Pay-per-view, baby, pay-per-view.
MfM reads me correctly. The question people want answered about inequality is why, and far more importantly, *who *is doing this to me so I can fuck and kill them. They’re never going to get that answer.
As everyone who posts to Politics should understand, every bit of numerical evidence is processed through chiral filters. There is left-handed reality and right-handed reality. This is something new in the world. Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.
For most of the first century of the technological world, people on all sides started to give up on (abandon or at least diminish) the western Christian outlook that the answers could all be found in the Bible. Systematic and scientific investigation of reality seems to have begun in German universities in the first half of the 19th century and slowly spread outward. By the close of the century most prominent American universities had reconstituted themselves as research universities with specialized graduate schools.
The incredible pace of technological advancement drove the optimistic notion about the future that everything could be quantified and placed onto a rational, scientific, neutral platform in which the One Right Answer could and would be found and implemented. The most specific expression of this was in the Technocracy movement, the early one patterned after Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineer and the Price System but echoed in the loony Depression-era fad. Engineers, in the larger sense of scientific workers outside theorists, would control policy instead of politicians. Science fiction writers lapped this stuff up and you see it all over Golden Age science fiction, though seldom mentioned by name.
Technocracy never happened. Instead the Depression saw the social revolution they wanted and WWII brought along an alliance with manufacturing to form the military-industrial complex. Many now very funny but then serious and highly-thought-of books were written saying that the liberal viewpoint had permanently won. As should have been expected, this brought an intellectual conservative revolutionary movement into play that happened to coincide with a general public conservative backlash.
What people didn’t expect was the death of the notion of the One Right Answer. Instead, intellectual thought became the essential equivalents of Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometries. They start with different axioms about the world and therefore the theorems and proofs they derive from these axioms are not merely different but often contradictory.
All results of scientific studies (some say all scientific studies themselves) are run through these fundamentally diverging viewpoints. You can’t have an answer, only a conservative answer or a liberal answer. Or an answer from another different geometry with other axioms, like libertarianism or socialism or what have you.
I personally think this is an unstable condition and that some synthesis will emerge in the future. I don’t expect to be around to see that world, sadly. In our world, politics can not give satisfactory scientific answers because it doesn’t ask satisfactorily scientific questions. Physics doesn’t answer whys about the world, either, of course. It like asking what should we do about climate change. Science is not even on the lineup of players.
No, class interests, as expressed in policy outcomes, are the matter under discussion.