Daily Archives: April 21, 2014

Guess what? US ‘democracy’ won’t cure rising inequality

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Well, well. Hot on the heels of the English translation of Thomas Piketty’s magnum opus comes this report of a new study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page from Princeton. Excerpt:

Money buys power.

That’s the bottom line of a new study from Princeton University political scientist Martin Gilens, who looked at 1,779 U.S. government policy decisions between 1981 and 2002. Gilens found that the preferences of the median earner had no impact on whether policies are adopted — but that politicians march in lockstep with what the top earners wanted.

You may think you’ve heard that conclusion before, but Gilens’s approach is unique, and that makes his findings all the more important. Gilens didn’t take one theory of who has political influence and test it with data, as does almost all of the research on this topic. He tested the power of the rich, middle class, and interest groups simultaneously, allowing for any theory to win or lose. That is new.

And here’s the real danger of what Gilens finds: It means that the U.S. political system is set to transform the dramatic rise of income inequality into entrenched differences in political power — and there’s very little the middle class can do to stop it from happening.

There is, in other words, an inequality feedback loop built into the U.S. political system — and America may be spiraling into it. A policy that enriches what Gilens calls the “economic elite” will command its support. Their support, Gilens shows, means that the political system is likely to make it happen. And the ever wealthier become the ever-more powerful. Policies that undermine the elite become ever more difficult to pass as economic inequality buys political obedience.

Book Review: ‘The People’s Platform’

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My Observer review of Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform: And Other Digital Delusions.

The launch of the Mosaic browser in 1993 transformed the internet into a mainstream medium and brought the corporate world online, so from then on the die was cast. What happened is that the two universes effectively merged, so we now live in a strange amalgam of meat- and cyberspace in which the elements of each run riot. A virtual space that once had no crime and no surveillance has become one with an abundance of each; and the “real” world has been destabilised by the astonishing power and properties of networks.

Yet public understanding of the implications of this convergence lags some way behind the emerging reality, which is why we need books like this. Astra Taylor is a talented documentary-maker who was dismayed by the way her work was appropriated and pirated online. But instead of fuming silently in her studio, she set out to seek an understanding of the paradoxical world that the merging of cyberspace and meatspace has produced. What she finds is a world which is, on the one hand, hooked on an evangelical narrative about the liberating, empowering, enlightening, democratising power of information technology while, on the other, being increasingly dominated and controlled by the corporations that have effectively captured the technology.

The big question about the net was always whether it would be as revolutionary as its early evangelists believed. Would it really lead to the overthrow of the old, established order? We are now beginning to see that the answer is: no. We were intoxicated by the exuberance of our own evangelism. “From a certain angle,” writes Taylor, “the emerging order looks suspiciously like the old one.” In fact, she concludes, “Wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume and connect. The companies that provide these and related services are quickly becoming the Disneys of the digital world – monoliths hungry for quarterly profits, answerable to their shareholders not us, their users, and more influential, more ubiquitous, and more insinuated into the fabric of our everyday lives than Mickey Mouse ever was. As such they pose a whole new set of challenges to the health of our culture.”