Noam Chomsky on Economic Inequality

as far as inequality is concerned it's been growing quite rapidly worldwide every year Oxfam leading development agency publishes a detailed extensive report of the state of poverty and inequality in the world in the year 2014 they found that about 90 individuals that literally had half of total world wealth which is an extraordinary degree of inequality in the year 2015 their latest publication which just appeared it's the number has been reduced from 90 to 60 to 62 individuals hold half the world's wealth and there are many very ugly consequences to this to take one example from the Oxfam report they point out that 5 million children are dying of starvation every year that means about 500 or so while we're meeting 500 children starving while we're talking and they could very easily be saved the resources are certainly there to save them what policy is designed so that it goes to enriching the super rich and the powerful not to saving millions of children from starvation the there is an organization of the rich developed countries the OECD the 31 countries among the OECD countries the US is at the extreme in both inequality and poverty just quote from the latest OED report on this it says the share of top incomes in the past year increased especially in english-speaking countries in the United States far more than others and by top incomes they mean the top one percent a fraction of 1% that's where there's been an explosion of inequality huge explosion primarily in the United States also to some extent in other english-speaking countries and poverty remains at extraordinary levels but with regard to poverty and inequality by most measures in the OECD studies the United States ranks with the poorest of the 31 countries it ranks alongside of Mexico and Turkey poverty rates and inequality in the United States are much greater than poor or quite poor European countries like Portugal and this has been consistent over 50 years the same is true of measures of social social justice that's measures that include things like infant mortality hunger and so on of the 31 OSE D countries the United States ranks 27th right down to the bottom right along with Greece only slightly above Mexico Chile and Turkey that there is an Associated and quite striking fact which you perhaps have read about in the newspapers it's recently been discovered that among the sector of the American population less educated whites mainly white males that means with on a high school education among this large sector of the American population a life expectancy is actually declining that's something that is unheard of in rich societies life expectancy continually Rises the United States is not particularly high in life expectancy as that's for the that life expectancy should reduce among a major sector of the population less educated white males that's unheard of these are surely consequence all of this is surely a consequence of the neoliberal policies of the past generation deregulation marketization decline of public institutions and so on it has led to general in the United States and similar things or even worse elsewhere it's led to a stack pretty much stagnation for much in fact the majority of the population awesome ones decline real wages actual wages evaluated relative to inflation real wages for male workers are now at the level of about the late 1960s there's been considerable growth but it's gone into very few pockets the last couple of years almost all the growths has gone into tiny percentage of the wealth wealthy population the said that there is in fact now this radical concentration of wealth and not in parts of the population that are really productive much of it is in financial institutions which have a dubious and maybe a harmful effect on the economy and this is understood by the major powerful institution so for example a couple of years ago Citigroup why the major financial institutions published a report for its and for the for the investors the investors and the Citigroup deals with and it urged them to direct their investments to what they call the plutonomy index bhutanam e means the sector of the population the wealthier sector of the population they said that worldwide incidentally so the plutonomy is a worldwide class system of very wealthy people the and it says the mostly in the united states but also some elsewhere some China some in Saudi Arabia and so on primarily in the United States that that's where the real good investment opportunities are you can kind of disregard the rest there is not important and infected so the common too just to divide the world's population into a putana me which is the upper sector of wealth and power and the what something is called the precariat the people who live precarious lives without security without benefits in many countries of including rich countries in Europe there's the unemployment among youth is extraordinarily high that people are living at home into the 40's again stark family is getting a job and so that's the precariat part on jobs no no just same in the United States at take colleges and universities which increasingly are hiring temporary workers adjuncts graduate students people of no protection can be dismissed easily a paid very little that's the precariat so the world is kind of dividing into a plutonomy and a precariat done as many have pointed out by now the super-rich really inhabit a a different world a world that barely has contact with the general population except to extract resources from them well there's much debate about the causes for all of this turns out to be many complexities but there's ample evidence that it doesn't have to do with any economic laws but to largely with the policy decisions but not economic necessity and if you look at the policy decisions keeping to the United States now we should recognize that the United States is different from other societies in many ways one way is that it's by far the richest Society in the world with incomparable advantages that's been true since its founding in fact throughout its history of the United States Disney has been the richest or close to the richest country in the world by the late 19th century of the US economy was greater than that of the other advanced societies come twentieth century just accelerated this I'll come back to it suppose but though the United that's one respect in which the and of course the United States has enormous advantages huge territory relatively unpopulated once the indigenous population was eliminated or destroyed enormous internal resources extraordinary security and so on but also to an unusual extent the United States is a business run society that's partly the result of the fact that it didn't grow out of existing feudal institutions it became to a high extent run by the business world and that's revealed in many ways so takes a voting much on everybody's mind right now oh the United States has a pretty high abstention level people who don't vote and that's been investigated with interesting results well one of the leading scholars who studies contemporary electoral politics Walter Dean Burnham for distinguished scholar about some years ago did a study careful study of the socio economics profile of non voters in the United States and what he discovered is that their socio-economic profile matches those in Europe similar societies those in Europe who vote for a labor based or social democratic parties the sector of the population in the United States just doesn't vote because nothing represents them there are no such parties just recently Dean Burnham's in scholar and Thomas Harrisonville were prominent political scientists did a careful very careful study of voting in the most recent election 2014 did a careful county-by-county study of just what floating was like and they came out with a pretty spectacular conclusion it turned out that voting in that election was approximately the same as in the 1820s when the vote was restricted to property Dwight Mills 2014 about the same level of voting which tells you quite a lot about participation in what's called a democratic society and these results are amplified when we look at how people are represented by their own representatives there's a way of studying that it's major topic and academic political science you study the policies that the representatives vote for that's public and you study the attitudes of the people who they represent their preferences we know a great deal about that from extensive and quite reliable and consistent polls and it turns out that for about 70% of the populations the lower 70% on the income wealth scale they're basically disenfranchised their own representatives vote in ways dissociated unrelated to their preferences as you move up the income wealth scale you get a little more influence on representatives and at the very top which means really a fraction of 1% policies are essentially made that's very good work on that by Mark Collins Larry Bartel other mainstream political scientists there's a recent study by gillum's and Benjamin page well-known political scientist published Princeton University in which they investigated a couple hundred major decisions that were made and they compete by the political system and they compared the decisions with popular attitudes here's their conclusion quoted economic elites in tiny fraction of economic power economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy while average citizens and mess based entry groups have little or no independent influence the results provide substantial support for theories of economic elite domination and for theories of biased pluralism but not for theories of majoritarian electoral democracy or majoritarian pluralism to decode to the political science rhetoric what it means as in simple words the United States is a to Tok recei with some formal Democratic elements that are increasingly at the margins and the public is aware of that they may not read people don't have to read the political science journals to see it in their lives we see it in much of what's happening now there have been posed about taxes for decades regular polls basically two questions people are asked or your taxes too high and people say yeah I'd like to pay less taxes our taxes on the rich too low sure the rich oughta pay much higher taxes that's consistent and it's very interesting in a few studies which showed that when these polls are reported it's typically the first question that's reported taxes are to buy not the second question which says taxes are too low on the wealthy when you go back to the 1950s the Eisenhower period Texas and the wealthy were far higher the top rate was 90% in fact it's being cut back regularly over the years in direct opposition to the popular will oh so by now in fact the poor probably pay a larger percentage of their income than the rich in taxes when you consider the whole array of largely regressive taxes state local sub security and so on that's these are all the effects of policy decisions in recent years which have led to the extreme inequality and the maintenance of high levels of poverty ever since the end of the Second World War picking up in the 1970s with the neoliberal programs the net effect of it is what we see today policies of deregulation which have led to regular crises concentration of wealth and financial institutions Bill Clinton's program of destroying the welfare system ending welfare as we know it at a roof seriously harmful effect on the people who need welfare especially women with dependent children right now there are 3 million children in the United States who are living on less than $2 a day lots of unskilled labor which helps because there's a work requirement which drives down wages as much else is a kind of a vicious cycle of the increase the concentration of wealth leads to concentration of political power leads to policy choices that increase the concentration of wealth and maintain poverty

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

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Keywords: income inequality, wealth gap, poverty, wealth inequality, wealth, chomsky, noam chomsky, rich, poor, politics, reaganomics, trickle-down economics, neoliberalism

Id: lPBaVcHJtjk

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2016