A pure functioning meritocracy would produce a society with growing inequality, but that inequality would come along with a correlated increase in social mobility. As the educational system and business world got better and better at finding inherent merit wherever it lay, you would see the bright kids of the poor boosted to the upper echelons of society, with the untalented progeny of the best and brightest relegated to the bottom of the social pyramid where they belong.
But the Iron Law of Meritocracy makes a different prediction: that societies ordered around the meritocratic ideal will produce inequality without the attendant mobility. Indeed, over time, a society will become more unequal and less mobile as those who ascend its heights create means of preserving and defending their privilege and find ways to pass it on across generations. And this, as it turns out, is a pretty spot-on description of the trajectory of the American economy since the mid-1970s.
Why Elites Fail | The Nation
8 JunBusiness – Derek Thompson – 2.6 Trillion Pounds of Garbage: Where Does the World’s Trash Go? – The Atlantic
7 JunThis year, the world will generate 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage — the weight of about 7,000 Empire State Buildings. What kind of trash is it? Where does it all go?
The answer is that just under half of it comes from “organic” waste — food, mostly — and most of it goes into landfills, according to a new report this week from the World Bank. Here’s that story in pie charts, provided by the report.
The rest of the article consists of pie charts showing distribution of trash. Half is produced by the OECD countries while Africa and South Asia produce the least.
Rocky Anderson wins California Primary for Peace and Freedom – Rocky Anderson 2012
6 JunRocky Anderson won the California primary of the Peace and Freedom Party yesterday! Rocky received 43.4% of the vote, with his two competitors receiving 30% and 26.5%. The party’s nomination will ultimately be determined at its convention August 4th and 5th.
The Peace and Freedom Party was founded in 1967 on the principles of peace, workers’ rights, democracy, ecology, feminism, and racial equality. These are issues Rocky Anderson has fought for throughout his career as a lawyer, community activist, mayor and Executive Director of the Human Rights Campaign.
via Rocky Anderson wins California Primary for Peace and Freedom – Rocky Anderson 2012.
Kohr Principles – NYTimes.com
5 JunLeonard Kohr argued that nations like the USA are too large, making catastrophic failure inevitable in the long run.
Unsurprisingly, Kohr’s guiding principle was anarchism, “the noblest of philosophies.” But its inherent nobility, he recognized, also made it utopian: a truly anarchist society could do away with governments and states only if all individuals were ethical enough to respect one another’s boundaries. Kohr cleverly turned this utopianism upside down, from weakness to strength: any party, any leader, any ideology promising utopia is automatically wrong, or lying [7]. Acceptance of utopia’s unattainability, in other words, is the best insurance against totalitarianism.
But if the ideal state cannot be attained, at least it can be approached, Kohr thought, by reducing the scale of government. Which sounds a lot like the famous quote from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”: “That government is best which governs least.” But in Kohr’s vision, smaller government should mean, first and foremost, a smaller area to govern. In such smallness, greatness resides. Counterintuitive as that may sound, didn’t Greece and Italy have their Golden Ages when they were divided into countless city-states? Not a coincidence, according to Kohr: smaller states produce more culture, wealth and happiness.
It might be easy to confine Kohr’s non-violent anarchism to the salon, where, over a fine glass of sherry, quixotic ideas may be lofted and shot down like intellectual clay pigeons. But he thought his gradualist approach eminently practicable, and tried to put it to good use in the field.
During his long career, Kohr supported the independence movements of Puerto Rico, Wales and Anguilla [8], and opposed grand unification projects like the European Union. He appealed for the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, long before they happened. And he publicized his ideas about how such small states should be formed and governed. He even devised a concrete upper limit for “smallness”: “The absolute maximum to which a society can expand without having its basic functions degrade, is about 12 to 15 million people.”
The answer was “not union, but division”: in a world where companies merge into megacorporations and countries into unaccountable supra-states, Kohr’s vision is both counterintuitive and refreshing. One of his 10 basic laws is the so-called Beanstalk Principle: For every animal, object, institution or system, there is an optimal limit beyond which it ought not to grow.
United States of inequality – Inequality – Salon.com
5 JunAs we wait for the results of the Wisconsin recall election, a refresher course on what the struggle over the future direction of the United States is really about might be in order. Fortunately (or depressingly) the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality has put together a new package of easy-to-digest “educational materials on trends in inequality” that pound the message home. The gist: the United States is becoming more unequal every which way you can imagine.
Between 2009 and 2011, the press release for the project notes, “media mentions of the phrase ‘income inequality’ increased by over 250 percent.” But changing trends in income distribution are only one part of the vast distortions rippling through American society. The slides now available for perusal at http://www.inequality.com are divided into 14 categories: debt, education, employment, family, gender, health, immigration, income, mobility, politics, poverty, race, violent crime, and wealth.
The most obvious insight gleanable from the charts is that class background matters. If you are poor, you are more likely to be in debt and have health problems, and less likely to get a quality education or have your priorities reflected in politics. Of course, that’s always been true, not just in the U.S., but everywhere.
A Practical or Coalition Strategy for “Truth and Traditions” Party as Paleocon Greens
5 JunBy Charlie Keil
There is NO split in the Republican Party unless there is a real T for Truth Party that old-fashioned, paleo-conservatives can vote for happily with confidence and in good conserving conscience. By Traditions, plural, we mean the diversity of eco-moralities that once upon a time (pick your pre-industrial era) kept all of us in some kind of balance with “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” If there is no real TnT Party most of those Ron Paul teaparty voters stay trapped inside the Republican Party at election time. You can guess who will win big in 2012, a divided but ‘big tent’ Republican Party. Same party that elected colorful women to governorships in New Mexico and North Carolina. Continue reading
Our new era of anxiety – Neuroscience – Salon.com
4 JunThe article reports high levels of anxiety in the contemporary world. Would more dancing, singing, and grooving help cut that down?
While evolution programmed anxious emotions to arise in threatening and uncertain situations, culture helps define what particular objects and situations people consider to be dangerous, what cues activate their fear responses, and what sorts of things they worry about as well as the degree of intensity or duration with which one should respond. For example, while witchcraft is a common source of anxiousness in many African societies, it is unlikely to be a source of fear in modern Western cultures. Witch fear is seen as reasonable in the former but not the latter. Fears of being buried alive dominated nineteenth century consciousness in the United Kingdom and United States but would be extremely rare at present; conversely, food allergies, a rare source of anxiousness in the past, are a dominant source of worry in the contemporary United States.
We Live in a Market State
3 JunIn 2002 Philip Bobbitt published The Shield of Achilles, his response to Francis Fukuyama’s prediction of an era of world peace based on the triumph of capitalism over Soviet communism. In a brilliant review of this book published the following year in New Left Review, Gopal Balakrishnan summarized Bobbitt’s predictions for the future of the capitalist society to come:
“An entirely new political form [of state], the market-state has arisen to supplant [the nation-state]. . . . the market-state ceases to base its legitimacy on improving the welfare of its people.
Instead, this new form of polity simply offers to maximize opportunities—‘to make the world available’ to those with the skills or luck to take advantage of it. ‘Largely indifferent to the norms of justice, or for that matter any particular set of moral values, so long as law does not act as an impediment to economic competition,’ the market-state is defined by three paradoxes. Government becomes more centralized but, yet weaker; citizens increasingly become spectators; welfare is retrenched, but security and surveillance systems expand. Bobbitt etches the consequences imperturbably. The grip of finance on electoral politics may become so tight as to erase the stigma of corruption. Waves of privatization will continue to roll over the state, eventually dissolving large parts of it into a looser, shifting ensemble of subcontracted and clandestine operations . . . .
Public education will implode as parents seek to augment the human capital of their children with early investments in private school. Inequality and crime could grow to Brazilian proportions. Civil liberties will have to be reconceived to accommodate far-reaching anti-terrorist dragnets. Some of the fictions of citizenship will gradually give way to more realistic weighted voting systems. Representative government itself will become increasingly nominal as media plebiscites openly assume the function f securing the assent of atomized multitudes. National security spin-doctoring will become so pervasive as to engender a new epistemology of managed opinion.”
Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 54-55
By Hayden White, via ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, and the World.
International – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Kill List – The Atlantic
31 MayThe US Presidency is governed by a logic that swallows Presidents and spits them out. We are becoming the rogue nation we fear in other states.
The Obama administration considers any military-age male in the vicinity of a bombing to be a combatant. That is an amazing standard that shares an ugly synergy with the sort of broad-swath logic that we see employed in Stop and Frisk, with NYPD national spy network, with the killer of Trayvon Martin.
Policy is informed by the morality of a country. I think the repercussions of this unending era of death by silver bird will be profound.
via International – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Kill List – The Atlantic.
Truth and Traditions 