But there are systemic effects that act against a political solution. Greater wealth leads to many things, including:
•Greater political leverage. Wealthy people and corporations have great lobbying power with public officials, and it is getting greater all the time.
•Greater control over public discourse. Wealthy people and corporations can control public discourse in many ways—by owning media outlets, sponsoring shows, massive advertising, and so on. This control works via the brain. Language and imagery that activate conservative frames will also activate conservative morality—strict father morality in general. As conservative morality gets stronger, progressive morality gets weaker in the brains of the public. This mightily affects what people believe unconsciously as well as consciously, and therefore affects how people vote.
•Greater control over the rights of others. Through state control of legislatures, the wealthy can control the voting rights of poorer populations, and state control is cheaper than national control.
What is needed is government payment for elections and serious regulation of political control of the media. But given the present distribution of wealth and the present distribution of strict father morality in the population in the United States, as well as other countries, the necessary political change seems unlikely—unless there are other important changes brought on by progressives willing to build the grounding frames for systemic issues, and to keep the focus on these issues sharp and strong through continual public discourse.
The Effect on Satisfying Productive Work
One of the major systemic effects of the ascendance of reinvestment wealth concerns the nature of productive work itself. It has become less satisfying in many ways. The most obvious is that the productive economic system produces less wealth—it doesn’t pay enough for a satisfying life for many of our citizens. It also provides less work—fewer jobs. And the work it does provide is less satisfying.
Satisfying work is about pay and working conditions but also about skilled work that is useful and that people feel good about doing. This work needn’t be very high-paying or glamorous, just satisfying. Here are some professions of people I know who have found ways to have satisfying work lives: carpenter, gardener, barber, cheese salesperson, baker, mechanic, office manager, tailor, house painter, chef, tearoom server, schoolteacher, house cleaner, and so on. They are not professionals—not lawyers, doctors, computer scientists, chemists, biologists, or finance professionals, nor musicians, movie actors, or professional athletes. Just folks. They can be well-educated, functioning citizens, good parents. However, fewer and fewer people manage to have such satisfying work lives, and fewer and fewer people are managing to get a real education and function well as community members and parents because of harsher working conditions.
There is a structural reason for this. Remember that companies tend to have two kinds of employees—the assets and the resources. The assets are senior managers and necessary creative people. The resources are people who are interchangeable; who are hired at the lowest possible skill level; the lowest pay and benefit level; and minimally acceptable working conditions such as employment guarantees, pensions, medical care, a pleasant work environment, few if any sick leaves and parental leaves, little choice in work times, few if any raises or bonuses, and so on. This makes for “efficiency,” which is defined as the maximization of profit. Workers treated as resources, not assets, are subject to layoffs, buybacks as contract workers, and job loss when outsourcing is more profitable. The corporate movement against unionization not only allows such conditions to occur, but accelerates them.
Computerization and mechanization leads to more and more jobs becoming low-skill, low-pay resource jobs. At the same time, it leads to even greater wealth for corporate managers and investors, since they can either lay off workers or downgrade their skill level and pay scale or outsource to places where labor is cheap.
That tendency is driven by investors’ demand for greater and greater reinvestment returns and the drive for managers to become part of the reinvestment wealth class by increasing their wealth. Since corporate managers manage corporate wealth, they can get a greater share of that wealth. Those in a corporation who control where the corporation’s money goes can gather to themselves more and more of the corporation’s wealth, leaving less for workers who create that wealth.
Are Ordinary Liberal Economic Solutions Inadequate?
Liberals regularly propose measures set within classical liberal economic theory: raising the minimum wage, massive programs for rebuilding infrastructure, better safety nets, early childhood education and better education in general, better health care, and so on. These would help ease the pain on the nonwealthy—and that is a vitally important thing to do. But can liberal economic measures alone overcome runaway accumulation for the rich and runaway loss for the nonrich?
Even to get these easing-the-pain measures, the political climate would have to change radically. And as we have seen, just telling people the Piketty economic facts cannot help, because the Piketty facts will not have real effects without radical framing change.
What’s Wrong with Runaway Accumulation?
The major thus-far-unframed effect is that runaway exponential accumulation of wealth share tends to kill off the provision of public resources that makes a satisfying and healthy private life possible. The political effect of runaway wealth is, for example, to cut taxes on the wealthy, taking away funding for the public resources that made that wealth possible in the first place.
Take university education. There are only so many top research universities. A number of them are public. By cutting funding to such “public” universities, these public resources have to raise tuition and other costs and so move away from really being public toward being private. The same goes for education at all levels.
At the same time, real education is being lost. The point of a classic liberal education was manyfold: to develop one’s mind and critical faculties in general, to teach about the world so as to open a world of possibilities in life, to provide skills for learning whatever one needs to learn, and to create citizens who contribute to a democratic society. Because of the runaway loss of satisfying work, education has radically changed. More and more students see education as a direct route to either wealth or a satisfying work life—and are therefore getting “educated” for today’s jobs, without the intangible but vitally important personal riches of a liberal education. That is educational robbery, because a liberal education opens up possibilities for one’s entire life that an orientation toward today’s jobs does not—especially when today’s jobs may not be there in the future.
The Runaway Loss of Valuable Experiences
If those of great wealth own the beaches, it means all others are deprived of the experience of them. Access for most people is cut off. The loss is a loss of experience. This is true not only of beaches but also of many things that the ultra rich can experience but that the lower-middle class and poor cannot. Excellent schools, pleasant surroundings, summer camps, trips to lovely or interesting places, the ability to visit family, time off from work, expensive art or music events, nice clothes, great food and wine, healthy food, first-rate medical care, major athletic events, world cultures, great cities, film festivals, and on and on. Money buys experiences of personal value—what a lot of life is about. A single wealthy person can only experience so much. The runaway accumulation of wealth for the rich and the runaway loss of wealth for others mean for most people a runaway loss of experiences of personal value—the loss of a meaningful life.
Piketty and Global Warming
The rise of runaway wealth accumulation at the same time as intensifying global warming has created the perfect storm, and these concepts need to be linked in political discourse.
Wealthy corporations and individuals keep reinvesting and getting wealthier. The current framing of global warming in the conservative and often the mainstream media uses both denial and scare tactic
s like claiming that addressing global warming is too expensive, would ruin the economy, cost massive job layoffs, increase energy dependency, and so on. These are all false claims, as independent studies have shown. But when the wealthy control what appears in the public media, they can control public discourse and public thought mechanisms through the control of language and imagery. And the worse global warming effects get, the greater the pain on the middle and lower classes, while the effects of global warming can be more easily withstood by those with great wealth.
Global warming is the greatest moral issue facing our generation. Accelerating wealth accumulation by the wealthy is a close runner-up. Together, they present a clear and present danger, not just to the United States, but to the world.
Growth
There is a major systemic effect of framing the Piketty insight in terms of inequality alone, and not thinking about how it relates to global warming and other major issues, like the pressure for continued economic growth. Piketty is arguing within traditional economic theory. He estimates that R can in principle (with the right politics) be kept less than G (economic growth measured in terms of GDP) if economic growth G is kept below 2 percent per year.
But growth is compounded and therefore exponential too. Economic growth means population growth, growth in the use of resources, growth in global warming, growth in weather disasters, and growth in the diminishment of the natural world. Over fifty years, even 2 percent growth is huge!
Once one starts talking about global warming, growth itself becomes an issue—population growth, growth in worldwide production for and by that population, growth in food needs, growth in energy needs, growth in natural resource needs, and so on. Fossil fuel use has to be reversed to avoid global warming disasters. An economy based on growth—even as low as 2 percent—in all these areas would not prevent a global warming disaster.
Models for a new “sustainable”—that is, nongrowth—economics are being developed. How does the Piketty insight square with such economic models—if it does at all?
That is a systemic causation question that needs to be asked. For example, the main factor in population growth appears to be women’s education and the availability and use of contraception. Women’s education is affected by poverty, but every bit as much by religion. Religions like Catholicism and Islamism promote population growth, which makes it harder to control global warming. It isn’t just whether R is higher than G.
The Intertwined Systemic Effects
One of the main take-home points of this book is that framing can have massive systemic effects. The absence of adequate framing can have just as massive effects.
Framing the Piketty insight as just about inequality misses most of what we have just discussed. It misses the systemic effects.
Framing is about thought, about understanding at the deepest levels, about circuitry in your brain with strong synapses that last, about changing unconscious, automatic, effortless understanding—in other words, about changing common sense. Frame change itself is a systemic effect. There are a lot of frames to be changed. How can such overall change be effected?
It begins by strengthening the framing for the progressive moral system and for the progressive view of democracy based around empathy and the responsibility flowing from that empathy. In other words, we have to care about others—fellow citizens of the world we have never met and never will meet—and recognize the fact that the private depends on the public.
That in turn depends on another systemic effect—the effect of language and the brain on public discourse, and the failure in universities to teach that effect.
★ 9 ★
Government by Corporation
As we have seen, there is much that is unframed by the general public that needs to be framed, most notably:
•Runaway wealth to the wealthy. The wealth share of the most wealthy is growing exponentially, and the wealth share of others is correspondingly declining. In the absence of adequate framing, most people feel the effects but don’t comprehend the systemic causes.
•Runaway climate disasters. The earth is warming dangerously and quickly, and that warming is systemically causing climate disasters, including extreme cold. Without understanding systemic effects, extreme cold leads to the denial of global warming.
•Runaway privatization of public resources. The private depends on the public, but conservatives are drastically cutting funds for public resources while successfully promoting privatization. They say that government doesn’t work, and by cutting funds they can make government cease to work. And by cutting government resources for all, they can make democracy cease to work.
But there is an important framing that is beginning to catch on:
•The Constitution applies only to human beings.
Conceptual metaphors have no legal standing. We normally think using thousands of them, but the law does not overtly give them any official role in the law itself. So far as the law is concerned, metaphorical thought, which is ubiquitous, does not exist. But in reality, unconscious conceptual metaphors do exist, they are everywhere, and they have consequences. This disparity between the law and the human brain and mind is unframed—not part of most people’s everyday consciousness or discourse. At the same time, a major metaphor has entered into the national consciousness because of certain Supreme Court decisions—that Corporations Are Persons with Constitutional Rights.
Reflexivity enters here. Decisions made by our courts have the power to turn metaphors into facts-on-the-ground, as in this example. Those metaphors taken as facts give rise to further court decisions extending those metaphors.
The power to turn metaphors into facts can be an awesome power—a power with enormous political impact. The Corporations Are Persons metaphor has so great a political impact that it is worth some discussion here. Let’s begin, though, by looking at two powerful metaphors that form its roots.
Cognitive scientists who study metaphorical thought have recognized two common metaphors, which we adopt unconsciously and automatically, that are relevant here.
Metaphor 1: Pluralities Are Groups. The Pluralities Are Groups metaphor attributes group properties to separate individuals—whether warranted or not. The result is that the group is perceived as an entity with different properties than the individuals in it. Take a look at the two operative words:
•A plurality consists of people, animals, plants, or other things considered separately—ungrouped. A number of people may be riding on the subway, for instance; but aside from being on the same subway, they are not necessarily part of any particular group. They are a plurality—but they need not have common characteristics, goals, or functions.
•A group is an entity, conceptualized metaphorically as a container for other entities. The group can, and usually does, have properties, resources, goals, and functions that are separate from the individual entities in the group.
Once we combine the two metaphorically, we being to think about pluralities differently. For example, a club, a church, an association (e.g., the AARP—the American Association of Retired Persons), can have money, a home, legal responsibilities, and liabilities (they can be sued or a lien can be placed against their property) that don’t apply to any individual members. Similarly corporations can be sued, while their stockholders can be immune to such lawsuits as individuals.
Metaphor 2: Institutions Are Persons. Ask most people if institutions are people, and they will say no. In fact, our definitions of the two words are quite distinct.
•An institution is an abstract entity conceptualized metaphorically as a container for people. An institution is typically defined by its goals, resources, and by various functions, responsibilities, and privileges for whatever people are in the institution. The institution is defined independently of the people who happen to be in it, serving its functions.
•A person is a human being. Human beings have goals and resources, and typically have responsibilities, privileges, and carry out f
unctions. Human beings also have properties that institutions do not have: human bodies and brains, feelings and emotions, desires and beliefs, physical functions and needs, as well as social roles and the ability to think and communicate.
But this conceptual metaphor has long been in our brains. We use this metaphorical mode of thought constantly when we are comprehending and discussing institutions, as in: The EPA was disappointed by the court ruling; Major League Baseball wants to wipe out the use of performance-enhancing drugs; Stanford thinks that online courses are a good idea; Berkeley is troubled by rape on campus; Planned Parenthood was disgusted by the recent court decision; and so on.
These two conceptual metaphors—Pluralities Are Groups and Institutions Are Persons—exist in many parts of the world and have for millennia. And in many cases they have been recognized in law. Roman law recognized certain business and religious groups as institutions with the properties of human beings: goals, resources, functions, responsibilities, and privileges. Today, we still attribute these properties of human beings metaphorically to institutions.
There is a long history of just what properties of human beings are attributed metaphorically to institutions. For example, the Medieval Church saw monasteries as institutions with goals, finances, responsibilities, and privileges—but differing from people in that they lacked a soul. In England, “companies” were institutions given exclusive rights or “charters” to do business for the financial benefit of their shareholders and the British Crown. One of the most successful was the East India Company.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded by the owners of the Massachusetts Bay Company, which had a charter to do business in the New England area. The metaphorical idea that A Government Is a Business came to America in 1623 with the Massachusetts Bay Company, and has been part of American political life ever since.
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