Next Up: Feb 2 – Inequality and democracy

The next Penny U will discuss the relationship between wealth and income, inequality and democracy. The conversation is scheduled to begin at 5:30 pm, on Monday, February 2 in Town Hall’s downstairs cafe. The doors open at 5:00. Join us early for drinks and snacks in the cafe.

By the time we get together on Monday, my co-organizer Edward Wolcher and I will have a few specific questions to spark our conversations. You’re welcome to bring your own as well. In the meantime, what follows is background for the discussion. We hope you can join us!

                                                                                                 – Anne Focke

P.S.  Consider joining us afterward to hear Nikil Saval, whose recent book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, is an investigation into the way we work and a history of how we got from bookkeepers in dark counting houses to freelancers in bright cafes. <http://townhallseattle.org/event/nikil-saval/>

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Is inequality the new normal?

One starting point for our conversation will be a Town Hall program a few days before Penny U:

      “Understanding Inequality in America and the World” – James K. Galbraith

      7:30 pm, Town Hall’s Great Hall, Friday, January 30

In his new book, The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth, Galbraith challenges the view that the economic growth from the early 1950s until 2000 represented the “normal.” A publisher’s statement says:

Today, four factors impede a return to normal. They are the rising costs of real resources, the now-evident futility of military power, the labor-saving consequences of the digital revolution, and the breakdown of law and ethics in the financial sector.… Policies and institutions going forward should be designed, above all, modestly, to cope with this fact, maintaining conditions for a good life in difficult times.

Galbraith argues that unstable economic conditions and the rise of inequality, which we see today, should be regarded as the new normal. And Town Hall’s announcement suggests that he will offer advice on how average citizens can combat this war of economics.

Extreme inequality threatens democracy

Several Penny U participants are taking a class at the Richard Hugo House with Charles Mudede titled, “Thomas Piketty: Capitalism and Lit.” My hope is that they’ll come to Penny U with insights from Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century.

I’d never pretend to be able to summarize a 700-page book, especially one I haven’t read. But many interviews and reviews I’ve read of Piketty’s book are intriguing in light of the topic of this Penny U. In an article in The Guardian from December 2014, Owen Jones gave a quick summary:

Using a mass of data, the book sought to expose why modern capitalism is an engine of exploding inequality: the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate at which the economy grows, Piketty argues, and wealth is becoming ever more concentrated at the top.

While Piketty seems to say that inequality by itself is acceptable as long as it is in the common interest, according to Steven Erlanger in The New York Times. But Piketty, like economist Joseph Stiglitz, “argues that extreme inequality ‘threatens our democratic institutions.’ Democracy is not just one citizen, one vote, but a promise of equal opportunity.” Erlanger goes on to quote Piketty:

It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such extreme inequality [in income] and such extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information. One of the big lessons of the 20th century is that we don’t need 19th century inequality to grow.”

But Piketty concludes, Erlanger added, “that’s just where the capitalist world is heading again.”

References

           

•     James K. Galbraith at Town Hall 

•     James K. Galbraith in The Baffler

•     Paul Krugman on Thomas Piketty in the New York Review of Books

•     Steven Erlanger on Thomas Piketty in The New York Times

•     Owen Jones interviews Thomas Piketty in The Guardian

Spring Conversations

Save the Dates

On Monday, February 2, Penny U at Town Hall will begin a new three-part series of conversations about the changing nature of work. In general terms, the conversations ask: How are the concepts of jobs and work changing or being redefined? What does our own work experience tell us? What does this mean for the future?

Join us for conversations about these and related questions.

Penny U schedule

5:30 to 7:00 p.m., Town Hall’s downstairs cafe

Doors open at 5:00. Come early for drinks and snacks.

•    Monday, February 2 – Inequality, capital, and democracy

•    Tuesday, March 10 – Climate change and jobs

•    Tuesday, April 7 – Work and the commons

What’s happened so far?  Is there more?

Penny U conversations draw from Town Hall speakers and always begin with questions. Last fall, the first three Penny U sessions asked, in sequence: What kind of work is valued? What is the impact of technology on work? and What’s the state of wages, income, and equality? The third session’s conversation led to another question, What is the fundamental problem underneath our current inequality?

The posts in the Penny U archive include an introduction to each conversation (“Next Up:…”), a report on what happened at each one (“Notes:…”), and a few other related pieces. Notes can’t capture the real energy of the discussion, but they’ll give you a general sense of what we talked about.

Check it out!

Why talk about work? My take.

As we start the second series of Penny U conversations, I’m prompted to pause, take a deep breath, and ask myself why I wanted conversations about work. Everyone starts where they are, and my interest in learning more about work definitely began with my own experience.

For one thing, I wanted to step beyond seeing the “trees” of my work and livelihood and try to understand the “forest” of how my work compares with a societal sense of what work looks like. I want to understand how the way we get a living is changing and why it so often seems like such a struggle.

I could do this by reading, going to lectures, or talking with people who study these things. And I do. But I also want to learn from others about their real-life experiences. I want to hear how you see your work, whether the nature of it is changing, and how you see it fitting into a larger world. And I want to discover new ways of thinking about work and jobs and the economy that could be useful both to me and to others.

Work beyond jobs

When I say “work,” I’m not simply meaning work for pay, important as that is. I mean it more broadly than that. Perhaps my view comes from my early days as an artist when the artists around me made a distinction between “jobs” that paid the bills and their “real work,” that is, their painting or poetry or music. Their work was what they were driven to do, whether it paid or not. Of course everyone wanted to reach a point where the work also put food on the table, but we knew that didn’t happen often. Some time later I realized that many kinds of work – very real and sometimes very hard work – also didn’t pay, or at least didn’t pay well.

Over the decades, I’ve wondered why so much important work is not well paid in our economic and political world, not only artists’ and poets’ work, but the work of caring for young children and aging parents, of coming together to solve community problems or to celebrate, of protecting our common resources, of independent research, philosophy, and invention. Why, when there’s so much work to do, are there so few jobs that pay to do it?

“The end of jobs as we know them”

As soon as I started carrying ideas about work around in my head, the topic seemed to be everywhere.

“The entire concept of  ‘work’ will undergo a significant shift in the next decade,” according to an August 2014 PewResearch study of the impact of technology on the future of jobs. Carl Camden, CEO of Kelly Services, wrote last year, “Some 43% of working Americans don’t have a ‘job’ – they have work and they’re employed, but they don’t work as a traditional ‘employee’.…The way we think about work, and in particular how we define a job, is changing – and it’s changing fast!… Job security is an oxymoron.”

Andy Stern, former president of the SEIU, now at the Columbia Business School, is part of an initiative with the Open Society Foundations that is exploring the Future of Work. In 20-30 years, he says, we’re apt to see “the end of jobs as we know them.” Among other things, we need to “align our economy toward work that is needed and valuable to society, like child care and reducing our carbon footprint.” Paul Mason, economics editor at the UK’s Channel 4 News, also recently said an alternative to our current economic system is needed, “because populations armed with smartphones and an increased sense of their human rights will not accept a future of high inequality and low growth.” 

And certainly in today’s world the dramatic and increasing inequality between the highest and lowest earners and wealth holders is affecting, or will affect, all our lives. A new report from Oxfam [Oxfam news] finds that the combined wealth of the richest 1 percent of the world's population will be greater than that of the other 99 percent by 2016 – that’s just next year!

All in all, there’s much to learn and lots to talk about! 

Join us!

Come join us this spring at Town Hall for a Penny U conversation.