I recently wrote about some of the causes behind the current global food price inflation. Two of the more obvious and interrelated causes are the high price of oil and the diversion of significant amounts of grain production for biofuel production.
Another reason, though, is a negative consequence of a positive development. In recent years, in India and China and some other developing countries, there has been a real and significant rise of affluence. This is a good thing; even if this increase in affluence has been highly uneven (and it has been), the real rise in standards of living of many is a socially positive development. One consequence has been an increased demand for food, including more meat, on the part of those with somewhat higher standards of living than before, and this has contributed to global food price inflation.
There have been other developments in relation to the growth of sectors of populations in many developing countries with somewhat higher standards of living than before. Tata’s unveiling of the “Nano,” an ultracheap car designed for the Indian market is just one example of products of all sorts being designed primarily for India’s or China’s growing middle class, something that will have positive effects, e.g. increased personal mobility and autonomy, but also many negative consequences, e.g. all the sorts of negative environmental effects of affluence common already in more highly developed economies.
The following is from a recent news article about the unveiling of Tata’s “Nano”:
“The potential impact of Tata's Nano has given environmentalists nightmares, with visions of the tiny cars clogging India's already-choked roads and collectively spewing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air.
“Industry analysts, however, say the car may soon deliver to India and the rest of the developing world unprecedented mobility.”
Showing posts with label affluence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label affluence. Show all posts
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Income Inequality Isn't The Problem - Stagnating Affluence At The Bottom and Middle Is
In his June 10 column, “Democrats’ Prosperity Problem” (this link may require you to sign in, though it should be free to do so if you’re willing to give your email address to the Washington Post), George Will takes the various Democratic presidential candidates to task for their concerns over income inequality in the U.S.
Will points out that there has been continued, sustained economic growth over the past several years. This is true – the economy is in grand health, or it would be if the economy were the sort of thing that could be healthy. Will brushes aside concern with growing economic inequality in two ways. First, he questions the concern with fairness, asking when wealth has ever been distributed evenly or fairly (which is to say that since things have never been fair, we shouldn’t now be concerned with fairness). Second, here and elsewhere, he and other fiscal conservatives have argued that so long as everyone benefits from an expanding economy, it shouldn’t matter that some benefit more than others, especially since it is through the investment of capital by the wealthy that great wealth is produced for everyone.
In theory, that’s all well and good. At certain times in the past and for certain places (mainly the industrialized world in the post-WWII decades) this has actually happened to some extent. The middle classes, and to some extent the working classes, of the industrialized world did see a significant expansion in affluence over several decades. (I addressed some of the effects of this in popular culture in an earlier post, "Generation Gaps, Popular Music, and Affluence," and in relation to sushi in "Sushi and Globalization.")
The extent of both the growth of economic inequality and the stagnation of the expansion of affluence are made clear in an article in The New York Times from June 10 by Roger Lowenstein, “The Way we live now: the inequality conundrum.” The article includes these striking figures. First, the top 1 percent of the U.S. population collected 9 percent of national income in 1979 and 16 percent in 2004. While striking, this alone doesn’t bother me. If everyone were doing significantly better, it wouldn’t bother me that the richest are sucking up an increasing proportion of total wealth, but that’s not the case. The real problem is with stagnation of affluence for the rest. Lowenstein also points out, for example, that the incomes of the bottom 20 percent of Americans, adjusted for inflation, have increased only 2 percent, which is to say not significantly at all. Many in the middle class feel increasingly insecure as well.
I find myself stirred by the concluding paragraphs of Will’s column, though I read them differently than he intends:
“Democrats need not confine themselves to their ritual tropes about how "the middle class is under assault" (Clinton again). They control Congress; they can act. The unemployed John Edwards, who has the luxury of irresponsibility, challenges Democrats to repeal the Bush tax cuts they disapprove of rather than wait for them to expire.
“Democrats cannot end the war (actually, they can but won't), but they can send their tax agenda to the president and dare him to veto it. They can, but they won't. Do you wonder why?”
Given everything else he’s said, Will clearly thinks the Democrats will remain inactive on this front because of a disjuncture between their theory and reality. To me, the inaction of congressional Democrats seems to be the result of other factors. First, though slightly less spineless than during most of the Bush Administration, the Democrats in general are still mostly spineless in standing up to Bush, even though they control Congress. Second, while I don’t at all think that Democrats and Republicans are all the same (the Republican party is much more beholden to the interests of large corporations and the wealthy, and this does make a difference), they are more alike than I’d like (See my earlier post "The 'Sameness' of Republicans and Democrats"). Talking about economic inequality is the Democratic equivalent of Republicans talking about the perils of gay marriage or abortion – it’s a way of drumming up support from the party’s voting base. Actually doing something about economic inequality would require bucking the interests of the wealthy and the corporations who provide most of the campaign funding for the Democrats as well as Republicans (even while the Democrats do get more money in small sums from large numbers of middle and working class people, and Democrats receive less corporate money than Republicans).
(I was led to both Lowenstein’s and Will’s pieces via a summary in the June 22 print issue of The Week magazine.)
Will points out that there has been continued, sustained economic growth over the past several years. This is true – the economy is in grand health, or it would be if the economy were the sort of thing that could be healthy. Will brushes aside concern with growing economic inequality in two ways. First, he questions the concern with fairness, asking when wealth has ever been distributed evenly or fairly (which is to say that since things have never been fair, we shouldn’t now be concerned with fairness). Second, here and elsewhere, he and other fiscal conservatives have argued that so long as everyone benefits from an expanding economy, it shouldn’t matter that some benefit more than others, especially since it is through the investment of capital by the wealthy that great wealth is produced for everyone.
In theory, that’s all well and good. At certain times in the past and for certain places (mainly the industrialized world in the post-WWII decades) this has actually happened to some extent. The middle classes, and to some extent the working classes, of the industrialized world did see a significant expansion in affluence over several decades. (I addressed some of the effects of this in popular culture in an earlier post, "Generation Gaps, Popular Music, and Affluence," and in relation to sushi in "Sushi and Globalization.")
The extent of both the growth of economic inequality and the stagnation of the expansion of affluence are made clear in an article in The New York Times from June 10 by Roger Lowenstein, “The Way we live now: the inequality conundrum.” The article includes these striking figures. First, the top 1 percent of the U.S. population collected 9 percent of national income in 1979 and 16 percent in 2004. While striking, this alone doesn’t bother me. If everyone were doing significantly better, it wouldn’t bother me that the richest are sucking up an increasing proportion of total wealth, but that’s not the case. The real problem is with stagnation of affluence for the rest. Lowenstein also points out, for example, that the incomes of the bottom 20 percent of Americans, adjusted for inflation, have increased only 2 percent, which is to say not significantly at all. Many in the middle class feel increasingly insecure as well.
I find myself stirred by the concluding paragraphs of Will’s column, though I read them differently than he intends:
“Democrats need not confine themselves to their ritual tropes about how "the middle class is under assault" (Clinton again). They control Congress; they can act. The unemployed John Edwards, who has the luxury of irresponsibility, challenges Democrats to repeal the Bush tax cuts they disapprove of rather than wait for them to expire.
“Democrats cannot end the war (actually, they can but won't), but they can send their tax agenda to the president and dare him to veto it. They can, but they won't. Do you wonder why?”
Given everything else he’s said, Will clearly thinks the Democrats will remain inactive on this front because of a disjuncture between their theory and reality. To me, the inaction of congressional Democrats seems to be the result of other factors. First, though slightly less spineless than during most of the Bush Administration, the Democrats in general are still mostly spineless in standing up to Bush, even though they control Congress. Second, while I don’t at all think that Democrats and Republicans are all the same (the Republican party is much more beholden to the interests of large corporations and the wealthy, and this does make a difference), they are more alike than I’d like (See my earlier post "The 'Sameness' of Republicans and Democrats"). Talking about economic inequality is the Democratic equivalent of Republicans talking about the perils of gay marriage or abortion – it’s a way of drumming up support from the party’s voting base. Actually doing something about economic inequality would require bucking the interests of the wealthy and the corporations who provide most of the campaign funding for the Democrats as well as Republicans (even while the Democrats do get more money in small sums from large numbers of middle and working class people, and Democrats receive less corporate money than Republicans).
(I was led to both Lowenstein’s and Will’s pieces via a summary in the June 22 print issue of The Week magazine.)
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Generation Gaps, Popular Music, and Affluence
In my previous two posts ("Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop" and "Miles Davis' Ferrari, or Popularity and Art") I argued that one of the important factors in the waning popularity of jazz, especially big band swing, beginning in the mid-1940s was a generation gap. The popularity of swing had been related to its role as dance music, appealing to and depending upon a young audience’s attendance at dance halls. Swing had been the popular dance music of the 1930s and early 1940s, but by the mid-1940s, the music was associated with those who had been young and sounded out of date to the youth of the time, and it began to give way to new forms of dance music.
(I’m not suggesting this was the only factor. Big bands were expensive to maintain, being comprised by definition of many musicians. They required large attendance at dance halls to be maintained. When the oil and automobile industries began buying up and dismantling many of the private trolley companies in a variety of American cities in the mid- to late 1940s, one effect was to make it harder for youth to attend dance halls in the same numbers – favoring smaller ensembles that were more cheaply maintained.)
Swing waned in favor of the new rhythm and blues music, which in turn gave way to rock and roll in the 1950s. The name “rock and roll” might have stuck around, but styles waxed and waned, with the intense popularity among 1950s youth of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and even Elvis giving way to Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and James Brown (just to name three intensely popular acts associated with somewhat different varieties of 1960s popular music).
But then something different happened. Most popular acts of the 1960s saw their popularity wane and disappear eventually as with previous acts, but the most popular acts of the 1960s never lost their audiences. The youth of the 1960s continued to enjoy popular music beyond their youth as most individuals of previous generations had not (i.e. popular music became seen as something more than a frivolity for kids to listen to). Further, over time acts like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or James Brown became dissociated from a specific generational cohort in the sense that later generations of youth have continued to discover and maintain the popularity of such acts to a much greater extent than with previous popular music.
There is a similar but distinct phenomenon in visual popular culture. Certain films, images, and styles (from the 1950s on) have become stylized as tropes of “youth” and/or “rebellion” – the images of Rebel without a Cause or The Wild One, Che Guevara tee-shirts, Mohawk haircuts or dyed hair, the “Goth” look, piercings, etc. These are modularized visual tropes that any youth can use to make a visual statement about their individuality that will be understood by nearly everyone precisely because modular and not individual. They are also tropes typically picked up and later mostly dropped.
This is different from what has happened with popular music since the 1960s, when popular music is associated with youth, but as a sort of sign and symptom of youth that isn’t dropped and isn’t expected to be. Further, popular music styles have continued to change, as in earlier decades, but each style adds to a repertoire rather than replacing the previous popular style. 1960s popular music co-exists with 1970s “classic rock” (which as far as I can tell never experienced a dip in popularity – with many acts getting as much or more radio play as during the 1970s) with 1980s New Wave (and many contemporary “alternative” bands sounding virtually identical to New Wave bands).
What made the popular music of the 1960s and later different from what came before? Better, what made youth, at least in the industrialized world, different beginning in the 1960s?
Much has been written of the “Baby Boomers” who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as the “Me” generation. In the May 26, 2007 issue of The Economist (p. 33), the anonymous columnist “Lexington” presents an interesting perspective on the issue in a discussion of Brink Lindsey’s book The Age of Abundance. Lexington writes:
“The industrial revolution in America was driven by a bourgeois Protestant ethic that celebrated work and frowned on self-indulgence. Those who invested their pay earned respect as well as compound interest; those who wasted it on whiskey and cards forwent both. But over the years, thrift combined with technology and capitalism produced such vast returns that thrift went out of fashion. The 1960s saw the coming-of-age of the first generation whose members had never known scarcity, and therefore did not fear it. Spurning their parents’ self-restraint, the baby-boomers rebelled against every form of authority and sampled every form of fun.”
This is a highly partial account to be sure. Before the mid-20th century, many who did their best to be thrifty earned neither respect nor compound interest, and many coming of age in the 1960s were well aware of scarcity. What Lindsey and Lexington are speaking of, then, is a largely middle-class phenomenon, but nonetheless real and important for that. What Post-War affluence led to for the middle-classes at least was not the elimination of the distinction between work and play, but a change in the relationship. Play was no longer a temporal stage, something that one mainly engaged in as a child before transitioning into adulthood and work and responsibility. Instead, one could thoroughly engage in play while being and becoming an adult. With the distinctions between work and play or between responsibility and play no longer tied to temporal stages of life, the line between youth and adulthood was blurred as well, leading to the marketing of continual youth (and the marketing of elements of popular culture associated with “youth” to youths born decades after the fact because of the dissociation of the tropes of “youth” from the particular sets of youth originally associated with them.)
(I’m not suggesting this was the only factor. Big bands were expensive to maintain, being comprised by definition of many musicians. They required large attendance at dance halls to be maintained. When the oil and automobile industries began buying up and dismantling many of the private trolley companies in a variety of American cities in the mid- to late 1940s, one effect was to make it harder for youth to attend dance halls in the same numbers – favoring smaller ensembles that were more cheaply maintained.)
Swing waned in favor of the new rhythm and blues music, which in turn gave way to rock and roll in the 1950s. The name “rock and roll” might have stuck around, but styles waxed and waned, with the intense popularity among 1950s youth of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and even Elvis giving way to Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and James Brown (just to name three intensely popular acts associated with somewhat different varieties of 1960s popular music).
But then something different happened. Most popular acts of the 1960s saw their popularity wane and disappear eventually as with previous acts, but the most popular acts of the 1960s never lost their audiences. The youth of the 1960s continued to enjoy popular music beyond their youth as most individuals of previous generations had not (i.e. popular music became seen as something more than a frivolity for kids to listen to). Further, over time acts like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or James Brown became dissociated from a specific generational cohort in the sense that later generations of youth have continued to discover and maintain the popularity of such acts to a much greater extent than with previous popular music.
There is a similar but distinct phenomenon in visual popular culture. Certain films, images, and styles (from the 1950s on) have become stylized as tropes of “youth” and/or “rebellion” – the images of Rebel without a Cause or The Wild One, Che Guevara tee-shirts, Mohawk haircuts or dyed hair, the “Goth” look, piercings, etc. These are modularized visual tropes that any youth can use to make a visual statement about their individuality that will be understood by nearly everyone precisely because modular and not individual. They are also tropes typically picked up and later mostly dropped.
This is different from what has happened with popular music since the 1960s, when popular music is associated with youth, but as a sort of sign and symptom of youth that isn’t dropped and isn’t expected to be. Further, popular music styles have continued to change, as in earlier decades, but each style adds to a repertoire rather than replacing the previous popular style. 1960s popular music co-exists with 1970s “classic rock” (which as far as I can tell never experienced a dip in popularity – with many acts getting as much or more radio play as during the 1970s) with 1980s New Wave (and many contemporary “alternative” bands sounding virtually identical to New Wave bands).
What made the popular music of the 1960s and later different from what came before? Better, what made youth, at least in the industrialized world, different beginning in the 1960s?
Much has been written of the “Baby Boomers” who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as the “Me” generation. In the May 26, 2007 issue of The Economist (p. 33), the anonymous columnist “Lexington” presents an interesting perspective on the issue in a discussion of Brink Lindsey’s book The Age of Abundance. Lexington writes:
“The industrial revolution in America was driven by a bourgeois Protestant ethic that celebrated work and frowned on self-indulgence. Those who invested their pay earned respect as well as compound interest; those who wasted it on whiskey and cards forwent both. But over the years, thrift combined with technology and capitalism produced such vast returns that thrift went out of fashion. The 1960s saw the coming-of-age of the first generation whose members had never known scarcity, and therefore did not fear it. Spurning their parents’ self-restraint, the baby-boomers rebelled against every form of authority and sampled every form of fun.”
This is a highly partial account to be sure. Before the mid-20th century, many who did their best to be thrifty earned neither respect nor compound interest, and many coming of age in the 1960s were well aware of scarcity. What Lindsey and Lexington are speaking of, then, is a largely middle-class phenomenon, but nonetheless real and important for that. What Post-War affluence led to for the middle-classes at least was not the elimination of the distinction between work and play, but a change in the relationship. Play was no longer a temporal stage, something that one mainly engaged in as a child before transitioning into adulthood and work and responsibility. Instead, one could thoroughly engage in play while being and becoming an adult. With the distinctions between work and play or between responsibility and play no longer tied to temporal stages of life, the line between youth and adulthood was blurred as well, leading to the marketing of continual youth (and the marketing of elements of popular culture associated with “youth” to youths born decades after the fact because of the dissociation of the tropes of “youth” from the particular sets of youth originally associated with them.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)