This is some absolutely crazy data. In summary, black and poor people advocating for a policy results in a slightly lower chance of it being enacted. For women, advocating for a policy means it is significantly less likely to be enacted. It is important to note, this data only shows a correlation, so the reasons are purely speculative, but this is really depressing to see.
Also relevant: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page. This is not news, you say. Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it: Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power. Chomsky mentioned this many times before, here for example.The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work that's essentially the gold standard in the field, it's concluded that for roughly 70% of the population - the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale - they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They're effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it's plutocracy.
This is, of course, a tautology. History, the only arbiter of truth, reminds us that when someone rises up and ousts the rich and powerful elite, their next step is to make themselves the rich and powerful elite.The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
Sure. Although history has its own arbiters. Which coincidentally doesn't include those so poor and powerless that their version is not heard. Our modern version of democratic states is supposed to curb the relationship between wealth and influence on political decision making. Showing empirically that the system is a functional plutocracy implies a serious lack of political legitimization in any narrative which is still formally democratic. It's true that in a well developed plutocracy like ours, removing one group of plutocrats only replaces them with another group, which was your original point. Yet the mainstream consensus as suggested by mainstream media still implies the existence of a functional (not just formal) democracy. That makes the findings discussed here quite relevant to every informed political discourse.
But we still have to come to terms with the fact that this is now happening globally, in basically every country. It is really hard for me to think of any region on the planet where representative democracy is actually functioning, even roughly on its core principles. If anyone has good examples I'd like to see them, but the data tend to show a very real and advancing drift towards some form of financial authoritarianism, or global oligarchy, whatever. Of course, it is not consciously coordinated, but instead an adaptive property of unregulated capitalism, which should perhaps give us some hope because if we do show solidarity and commitment to fight this system, we can affect regulatory change. However, I must admit things overall look quite bad, and the struggle would be very tough. Look at Greece, I couldn't be more proud of the Greek people and also the European people who came out in solidarity with them. But it didn't do anything to help their situation in the end. Now it seems like the more the people fight back, the even more harsh the economic policies developed by the financial sector become. Crazy, crazy, times.
I grew up hardcore Catholic, believing in the Rapture, 3 horsemen of the apocalypse. That when the end time came (somewhere around the year 2000), a new world order would occur, illuminati, secret upper eschelon groups ruling the world, we'd have identity chips encoded into our skin to mark us as loyal citizens, there'd no longer be money, it'd be electronic, that the world would be slaves crushed by an authoritarian elite. That only those who rejected the Mark of the Beast would be saved--these people would be swept up in the The Rapture, whisked away to Heaven, and all the weak, godless people who'd taken the Mark of the Beast would then live 100, 1000 (can't quite remember) years in the reign of the Antichrist, Satan reborn on the face of the earth, and those would be terrible, terrible times. I then grew up, became anti-catholic, and taught myself to believe in different things. But it's scary, how close the description of the Rapture--apocalypse, end times I grew up with--mirrors what is happening in the world around me. Messes with my mind.
First, thank you for sharing your point of view, I find the parallels between religious prophecy, and specifically eschatology, with actually existing global realities related to economics and technological evolution to be very interesting. As an anthropologist I view this belief as "folk knowledge", in the sense that, yes, there is a (so-called) "new world order" (i.e. post-"second world"-communist world order) that is being controlled by a wealthy financial elite that is more and more able to direct the contours of the global economy away from transparent democratic decision-making processes. However, as I noted above, it is not being coordinated by some "illuminati" or whatever, it is just the unconscious tendencies of a capitalist super-organism, which is indeed very real, even if it is not conscious. This is another example of folk knowledge, in the sense that, yes, money will eventually disappear, and eventually we will have some type of system which is hopefully far more ethical and socially moral, ideally based around mechanisms of universal access, trust, and reputation (things that help online social media sites self-organize for example, i.e. on Hubski we have universal access to the site (no money changes hands), and there are sophisticated mechanisms based trust and reputation in regards to the pre-programmed value system of Hubski, which is "thoughtfulness" of commentary, etc. We need to be innovative about the future of socioeconomics, and, in my opinion, that innovation away from capitalism and money, and towards a more social and ethical system, should be based in universality, trust, reputation, etc. In short, what the particular example of folk knowledge represents, to me, is a classic example where a group of people make the common sense extrapolation of technological advancement (i.e. money disappearing and electronic devices merging with human biology, etc.) and do not realize that such advancement will necessarily require a concomitant social revolution in the way we structure the world. Of course, such social revolution is always the true singularity, which is why, in this particular example, we get a dystopian scenario where we are all controlled by authoritarian elites. This is classic Christian anti-Singultarianism (there is also Christian pro-Singultarianism). I think it comes down to whether or not you take the central warning of Christianity seriously or not (i.e. do not eat from the tree of knowledge). If you take it seriously than the singularity, i.e. using human knowledge to become God-like and live indefinitely, is indeed the mark of the Antichrist. But what is obvious, at least to me, is that this central warning of Christianity is at best ambiguous, and possibly even a joke (i.e. why in the world would God create an infinitely inquisitive and curious species and place them within a world where they are ignorant of the natural processes around them, if He didn't want them to explore that world and learn how to better live in symbiosis with it?). I can sympathise. What I would recommend, if my recommendation is worth anything, is that you look for the synergies between knowledge structures. This is basically the Kurzweilian approach to singularity, in the sense that Kurzweil, on the first page of The Singularity Is Near (2005) reveals that he was raised in a Unitarian church where he was encouraged to explore all of the overlapping commonalities between world religions under the basic principle of "many paths to the truth". Of course, we do know, from a scientific perspective, that objective knowledge is illusory, and that our models are not objective reality, and our perceptions are not objective reality (or Kant's we do not see the "Thing In Itself", etc.). So, in the end, all we have is our historically contingent, subjectively constructed knowledge structures, created with imperfect perception, and imperfect tools, to explore a world we all share, but at the same time, to explore a world we all have an irreducibly unique perspective and understanding of, etc.when the end time came (somewhere around the year 2000), a new world order would occur, illuminati, secret upper eschelon groups ruling the world
we'd have identity chips encoded into our skin to mark us as loyal citizens, there'd no longer be money, it'd be electronic, that the world would be slaves crushed by an authoritarian elite.
That only those who rejected the Mark of the Beast would be saved--these people would be swept up in the The Rapture, whisked away to Heaven, and all the weak, godless people who'd taken the Mark of the Beast would then live 100, 1000 (can't quite remember) years in the reign of the Antichrist, Satan reborn on the face of the earth, and those would be terrible, terrible times.
But it's scary, how close the description of the Rapture--apocalypse, end times I grew up with--mirrors what is happening in the world around me. Messes with my mind.
That certainly sounds scary, but take political power out of the picture and what's left of your boogeyman?a capitalist super-organism
Quite the contrary, Capitalism without the Crony- -part that's enabled and maintained through political power.
Well, I agree that capitalism without the crony- -part, as you put it, would be preferable to the current system (of socialism for the rich). So now we have capitalism without a political system. Who's going to mediate conflicts between businesses? Who elects the mediator? What incentive does "Megacorp Inc." have NOT to dump their toxic waste into some poor country, where people aren't likely to be consumers, anyways? What keeps corporations from monopolizing markets, merging into entities which make today's corporations look like mom & pop's neighborhood store and forming de-facto governments, with his glory, El'CEO on top?Quite the contrary, Capitalism without the Crony- -part that's enabled and maintained through political power.
The key to your questions is to realize that having rulers exacerbates any societal problems you might see, because they're just going to let their cronies loot and pillage and pollute as they please, as long as they receive adequate bribes - that's why they went into politics after all. Would people do something about "Megacorp Inc" raping the world, if they didn't think it was their rulers' job to stop it? But here's a realistic idea anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_resolution_organization
True, but the reason that most rich people in America are white guys is because our government has, as an institution, historically worked to deny other groups access to power. And, in many cases, still work hard to deny minority groups access to political power.
Certainly. I don't deny this. Historically speaking, old white males were certainly privileged in terms of the law and business. And indeed there were laws enacted to keep things this way. In modern society, those laws and restrictions have been all but removed, so now it boils down to who's rich and has societal power. Which happen to be mostly those rich white guys and their families. The reason I make the correction is because we similar things happening in other parts of the world, but with whatever the majority demographic happens to be there. The most powerful men in africa aren't rich white guys. They are, quite frankly, rich african guys. The most powerful people in china/japan aren't rich white guys. They are rich chinese/japanese guys. It just happens that in the US, we've had the history of rich white guys controlling the landscape and legal system. That doesn't mean all white guys are privileged or are biased for. It just means that most rich people happen to be old white guys. As such, the real demographic we are talking about are rich people. Not white guys. Just look at any homeless white guy. Where's the privilege? Where's the power? You don't see it. Yet, look at any rich person (regardless of ethnicity/gender), and you'll immediately see the power. You don't see begging homeless rich people. But you do see rich and powerful black women. White males just happen to be the majority demographic in the US. And rich people happen to be older most of the time (due to a variety of reasons).
If it's any consolation, it's not just that black and poor people aren't "well represented". In reality, it's just that democracy is a sham meant to give us the illusion that we have a say in how we're coerced by our rulers. Does any ordinary person want all their communications monitored and processed? No, of course not. They do it to us anyway. Does any ordinary person want SOPA / PIPA / CISPA / whatever? Of course not. But they pass that kind of legislation anyway. It's plainly clear they're not working with our interests in mind, but then again, we are the subjects and they are the rulers, so why would they?
But this is only true of the past 30 years, America since Reagan. Before that we had affirmative action, voting rights act, civil rights act, title IX, etc. The interesting question, and the one we should be asking, is what has changed since then? Saying, "Why hasn’t democracy reduced inequality? Because it never had the chance." adds little to the conversation, and isn't true to boot. In post wwii plenty of positive things happened, so it is possible, we've just lost our way.
I'm pretty sure the solution is to stop focusing on the final election, and focus more on the primaries. If the winners of the primaries are really the best candidate from each party, then the people win no matter which party wins the election. But that's not what happens at all.
I wonder... I've read that Congresspeople spend the bulk of their time flying around begging for money from wealthy donors. Their influence within the party hierarchy, what Senate committees Senators are selected for, etc. are all basically functions of how effective they are at fundraising. I think if you don't address campaign finance, it doesn't matter in the end how you elect the people. The system will force them into behaving like they all currently do, or consign them to a position of diminished influence so that they can't counter the people who do sell out.
That only works if you assume that the reign of financial elites can be ended by having the right guy in office. I don't see any evidence for that assumption. Logically, I'm not sure that there are individual solutions to this deeply ingrained systemic problem.
Right. I don't disagree about your point concerning democracy vs visibility. But again, say these really great guys, the best each party has to offer, are elected in the primaries. One of them then is voted or votemachined into office. Then what? Who cares about who is shuffling around some pieces. The rules, the boundaries of reasonable discourse are still going to be dictated by "financial realities". There will be no change as long as this way of interpreting reality and its possibilities is in place. At levels of real wealth, the game was decided long ago.
Not doing anything is an action just as well. You ask then what. I ask then what without? I don't mean this as a trap, it's a pretty binary proposition so the question isn't whether to take a third option but whether either has advantages. That aside I don't believe that any complex problem ever comes down to a single solution. It might seem like it. Revolutions, strong personalities, etc. popular history is in love with the single mover trope, whether it's an event or a person. I however see those as results of gradual buildups. Just look at the right-shift in US politics. Each succesive genration of politicians was just a little bit more conservative. And now a democratic president is uncomfortably close to Nixon in more than a single area. I believe a similar shift away from "financial realities" is possible as well. It's not a satisfing answer but it's how, as far as I can tell, any progress is ever made. Hopefully in 50 years we can have a "defining" event that it can all be atributed to too.
I agree on all of that. Which is why I don't advocate taking no action. I'm a member of a political party, precisely because I agree that something is better than nothing. At the same time, I suspect that there is little capacity for significant course correction left in the formally democratic process. Those shifts you speak of seem to have known only one direction for decades. I still hold some hope for change being introduced through peaceful activism.