The Levelling

by Michael O'sullivan

  The computerization of welfare benefits also allows more detailed monitoring of recipients and their lifestyles. One example Eubanks mentions is the Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) Family Screening Tool (AFST), which is designed to screen 131 variables that help predict whether children in a family are in danger of abuse. The tyranny of this system is that disadvantaged families receive high AFST scores because of their regular interactions with social services, and they are denied assistance as a result. Eubanks’s overriding fear is that algorithms are designed to reinforce existing prejudices within the US system, where many people presume that people are poor because they have made bad choices rather than because they are disadvantaged. The same process is probably increasingly true in more commercial applications such as credit screening and access to education. It has the effect of hardening inequalities and making social stratification more rigid. Another example of technology-driven inequality comes from Joy Buolamwini, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, whose research initially discovered that facial recognition software was much more accurate at recognizing white faces than black faces. Inaccuracies in algorithmic-based identification can translate into denial of access to social welfare, or misclassification of an innocent person in criminal records.

  Inequality is deeply rooted, and in the United States it is pushing extreme levels. A valuable data resource here is the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which tracks the lifestyle of a control set of young people across America. It details the rise of obesity, of incarceration (showing that one-third of Americans have been arrested by the age of twenty-five), of interracial relationships, and of health-care issues.30 Inequality is a recurring theme in the research based on this data set.

  These blockages in social advancement and behavior are important because they condition people’s expectations of their future and of the world around them. If people are faced with a reality in which income and wealth growth are capped, and in which educational and professional advancement may no longer be as fluid as they have been historically, it can produce a sense of disappointment that is then manifest in political attitudes.

  Trends in social mobility also reflect a sense that the “American Dream” is less attainable than it was historically. For example, one academic study identifies a “grandparent effect” in the United States, meaning that people’s roots, or the socioeconomic position of their grandparents, determines their standing in society.31 The study uses long-term generational data going back to the 1910 census (so it includes data on grandparents and great-grandparents) and asserts that US society is less mobile than many think. Another fascinating study based on Italian data—but one that makes me think of the Gore, Bush, and Kennedy families in US politics—uses tax records for family dynasties in Italy going back to 1427 (twenty-four years before Christopher Columbus was born).32 Broadly speaking, the top earners in Italy today are found to have already been at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago. This is striking and shows that despite the changes brought about by the Renaissance and upheavals such as two world wars, family prosperity in Italy has carried through the centuries. As an aside, family businesses have a particularly successful track record in Italy.

  Still, inequality itself may not explain the degree of change in political attitudes displayed across a range of countries. There is a greater sense of a world turned upside down, or a sense that something is not right. One startling place where the world we are used to is slipping away is in our bodies. The last ten years have probably seen the biggest change in human body/skeletal form since the nineteenth century. On balance people exercise less, and when they do employ their body in work it is often in the hunched form of the “texter,” which is producing a multitude of new skeletal and repetitive-strain injuries.

  Obesity rates are a clear manifestation of these bodily changes: the OECD notes that in some countries (such as the United Kingdom, Mexico, and the United States), obesity rates are close to 30 percent (with Korea, Japan, and India having among the lowest obesity rates) and that, more broadly, in the United States and the United Kingdom between 60 and 70 percent of the population qualify as being overweight or obese. In China, the prevalence of overweight or obese people has shot up from 20 percent in 1991 to 45 percent in 2011.33 A driver of this is sugar consumption, which in many countries has spurred a rise in conditions such as diabetes. In tandem with this, calorie consumption in the United States has risen from 3,200 calories average per day in 1981 to 4,000 in 2005 according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Other ailments are also telling, such as high levels of hip and knee osteoarthritis because of sedentary lifestyles.34 Similarly, arthritis-related repetitive-strain injuries are on the rise in the United States.35

  The behavior of the climate is another area where change is becoming more alarming and extreme. In the last fifteen years, there has been a rising magnitude in international temperature anomalies, on a scale not seen since the 1880s (when temperature anomalies were to the downward/cold side). In particular, in the last one hundred years, nine of the hottest years on record have come in the twelve years from 2006 to 2018, and there are growing numbers of climate-driven disasters and accidents. With flash fires and droughts (from California to Chad to Sweden) now more commonplace, NASA satellite-based research shows growing extremes in the displacement of freshwater around the world.36 This research—illustrated by some interesting graphical representations—shows that climate change and human behavior are causing wet areas to become wetter and dry areas to become drier.37 This hydraulic shift will affect cities, economies, and agriculture and in extreme cases—as is now being seen in Africa, where there are freshwater-based tensions between Egypt and the Sudan and between Kenya and Ethiopia—could lead to wars.

  Irregularities in the flowering of plants and trees and in the migratory patterns of animals and birds help confirm the sense that all is not as it should be. For instance, the World Bank estimates that in and around the United States there are 250 threatened species of fish and that there are 100 threatened species of birds in China. There are also a growing number of accounts of ecosystems that are destabilized.38

  Old World Recedes

  The way we communicate is also changing. In 1990 close to 270 million letters passed through the US Postal Service on a daily basis, but this had dropped to close to 150 million by 2014.39 At the same time, the number of email accounts globally has risen from close to 3 billion in 2011 to nearly 5 billion in 2017. On a similar trajectory, social media users have grown from fewer than 1 billion in 2010 to 2.5 billion in 2017, and the average time spent on social media has risen from 96 minutes daily to 118 minutes daily in 2016.40

  Attitudes toward marriage are also changing. Pew surveys show that, in 2006, 52 percent of Americans felt it very important that a male/female couple be legally married, but this had dropped to close to 40 percent by 2013. This reflects changing demographics: nearly 25 percent of men and 17 percent of women aged over twenty-five have never been married, compared to 10 percent and 8 percent, respectively, in 1960s America. Views of relationships are changing in other ways. In 2004, according to the Pew Research Center, 30 percent of US adults favored allowing same-sex marriage and nearly 60 percent opposed it, and by 2016 this had changed to 55 percent in favor and 35 percent against. There is quite a bit of difference in attitudes between age groups on the question of same-sex marriage, with millennials strongly in favor and older generation (grandparents) against. In addition, technology is dramatically changing the ways in which people meet each other and interact romantically. One interesting outcome is that dating through social media appears to be producing more couples with disparate backgrounds.41

  The pattern of the average day may also be changing. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spend roughly three hours a day watching television and less than thirty minutes on sports and other recreation-related activities.42 In many countries wasted time is also increasing. According to the TomTom Traffi
c Index, travel time during peak traffic hours in the United Kingdom and China takes nearly 40 percent longer. Chinese people waste the most time in travel congestion, on average losing 161 hours per year (in 2015), with those in the United Kingdom losing 149 hours and Americans losing only 117 hours.

  A very contentious political issue is migration, which surfaces as one of the changes people are least comfortable with. In some countries, the number of international migrants living in a country as a proportion of its total population is high. Switzerland has a migrant stock of close to 29 percent, making it one of the most migrant-intense countries in the developed world, according to the World Bank (Canada has 21 percent and Singapore 45 percent, for instance). In the United States and United Kingdom, the percentage of migrant stock has steadily increased in recent years, from 9 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2015 in the United States, and from 6 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2016 in the United Kingdom. In some cities—Brussels, Toronto, Sydney, and Los Angeles—the proportion of the population that is foreign born is very high (close to 30 percent). One reason for this is that fertility rates in most developed countries are at historically very low levels. For example, Catholic Italy is now at the bottom of the European fertility table, with a rate of 0.7 children per family (in 1960 it was 7). To a certain degree, people’s decision to have families or not is a statement about their long-term views on the future and the relative pessimism over the costs of living (e.g., young people still live with their parents) and to an extent is also a statement by women regarding their role in society. In addition, the low birthrate may reflect the way in which social media and inflexible work practices in countries like Japan have diminished social skills, to the detriment of physical relationships between men and women (according to the BBC, the proportion of virgins among single Japanese between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four is 45 percent).43 As a result of low fertility, the Japanese population is expected to drop from 128 million today to 86 million in forty years.

  What Do People Think?

  Having laid out the retreat of globalization, the problems that retreat exposes, and the ways in which people’s expectations and their sense of calm are being disturbed, it should be no surprise that disillusionment is marking political choices. My line of thinking here is that tectonic trends in economics—such as inequality and very low, inflation-adjusted increases in wages—shape the ways in which we view the world and, as such, filter through to political choices.

  In the United States, the first inkling of discontent came in 2014 with the shocking unseating of the House majority leader Eric Cantor by the Tea Party in the Republican primary ahead of the congressional elections by a relatively unknown economics professor named Dave Brat. Then the drift of blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party to the right and the appeal of nonestablishment candidates like Bernie Sanders to younger voters became new political trends. We can now say, without controversy, that Americans have lost faith in politics and politicians. For example, Gallup polls show that Americans rate members of Congress at the very bottom of professions (only 7 percent believed members of Congress had high ethical standards), just above car salespeople and well down in the ranking from nursing, the top profession.44 It is also worth mentioning that in the United States, according to Gallup, nearly 45 percent of voters now identify themselves as independents, and two groups of close to 25 percent each identify with the Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

  In Europe there is also a growing literature on political dislocation. When the late Peter Mair, an Irish political scientist and professor of European Politics at the European University Institute in Florence, started to write his book Ruling the Void in 2007 before the global and European financial crises, there was already a tangible sense that democracy, and in particular party-based democracy, in Europe was atrophying. Voter turnout was falling across a range of countries; voter behavior had become more volatile, with voters shopping around fringe and smaller parties with larger, more established political parties seeing a corresponding drop in membership and loyalty.

  By the time Mair’s book was published in 2013, after his death, these trends had been exacerbated by financial crisis, though he had still been ahead of his time in declaring that the era of “party democracy has passed.” Another trend identified by Mair was the “Europeanization” of national politics, which he took to mean the penetration of “European rules, directives and norms into the domestic sphere” as individual states increasingly adopted laws “made in Brussels” to replace domestically agreed ones.45 Brexiteers are known to complain that the Europe Union regulates the size of British cucumbers, sausages, and pints of beer. This trend probably prefigured the counterreaction of British voters toward the European Union in the Brexit referendum. Even as Brexit passes, it looks like Britain will still be beholden to European law across a range of fields such as trade and services. Getting out of Europe is well-nigh impossible in practice.

  If we update many of the tables and data in the Mair book, the trends he described have become more pronounced. Voter sentiment remains poor, to put it lightly. Opinion polls and surveys show that close to 80 percent of Europeans distrust political parties and that about 40 percent are pessimistic about Europe. Comparing EU citizens’ attitudes to the European Union between 1993 and 2016: in Greece trust in the European Union has dropped from over 60 percent to 22 percent, and in France and Germany it now lies in the mid–30 percent range. In many European countries, however, especially in eastern Europe, people trust the European Union more than their national political parties.46

  Pessimism

  Correspondingly, pessimism in the European Union has risen sharply in the past nine years. In 2007, less than 20 percent of people in European countries were pessimistic about the European Union, but this has now risen to close to 35 percent, led by Germany and France. Nearly half (49 percent) of Europeans felt that their voice doesn’t count in European affairs. That said, Eurobarometer polls show that the majority of citizens in eurozone countries would stay in if they were offered a United Kingdom–style referendum. Europeans are more cynical or less trusting when it comes to politicians. In 2000, 65 percent of Europeans declared that they distrusted political parties. This has now risen to close to 90 percent in France, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. The Danes and the Dutch still have a modicum of trust in politics, and Swedes and Finns have become modestly more trusting of political parties than they used to be.

  Internationally, we see the same picture. For example, the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer outlines the crisis in trust around the world.47 It shows that two-thirds of the countries surveyed are “distrusters” in the sense that less than 50 percent of voters trust the mainstream institutions of business, government, media, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to do what is right. The sharp change in the survey results in recent years has been the steepest decline in trust in the United States on record for the Edelman Barometer, with Italy and Brazil also seeing drops in trust. In more detail, it found that only 15 percent of the general population believed the present system is working, 53 percent do not, and 32 percent were uncertain.

  Distrust in the system breeds volatility in the behavior of voters. In most European countries political stability is now increasingly rare. Voter turnout is falling in many countries, precipitously so in the last ten years, with that in France falling from 80 percent in 1945 to below 60 percent in 2011, though more recently it rose to 74 percent in 2017.48 In Italy, Greece, Germany, and Spain, voter turnout is the lowest it’s been in the past sixty years, having dropped discernibly in the past twenty years. In the last European Parliament elections, average turnout has dipped from the mid–60 percent level to the low 40 percents. Reinforcing these numbers is a generalized sense of disinterest in mainstream politics across European countries. Voters also show less allegiance to established parties. Reflecting the rise of issues like immigration, they are specifically attracted to right-wing parties, which are garnering 25 percent of the vo
te in many countries.49

  My own experience observing elections in countries like France and Ireland suggests that when it comes to mainstream politics, there is a great deal of apathy on the part of voters, disbelief that they can influence election results. In France, the election of Emmanuel Macron, widely and I think correctly seen as someone who can reinvigorate France, took place in the context of a historically low turnout because many voters had thought the result was a foregone conclusion. Two other trends are worth mentioning: First, radical parties are attracting both ideologically committed voters and, it seems, voters who would not ordinarily have voted in elections. And in Ireland, two recent referenda on gay marriage and abortion have mobilized very large turnouts, suggesting that, second, when it comes to single-issue votes, many who do not ordinarily vote (i.e., in this case, younger voters) are politically very committed. In addition, in the Brexit referendum, three million people who had not voted in the prior three general elections came out to vote in the referendum.

  The practical consequence of dissatisfaction with the old political order in the developed world is that it causes apathy (as evidenced in lower turnout), rage, or political entrepreneurship. Reflecting this, the last five years have seen a jump in the formation of new political parties across Europe, from five in 2010 to fourteen by 2015. Of these new parties, several are emerging on the right of the political spectrum, joining other established right-wing parties such as the Front National (now rebranded as Rassemblement National) in France and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), effectively European versions of the Freedom Caucus and the Tea Party Caucus, and contributing to a new political phenomenon whereby right-wing parties are garnering a rising share of voter support. It is now not unusual for right-wing parties to have 20 percent or more of the vote across a range of European countries. For example, in the Swedish general election in September 2018, the far-right-wing Sweden Democrat Party won 17.6 percent of the vote. More broadly, an interesting study from Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, in 2017 showed that the populist vote (at 35 percent in developed countries like the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany) has today almost equaled the previous peak, 40 percent in the mid-1930s.50