An excess of billionaires is destabilising politics – just as academics predicted
An excess of billionaires is destabilising politics – just as academics predicted
Politicians have always courted the wealthy, but Elon Musk and co represent a new kind of donor, and an unprecedented danger to democracy, writes Guardian columnist Zoe Williams
The concept of “elite overproduction” was developed by social scientist Peter Turchin around the turn of this century to describe something specific: too many rich people for not enough rich-person jobs. It’s a byproduct of inequality: a ton of poor people, sure, but also a superfluity of the wealthy, without enough positions to house them in the influence and status to which they think themselves entitled. In a modern context, that would mean senior positions in the government and civil service, along with the top tier of finance and law, but Turchin tested the hypothesis from ancient Rome to 19th-century Britain. The names and nature of the contested jobs and titles changed; the pattern remained. Turchin predicted in 2010 that by the 2020s it would be destabilising US politics.
Turchin didn’t specify exactly how much wealth puts you in a situation with an overproduced elite, but he didn’t mean debt-laden students; he didn’t mean MPs; he meant, for brevity, billionaires or the top 1%. When a lot of your media are billionaire-owned, those media sources become endlessly inventive in taking the heat off billionaires, nipping criticism in the bud by pilfering its vocabulary and throwing it back at everyone.
Elon Musk could never have got himself elected into office in the US. But as the cost-cutting tsar, a made-up role Trump has promised him, he would exert extraordinary power to cause pain, with the only choice left to citizens being whether or not to hug it. Another billionaire donor, John Paulson, has been floated for the treasury secretary job, and Trump has a track record of rewarding big-ticket donors with a seat at the table – the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman boasted in print about his role in the new North America Free Trade Agreement negotiations in 2018, and as part of Trump’s “strategic and policy forum” during the 2017 administration.
One billionaire is an excess.
One cannot earn that much money without exploiting workers.
I'd argue against the word "earn" even. One cannot earn one billion dollars at all.
Nobody deserves $1 billion when it would take a teacher about 20,000 years to make the same amount. And it's not earned if it's not deserved.
But that's just semantic ranting, you're right.
No, I realized that after I wrote it and did the lazy thing and didn't edit.
Even the best teacher on Earth can only teach so many students a year. You can't become a billionaire without being able to 'scale up'.
But, for example, someone who invents something that makes a common manufacturing process just a few % more efficient, can affect millions if not billions of products that millions if not billions of people around the world buy. Even a small increase in profit margin can aggregate to a huge amount of increased wealth.
If you create that level of aggregate value, then you absolutely have earned that aggregate sum.
Also, it is literally not possible to become a billionaire by simply underpaying employees. That'd be the same kind of linear increase used in all of the dumb 'if you made $X every day for thousands of years (and interest didn't exist for some reason)' analogies, so I know the people who argue this do understand that linear growth doesn't get you there in a lifetime.
P.S. if employees were such an automatic profit source, why does downsizing exist? If labor is a profit source, firing people is throwing money away.
Just like academics predicted based on repeated patterns throughout the recorded human history
"Let them eat cake!" (Which Marie-Antoinette never said.)
It wasn't great though, the American Gilded age translation would be, "Let them eat sawdust bread".
When people say humans are bad at big numbers and you see all those "this is how big a billion is!" They do indeed pack a punch.
This one packs the biggest, to me, though.
As much as I love Tom Scott and it's a fantastic visual/temporal representation, I doubt a lot of people have the patience.
I like "1 Million seconds is 11 days, 1 Billion seconds is 31 years" as a more succinct example.
One person earning $3600/hr, 24/7, without spending any of it, would take 31 years to become a billionaire.
One person earning $3600/hr, 24/7, without spending any of it, would take 31 years to become a billionaire.
Why are you using analogies that pretend compound interest doesn't exist?
I truly believe the world would be a much better place if there was a clear cutoff for wealth. But of course, there would still be weasles out there circumventing such measures. Greed is such an incredibly harmful thing.
Not a single redeeming thing about billionaires. Not a single one. Their "philanthropy" would be entirely unneeded, if they simply paid their fair share back to society, without which they wouldn't have what they have in the first place.
if we're imagining a better place why not go further? private ownership over collective production is the only way such gross amounts of wealth are possible.
A 100% tax bracket is fine and all, but why don't we reimagine the economy so that individuals aren't controlling so much of it? We built the infrastructure, we built the factories, we invented the machines and algorithms.
Philanthropy is just bullshit at their level. My grandma giving to unicef is not the same as what they do. They want you to believe this. But they have the power to shape policies and society in their favour. It's always about money and power. Whether it's for tax, or anything else they can shape through philanthropy.
If you play android netrunner, there is an asset card used by Corporation called NGO front, and when I hear about billionaires philanthropy, I think of the small quote on this card "Who new non-profit could be so profitable."
Their "philanthropy" would be entirely unneeded, if they simply paid their fair share back to society
The entirety of the net worth of all billionaires in the US (~$5 trillion), assuming a magic wand could magically convert the figure 1:1 into cash (big assumption being made in favor of your argument), would foot the bill of total US government's welfare spending ($1.03 trillion: https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS Report - Welfare Spending The Largest Item In The Federal Budget.pdf ) for five measly years.
So even if your definition of "fair share" for them is literally 100% of what they have, the quoted statement is extremely obviously untrue.
Not to mention that's also assuming that that $1 trillion the government spends is enough to make philanthropy redundant, which it demonstrably isn't.
So instead of using our magic want to just take it all and convert it to cash we convert 1/4th to cash and keep the rest invested how it was with just the ownership changing to a public trust, that could fund welfare indefinitely based off just the interest and dividend payments that would otherwise just go to the former billionaire doubling their net worth every 5 years.
When money gives a handful of individuals more power than the rest of society, what could possibly go wrong?
Keep it up, and soon the masses will destabilize the meat from their bones.
the only solution
The thesis also elicited that elite overproduction tends to favor political change in the dispossessed elite's favor
It posits most revolutions, including communist revolutions, were pushed by elites who weren't given the station they were promised.
That's what will happen to the Trumpublican Party when its figurehead is gone. They'll spend years clawing each other to pieces to fill the yuge void.
I warned you about the tendency for wealth to accumulate under capitalism bro!!!
I told you dawg!
It keeps hapening!
Oh is this a thing that academics predicted? Welcome to the 1840s, Guardian
Also blaming the billionaires for destabilizing the economy is only partially true. The system is unstable, but billionaires profit from "instability", so sure they cause it as much as the system causes billionaires and millionaires.
The problem isn't who owns gigantic companies like Walmart and amazon and google and apple, the problem is that they can be privately owned. The instability isn't a bug so much as a feature. Its not the individuals, it's the system. Individuals can make adjustments, sometimes very critical ones but the system doesn't pick winners based on who does the best at adhering to externalized ideals, it picks winners based on who can create the most profit for owners, profit made of the immense amount of collected time and energy siphoned off of workers.
All these billionaires are making me hungry.
So we make a day like the purge but instead of weapons you have to eat the 1%
turn of the century
2010
😭
Almost a quarter way through this century
This just in: Bathroom breaks cost 200 million dollars a year in lost productivity.
[Sharpens guillotine with revolutionary intent]
I love that the headline says An excess of billionaires is” implying excess is the collective noun for billionaires. And I think that is perfect. An excess of billionaires.
Kind of like a murder of crows, but with greed.
Seems like a good time to remind people of this excellent (enraging) visualization:
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/The problem isn’t billionaires per se, the problem is not taxing people at higher income levels enough. People with higher incomes will do the rational thing and work towards self-preservation. It’s up to governments to work towards social stability, which is the point of civilization. It’s up to people to hold their governments accountable via democratic action. This model works in a lot of instances, but maligned processes can make it fail.
You sweet summer child. You think billionaires don't control things?
I am not saying that. I am saying that if you take a really rich person and and really poor person, and switch their places, then there’s no guarantee that anything effectively changes about society because innate self preservation tendencies enables us to make similar rational decisions. Systems need to counteract these self preservation tendencies because often times these tendencies can be ruinous to the system they benefit from. Look at everything happening now, for example
there are obvious, accessible solutions.
Theres this dazzling student of Hegel that has a few novel ideas about just that. You may have heard of him . . .
s/An\ excess/The\ existence/Never thought I'd see communist regex getting downvoted on lemmy
You call this news? Or new information?
It's always been like this .... it was more discreet before ... now it's just blatant.
