A probably controversial summary of the Occupy movement and assorted precursors

[chess]

As with all of these posts I may well be very wrong about most of this stuff ;).

These, as far as I can tell, are the issues the Occupy movement (and its precursor the 15M / Indignados) is attempting to address - which most of the movement has conflated into one mega-issue for which 'the bankers' are to blame:

1) Broken / nonexistant regulatory systems have led to a lack of transparancy in the financial sector resulting in the ongoing bank crisis seeded by the 2008 crash. This is very important to campaign on especially in the US as it appears that currently nobody is doing anything effective to fix it, and it is a clear and present danger.

2) Rising inequality, caused (at least in part) by taxation cuts (taxes are definitely down since e.g. the 1950s) reducing redistribution, and hence the measures the government is taking to reduce spending rather than increase taxes to pay down the deficit.

This is exacerbated by 1) because 1) has resulted in / further empowered a highly mobile financial elite who can go and sit in tax havens or a more welcoming country if unilateral taxation increases make one country more expensive for them to be based in, taking the extensive tax revenues they were already paying with them. Also it has been highlighted by the crash caused by 1) as governments are no longer able to borrow their way out of their spending/taxation gaps as easily as they have been doing.

This is again worse in the US because they don't seem to believe in giving people second chances or feeding, housing and clothing the people at the bottom of the pile even in the patchy and inadequate fashion our government do - which means rising inequality that includes people going down as well as up hits more people harder.

Also in this category is rising awareness of global inequality (and probably rising actual global inequality too, but that's harder to prove / could be said to be a good thing if you assume some people will always have nothing / next to nothing as it just means that the world as a whole is improving!), with some advocating much more widespread redistribution. Which I think is an excellent idea (...just as soon as we solve the problem of selfish human nature...), but would probably suffer greatly from if it happened because I have _way_ too many toys, globally speaking.

3) Environmental degradation and exponential growth patterns becoming unsustainable, causing the end of the assumption of continual economic growth in real terms

It's not clear we can or should do anything about this until we've got 1) and a bit of 2) under control, and it's even less of 'my field' than speculative economics, but due to exponential growth curves it's creeping up on us pretty fast so it's not surprising that people who are generically concerned about The World Being Broken and the onrushing New Dark Ages are also pretty concerned about this.

Comments

[favouredenemy.livejournal.com]

This is a link I picked up from Joe Rooney's fb:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corporation-london-city-medieval

It is quite interesting.

[gwyntar.livejournal.com]

I find 1) Extremely persuasive. The fact that noone had the power to stand up and say effectively "Oi! CDOs! NO!" is a damning indictment of the US and to a lesser extent world financial regulatory system.

I agree that 2) is a serious problem, but I find most people's explanations as to the causes based purely on their own political prejudices.

With 3) I think demographics is a more compelling argument for declining growth rates than any limits imposed by the finite resources available to us.

Furthermore with both 2 and 3 I'd argue that _global_ inequality is decreasing at a historically rapid rate, and _global_ growth is at a historically high rate, due largely to (classical) liberal free trade policies.

[chess]

Demographics as in 'aging population, low incoming working population to support them in old age'?

That's okay, I hear there are a lot of eager young immigrants who are just waiting for the go-ahead to take our jobs ;).

[passage.livejournal.com]

I hear they take our jobs while simultaneously being lazy, out of work benefit scroungers. It's a frightening level of ingenuity.

[passage.livejournal.com]

Isn't comparing tax to the 1950 a bit like complaining to Henry the VII that technology had really gone backwards since Roman times?

I hear there was some kind of major war in the 40s which meant governments had rather high debts to clear in the 50s.

[fryyhite.livejournal.com]

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