Sustainability Requires Social Fairness and Justice
My mother, who reads this blog regularly, hates it when I come out in support of concepts that could be viewed as leftist – and even if that weren’t the case, I try to tread lightly on the political content here anyway. Still, I thought I’d share this recent piece by Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich on the growing divide between rich and poor and the issues associated with it.
I have two questions about this:
1) Can anyone, regardless of how rich, really think they’re happier and more secure in a world with a dwindling middle class? I understand that some people may want to be a part of the “ruling elite,” but do they really want to rule over a huge class of desperately poor people? It looks like I’ll be visiting India soon, and I’ve been to Jamaica, and I can tell you this: driving past hundreds of thousands of people living in cardboard boxes isn’t a joy-inspiring experience. Regardless of your level of disconnection from the common man, I would think some level of innate empathy would kick in at a certain point.
2) In the absence of a large and prosperous middle class, who do you think is going to pay the taxes that support the U.S. government, whose defense budget is greater than the next 17 countries’ combined?
Regardless of your political persuasion, I would have to think that it’s a good idea for us all to promote a fair and more egalitarian world.
Regardless of your political persuasion, I would have to think that it’s a good idea for us all to promote a fair and more egalitarian world.
This platitude sounds great but implementing it where the lifting comes in.
The problem originates with children having babies. Our society has removed sexual promiscuity from the moral taboos of previous generations. Unwed mothers statistically doom themselves to a underclass subsistence. The middle class is out of reach for those who have been taught that instant gratification is the norm and should be the prize. This is the message of Hollywood and the music entertainment crowd.
Attacking this stratification of rich and poor begins with restablishing of moral values. The liberals who are preaching about the social stratification are living one life style and promoting quite another for the group that they are trying to lift out of poverty.
Throwing government money at the problem is not the answer.
In principal, although not necessarily in all details, I agree with you on income disparity. However, I wonder whether it is a good idea to address income disparity on a site that is primarily concerned with energy. You may lose the support of people who agree with you on energy matters but who disagree with you on income disparity.
As long as this thread is concerned with income disparity, I shall address it.
I suggest reading the biographies of the “robber barons” who lived during the gilded age, i.e., the period following the Civil War and through the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. Those biographies cover in considerable details the evils of the era and how ordinary citizens were affected. By reading this material, one can learn about many things that are typically omitted from high school American history classes.
It would also be helpful to study the Irish potato famine and how high import taxes, insisted upon by the landed and monied gentry who were indifferent to the plight of the common people, made it impossible for the people of Ireland to feed themselves during the potato famine thereby resulting in death from starvation. You can also read about child labor in England and how children were forced to climb through chimneys to clean them and the damage it did to them. They were also forced to crawl through sanitary sewers to clean them.
Of course not all wealthy people were indifferent to the plight of the poor, but enough were that there was considerable unnecessary suffering in all countries. There is no reason to assume that human nature has changed since those times. History indicates that unbridled laissez faire and unregulated capitalism result in intolerable social injustice.
Capitalism is the only system that has been shown to work well, but not without legal constraints to control unethical behavior and mitigate social evils that inevitably result from laissez faire. We’ve always had a mixed economy, i.e., part capitalism and part government investment. There will always be disagreements about the optimal balance, but It has worked reasonably well.
Larry, you statement, “Attacking this stratification of rich and poor begins with restablishing of moral values,” seems to assume that there was a time in our history when people were more Godly and more moral. I really don’t know when that time was.
You will notice that in my previous post, I have suggested some reading material to understand better the evils of the gilded age. I suggest doing that reading; it will reveal in a very graphic manner the horrible behavior of people at a time when many assume people were more Godly and more moral. Consider also the horrible evils of slavery when slave families were spilt apart on the auction block and slaves were often beaten to with an inch of their lives. Consider also the horrible conditions on the slave ships. Surely none of that was moral.
Unless you see morality as being concerned only with sex, it is quite clear that there was no time when people were more moral than they are now.
It is true that some poverty is the result of unwed parenthood, but that certainly is not the only cause of poverty. It also works the other way, i.e., some unwed parenthood is partly the result of poverty.
Although people would be better off postponing sexual activity until marriage and should be encouraged to do so, it must be recognized that not everyone will do so. It has been shown that good sex education, which includes instruction on contraception, does not result in more sexual activity; actually, it tends to result in delayed sexual activity. In areas of the country where sex education, including education about contraception, is inadequate, the unwed pregnancy rate is far higher. Thus, sex education should include the importance of respecting other people and the importance of using contraception when abstinence is not chosen.
I agree that overall morality has been no better or worse in the past as what we are seeing today. I was specifically referring to the aspect of morality that discourages sexual promiscuity.
The percent of single parent households is at an all time high. This is not just due to Hollywood and pop music influences but it is certainly a huge contributing factor. The other factor that looms big is the incentivization of the single parent lifestyle through government subsidy. No amount of sex education is going to disuade inner city youth from getting it on when they see older siblings receiving aid for dependent children that can actually be used to buy drugs and even lottery tickets. Wrong headed government programs which have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the problem over the last few decades have only inflamed the situation and made it worse.
I agree that sex education should be an integral part of the solution but when it is decoupled from positive recommendations for responsible behavior regarding family formation, it is counter productive.
Poverty is a viscious cycle that is not easily interupted. It will take boots on the ground by humanitarian minded individuals who are not just collecting government checks for an ever expanding case load.
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It certainly is true that sex education should encourage responsible behavior, and also respect for others. I’m sure that some programs do, but I wouldn’t assume that all do.
From the statistics I’ve seen, the percentage of out of wedlock births has been declining.
Poverty does not have one single cause. There are many factors involved. In some poor families, the father, and sometimes also the mother, works very hard, sometimes for long hours at more than one job, but because of not being well-educated, lacks adequate learning capacity. Surely part of the solution in such cases would be to provide effective job training. In some cases, families are poor because if ill health and disability.
I remember a poor family in St. Paul, MN. The mother couldn’t work; she had EIGHT children to care for. The father had always worked, but had insufficient earning ability to support eight children. They lived in public housing and were very concerned about the influence the poor neighborhood was having on the children, but couldn’t do much about it. In addition to the public housing, they got other assistance. The children always looked clean and neat, and the house was always clean and orderly. Surely that indicated diligence on the part of the mother.
The mother had had four children by her first husband. When he died, she had four more children by her second husband. She told me that she was a “fallen-away Catholic,” that she wouldn’t be having any more children, and that she heard that it’s a great life if you don’t weaken. Read between the lines and you will see why she had so many children.
So, one of the reasons for poverty, although not the most common one, is that people of limited means are made to feel guilty for being responsible and not having more kids than they can support. One could question the morality and responsibility of religious leaders who contribute to such problems. Better educated people generally ignore such inappropriate advice.
It is important not to paint all poor people with the same brush and to recognize that many people are poor because of circumstances over which they had little control.
On a wider front, one thing which is clear is that huge disparities between wealth and poverty can be a factor in making a society unstable, and together with authoritarian rule by a rich elite was almost certainly a major factor in the Arab Spring.
China is very conscious of the social tensions arising from wealth disparity and gives number one priority to political stability – and is making huge efforts to avoid mass unemployment for this reason.
Even taking into account the pure capitalist view, there is a case for saying that enabling the emergence of a large aspirational middle class can help to expand the market, better harness the skills of a wider cross section of society, and growing the size of the total economy in the process. This latter effect can be seen in the emerging economies of SE Asia where large numbers of highly educated workers have enabled economies to grow into sectors largely closed to the less educated.
Finally, societies where large numbers of people are desperate and will do almost anything to earn sufficient money to pay for basic necessities like water and food tend to have high levels of environmental degradation, high birth rates, and high significant losses of biodiversity.