple more planet earths in terms of resources. We seem to end up with what happens in nature. Randomness. In one ecosystem a couple of whales and whole lot of plankton, in another a couple lions and herds of wildebeest. So progress towards what? It's not entirely clear. And where are the incentives to produce consensus about it or even focus on it? We can be doing a much better job creating those incentives.
- tim333 11y ago
  >to the basics (rights/health/edu)... we need a couple more planet earths I don't think that's true. Human rights, health services and education needn't use much resources. The ability the whole planet to drive 3 ton SUVs might be an issue but that's a different matter.
  - Sven7 11y ago
    We have been trying to get the basics into the third world for a long time now. It's not cheap because its not easy. I am not even talking about the extreme cases like Somalia and Afghanistan. Even in countries like India and China try getting a good lawyer/policeman/doctor/teacher to stay in areas where they are most needed. They have no hope of any semblance of the lifestyle their urban counterparts enjoy. And I pulled in the couple more planet earths from sustainability calculations Craig Simmons did for the Guardian a while back. http://www.theguardian.com/greenliving/story/0,,441590,00.html http://www.theguardian.com/greenliving/story/0,,441590,00.ht...
- wavefunction 11y ago
  I saw an article that stated the 1% now own slightly more wealth than the rest of the 99% of the population, so I feel like there are untapped resources just waiting to be put to good use. I don't see the need for this continuing farce when there are infrastructure needs and the opportunity to build real and lasting wealth for all of us in the form of a more developed and inclusive society for all.
thomasmarriott 11y ago
No.
vlehto 11y ago
>One could argue—and not with pride, but deep unease—that global dominance was, if not the only, then an essential ingredient to reducing domestic inequality. History keeps repeating itself. Usually any civil rights have come with the expense of either fighting in the military or funding the military. I just wondered how suspiciously easy it was for women to gain their rights, but total war seen in world wars explains it nicely. Organizations only change when they have to. With fall of soviet union, stagnation of American civil rights progress seems inevitable. Rise of China could be a good thing for Civil rights. But in the post-Vietnam high tech weapons age, it's likely to be "how can we motivate people to pay more taxes" than the seemingly more equal "how can we motivate every man to fire a rifle". Any suggestions?
donatj 11y ago
The argument that our successful being very successful is a bad thing never ceases to be wrong. Our poor are also the richest poor in the world. Making the rich poorer would do nothing to help the poor and quite the contrary hurt them. Bill Gates and his malaria work for instance have done far more good for Africa than all the aid the government has ever provided.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Our poor and even our middle class struggle to get medical care due to the insane costs. Poor people in Europe don't have that problem. Poor people in Latin America don't have that problem. It doesn't sound like our poor are rich enough. American exceptionalism is a cult which needs to be liquidated... there is nothing special about despotic distribution of resources.
- cmiles74 11y ago
  I don't think anyone is arguing against the fact that it is good to be successful and that the more successful someone can be, the better. In my opinion, the issue is that those who are most successful are being rewarded with far too much and creating a system that will inevitably make those who are most successful even more successful by shrinking the total number of successful people and increasing the number of unsuccessful people. Another concern is that this will lead to general stagnation of the economy and a slow-down of progress in general.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
moootPoint 11y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines to the rescue.
cryoshon 11y ago
" In 1900, the wealthiest 10 percent pocketed 41 percent of the nation’s income—a number that would only be surpassed in 2010, when the top 10 percent took home 48 percent of the national income. " Ah, so we are now officially more unequal than during the gilded age. A travesty of the highest order. Remember when people were protesting this in the streets and were hung out to dry by the media and their fellow citizens? Remember when those protesters were smashed by the cops for having the gall to ask for a better deal? That happened in the US, not China or Russia. "The authors are only the slightest bit sympathetic to Obama. They concede that he operated under conditions not of his own making. But he “was not a transformational president.” He caved to Wall Street in bailing out the banks without demanding any meaningful reform; the Affordable Care Act may have insured millions, but countless others have been forced to pay more because its biggest beneficiaries were insurance and drug companies. And his foreign policy effectively continued to do by stealth what George W. Bush barely kept secret at all: drone strikes, secret wiretaps. Other fundamental problems that began at the start of the 20th century have re-emerged under Obama: racial segregation abetted by a criminal justice system that is the New Jim Crow; anti-immigration nativism, which has hardly been helped by an immigration policy whose only achievement is a record number of deportations. Meanwhile, as of 2012, a woman still made 81 cents for every dollar a man earned." My sentiments as well.
- stevetrewick 11y ago
  >Ah, so we are now officially more unequal than during the gilded age Unequal with whom ? You are considerably less unequal with millions of people who a decade or two ago were desperately scratching their survival out of subsistence farming. Some people would call that a win. YMMV.
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    A relative win against people who aren't even in the proper frame of reference. It's the same as saying "you have a refrigerator, people in Africa don't even have that!" which isn't even a true statement to make these days. Extreme poverty is on the endangered list. The frame of reference is in-country and between the country's peers. The worrying part of this frame is that relatively poor places like Latin America are catching up or have caught up already. We are losing ground.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

66 points by samclemens 11y ago

I was all ready to rant about how the social, medical, and scientific advances of the last 100 years matter more than a few economic stats. The question actually posed by the book is more narrow/interesting than the article, "How far has our democracy come?" rather than "Has all the progress of the past 100 years come undone?" http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393239527/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393239527/

aaronmhatch 11y ago

Thanks for posting.

flubert 11y ago

'"But that book was written in 1908. Based on what I've seen on Downton Abbey, things were a lot different then." Well, yes, obviously, there had just been a massive leap forward in technology and industrialization, a booming economy fueling a wealth gap, temporarily course corrected by a financial panic "precipitated" by the failure of two overspeculating brokerage houses. There were also, simultaneously, great advances in progressive causes like worker's rights and food quality, all on the background of decreasing importance of religion among educated whites in favor of science. Not physics or chemistry, but evolution. Tabloids were incomprehensibly popular, partisan media the norm. A loosening of conventional morality manifested as bored promiscuity, female bisexuality, and a flood of new porn the likes of which never existed before. "That does sound different. And awesome. What did their Millennial kids inherit, what did they experience over their adult lives, say 1929-1945?" I totally don't know, Boardwalk Empire only goes up to 1924 and Mad Men starts 1960.' http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown_relate_t.html http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown...

marknutter 11y ago

As another commenter pointed out, the title of this article is heavily editorialized. And I think that's the most interesting part of this link. There seems to be a growing appetite in this country to stoke the flames of class warfare. Perhaps it's because, despite the Great Recession and those two wars you never really hear anything about anymore, our generation truly does not have any great struggle to arm ourselves against. Poverty rates are dropping precipitously around the globe as is violent crime. We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury. Our life expectancy rates are ever increasing. I think we Millenials are, more than any generation before us, desperately in search of our great cause. As we continue to see American wealth "trickle down" to developing nations as labor is shifted overseas, it brings into starker contrast the wealth inequalities between us and our 1%, ignoring of course the irony that we Americans collectively are the one-percenters of the world.

msvalkon 11y ago
"I think we Millenials are, more than any generation before us, desperately in search of our great cause." Look no further, there's a global crisis of climate change that must be solved. We have a cause, but unfortunately not one that is nicely contained within the borders of a country.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Indeed. We're the ones to face the grandest causes - fixing the climate, killing the death itself, spreading human life to the rest of the Solar System. And only handful of geeks care. Most of the world seems to be busy with celebrity gossip or complaining about 1% or inventing new reasons to get outraged about something.
  - duncanawoods 11y ago
    >> celebrity gossip or complaining about 1% One is entertainment, the other ends in violent revolution. I suspect we can't fix the climate until we fix inequality because its the 1% that profits from climate destruction yet holds the power of regulation.
danghica 11y ago
You seem to assume that extreme inequality in society is to be fought against only if it leads to an overall degradation of material prosperity. That is nonsense. People always wanted more equality for the same reason they wanted democracy, no matter what the level of material prosperity in a country. People have a deep-seated need to be engaged and to have a say in the unfolding of their own destiny at the scale of society, to have meaningful lives. Indeed, the average person in the US, EU, Japan, Australia, etc. has food, clothes, transportation, health-care (perhaps not US), technology and so on that would make the kings of 100 years ago envious. But they also know that their influence on society through conventional democratic means has decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, as the super-wealthy amassed the material and political means to control the decision-making process. And guess what? Many people hate that. Many people will not be bribed into political submission by knick-knacks, amusement and delicious snacks. There is deep resentment brewing.

Hytosys 11y ago

So, to sum up... Our wages stopped rising in the 1970s, because: * Decreased demand for US workers — factories closing to move to other countries; technology replacing human labor; increased capitalist competition with a global economy consisting of countries finally recovered from their wars * Increased supply of US workers — the women's liberation movement; the continued influx of immigrants The country's rotting social justice can successfully be expressed in terms of the prosperity of its workers.

randomsearch 11y ago
I'm not sure about the US, but the in UK you need to add to that the fact that inequality has soared, so the rich have taken more of the gains. A major cause of this problem is the regressive tax system that has been developed by successive governments in the UK.
- Hytosys 11y ago
  Sorry, that was the point I was trying to make as well: https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/productivity-and-real-wages.jpg https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/product... The increasing gap between wages and productivity symbolizes growing exploitation — the inequality you're talking about.
collyw 11y ago
Don't you think that moving to a fiat money system has contributed?

Sven7 11y ago

Progress towards what? For the developing world to get to the basics (rights/health/edu) the developed world is used to, we need a couple more planet earths in terms of resources. We seem to end up with what happens in nature. Randomness. In one ecosystem a couple of whales and whole lot of plankton, in another a couple lions and herds of wildebeest. So progress towards what? It's not entirely clear. And where are the incentives to produce consensus about it or even focus on it? We can be doing a much better job creating those incentives.

tim333 11y ago
>to the basics (rights/health/edu)... we need a couple more planet earths I don't think that's true. Human rights, health services and education needn't use much resources. The ability the whole planet to drive 3 ton SUVs might be an issue but that's a different matter.
- Sven7 11y ago
  We have been trying to get the basics into the third world for a long time now. It's not cheap because its not easy. I am not even talking about the extreme cases like Somalia and Afghanistan. Even in countries like India and China try getting a good lawyer/policeman/doctor/teacher to stay in areas where they are most needed. They have no hope of any semblance of the lifestyle their urban counterparts enjoy. And I pulled in the couple more planet earths from sustainability calculations Craig Simmons did for the Guardian a while back. http://www.theguardian.com/greenliving/story/0,,441590,00.html http://www.theguardian.com/greenliving/story/0,,441590,00.ht...
wavefunction 11y ago
I saw an article that stated the 1% now own slightly more wealth than the rest of the 99% of the population, so I feel like there are untapped resources just waiting to be put to good use. I don't see the need for this continuing farce when there are infrastructure needs and the opportunity to build real and lasting wealth for all of us in the form of a more developed and inclusive society for all.

thomasmarriott 11y ago

No.

vlehto 11y ago

>One could argue—and not with pride, but deep unease—that global dominance was, if not the only, then an essential ingredient to reducing domestic inequality. History keeps repeating itself. Usually any civil rights have come with the expense of either fighting in the military or funding the military. I just wondered how suspiciously easy it was for women to gain their rights, but total war seen in world wars explains it nicely. Organizations only change when they have to. With fall of soviet union, stagnation of American civil rights progress seems inevitable. Rise of China could be a good thing for Civil rights. But in the post-Vietnam high tech weapons age, it's likely to be "how can we motivate people to pay more taxes" than the seemingly more equal "how can we motivate every man to fire a rifle". Any suggestions?

donatj 11y ago

The argument that our successful being very successful is a bad thing never ceases to be wrong. Our poor are also the richest poor in the world. Making the rich poorer would do nothing to help the poor and quite the contrary hurt them. Bill Gates and his malaria work for instance have done far more good for Africa than all the aid the government has ever provided.

cryoshon 11y ago
Our poor and even our middle class struggle to get medical care due to the insane costs. Poor people in Europe don't have that problem. Poor people in Latin America don't have that problem. It doesn't sound like our poor are rich enough. American exceptionalism is a cult which needs to be liquidated... there is nothing special about despotic distribution of resources.
cmiles74 11y ago
I don't think anyone is arguing against the fact that it is good to be successful and that the more successful someone can be, the better. In my opinion, the issue is that those who are most successful are being rewarded with far too much and creating a system that will inevitably make those who are most successful even more successful by shrinking the total number of successful people and increasing the number of unsuccessful people. Another concern is that this will lead to general stagnation of the economy and a slow-down of progress in general.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

moootPoint 11y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines to the rescue.

cryoshon 11y ago

" In 1900, the wealthiest 10 percent pocketed 41 percent of the nation’s income—a number that would only be surpassed in 2010, when the top 10 percent took home 48 percent of the national income. " Ah, so we are now officially more unequal than during the gilded age. A travesty of the highest order. Remember when people were protesting this in the streets and were hung out to dry by the media and their fellow citizens? Remember when those protesters were smashed by the cops for having the gall to ask for a better deal? That happened in the US, not China or Russia. "The authors are only the slightest bit sympathetic to Obama. They concede that he operated under conditions not of his own making. But he “was not a transformational president.” He caved to Wall Street in bailing out the banks without demanding any meaningful reform; the Affordable Care Act may have insured millions, but countless others have been forced to pay more because its biggest beneficiaries were insurance and drug companies. And his foreign policy effectively continued to do by stealth what George W. Bush barely kept secret at all: drone strikes, secret wiretaps. Other fundamental problems that began at the start of the 20th century have re-emerged under Obama: racial segregation abetted by a criminal justice system that is the New Jim Crow; anti-immigration nativism, which has hardly been helped by an immigration policy whose only achievement is a record number of deportations. Meanwhile, as of 2012, a woman still made 81 cents for every dollar a man earned." My sentiments as well.

stevetrewick 11y ago
>Ah, so we are now officially more unequal than during the gilded age Unequal with whom ? You are considerably less unequal with millions of people who a decade or two ago were desperately scratching their survival out of subsistence farming. Some people would call that a win. YMMV.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  A relative win against people who aren't even in the proper frame of reference. It's the same as saying "you have a refrigerator, people in Africa don't even have that!" which isn't even a true statement to make these days. Extreme poverty is on the endangered list. The frame of reference is in-country and between the country's peers. The worrying part of this frame is that relatively poor places like Latin America are catching up or have caught up already. We are losing ground.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]