Please take the time to follow him on Twitter and to read his great article.
Here is a quote to get your started:
When leftists challenge Joe Biden on his racist record, one of the first things that is brought up is the Crime Bill, but the bankruptcy bill was also devastating to black lives. The bankruptcy bill was one of the most anti working-class pieces of legislation ever. Joe Biden voted against amendments that would have eased the burdens of those suffering from medical debt and student loan debt. This highlights the key difference between black liberals and black leftists because black leftists discuss the black financial consequences of neoliberal capitalism. Black people are the demographic that suffers the most under medical debt.Black people pay the most interest on student loans. Joe Biden fought his entire career to make it more difficult to go after Wall Street fraudsters who charge black Americans higher interest rates and deny them loans.
Maximum Wage has been a cornerstone for my Economic Policies @ Interstellar New Deal for quite a while. I tore through this 118 page book, The Case for a Maximum Wage, in half a day as a part of the research to write a policy proposal for Maximum Wage for the Movement for a People’s Party. Its research closely reinforces my policy proposals in so very many ways.
Comments on the Book
The book was amazing and even calls to research from one of the powerful books that I have as required reading for my policies – The Spirit Level -which talks about the harms of inequality. The Case for a Maximum Wage is important enough that I will be adding it to my required reading list which now consists of 5 books.
It goes over the harms of inequality, benefits of a society with low levels of inequality, previous movements for maximum wages, the fraud of philanthropy, as well as the advantages of enacting a maximum wage. There are lots of links to articles and studies for further reading too at the end of each chapter.
I only have 2 super small and rather pedantic problems with the book:
He frames high progressive marginal tax rates as “unsustainable” which is an inappropriate word. They are most definitely is sustainable from an economic standpoint. They are hard to keep on the books within societies with large levels of inequality where the rich and corporations will eventually worm their way into destroying it just like they have here in the US, and just about everywhere else in the world.
There is a level of naivety about the thought that an implemented Maximum Wage as being immune from manipulation, thwarting, and repealing, however, I think his thoughts on its power to reduce the 1%’s ability to affect it are quite seductive.
Unknowingly, he makes a great case for Economies for the Common Good as the method of enforcement and reinforcement for the Maximum Wage which is also key to my policies too.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the problems that we face today. It tackles a very important policy – the Maximum Wage to which I say that “If your candidate or political party does not have a Maximum Wage as a corner stone to their economic policy then they are NOT serious about tackling inequality.” A Maximum Wage is one of the most powerful policy tools and this book makes a great case for it. Give it a read. It is well worth your time.
I first saw this amazing video while watching one of the political streams I follow on Twitch. It really cut to the core for me. Please take the time to watch this heartfelt and raw 6+ minute video where activist and author Kimberly Jones (Wikipedia, Author site, Twitter) unleashes about the harms caused by historical and contemporary racism in America is a speech colloquially titled “How can we win?”.
I have both the video and the full transcript written up below.
Like most transcripts I do I try to clean it up by adding lists, paragraphs, links, etc so that it is more readable. Those are all me. =)
Video Transcript
So, I’ve been seeing a lot of things talking of the people making commentary, interestingly enough, the ones I’ve noticed I’ve been making the commentary are wealthy black people making the commentary about:
We should not be rioting.
We should not be looting.
We should not be tearing up our own communities.
And then there’s been an argument of the other side of:
We should be hitting them in the pocket.
We should be focusing on the blackout days where we don’t spend money.
But, you know I feel like we should do both and I feel like I support both. And I’ll tell you why I support both.
I support both because there’s – when you have a civil unrest like this there three type of people in the streets: there are the protesters, there are the rioters, and there are the looters. The protesters aren’t there because they actually care about what is happening in the communities. They want to raise their voices and they’re there strictly to protest. You have the rioters who are angry, who are anarchists who really just want to fuck shit up, and that’s what they’re gonna do regardless. And then you have the looters. And the looters almost exclusively are just there to do that – to loot.
Now, people are like – “What did you gain? Well, what did you get from looting?” I think that as long as we’re focusing on the ‘what’ we’re not focusing on the ‘why’ and that’s my issue with that. As long as we’re focusing on ‘what they’re doing’ – we’re not focusing on ‘why they’re doing’. And some people are like “Well, those are people who are legitimately angry about what’s happening. Those are people who just want to get stuff.”.
OK, well, then let’s go with that. Let’s say that’s what it is. Let’s ask ourselves why in this country, in 2020, the financial gap between poor blacks and the rest of the world is at such a distance that people feel like their only hope and only opportunity to get some of the things that we flaunt and flash in front of them all the time is to walk through a broken glass window and get it. But they are so hopeless that getting that necklace, getting that TV, getting that change, getting that bed, getting that phone, whatever it is they’re gonna get – is that in that moment when the riots happened, and if they present an opportunity of looting that’s their only opportunity to get it.
We need to be questioning that. Why? Why are people that poor? Why are people that broke? Why are people that food insecure, that clothing insecure that they feel like they’re only shot – that they are shooting their shot by walking through a broken glass to get what they need. And then people want to talk about “Well, there’s plenty of people who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and got it on their own. Why can’t they do that?”.
Let me explain to you something about economics in America. And I’m so glad that as a child I got an opportunity to spend time at push where they taught me this. Is that we must never forget that economics was the reason that black people were brought to this country. We came to do the agricultural work in the South and the textile work in the north. Do you understand. That… that’s what we came to do. We came to do – the agricultural work in the south and the textile work in the north.
Now, if I’m right now, if I right now decided that I wanted to play Monopoly with you and for 400 rounds of playing monopoly I didn’t allow you to have any money. I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board. I didn’t allow for you to have anything and then we played another 50 rounds of who not believe and everything that you gained and you earned while you were playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you. That was Tulsa. That was Rosewood. Those are places where we built black economic wealth where we were self-sufficient where we owned our stores, where we owned our property, and they burned them to the ground.
So, that’s four hundred and fifty years. So, for 400 rounds of Monopoly you don’t get to play at all. Not only do you not get to play, you have to play on the behalf of the person that you’re playing against. You have to play and make money and earn wealth for them and then you have to turn it over to them. So, then for 50 years you finally get a little bit and you’re allowed to play. And every time that they don’t like the way that you’re playing or that you’re catching up or that you’re doing something to be self-sufficient they burn your game. They burn your cards. They burn your monopoly money. And then finally, at the release and the onset of that, they allow you to play and they say “OK, now you catch up.”. Now, at this point the only way you’re gonna catch up in the game is that the person shares the wealth correct? But, what if every time you share the wealth then there’s psychological warfare against you to say “Oh, you’re an equal-opportunity hire.”.
So, if I played 400 rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made, and then for 50 years every time that I played I, if you didn’t like what I did you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa and like they did in Rosewood. How can you win? How can you win? You can’t win. The game is fixed.
So, when they say “Why do you burn down the community? Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?” It’s not ours. We don’t own anything. We don’t own anything. There is -Trevor Noah said it so beautifully last night “There’s a social contract that we all have. That if you steal or if I steal then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us. So, the social contract is broken. And if the social contract is broken why the fuck do I give a shit about burning them fucking Football Hall of Fame, about burning a fucking Target.
You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and didn’t give a fuck! You broke the contract where for 400 years we played your game and built your wealth. You broke the contract when we built our wealth again on our own by our bootstraps in Tulsa and you dropped bombs on us. When we built it in Rosewood and you came in and you slaughtered us. You broke the contract.
So, fuck your Target. Fuck your Hall of Fame. Far as I’m concerned I could burn this bitch to the ground and it still wouldn’t be enough. And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.
This book powerfully drives home how inequality affects us all and why and how it is harmful to all it affects from rich to poor. In societies with greater inequality the rich live 10 years less than those in more equal countries. High levels of inequality like we see in the USA are devastating to everyone especially to those who are poor, and horrifically harms educational potential in all students rich or poor. As a society, we cannot hope to heal ourselves or even advance until inequality in annihilated globally.
Quotes from the Book
By raising the stakes and making the differences more apparent income and social position are seen as ever-more prominent indicators — measures almost — of a person’s worth. Each step down the status hierarchy matters more as we come increasingly to judge each other by status. It is not surprising that problems which are sensitive to social status within our societies get worse when status differences increase.
The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (pg 12)
All the progress towards greater equality which was made in the intervening decades has been lost and the inflated salaries and bonuses of mans bankers and coma CEOs have allowed them to found new dynasties in which their children and grandchildren will be able to live on unearned income in perpetuity. In the same way as the yawning gap between rich and poor led to the conspicuous consumption of Veblen’s days, so the rise in inequality since the end of the 1970’s has intensified status competition and consumerism in our own societies.
The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (pg 45)
There are so many life events or situations that can trigger this ‘deactivation’ strategy — defeats and setbacks, being dominated, bullied or rejected. While initially protective, such a response involves feeling less (or nothing), turning off our positive as well as negative emotions, and some of us get stuck, unable to turn off this ‘coping’ strategy when it is no longer helpful. Feeling cut off from other people, we can get stuck in a self-reinforcing cycle of rumination, trying to work out why we feel such a failure and driving ourselves further into depression. This chain of events, from rejection and defeat to depression, seems to be activated on the scale of an epidemic in the modern world: as mentioned earlier, according to the World Health Organization, depression is the major cause of disability globally. We might be trapped in a situation, at school or work or at home where we are bullied, put down or made to feel inferior. We might hate our job but need the money, so continue in a situation where we feel stressed every day. We are often trapped, and it is this entrapment in a submissive or subordinate response that is at the root of depression.
The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (pg 73)
He describes how constantly monitor our actions in each other’s eyes to avoid rejection, and cites Charles Cooley, the influential early American sociologist quoted at the beginning of Chapter 1, who taught that: ‘The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind.’ We monitor how others react to us for fear of any negative evaluations which might lead to rejection.
The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (pg 151)
Individuals who behaved too generously in a dominance hierarchy were likely to be taken advantage of just as those who were too self-serving in an egalitarian society risked ostracism. In societies with strong ranking systems, the threats to the survival of subordinates came not only from dominants but also from restricted reproductive opportunities and insufficient access to scarce resources. In contrast to the pressures towards self-advancement dominance hierarchies, egalitarian societies provided both negative selective pressures, such as ostracism for antisocial behaviour, and positive selection for more co-operative characteristics. People who were less selfish and more generous and trustworthy would have been more popular as partners in co-operative activities as well as being preferred as mates.
Through these rewards and sanctions, egalitarian societies created a strong evolutionary pressure towards the development of more sociable characteristics in our evolved psychology.
The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (pg 176)
If you are into Resource Based Economies, this will also be a powerful book to expand your knowledge and support for why a RBE and is the only real answer to the inequality problem.
A fellow progressive friend of mine recommended that I read The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Picket because it dealt with inequality and how it explains most of our societal problems which sounded very interesting. After tearing through it over the last day or so I just finished reading it and, wow, was that an amazing and enlightening read! Everyone should read this whether conservative, centrist, or progressive, because this issue affects all of us no matter our ideology, for inequality harms all of us regardless of socioeconomic status – yes even the rich are effected.
After about 500 man-years worth of research they published this book with amazing revelations that clearly show the harmful effects of inequality on a country and its people. It is amazing how consistent the harms are from country to country with the United States being the worst of them all, of course. If they know a country’s level of inequality they can pretty much predict its social and economic conditions from poverty and teenage pregnancy to number of people in prison and existence of specific health problems. They are also able explain why that is too. =O
A powerful reason for most of why this is true is because Humanity has evolved as a social species. Because of that, the powerful psychological ramifications of threats of adverse social opinion or reputation, feelings of less worth than others, are powerfully damaging to all aspects of society from the most rich to the most destitute. Inequality harms trust at all levels which negatively affects all aspects of life due to biopsychosocial effects. All of the rest of the problems follow from that. I have a post that talks about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (MHoN) and the Biopsychosocial model in Psychology (BPS) which can help you understand why this is so important and powerful to understand.
Quotes From the Book
Here are some quotes from this amazing and revelatory book:
It was Thomas Scheff, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who said that shame was the social emotion. He meant almost exactly what Dickerson and Kemeny were referring to when they found that the most likely kinds of stressors to raise levels of stress hormones were ‘social evaluative threats’. By ‘shame’ he meant the range of emotions to do with feeling foolish, stupid, ridiculous, inadequate, defective, incompetent, awkward, exposed, vulnerable and insecure. Shame and its opposite, pride, are rooted in the processes through which we internalize how we imagine others see us. Scheff called shame the social emotion because pride and shame provide the social evaluative feedback as we experience ourselves as if through others’ eyes. Pride is the pleasure and shame the pain through which we are socialized, so that we learn, from early childhood onwards, to behave in socially acceptable ways. Nor of course does it stop in childhood: our sensitivity to shame continues to provide the basis for conformity throughout adult life. People often find even the smallest infringement of social norms in the presenœ of others causes so much embarrassment that they are left wishing they could just disappear, or that the ground would swallow them up.
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (Kindle edition, location 674)
Not only do large inequalities produce all the problems assocated with social differences and the divisive class prejudices which go with them, but, as later chapters show, it also weakens community life, reduces trust, and increases violence
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (Kindle edition, location 754)
Social Trust vs Income Inequality The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (Kindle edition, location 820)
We also found that living in a more equal place benefited everybody not just the poor. It’s worth repeating that health disparities are not simply a contrast between the ill-health of the poor and the better health of everybody else. Instead, they run right across society so that even the reasonably well-off have shorter lives than the very rich. Likewise, the benefits of greater equality spread right across society, improving health eve not just those at the bottom. In other words, at almost any level of income, it’s better to live in a more equal place
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (Kindle edition, location 1212)
A second observation that supports our belief that greater income inequality reduces social mobility comes from data on spending on education. Education is generally thought of as the main engine of social mobility in modern democracies —people with more education earn more and have higher social status. We saw in Chpt 8 how inequality affects educational achievements and aspirations but it’s worth noting that among the eight countries for which we have information about social mobility, public expenditure on education (elementary/primary and high/secondary schools) is strongly linked to the degree of income equality. In Norway, the most equal of the eight, almost all (97.8 per cent) spending on school education is public expenditure. In contrast, in the USA, the least equal of this group of countries, only about two-thirds (68.2 per cent) of the spending on school education is public money. This is likely to have a substantial impact on social differences in access to higher education.
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (Kindle edition, location 2268)
Conclusion
It is a political, social, ethical, and economic imperative that we annihilate inequality which will save many lives, increase social trust, increase social cooperation, increase productivity all while save billions of dollars and saving the climate while doing it. Everybody wins!!
I was rather amazed that most of the methods that they briefly talk about as measures to combat inequality are things I have already thought about or even implemented in my Interstellar New Deal which are the policies I would run on if I ran for office. In my 28+ page document I have very aggressively attacked income inequality before I even fully understood its ramifications through reading this book.
They also have a website which was created to help raise awareness to to work towards reducing inequality: Equality Trust.
Their Follow-up Book – The Inner Level
On January 22, 2019 they released a follow up book which I will read this weekend thanks to the friend same friend that recommended The Spirit Level!
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy
RSS - Posts
You must be logged in to post a comment.