Arts and Letters Daily links to a Boston Globe story on Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s UK book,The Spirit Level. The authors marshall persuasive evidence that in countries where income inequality is high, social conditions and general welfare suffer.
It is economic inequality, not overall wealth or cultural differences, that fosters societal breakdown, they argue, by boosting insecurity and anxiety, which leads to divisive prejudice between the classes, rampant consumerism, and all manner of mental and physical suffering.
The source of this anxiety, they argue, is status disparities and the inability of those of low means to achieve higher status. Ironically, their research shows that increasing wealth disparities lead to a more consumeristic society (and, we might add, increase the destructive pressure on that society):
We want bigger houses and more cars, not because we need them, but because we use them to express our status. Material goods are how we show the world we’re keeping up, and in a more hierarchical society that’s more important. Status competition becomes more intense, and that increases our need to consume.
A challenging and tempering thesis … if only we can heed the warning.
The Christian Science Monitor editorial board offers a useful and well-reasoned defense of shrinking prison budgets, driven by states’ revenue shortfall, as an opportunity to rethink our approach to treatment and punishment.
The US ranks as the prison capital of the world. In 2008, more than 2.3 million men and women (or 1 in 100 adults) sat in prisons or jails. This dubious distinction comes from a near tripling of the inmate population over the past two decades – and a similar rise in state spending on corrections.
Drawing from the results of a recent study by The Pew Center on the States, the board notes that states can count on public support for rehabilitation, vocational training, and parole reform, while support for sentencing reform is weaker. Even so, the editorial concludes,
The states are imprisoned by their prison budgets. Economic necessity can unloose their chains with a different way of doing things.
Dierdre McCloskey, professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is a Harvard-educated economist who taught at the University of Chicago before moving north to UIC. She is the author of a theological defense of capitalism, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Self-described as “a postmodern free-market quantitative rhetorical Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian woman who was once a man” and an “iconoclastic” economist, her thoughts on the sources of the current recession appear in a compilation in the July 28, 2009, Christian Century (p. 24). Her perspective: That recessions don’t come from greed but, rather, from risk and daring undertaken by fallible humans; and without the economic growth that has resulted from such risk and daring, the world’s poor would be much less well off.
The recessions do not come from greed …. The recessions come from hope and courage, from venturing on building railways and then overbuilding them; from founding dot-com companies, and the overfounding them; from innovating in financial services and then overinnovating. We go too far, as imperfect creatures with imperfect knowledge of the future …. But in the meantime we get better railways, computers, banks. That’s why the recovery is always greater than the decline. The trend has been startlingly upward, the second most important event in human history.
The jagged rise of innovation has been disturbing, but on balance it has been immensely good for the poorest among us ….
This is a writer and thinker whom I need to get to know better.
Stumbled onto this book while browsing in a paper store in San Francisco recently and just had to share. It appears to be a terrific send-up of consumerism in religion carried to an extreme. “Compare and contrast before you commit. 99 religions to choose from.” From the same publisher (Knock Knock Books): How to Procrastinate, How to Get into Debt, How to Get Fat, The Complete Manual of Things that Might Kill You, and many more. Available from Amazon.
I listened recently to Louise Fresco’s TED talk contrasting artisanal bread and the culture that prizes it with its industrial counterpart (Wonder Bread) and arguing that something like sustainable Wonder Bread is essential to feeding the planet as its population grows to 9 billion. TED puts this talk in the “Unconventional Explanations” category, and the moniker certainly fits. There’s a lively series of comments about the talk on the TED site.
Thoughtful blog post by Tom Laskawy on Slate, arguing that despite the policy shifts signaled by the new administration and some changes in public opinion, industrial agriculture, with help from the farm lobby, is largely safe in the hands of Congress:
Big Food feels the ground shifting beneath it. So much so that its acting as if it could lose its grip on the American food system. But Big Food persists in battling the wrong target. While it is indeed locked in an existential struggle with an implacable foe, the government is not the enemy. The enemy is Mother Nature.
Mother Nature is represented by drout, industrial agriculture’s almost complete dependence on petroleum, flat crop yields (even in GMO crops).
Support your CSAs, folks, and plant bigger gardens!
Reading the BBC news site, I just learned that one of my favorite singers and greatest heroes, Pete Seeger, is celebrating his 90th birthday on May 3. The festivities include a concert at Madison Square Garden featuring Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, and thirty other musicians paying tribute to him.
The article linked above, from the BBC website, is charming, interesting, and provocative … like Seeger himself.
It was only a five-minute interview on The News Hour last night, but it contained a wealth of great quotes.
A few gems:
“We cannot sustain the juggernaut of consumption that we have had here in the United States over the past decade….. Our houses are too big, our cars are too big, our debts are too big, our bellies are too big, and it’s time to go on a diet.”
“Sixty percent of discretionary income of people in North American is held in the hand of people who are 55 and over…. [Those of us of that age] could live the rest of our lives on fruit, vegetables, pasta, olive oil, wine, and yearly doses of socks and underwear.”
“Our basic marketing engines are in the hands of people who are thirty-something, and they like selling to themselves, and they like selling to a younger generation.”
“One of the fundamental issues that we’re trying to discover as consumers is that there are no acquisitions that are transformational. Acquiring that iPod or that tube of lipstick or that Maserati doesn’t change us into anyone other than what we were to start out with.”
Here’s Diana Butler Bass in her typical even-handed way offering a rebuttal of the “tea-party” tax protests of the last week:
When I handed [my tax payment check] to the clerk, she said, “I hate tax day.” I replied, “Not me. I don’t love parting with the money, but I kinda like it. That check is a bargain — roads, schools, medical care, social security, and the freedom of living in the greatest country in the world. It is patriotism by checkbook. Why should I hate it?” She replied, “Why, I’ve never heard anybody say that It isn’t such a bad deal when you put it that way.”
Comparing today’s tax protesters to those who resisted the establishment of the progressive income tax in 1913, Bass restates the arguments developed then by progressive Christians to show the positive social and spiritual benefits of taxation that would “increase the overall morality of society.”
Catherine Falsani, writing on the Sojourners Blog, reviews Whitefoot, a children’s story by Wendell Berry that she calls “a beautiful, subtle book,” surely in part because of Berry’s luminous writing, and also due to the illustrations by Davis Te Selle.
As compelling as the book seems, based on the review, I was equally taken by the Berry poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” with which she ends the review:
As I read and re-read Whitefoot, I was reminded of Berry’s famous poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.” In this moment when the foundations of our world economy are trembling (along with our souls), it bears repeating:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Stumbled onto this book while browsing in a paper store in San Francisco recently and just had to share. It appears to be a terrific send-up of consumerism in religion carried to an extreme. “Compare and contrast before you commit. 99 religions to choose from.” From the same publisher (
