Socio-economic Darwinism

From what I understand, Adam Smith's principles didn't work out so great when we started out. Capitalism was pretty brutal, there weren't many regulations. People - even women and children - worked long hours for meagre pay. Monopolies and oligopolies were common and heck, there weren't exactly anti-trust measures to break things up. So we had a small super-rich caste (the Carnegies, the Mellons, the JP Morgans and the Rockefellers - the robber barons), and everyone else was, effectively, poor.

It was this mass growth in inequality that prompted Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifest; what prompted the failed Communist experiments in the Soviet Union and China. It was this that prompted prompted Bismarckian measures like The New Deal to take root, even in the ultra-capitalist US, and the rapid expansion of the welfare state post WW2. But something about liberty, the Declaration of Independence, and the Weberian Protestant ethic stopped the US from turning all out Red.

So in the 50s and 60s we had somewhat of an idyllic haven (unless you were a woman or black) - a working man's paradise. Jobs aplenty, and well-paying too. Home ownership became a reality tens of millions, aided by the GI bill and government-aided mortgages. It became possible for a factory worker to support a wife, four kids, a car, and a house in the suburbs on a single wage - something unfathomable today.

Then a lot of radical things began to happen. Black people started demanding their rights. Women left the kitchen and burned their bras. In 1970s, women and immigrants started flooding the marketplace, thus resulting in an expanding pool of labour that placed a downward pressure on wages. In 1973 the Arabs jacked up oil prices and the price of fuel began to rise; inflation spiraled out of control.

Then the government got less compassionate and more cold. They realized they were in deficit, debts were rising out of control. Times were getting tough economically - they couldn't afford to pay for all these welfare programs. So Reagan came on board with his "government is the enemy" rhetoric and hacked and slashed away at welfare benefits for the poor, all the while castigating and demonizing the underclass (which equated with black). Of course, corporate welfare for the rich is A-OK - the GOP, after all, must stay loyal to their home base, must stay in power, and well, you don't wanna tick off your fundraising sources!

So with the onset of the 80s and accelerating through the 90s, the gap between the haves and the have-nots – which had been shrinking up until the 70s – began to rise again. Suddenly, a major, divisive cleavage began to form in society: between those with a university degree and those without. The university-educated reaped the benefits of a knowledge economy - their earnings soared. The latter (unless protected by a militant union) either stagnated or saw their living standards decline.

And still today we see society becoming less compassionate towards the needy, and a cold, calculated, a Darwinian me-first every-man-for-himself ethos has taken hold. All those things that were implemented generations ago to mitigate the harsh consequences of the cold, brutal free market - unemployment insurance, public health insurance, affordable post-secondary education, pensions - are being repealed. We're morphing into cold, compassionless, amorphous society, and I do believe this in part has something to do with the decline of Christianity in our society.

Do I fear from this turn of events? You might be thinking "Why is Sen shedding crocodile tears over this? He's not gonna be some poor kid working at Starbucks." And true, for a reasonably smart but physically unimposing guy like me, there is probably no time like the present. I live in an economy that bestows huge monetary/social rewards on people with my skillset - people with drive and intelligence. But I also happen to be a disbeliever in the axiom of equality - I don't think everyone is equally endowed in IQ - and not everyone will have the mental capacity to become a doctor or a statistician or an actuary, like the contributors to this blog. So what about those that are swept behind? Agrarian and even industrial societies were really more egalitarian - the jobs weren't mentally taxing or draining in the least, and so long as one wasn't infirmed, everyone were capable of doing the work. And though, in relative terms, people weren't nearly as well off as we are today, there was stability generation after generation.

And so I don't have anything to worry about. Neither do the knowledge workers around me, and all those future knowledge workers I go to school with. No, because unfortunately we're all to caught up in the rat race to care.

Now enter the 21st century, the service world, where the Knowledge Worker reigns king. IQ is everything. But we live in a post-industrial world where if you're not a BSc or not part of some militant union, your labour is essentially expendable, where you can be replaced by a robot or a drone in Mexico or a code monkey in Bangalore at any moment. And I kinda feel bad for those people. Everyone's subject to market forces, nobody's job is safe, and the market is cold and brutal.

I think I like capitalism - not because it's a system that rewards handsomely those with my skillset - but out of a sense of benign altruism. I am fundamentally good-natured and like to see my fellow man do well. So capitalism is a pretty cruddy system that, if not tamed, produces huge inequalities, but just as what Churchill said about democarcy, it's superior to all other systems. (Though I don't think I can ever be a Sam Walton type entrepreneur - sure Sam, you're a multi-billionaire, but your billions were earned on the backs of people who earn a mere pittance. I don't know how you can live with that.) And if you want to head in the opposite direction - producing equality outcomes - then you'll necessary have to curtail everyone's liberty. Human nature is driven by incentive; take away the incentive and nobody works. Everybody suffers. Is this what's best for humanity? No.

Sadly, it seems that we're reverting back to the era of the robber barons, or like France during the Revolution - except in the 21st century the impervious right-side of the IQ bell curve distribution sit comfortably behind gated communities sipping on 5 dollar lattes and tapping away on blogs, and the teeming masses toil away, oblivious.

So while a record number of students are pursuing university education, something like one-third of students never complete high school. I was shocked – SHOCKED – by this figure! I had no idea dropout rates were so high. Question is – what are all these people gonna do?