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/>
*
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
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