[Peace-discuss] Mean Streets (2) (David Sirota on Populism, too)

Mon Apr 27 11:49:24 CDT 2009

>Of course we're employing the principle descriptively, not prescriptively.

As was Pareto, Mosca, and Schumpater and as am I. 

Unless things have changed drastically since I was an active Political Scientist, there was no commonly agreed upon standard notion of "political class" much less one that was precisely defined in terms of 20% or even about 20%.  Moreover, most of the work which placed any sort of quantitative figure on the size and composition of the "political class" had their final results and conclusions based on them being highly dependent on who was surveyed and who actually responded to the surveys, the sorts of questions asked and how they were asked, what was defined as being political and political activity and what was excluded, among other factors. I sort of doubt that for most researchers, persons such as the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, or the like would have been considered much less defined as being engaged in political and economic affairs - much less part of the "political class."

My only point was that Pareto's political thought and analysis - like that of Mosca and Schumpater - reflected and extended the principle to the political system and projected that democracy was in fact empirically impossible and that there would always be a circulation of elites in operation.  I was not attempting to address whether or not any of the three prescribed elitism as a preferred form of government or even in their own daily lives supported elitism.  I only suggested that they did not believe anything but elitism to be possible given their analysis and empirical evidence which described a historic factual state of affairs as presented to them.

-----Original Message-----
From: C. G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] 
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 11:12 AM
To: LAURIE SOLOMON
Cc: 'Ricky Baldwin'; 'peace-discuss'
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Mean Streets (2) (David Sirota on Populism, too)

Of course we're employing the principle descriptively, not prescriptively. As
Chomsky points out, to move anywhere near a real democracy in America, one has
to understand (and combat) how the political class works (and is worked, so to
speak) politically:

"The 20 per cent figure ... is a standard notion in political science called the
'political class', the class that is actually active in public and economic
affairs. This roughly constitutes about 20 per cent of the population. >From the
point of view of the propaganda or the doctrinal system they are a different
kind of target than the rest of the population."

Sirota: "today's political class portrays the public's outrage as the nation's
biggest problem, rather than what the public is justifiably outraged at."

Ricky quotes Krugman to give numbers to the observation that "the political
class has to be distinguished from the real economic elite in America -- a
fraction of 1%, whose wealth has grown rapidly and at an accelerating pace in 30
years of neoliberalism, and now is equal to that of the bottom 90%.

"They won't stop at much to keep it.  And the key is to maintain the loyalty of
the misled 20%.  They're the crucial recipients of political propaganda in
America.  If they realize that their interests lie with the 80%, they will
'fight the rich, not their wars,' as Street says. That's what Obama meant when
he said that his job was to 'restore the bond of trust' between the government
and the people in America: fight the wars, not the rich..."

The site of struggle is the 20%, the political class.  The fraction of 1% have
got to maintain the twenty percent's contempt for the 80%.  If they ever
discover where their real interests lie...  --CGE

LAURIE SOLOMON wrote:
> Of course, Pareto, along with Mosca and Schrumpeter, also had what can be
> described as elitist theories about the circulation of elites in Democracies
> which basically projects the Pareto principle onto politics as well as
> economics and holds that there would always be a small powerful elite that
> governs and democracies are nothing more than systems where there is a
> circulation of elites and among elites.  Thus, there is no such thing as a
> representative democracy and maybe not even a democracy.
> 
> 
> 
> *From:* peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net 
> [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] *On Behalf Of *Ricky 
> Baldwin *Sent:* Monday, April 27, 2009 9:31 AM *To:* peace-discuss *Subject:*
> Re: [Peace-discuss] Mean Streets (2) (David Sirota on Populism, too)
> 
> 
> 
> Sorry to have missed it, Carl, Wayne, all -
> 
> 
> 
> Just a note about the Pareto principle below...  Krugman, as usual, surprises
> you if you don't expect much from a liberal.  Too bad he doesn't go into how
> these "power relations" work in this article, but he addresses it elsewhere.
> As I understand the principle, and I'm no expert, it describes a phenomenon
> that's worth discussing.  Krugman takes issue with a common use of the term,
> and the economic process assumed to explain it.
> 
> 
> 
> Krugman doesn't go this far, but it can't be said often enough: the so-called
> "free market" doesn't exist, and hasn't for at least 125 years (I'd argue it
> never has, real capitalism being based as it always has been on theft and
> brutal violence), and not just because big business is always scurrying up
> under the wing of the "nanny state".  What the Marxists, Leninists, and
> others have described as tendencies to centralization, concentration and
> monopolization have worked strongly against the "competitive" idea.  I don't
> think we have to agree with them that this is a "progressive" trend that we
> should support to recognize that this trend is in fact a sort of economic
> juggernaut (and by the way that competition is not necessarily that great,
> either, but rather usually pretty destructive and wasteful) - not just a fad.
> It's like a ball rolling downhill.  Bring interference from government,
> unions, or organized resistance in some form, this "oligarchy" is
> demonstrably the direction our economic system heads.
> 
> 
> Ricky
> 
> 
> 
> "Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=2
> 
> 
> 
> Graduates Versus Oligarchs
> 
> By PAUL KRUGMAN 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Ben Bernanke's maiden Congressional testimony as chairman of the Federal 
> Reserve was, everyone agrees, superb. He didn't put a foot wrong on monetary
> or fiscal policy.
> 
> 
> 
> But Mr. Bernanke did stumble at one point. Responding to a question from 
> Representative Barney Frank about income inequality, he declared that "the
> most important factor" in rising inequality "is the rising skill premium, the
> increased return to education."
> 
> 
> 
> That's a fundamental misreading of what's happening to American society. What
> we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers.
> Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are
> becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.
> 
> 
> I think of Mr. Bernanke's position, which one hears all the time, as the 
> 80-20 fallacy. It's the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal
> society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American
> workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and
> globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don't have these
> skills.
> 
> 
> 
> The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than
> those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to
> big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the
> real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between
> 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings
> of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.
> 
> So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent,
> or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much
> richer group than that.
> 
> 
> 
> A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern 
> University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. 
> Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th
> percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1
> percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution,
> like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.
> 
> But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th 
> percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497
> percent. No, that's not a misprint.
> 
> 
> 
> Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax 
> Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to
> an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726.
> The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's
> probably well over $6 million a year.
> 
> 
> 
> Why would someone as smart and well informed as Mr. Bernanke get the nature
> of growing inequality wrong? Because the fallacy he fell into tends to
> dominate polite discussion about income trends, not because it's true, but
> because it's comforting. The notion that it's all about returns to education
> suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it's just a case
> of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate
> inequality is to improve our educational system — and better education is a
> value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip
> service.
> 
> The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests
> that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as
> it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that's the real story.
> 
> 
> 
> Should we be worried about the increasingly oligarchic nature of American
> society? Yes, and not just because a rising economic tide has failed to lift
> most boats. Both history and modern experience tell us that highly unequal
> societies also tend to be highly corrupt. There's an arrow of causation that
> runs from diverging income trends to Jack Abramoff and the K Street project.
> 
> 
> 
> And I'm with Alan Greenspan, who — surprisingly, given his libertarian roots
> — has repeatedly warned that growing inequality poses a threat to "democratic
> society."
> 
> 
> 
> It may take some time before we muster the political will to counter that
> threat. But the first step toward doing something about inequality is to
> abandon the 80-20 fallacy. It's time to face up to the fact that rising
> inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the
> modest gains of college graduates.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> *From:* C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> *To:* Anthony Pomonis
> <apomonis at gmail.com> *Cc:* Morton K. Brussel <brussel at illinois.edu>; Stuart
> Levy <slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu>; peace-discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net> 
> *Sent:* Sunday, April 26, 2009 9:14:14 PM *Subject:* Re: [Peace-discuss] Mean
> Streets (2) (David Sirota on Populism, too)
> 
> With the help of Wayne Johnson, we discussed the Pareto principle (and the
> Gini coefficient) on News from Neptune (Fridays at 7pm, cable channel 6) two
> weeks ago.  (If I ever get it together, these programs will be available
> though <newsfromneptune.com>.  I'm prevented by my fecklessness.)  --CGE
> 
> 
> Anthony Pomonis wrote:
>> 
>> As "soft" as economic or political sciences /may/ /be,/ any move to
> dismiss their insights/ /might be too casual.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
>> 
>> Thank you to all for a lively discourse...
>> 