Friday, January 16, 2015

A Tale Of Two Poverties

I saw this op-ed in The New York Times, and it gave me a great deal of food for thought, especially as it relates to the whole question of income inequality, and its victims.  It made me appreciate the fact that there are, in fact, two different kinds of poverty, both of them bred by income inequality, and both of them threats to our future unless something is done about it, and soon.

I know what you're thinking.  How in the world am I supposed to feel sorry for a 30-year old Ivy League graduate who shot his hedge-fund-running father to death over a dispute about his allowance?  For that matter, how in the world does someone with an Ivy League degree end up in a position where his parents need to support him well past his college years?

That latter question might, in some ways, be the more interesting one.  In any case, I can easily understand the justification for both questions.  But bear with me a little bit.

Admittedly, it's easy to find economic poverty.  It's grown geometrically over the past 35 years, to the point at which it takes a series of part-time jobs just to be what used to be lower-middle-class.  In fact, at this point, the lower-middle-class is the only middle class left, if by "middle class," your talking about a world in which a house, a car, college educations, summer vacations, paid holidays and pensions can be taken for granted by the majority of Americans--along with the ability to have all of these things and the ability to save for the occasional, but not inevitable, financial rainy day.

That world, roughly defined in time as post-World War II America, began to fall apart in the 1970s as the oil shocks heralded the emergence of a truly global economy, one that leveled the financial playing field worldwide, and made economic dominance difficult for anyone.  The results--inflation, high interest rates, and budget deficits--gave what was then the 10% the opening they needed politically to tell us how all-important it was to bow down to them in fiscal matters.  Thirty-five years later, the 10% has become the 1%, and the middle class as we knew it has vanished.  The "losers" have grown in enormous numbers, and the shrinking pool of "winners" feel justified in not caring.

Except that they should.  If it's now accepted conventional wisdom that absolute economic equality is neither possible nor desirable, it should be no less accepted that an economic "pyramid" is no stronger than its base.  And that base now extends far beyond the borders of the United States. Contrary to what you may have learned in Ayn Rand 101, elites don't create wealth.  Societies create wealth.  Some members of society simply have more leverage than others.  And that is why the twenty-first century looks and feels so much like the nineteenth.

Or, for that matter, the sixteenth.  Mark Twain, an author who witnessed the injustices of his time, reached back into history to illustrate them with "The Prince and the Pauper."  The prince is the only son of Henry VIII, who later succeeds him to the throne of England as Edward VI.  In Twain's novel, the prince exchanges places for a time with a poor commoner who by chance looks almost exactly like him.  Outside of the palace, the prince is moved by the injustice he sees and resolves to be a just ruler, while, at the palace, his counterpart uses his common sense to actually practice justice, thereby helping to deceive those around him about his true identity.

In the process, Twain illustrates an important point:  that the economic and political circumstances of our lives do not define us so much as does our basic ability to distinguish right from wrong. Sometimes, however, as in the case of the prince, we need an opportunity to sharpen that ability. Sometimes, as in the case of the pauper, we need to show that we can use that ability to good effect. Either way, each side of the economic coin (pun intended) are ultimately inseparable, and have something to offer each other.

If only Thomas Gilbert, Jr. had had the opportunity that the Prince had to see the injustice on which his father's fortune was built.  If only even a fraction of the people whose lives have been dislocated by the machinations of hedge-fund managers like Gilbert's father had received some of the federal financial assistance given to all of Wall Street, so that they could have even a chance of making something of lasting value with their lives.

Our enslavement to a morally and intellectually bankrupt set of economic principles has produced, to paraphrase another nineteenth century title, a tale of two poverties--the financial poverty of the many, and the emotional poverty of the few.  And all of us suffer as a result.  Only when that enslavement ends will the suffering end as well.

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