Rising inequality is a fixture of left-wing polemics. Sanders harps on it. Lamenting a widening gap between the richest and the rest. A lot of numbers are invoked — the top X%’s wealth share has grown from Y% to Z% over such-and-such a time span. As if such numbers are simple facts.
They never are. A recent in-depth lead article in The Economist explored all the assumptions and difficulties behind any such calculations. It casts much doubt on the “rising inequality” narrative, at least within rich countries.
Globally, inequality has indisputably been falling. That’s because economic growth rates in developing countries have greatly exceeded those in mature economies, narrowing that gap.
We keep hearing about “exporting jobs.” When we then import the goods produced from, say, China, cheaper than we can make them ourselves, that savings actually makes Americans collectively better off, even while some Americans who lose jobs are worse off. That job shift is a wealth transfer from richer nations to poorer ones — again, decreasing global inequality. Indeed, the numbers of people in extreme poverty have plummeted. Which progressives should welcome, no?
The Economist addresses four pillars of the “rising inequality” narrative: top earners snare a greater share of income; middle class incomes have stagnated; this is because labor’s share of rising productivity has fallen relative to capital’s; thus wealth has been concentrating at the top.
In each respect, you get very different results depending on how the numbers are parsed. 
It’s complicated: you must take into account not just raw income data but also taxes and government transfer programs, and fringe benefits, especially increasingly valuable medical benefits. And demographic factors — “household income” is often the focus, yet households grow smaller as marriage rates fall, with more single parenthood, thus income is divided among more “households.”
Results also greatly depend on how you adjust for past inflation. It’s widely acknowledged that government inflation numbers are too high, failing to properly account for, among other things, technological changes. For example, they actually disregard the valuable benefits from smartphones. When you chart pay levels over time using overstated inflation estimates, you can show pay falling even while the quality of life people get from it is rising.
The Economist also notes that while “returns to capital” (that is, to owners of corporate shares) have grown, a lot of that actually flows to the middle class because an increasing chunk of the stock market is owned by pension funds. Furthermore, as far as wealth is concerned, the effect of shareholding is actually eclipsed by the long-term rise in the value of home ownership, again mostly benefiting the middle class. This is another (usually overlooked) counter to the idea of rising wealth concentration at the top.
But on the other hand — showing how complex all this is — at the bottom of the income scale, educational inequality looms large. Kids born poor tend to stay poor because of lousy education. That’s largely because of where they live. Rising home values tend to lock them out of better locales. Moreover, higher house prices go with areas where good jobs concentrate. Everything is interconnected.
Meantime, when we say the top 10% or 1% of Americans’ wealth share has risen, we imagine we’re talking about the same people in Year X as in Year Y. Life doesn’t work that way. 
Those in the top groups in 2020 often differ from those who comprised those groups in 1990 or 2000. At the beginning, your income and wealth may be low because you’re a student or just starting out. The picture changes greatly in your peak earning years. So people move in and out among income groups at different stages of life. Students will of course appear very unequal vis-a-vis middle agers. Differences like that are a huge part of “inequality.”
So where does all this leave us? “Inequality” is almost surely not growing in the way many scream about. That doesn’t mean all is fine. A dynamic complex economy — and society— like ours will always have inequities of one sort or another, and we must constantly seek to diagnose and combat them.
I’ve mentioned one big example, educational inequity. Another factor is our allowing some businesses to be protected against competition. But we have to be clear on what the problems really are, and what they are not.
One thing that’s not a problem is people being rich. They’re not the cause of others being poor. 
Our focus should be not bashing the rich but lifting up the poor, giving more people opportunities to earn enough to live decently. And worldwide, thanks to globalization, capitalism, and free trade, that’s been happening a lot. A real social justice revolution.
Karlyn Borysenko was a strong New Hampshire Democrat for 20 years. Considered Trump supporters all racist, “horrible (yes, even deplorable),” as is Trump himself. But now, writing on Medium.com,* she’s almost reversed that view, calling Democrats out of touch and headed for an ass-kicking.
Wearing a red hat reading “Make Speech Free Again,” Borysenko noticed people on both right and left each saw it as aimed at the other side.
Borysenko acknowledges that Trump lies. “But the strength of this rally wasn’t about the facts and figures. It was a group of people who felt like they had someone in their corner, who would fight for them . . . they believe he has their back.”
Seeing Trump as speaking for them, having their backs, would be quite understandable were there any reality to it. But it’s all a big con; everything about Trump and his presidency is bullshit. The only back he has is his own.
But too many are hard left, latter-day Torquemadas, lusting for a new Inquisition to burn heretics. These are the hateful voices that so repel Borysenko. Supporters of Biden or Buttigieg aren’t like this.
Yet facing this crisis, Democrats, in a fit of foolish self-indulgence, seem on track to put up an utterly ridiculous candidate.
Can he buy the election? Gosh, it would be money well spent. Unlike Trump whose “charity” was (of course) a self-serving fraud, Bloomberg is a genuine philanthropist, with the public good truly at heart, and willing to use his money to promote that.
An essay by Daniel Farrell, in Louise Antony’s book Philosophers Without Gods, has no trouble disposing of the first, based on Socrates’s Euthyphro question: is something moral because God says so, or does God say so because it is moral? If the latter, we can figure it out without God. If the former it’s just arbitrary and we can do better.
Even given Socrates’s insight, Farrell still posits that God is our best source for knowing what is right, hence losing God from the picture is a big loss. And without God, isn’t everything futility and meaninglessness?
The reality that life has value to us, who live it, as individuals. Living it as a story, from a beginning to an end; living it through sensory experience, through pleasure and pain. Such feelings, experienced by beings capable of them, are ultimately the only things in the cosmos that matter, or can matter. Nothing you might posit, not even the existence of the Universe itself, can matter except insofar as it impacts those sentient feelings. And that is the only conceivable source of meaning — our strivings to optimize feelings, to enhance pleasure and combat suffering, for ourselves and our fellow sentient beings. Meaning aplenty for us, with no need for any god.
Contrary to Farrell, overcoming superstition is not a loss, but a benefit, in making meaningful sense of our lives, to live them authentically. We can do that only by eschewing delusions and coming to grips with reality. The rightness of our decisions can only come from within us.
Trump boasts about the strong economy. What makes it strong? Certainly not his “policies,” like stupid trade wars, and curbing immigration, very harmful. But if the government pumps a trillion dollars a year into it, you’ll have a good economy. That’s the big story: huge budget deficits, mostly borrowed money. Mortgaging tomorrow to live high today.
Back in antediluvian 2013, 
If it decides our game is up, we’ll be like Wile E. Coyote in the old cartoons — running off a cliff till he realizes nothing holds him up. Then he drops like a stone.
And today’s great tragedy is Trump’s destruction of even those institutions that were still continuing to function. For all our political conflict, we still operated under strong rule of law, with a basic level of civic decency, and acted as the responsible global leader.
We see it lately in the cases of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, convicted of serious crimes; then political interference trying to get them off the hook. While Trump critics are targeted. The Justice Department’s credibility is now in shreds.
And getting away with it all. That’s what acquittal by a feckless Senate majority, in the impeachment debacle, signifies. The death of accountability and rule-of-law. Our economy will not eternally be immune from the effects.
I started blogging in May 2008. It seemed cutting edge then. Now it seems passé.
After five years, my blog had attained a lordly followership of 70. Then one of my more brilliant posts, “
My daily hits also gradually rose, till I was averaging over 200 in late 2017 and early 2018. A lot of that traffic comes because google search terms bring up links to my posts. All my past ones of course remain available. Now numbering around a thousand. So as I keep writing more, on different topics, one should naturally expect more links to pop up in searches, and thus ever rising traffic.
The last two months’ daily average of 65 was actually the lowest since 2012 — before the “America on meds” big bang.
But what has changed is the world. All those legions of people fixated on their phones. What are they looking at? Not earnest blogs like mine. Instead, small discrete brain hits; snippets; quick little connects to others; videos watched for a few minutes, at most; photos viewed for seconds, or nano-seconds. Political jolts packed into just a few lines. Who, today, wants to read a 700-word essay?
In any case, I will continue writing for, if no one else, my one most appreciative reader — me.
Six more countries, including Africa’s most populous, have been added to Trump’s travel ban. He has also slashed, again, our annual refugee ceiling, to just 18,000, now fully 92% below the peak of 230,000 (while global refugee numbers are at flood tide). He’s also made it much harder, if not impossible, to apply for asylum pursuant to international norms. Ordinary legal immigration is far tougher too. Paperwork takes years, if not decades. And now anyone receiving any public benefit — or just deemed likely to — is ineligible. Further, they’ve announced yet another round of big fee increases for processing immigrants; achieving citizenship will now cost thousands. Even refugees applying for asylum must, for the first time, pay a fee. And the past program for fee waivers is largely defunct.
The war on immigration is insane. Condemning America to be an increasingly backward nation in decline. Especially as ever more Americans age and hoover up pension and health benefits, with fewer working people paying taxes to support that. We need more immigrants to replenish our workforce. Immigrants — and, yes, refugees — contribute more economically than they cost. And rejuvenate our society. (They are also (contrary to Trump’s fear-mongering) on average more law-abiding than the native-born.)
Stay out, you tired, you poor,
Monsters are a staple of nightmares.
In Milgram’s, most subjects complied with orders to administer to others what they thought were increasingly severe electric shocks. Zimbardo’s was the “Stanford Prison Experiment” with students role-playing as prisoners and guards. Here too the behavior was appalling.
Sapolsky quotes Solzhenitsyn that the line between good and evil runs through every heart.
But a much greater phenomenon is people in groups creating civilization. Its purpose is to make our lives better — mainly by curtailing the kinds of circumstances that cause people to behave badly toward each other, and expand those like I’ve experienced, increasing the likelihood that even a non-saintly person can go through life rarely behaving Zimbardoic or Milgramy.
And sometimes an entire society can become Nazi Germany. But that’s never been true of human civilization as a whole. It defeated the Nazis. And while the line between good and evil may go through every heart, they’re not equally partitioned. For most of us, the bad side of the line is dwarfed by the good.
But the climb does not go in a straight line. There was Nazi Germany. And there is Trump’s America where, for too many people, the better angels of their nature are succumbing to their demons. Whether our own downward spiral can be reversed remains to be seen.
I wouldn’t have done it. If only because Trumpers would exploit it. I’d have instead held a press conference (a long one) detailing all the outrageous lies in his speech.
I’m with Michelle. Democrats should not get in the gutter with Trump. His modus operandi is vicious lies, and his re-election campaign is taking that to new heights (or, rather, lows). We’ve seen it already in his making the State of the Union address a divisive partisan circus, then likewise defiling the National Prayer Breakfast, and his deranged chest-thumping post-impeachment bash-fest.
But it’s Trumpers themselves who seem to hate (or maybe never understood) the principles, values, and ideals America stands for. Which Trump tramples.
As a lad I got besotted with politics and political history. In particular, venerating the U.S. Senate, as the Olympian pinnacle of noble politics. I devoured biographies of Senate icons: Clay, Webster, Borah, Taft.
An impeachment trial is a most solemn and weighty Senate duty. At its start, Senators must take an oath to do impartial justice, as jurors. But Republican senators almost all made clear they’d refuse to seriously weigh the evidence. Their leader McConnell openly avowed he’d be coordinating with the defense team. So much for impartial justice.
Then John Bolton blew apart their denial, offering unanswerable first-hand evidence that Trump did exactly what he was charged with. But Republicans refused to let Bolton testify. And then, having thusly covered up Trump’s guilt (from their own eyes anyway), are voting with straight faces to acquit him.
Not a joke. That argument, holding the president truly above the law, was put forth by a famous law professor before the United States Senate. Which now proceeds to vote in accordance with it.
Columnist Michael Gerson (a Republican) notes that despite the Mueller report’s compelling evidence of wrongdoing and obstruction of justice, Trump escaped accountability (even as many of his flunkies went to jail). Now he’s done it again. How? “By employing the methods of his mentor Roy Cohn. Admit nothing. Stonewall investigators. Defy subpoenas. Viciously attack opponents. Flood the zone with exculpatory lies.” And it’s working, with Republican senators and state propaganda network Fox News covering for him with “layer upon layer of obfuscation, misdirection and deception.” Shredding “norms of truthfulness, public service and ethical behavior.” And the principles and institutions that once made America great.
Today, visiting the United States Senate would not be like ascending to Olympus. Instead, descending into Hades.
Frank Robinson:
Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man importantly broadened my political perspective. Now he’s written Identity — The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. 
Fukuyama distinguishes between megalothymos, in aristocratic systems, with dignity accruing to superiority (for a few), and isothymos, the modern democratic concept of equal dignity for all.
Rousseau would have said a craving for thymos is something that can only have meaning in a social context yet society actually impedes its achievement, a Catch-22 dooming us to unhappiness. But Fukuyama thinks social existence is of the essence in human life so it’s meaningless to posit its absence. It’s through society that our thymotic cravings play out — and their satisfaction is finally being enabled by modern liberal democracy. (That was the chief point in The End of History.)
Again, it’s thymos. In particular, immigration is seen on the right as a threat to the nation’s traditional culture, and undermining respect for those identifying with it.
This identity politics also diverts attention from society’s most salient inequality, namely that between educational levels. Which will only grow more acute as technology, the biggest factor behind it, advances. Progressives have little to say about this (and what they do say is often unhelpful — battling school choice and in effect defending an abysmal educational status quo for the underclass you might think they’d champion).
Thus “multiculturalism” and the idea of equal respect for cultures, contrasted with classical liberalism’s equal respect for human beings. Indeed, the left seems willing to sacrifice the latter on the altar of the former. (Some consider FGM or “honor” killings, for example, not wrong but merely culturally different).
What a shock that there’s a backlash, a reassertion of such other identities. Fukuyama considers this whole dynamic (with associated censorious political correctness) bad for free reasoned discourse and liberal democracy itself. It’s torn apart when groups within society demonize one another as illegitimate threats to all that’s good and holy. This plays into the bitter partisan tribalism dividing America. Fukuyama says “societies need to protect the marginalized and excluded but they also need to achieve common goals.”
That’s America’s own story, our identity uniquely grounded not in ethnicity or the like but in the American idea: constitutionalism, rule of law, democratic accountability, and all people being created equal.
And we lift our lamp beside the golden door. That too is integral to our American identity, expressed in our national motto, e pluribus unum. The very fact that diverse people came here from every corner of the globe, to join in the American enterprise, is our crowning glory.
Our identity in those ideals and values is what we must fight for.
The Rational Optimist 
